Do you have a favorite memory?  One that comes to your mind unbidden.  You take a breath and like oxygen you find it before your eyes playing out from angles that you never could have experienced in life.  What does this memory make you feel?  Is it like the wings of a butterfly against your fingers soft and whispering and so fragile?  Or does it come straight at you like a train down a tunnel in the dark of night when the moon and stars are hidden?

Can you share this memory with others or does it lose substance in the telling like a shadow under a flashlight?  Is it a memory to be shouted at the world or is it a memory to be whispered at night when only the shadows are listening?

High atop a castle peak rests a castle.  Not just any old castle though.  Oh no.  This is no outdated fortress.  This castle, with its winding stairs and teetering towers, is home to the infamous Dr. Mattavious.  Once an everyday scientist hard at work controlling rats by remote control and other such highly important and prestigious works, now Mattavious has set about the task of world domination.

See him in all his diabolical glory.  See his wild unkempt hair, crooked glasses, and long--blood splattered (of course, because what sort of self-respecting evil scientist doesn't have blood splattered on his lab coat?)--white lab coat.  He hunches over a rickety metal work table, mumbling to himself about pocket lint.  A patchwork cat--white, black, and orange--hobbles up to the work table and rubs her stitched body against his leg.  A seam tears and a part of her tail falls to the ground.  No matter.  Mattavious keeps a freezer full of cat corpses in the basement for just this sort of situation.

"Yes Patchavious...our time has nearly come.  I've faced many foes before, but at last no one can stand in my way.  No force on earth--nay...no force in heaven OR earth shall come--"

The door bell rang out, N'Sync of course--Mattavious is evil after all-- and Patchavious lept to her feet and raced down the stairs to greet their visitor.

The door creaked open slowly to reveal...a corn muffin salesmen.  Patchavious lept back in shock and shivered with horror.  Never before had she seen such a hideous creature as the pimply teenager who stood before her.

"Uh...dude...hello?  Anyone here?" He glanced down at Patchavious. "Oh, hello kitty...how are you..." He reached down to pet her and maggots crawled out from between the seams of her stitching to creep up his hand. He lept to his feet and started to scream.  Loudly.  Upstairs something exploded followed by a cloud of black smoke tumbling ominously down the stairs.

A very soot covered, partially exploded Dr. Mattavious came down the stairs.  And when I say "came down the stairs" I of course mean that he tumbled head over foot and landed in a sprawling heap on the cold stone floor.  The muffin salesman held out a box of muffins, not noticing the maggots still wriggling around on his skin.

"Uh...you like muffins man?"

"Muffins?" Dr. Mattavious sat up and shook his head.  He could see very well on account of the part where his glasses had been incinerated in the explosion. "MUFFINS?"

"Have a chill pill man.  They're just corn muffiny goodness in a box."

"Goodness?" It was all Dr. Mattavious could do to say the word without vomiting all over the place and making a mess that would be a real pain in the butt to clean later, unless of course he invented a vomit cleaning robot to do it for him...actually a vomit cleaning robot might be a good thing to have around.  Especially if he ever finished that vomit ray that he'd been hard at work on for many a year. "GOODNESS!  Do you have any idea the schemes you've ruined?  There I was...the final calibrations about to be completed on my anti-matter broccoli/chocolate chip cookie combo machine.  The most evil and diabolical device ever conceived of...and then what do I hear?  A shriek.  A shriek that startled my hand into pressing the wrong button..which any fool could tell you created a cascading antimatter/broccoli/chocolate chip implosion of immense size.  Even now a  black hold of unspeakable power is forming in my..."

"Dude...you are one messed up dude, dude."

"Did I just say unspeakable power?"

"I don't know man I just sell muffins."

"I'll take twenty million boxes..." Dr. Mattavious clicked his heels (in an evil way of course) and bounced up the stairs.

