Ok, so they're not the greatest musicians ever...but, I don't know that I have ever been proud of my alma mater's football-related shenanigans before. OMG. Band geeks are the best. I never thought I would actually say this but... GO BEARS!

Seriously. Girls just love boys like this.

(Found over at The Coveted.)

So you've heard of mileage running - booking multi-city marathon trips on an airline or airline partner to take advantage of fare sales and pricing in order to get the most number of mileage points per cent. It's something that I have toyed with trying - it's basically a game, a puzzle.

But then there's mattress running. That sounds a lot more fun, to me - sleeping in some featherbed at a Starwood hotel rather than crammed on an airplane for 18 hours. And potentially sexier, if done with a special friend.

Go Brandon! In a really solid interview with Peter Moore, late of Microsoft, our intrepid reporter asks him the critical question we've all been dying to know:

[A]re you in fact the Prince of Darkness?

PM: Damn, my cover's blown! Let me just tuck the tail in back there!

I knew it!

The rest of the interview is JUST as thought-provoking. :)

Plus, it's kind of nice to hear Peter say that he never gave up on the Dreamcast. The love was real, people!

It's so gorgeous!

I'm very envious of people who can create such detailed and marveous atifacts with their hands. I've tried painting and crafting and building but about all I can manage are simple line drawings and scarves. I can only knit in straight lines. But something like this, this is something really special. Doesn't it make you want to see little hobbit dolls living inside?

Actually, it also makes me want to film some stop-motion shorts or something... the detail is so amazing, and looks so great on film.

Jason's holding a celebrity Mii contest! Deadline is Monday, December 11. Let's get celebritied up!

Hurrah! The game that Robin's been working so hard on has been announced at last. It's going to get the full Famitsu treatment! It's for the Wii! It's the cutest Sims ever! And boy do I ever want to play it *right* now.

The game is Boku to Sim no Machi (Me and my Sim's Town). Robin's been flying back and forth between SF and Tokyo and the Nintendo HQ in Kyoto over the last several months, and I know she's psyched that she can actually start talking about the game. And I'm glad too, because I want to hear more about it.

My favorite internet star of the moment, GameJew (AKA Jonathan Mann), takes on education in the latest episode: GameJew Episode 7. He visits a videogame class at a technical college, then talks to a professor of interface design at an arts school, and finally ends by driving around a videogame bus to teach kids how to play co-operatively.

There's a wealth of interesting insights here - like the fact that the kids value winning over challenge, something that a lot of hardcore gamers may not understant, since one common critique that can lower a review score is that the game is "too easy."

The 3D interfaces designed by the teacher Jonathan interviews are also beautiful and inspire new possibilities for videogame controls.

GameJew is one of the smartest, funniest, most creative commentators on the culture of videogames today, and I urge anyone interested in that to check out his work. It's not always perfect, but I would argue that it never fails to engage.

What do you get when you combine snappy songs, a goofy sense of humour, and puppets? GameJew of course, one of my new favorite shows. It's the brainchild of Jonathan Mann, who also created the Mario Opera.

He posts the episodes directly to Youtube. I love the music. Check out the tribute to Wii in the first episode - it's gold.

This is episode 3:

I want someone to play with.

Ryan, myself, and several of our friends went to see the seminal Batman Begins on opening day and to while away the time we, of course, brought our PSPs and our copies of Wipeout Pure. Being in San Francisco, we thought we'd conduct an experiment and play with our little bundles of joy unabashedly in the open and hope that either a.) someone would approach us and ask us what we're playing in the hopes of joining in, or b.) a random somebody would just happen to be looking for a Wipeout game while we're sitting in the multiplayer lobby waiting to begin. Realistically, of course, the second of these scenarios is very, very unlikely to occur, and while we saw a few others jacked in over their miniature 16:9 displays, there was no spontaneous multiplayer. Which makes me weep. Mostly on the inside. Mostly.

To be clear, Ryan and I are in San Francisco--the, supposedly, most wired city in the country and we were seeing the show at the Sony Metreon where you'd assume other PSPers may possibly feel comfortable playing their portable systems in public. Granted, we're kinda dorky-looking and I can't blame people for not wanting to walk up to adult men playing with "children's toys" and ask for a game, but we've decided to be determined when it comes to spontaneous, public gaming and will continue to pull out our PSPs while waiting for dinner, in line for the cinema and on the subway in an effort to promote a method of open multiplayer that has an aspect no other multiplayer experience has yet to match: that of actually meeting flesh-and-blood people face to face. Is this a misguided attempt to surrounded ourselves with the like-minded in order to validate our own existence or is there something to really be said for taking gaming "to the people," as it were, as a social tool beyond just 0wnx0ring some n00b?

