Hey, hold on a second. I know what you're going to say:
"But Ben, this is shameless self-promotion and I hate that and I also hate fun."
Woah, chill out bro, just wait a second. You haven't even let me make my pitch yet.
A Fistful of Pixels is a little project me and a couple of friends have wanted to start for a while now, and it's finally catching steam. AFOP is a video game podcast, but not in the traditional sense. In our podcast, we take random phrases (sometimes generated by robots, sometimes people) and turn them into awesome video games.
This week we had our first 100% user-submitted episode, with submitees including podcast personality Justin McElroy. Give it a chance, I swear it's super funny. I have been indisposed as of late and haven't been on a couple of episodes, but the guys they've gotten to fill in for me are as funny, if not way less funny (nobody is funnier than me).
You can find it at http://afistfulofpixels.podomatic.com/! Also if you do like it maybe you want to subscribe to it on iTunes and give it a super-honest 5-star review?
After a long night of losing ranked 5s with my friends, something magical happened. We hit the loading screened and realized we were up against none other than Phreak himself, along with a few other Rioters. It was one of the most fun games I've ever had. I went mid against him as Morde (I won on kills, he had double my CS). Anyways, they were all super nice, and we won.
Well if you haven't, you should. If you have, keep reading!
Metagame fever has been taking over the office, so much so that tomorrow there will be a podcast about it that we are recording tomorrow. Here's the deal, we want you, YES YOU, to play along. Below is an image, and we want you, the listener, to pick a game as an answer. Here is the question and possible answers that we randomly drew.
So there it is. Which game changed the industry more: Pokémon or Sim City? Answer below and we'll pick some of the best responses. (Don't just leave one-word responses!)
You might be familiar by now with Norm's photo gallery over on Comic Vine with the 1100 plus cosplay photos by now. If not, check it out. Wait, no. First check out this video. Nick has a similar blog, but if his video gets more views by the end of the day tomorrow I lose. I know you don't want me to lose. I will crush him with by bare hands and each and every one of you as well. You know I can. Anyway, it's the 50 best female cosplays of Comic-Con. Tony and I take a look at them.
June 20th marked the start of the second month for my eight week stint. You could say that I'm halfway there. I feel like this song sums up my current task.
I've been doing minor stuff like creating wiki tasks for Screened. I feel like a deputy, calling for the tasks brought in dead or alive. I've also helped design quests for this week on Screened, and this week and next for Giant Bomb. So if you have any problems with the quests, make sure to send your angry messages to one Matt Kessler.
Right now we interns are in charge of operation Eagle Thunder Blast (I may or may not have just made up that name). What we're doing is some tidying up of some of the more important character pages over at Comic Vine. We're not changing the information, per se, but we are going through and making sure it is grammatically correct, fits in with the Comic Vine wiki style-guide and making sure the information provided by the hard working wiki-editors is presented as well as possible. Some of us, like Corey, happen to actually read comic books and know what they are all about. Some of us, like me, have no idea. Thankfully I sit next to two people who happen to know a little bit about comics.
They know a thing or two about a thing or two.
It's been mostly easy doing some minor tweaks, but being the curious cat that I am I always find myself exploring many of the characters that are hyperlinked in the articles that I am reading. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of comic books. I would be reading them, but I can't afford comics, movies, and video games. That being said I have come across some pretty rediculous stuff in my hyperlink travels. Including, but not limited to the following:
Yank and Doodle, the America-themed superhero twins that can turn invincible when they are in sight of each other.
Peter Parker had a pair of robot parents sent to kill him. The robo-dad would have killed him, but the robo-mom fell in love with Peter and stopped him.
Speaking of robots, there is a hero named Robotman. Who actually isn't a robot. I am about as disapointed as I was when I found out Iron Man wasn't a robot when I was eight.
The Hulk comics have been really progressive, dealing with issues like AIDS to abortion well before many other mediums. Also he fought a group of supevillains called the NWO, which, to my disappointment, never led to The Hulk fighting Hulk Hogan.
There have been like, a hundred "Captain Americas."
And finally, there is a teenage superhero named Jailbait.
All that being said, there are plenty of crazy, nonsensical things in other mediums I enjoy. Shit like Custer's Revenge, The Human Centipede,
Sometimes these just make me want to runaway. After all of this, I'm still having fun at Whiskey Media. I can't complain, because I chose to do this. I can't quit and go home now, because It's My Life.