"Uh...I only have ten boxes...and actually I only have this box...I ate the rest and....I don't suppose you have a bathroom or...because that smell is making me kind of..." The sales gave Mattavious a reason to invent that vomit cleaning robot and then fled the building leaving behind only the box of now maggot ridden muffins, which Patchavious shortly devoured before racing up into the smoky halls where she found Mattavious once more hard at work.

"With this broccoli/chocolate chip powered black hole nothing can stand in my way Patchavious!  The world is my oyster to...uh...what exactly do you do with oysters anyway?  That's okay, not nearly an evil enough metaphor...how about "The world is my catnip..." no, no...all wrong...I got it...the world is my crown to set upon my head...if only my head weren't so lumpy...but then when I finish my cranial delumper everything will be just fine and spiffy.  Oh yes.

Wha!ha!ha!ha!ha!"

"Meowha!ha!ha!ha!" (What, you've never heard a zombie cat's evil laugh before?)

Last week a little game came out on the Xbox Live Arcade going by the title Braid.  Many of you may not know much about this game or where it came from.  Worse still, sandwiched between the release of Geometry Wars 2 and Bionic Commando, you may be inclined to pass the game up for something you've actually heard of.  In this blog I'd like to strongly urge you to reconsider your choice.

No doubt by now anyone paying a smidge of attention to the video game scene has started to notice the fantastic reviews the game has gotten from almost every outlet around.  This is no exaggeration, the game is currently the tenth highest rated 360 game and the highest rated arcade game...period.

Sales have been decent, but in order for the creator of this game to have any chance of breaking even it needs to continue to sell and exceed expectations.  That's where you come in.  Yes, you there.  The one sitting and staring at the computer screen.  There are two main things you can do to help this incredible, beautiful, engrossing game to succeed.

This is a special request blog just for Pepsiman...that's right man, you requested it so now, without further adu, here is my rambling take on pocket lint:

Wikipedia tells us that pocket lint is:

"...the name commonly used to refer to lint found in the bottom of pockets. Pocket lint is usually made up of, but not limited to, detached fabric, dust and paper scraps. In some contexts, pocket lint may also refer to random items found in one's pocket."

Huh?  What?  Oh...sorry...I fell asleep.  Clearly the person who wrote this entry doesn't know the first, second, third, or fourth thing about pocket lint.  Maybe the fifth, but definitely not the seventh, eighth, ninth or tenth thing.  And everyone knows that those are the important things.  And now I will give you the truth.  The real truth, not the fake truth.

Pocket lint is evil.  PURE evil.  Some of you may think that I am 'kidding', well let me tell you I am not.  It was the great scientist Dr. Mattavious who first discovered in 1998 that pocket lint is not, in fact, made of fabric, dust OR paper scraps.  No.  One look through a super microscope TM shows that pocket lint is made of tiny little creatures, named Lintonians in a stroke of something that probably isn't genius.  Now these aren't like really small kittens or something else cute.  No Sir E. Bob (what does the E. stand for?).  They are ghastly creatures with lots of eyes and little feelers and those nasty mandible things that spiders have.

Right now you may be thinking that just because they look ugly does not mean they are evil.  You could not be more wrong.  You see these creatures have built tiny little cities in the bottoms of our pockets.  And in those tiny little cities they sit around plotting how to kill us all and take over the world and remake it to suit their--evil--preferences.  Under the microscope Dr. Mattavious saw them hard at work on itsy bitsy nuclear missiles and anti-matter weapons and all other manner of evil.

So what can you do about this unspeakable (but apparently not unwritable) evil?  Be prepared.  Clean out your pockets--better yet, don't wear clothing with pockets.  Utilize constant vigilance.  When you see everyone around you writhing around on the ground covered in minuscule mushroom clouds you will know what need to be done.  Oh, right, I forgot to mention.  Pocket lint is weak against fire so at all times I recommend you carry around a flame thrower.

Only YOU can prevent world take over by pocket lint!