"Shoe" writes about the EGM vs. Frag Dolls match up. What can I say? It made me smile.

The PSP apprently has a design flaw feature, which, Sony says, developers will just have to get used to. Turns out the Square button is less responsive than the other buttons. This might not be such a big deal. I mean, when do you ever use Square except when accessing the menu? It's all about X. Sometimes Triangle, as in, "Triangle out of the boring tutorial."

But with the frustrating response of the Square button, developers have a whole new range of gameplay opportunities. Go fishing! Push Square when you see a fish, and maybe you'll get lucky. What a great way to equalize skill levels, by introducing the element of chance.

Look for a lot of cramped thumbs coming your way.

I can't believe I'm making this writeup. Not because it's about sex, but because I'm going to lay bare before you the dark depths of my own gaming geekdom. You've been warned.

This seemed fitting with the recent rumblings of a Playboy featuring renders of "naked" female game characters (one could argue that game characters are almost always naked, since we don't bother to model the skin under their clothes, and underneath this skin, they're as hollow as a chocolate easter bunny). Those efficient Germans beat the US to the punch on the games/girlie mag cross-over front. Witness Spielboy! My mind is still reeling from the pun. Not only does this webzine exist, they are actually on their fifth issue.

Okay, so it's not a direct match to what Playboy is doing. Spielboy is really more about a playful combination of eroticism and boardgaming. It reminds me of Dan the Automator's Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By in that it's so playful that I have a hard time telling whether it's satire or straight-faced sex-positivism. Sections like the version of Am I Hot or Not using images from board and card games suggest satire, while the (tame) Pictoral points toward a more serious outlook.

This is the part where I reveal just how deep my gaming geekdom goes. What really interests me about this site is not the sex, but the sheer unadulterated love for non-electronic gaming and everything associated with it. There's a quiz page where you can try to match up 20 game designers with their previous occupations.

Take a minute to comprehend what that means.

While Germany is certainly famous for their love of family games, this sort of gaming wonkery just totally blows my gourd. Spielboy is unique in that it is not a goofy sexual niche site, no, it presents gaming qua lifestyle so completely that it demands human sexuality also be viewed through that lens.

I can't remember exactly where I heard it the first time, but Monday, March 22nd, The Playstation Store at the Metreon in San Francisco was going to have a party to celebrate the release of Final Fantasy XI (the MMO one) for Playstation 2 from 8 PM until 2 AM the next day, with the PS2 Harddrive with FFXI preloaded going on sale at precisely 12:01 AM. And there was going to be a costume contest. Thus it was that I went straight from work to spend approximately forever sitting on trains to get to the Metreon, camera in hand, to see (and record) what there was to see.

I've been thinking lately about various "Game Nights" I've attended over the past year. There's the testerone-drone of Halo night, with three X-boxes and three TVs and two bloodthirsty teams shouting boisterously at each other. Then there's the group of game developers and a stack of board games, some untranslated from the German which we have to muddle through. There's Saturday D&D. There's after-work impromptu Quake. After-dinner DDR. High-stakes poker at the GDC (I didn't actuallly *play* in that one).

And then there's my fantasy - "JaneCon". I'd make everyone dress up, we'd have a panel of speakers, and then we'd all get geeky playing obscure games.

What about you? What does "Game Night" mean to you?

I'm feeling lazy. And i'm busy getting ready for my trip - doing laundry, cleaning the house, throwing out the spoilage-imminent vegetables in the fridge. Justin's been stuck at JFK since yesterday morning on his way to Finland; but let's party!

Maybe, since the weekend is upon us, we can talk about how we're going to play - whether it's watching movies or reading books or playing games or whatever.And we can pray to whatever deities we believe in to please let the Northeast get their power back so that they may have email and electronic gaming and cartoons before Saturday morning.

So here are my Friday Five that I'm looking forward to:
1. Reading: Philip Roth, The Human Stain.
2. Listening: The Postal Service, Give Up
3. Playing: Neverwinter Nights, Shadows of Undrentide (yes, still!!)
4. Watching: Reruns of Xena on Oxygen while i fold the laundry. (i guess i *am* a girl - i'm watching the 'network for women').
5. Doing: painting in acrylic, pixelated emperiments, and writing a silly novel/cookbook with my sister.

And you?