It's been two weeks since I've started here at Whiskey Media, and boy time flown.
Except when it hasn't.
Such was the case over the past two days when I had my most grueling of tasks. Intern-wrangler Ethanassigned me the task of getting some quotes for every movie in 2011, past and present. At first I thought "oh this won't be so bad I'll go find some quotes on IMDB or something." I was wrong.
This task was easy enough with big movies like Hangover II, or Thor, but some of these movies had quotes nowhere to be found. So I figured I would go watch the trailers and get some quotes from them.
Do you know how many movies have been released this year? No, go on, I'll let you guess... no really. What? Like, 50 or something? Yeah that's what I thought too. Turns out there have been 350 ****ING MOVIES in the five months of 2011 alone. And I have to watch trailers for all of them.
They have ranged from bad:
To terrible:
To pretty much the worst thing ever (WARNING NSFW... or anything)
Anyway, this is a terrible task but I still love my job here. Even if I'm only 50 deep into the 350 releases of the year.
Have you ever wondered what it takes to make a Whiskey Media happy hour? Well here's your chance to check out a gallery of pre/during/post show images to let you know what's up. (For what exactly is going on in these photos check them out in my image gallery)
This live show was especially chaotic because a few minutes before the show was scheduled to start, the sites went down. On top of this all of our Top Men™ were on an important Top Mission. But as soon as the signal was sent out, they were able to get back to Whiskey HQ to fix the sites so you could all enjoy last week's happy hour.
They say that everyone loves sausage until they see it get made, but so far here at Whiskey Media that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve been here X days and so far even though I know how it’s made; I still crave Whiskey Media’s sausage.
Wait, that came out wrong.
My two most important jobs.
I hopped on the 38B Express at 7:55 am in order not to be late for my first day. After getting off the bus I noticed someone else wearing a Whiskey Media member shirt walking in the same direction, and it ended up being Cory, aka Undeadpool, aka the first intern who caused the Whiskeypocolypse. We chatted for a bit while walking to work and little did I know he was very happy to see me, because I was handed all of his duties, including answering the phones, making the coffee, and gathering and uploading trailers for Anime Vice. I never have made coffee before, so after a quick walkthrough from Tested’s own Will Smith I was grinding beans like a pro in no time.
So far aside from posting trailers and helping out around the office, my duties (heheh… duties) have been mostly wiki related. I’ve been going through and captioning various image galleries. I jumped at the chance to handle a few fighting games that I was familiar with and breezed through with some image captioning and general upkeep.
Step it up, Cory.
The atmosphere is great here at Whiskey Media. It’s easy to forget you’re in a basement. What astounded me the most was the work ethic of the people here. You may have the idea in your mind after seeing various mailbag segments and the like that Whiskey Media is some kind of Willy Wonka-like factory where instead of candy and chocolate, there are magical forests of reviews and rivers of video content. These are hard working people, who from the time they get there to the time they leave, are working to keep the websites you love going. That’s not to say it’s some sort of no-fun zone where laughter and smiles are punishable by law, it’s by no means a stereotypical grey, dour office. It strikes a nice balance of serious and fun that can be seen in the site.
Coming up on my to-do agenda are to learn how other sites operate, get in more questions on live shows, and take down Cory. Wait. Ignore that last part.
Hey all, new Whiskey Media intern here asking for a favor from some of you guys. (I know, one day and I'm already asking favors) The tl;dr is that my friend's wife is very sick, and is going to need treatment that costs around $10,000. This friend is a man who created what is known as the JPAG, the Joystiq Podcast Appreciation Group. This is the only other gaming thing I'm involved in besides Giant Bomb (and is what actually got me into GB in the first place). Now, I wouldn't come here just asking for your guys' money, so I want to let you know there are a TON of cool prizes donated by members of the JPAG including Joystiq's on Justin McElroy.
Here is a link to the Facebook event, if you don't have Facebook, I'm going to put the details below in spoilers. Basically there is a live stream, and every donation of $5 gets you a raffle ticket for one the hourly prizes, and a raffle ticket for the grand prizes. I would be grateful if you were even to check out the link, let alone attend tomorrow or tell a friend.
The event starts tomorrow at 3:00 Central Standard time (1 Pacific, 4 Eastern, something else European). I'll bump it again tomorrow around then
Thanks again, -Ben
Edit: I know some of you guys are Redditors, so if you can at the very least upvote here so we can get some attention. Thanks!
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