I've been re-watching one of my all time favorite series lately (Farscape in case you're too lazy to read the title, but also somehow not too lazy to be reading the actual blog).  As you may or may not know Farscape was canceled in the middle of it's run.  Eventually the plot was somewhat concluded in a miniseries, but as I know I'm not alone in wanting more.

Today I've learned that my prayers have been answered.  The creator of the show will be writing a comic book in canon that picks up right where the miniseries ended.  This is fantastic news and I'm super happy about it.  I wasn't very interested in the idea of the comic book till I learned it was being written by the creator of the show himself.  Now all I can do is pray that the art is up to the quality of the writing (love the Buffy comic, but I can't stand the bland art in that book).  I'm going to miss the actors, but this is probably better then I could have hoped for.

As for the actors, maybe they'll show up in the much delayed webisodes (which according to the creator will tie into the comic book--so cool).

Let me start this off by saying that I know this site is brand spanking new and that it is going to be a while before all the kinks are worked out.  With that in mind I'd like to play doctor and mention some of the things that I (Mad Genius Extraordinaire ) have come up with that might help speed the submission process up.  These are just my personal thoughts and I fully accept that the powers that be no doubt know what they're doing.

The most notable thing is that one of my submissions--where I added two related games and a genre to Within a Deep Forest--has been sitting for over three days.  What do I find notable about this you may ask?  After all, the site is overwhelmed with submissions is it not?  Yes, of course it is.  But what stands out to me is the question of how much moderation small changes like this should really require.

Sure, I could be way off base with those related games, but I have to wonder how a moderator would even be able to figure that out.  The number of people who have played Within a Deep Forest is pretty small.  I suppose the mod could go and play the game and then decide if they agree with me, but odds are they're going to have to just up and trust me to a certain extant.

So the question I would ask is why moderate that at all?  It seems to me that these small changes (related games, genre, etc.) must just be clogging up the moderation queue at the moment.  I have a number of thoughts of ways that this could be remedied.

One: The obvious, just don't moderate changes that small.  If someone gets something wrong (as seems to occasionally happen even with moderation, because the moderators are only human) eventually someone will notice and have it fixed.  This works well on wikipedia for the most part and while I don't think the entire submission process should follow this rule it would probably work perfectly for the small stuff.

Two: Okay, fine, so you guys love you your moderation.  I've noticed that image submissions go really fast, which makes sense given the relative simplicity of figuring out if an image is proper or not.  So why not have related game submissions go in their own fast moving queue?  I'm not sure what the submission queue looks like or how the moderators are organized so this idea may or may not be doable at all.

Three: It takes 1,000 points in order for someone to be allowed to submit without being moderated.  What if when you reached a lower number (say 50 or 100) you could make small changes without being modded?  This would be a nice early reward for people, especially for the casual submitters who don't have the time or energy to write lengthy articles, but still want to contribute.

This last idea may actually be my favorite because of the way it fits in with the kind of rpg experience this site offers where you build up points (xp anyone?) for contributing.  Right now there is only one goal, one thousand points, with one reward, but the site might be more fun if you could get a variety of rewards as you gained points.

Well that does it with my suggestions.  Keep up the good work with the site mods and company!

Just testing this place out to see how I like it.  I'm not sure what exactly, if anything, will end up going in this blog.  I've already got a pretty extensive blog over at Gamespot (the ancient enemy) you can find it here if you so desire.  In that blog I'm telling the story of George Miller and his exciting (or not so depending on your opinion I suppose) adventure in an alternate dimension.  If you like monsters and chaos I suggest you check it out, because, uh, why would I lie to you about my own blog being good.  Exactly.  And besides, would anyone with a face like mine lie to you?  Er, you know, not that you can see my face.  I mean, unless you have spy cameras watching me right now but that would be crazy...wouldn't it?  Wouldn't it?!?

Hmm...but what about this blog?  I may syndicate George's adventures here or I might use this blog to actually--gasp--talk about video games.  Or maybe it'll just become the home for another blog storyline.  Or maybe I'll just ramble nonsensically about pocket lint...hmm...this last option has a lot of potential...