Penny Arcade

I hope that I’m not the only person who applies 3.5 Edition rules to virtually every facet of my life.

Last night was the charity dinner/auction for Child’s Play, which went off basically without a hitch.  This is almost entirely due to the help we received from volunteers tightening up the event, and those volunteers were drawn exclusively from our Enforcers at PAX who helped make that a success.  Those guys have us covered every time and I hardly know how to respond to it.  They deserve a   somber, featureless monument. 

We had tuxedos and everything, but the level of dress in general was very high.  There were no “basement casual” stalwarts determined to represent genuine gamer attire, which I appreciated. 

Some of the auctions themselves were pushed into the stratosphere by humans ravenous for what we had on offer - it turns out that a young man will pay as much as eight hundred dollars to go to Bungie and get beaten down by those guys in Halo.  Two men fought hard over an ornately framed Twisp and Catsby print which eventually went for over a thousand dollars.  Bidding to see yourselves represented in a Penny Arcade strip was “off the chain” from the word go, and it was eventually decided that (once bidding had gone past 1200 dollars) we would simply perform the service for any person (or group of persons) willing to donate a thousand dollars to Child’s Play.  To be at the helm of something like that was overwhelming.  All week long I have been waiting to fail in this endeavor, to see no item breach the five dollar mark and see people come away with super elaborate items at fire sale prices.  That did not happen. 

G4/TechTV was there to film the event and interview us, which I found terrifying.  I’m really nothing to look at.  Aside from that, I harbor primitive superstitions about cameras and their evil power.  I don’t find the production of language all that intimidating usually, but I’ll be God Damned if I can project the most fundamental concepts with a device of that classification present.  I really enjoyed talking to them when the camera wasn’t on.  I believe this link has the show airing info.  For the love of God, don’t watch my part.  Focus on the left side of the screen where Gabe is, because apparently their devil machine doesn’t have the same deleterious effect on him. 

There’s still other sites kicking in for the cause, if you’d like to help but aren’t sure how.  For a long while now, Popcap has been donating a dollar from each sale and will continue to do so until Christmas.  Eric Burns of Websnark fame is offering to snark for hire, here is his blog about it and a link to the pertinent eBay auction.  My friend Zach from over at Shaw Island put up three art auctions a few days ago, and this is the last chance you’ll have to bid on those.  These are just a few of the places helping out this year - the partners page lists each one and what they’ve committed. 

You might be curious just how much money the dinner brought in.  All told, the night produced $17,000 dollars.  My mind automatically breaks that down into “Standard Game Units,” groups of hundred and fitty dollar donations that (in aggregate) have the power to purchase over a hundred systems.  One night, a hundred systems.  I find this ratio satisfactory.   

(CW)TB out.

the weather outside is frightful

This year we had a couple different PR companies offer to help us spread the word about Child’s Play. They get us interviews on radio stations and in newspapers all over the country. Since Tycho is generally much better at that sort of thing it became his job to take all these interview requests. He’s been doing one or two of these a day practically for nearly a month and so I figured I should step up and take the next one. The next one as it turns out was with a Seattle radio station 100.7 the BUZZ on the BJ Shea show.

Apparently the place that set this up for us made the interview for noon but then forgot to call us until a few minutes after 12:00. So they called us and said someone needed to call the BJ Shea show right away which I happily did. A guy picked up the phone and I said, “Hi, my name’s Mike and I’m with the Child’s Play charity. I understand someone there wanted to talk with us on the air about what we’re doing this year.” Then this is what the guy says to me “NO! You wanted to talk to us! And you’re twelve minutes late!” I could see that things were not off to a good start. I apologized and told him that someone on my end dropped the ball. I said I understand if it’s too late to do the interview but I was just told to call and I didn’t realize it had been scheduled for noon. He told me that the host was super pissed off and he wanted to know why I was calling so late. I really didn’t know what to tell him besides what I’d already said. I explained again that someone on my end must have screwed up and I said I’d find out who it was and speak with them. It was apparently too late to do the interview so I hung up and figured that was the end of it.

Later in the afternoon Tycho got a call from a friend of his who happens to listen to the BJ Shea show. Apparently BJ talked for 45 minutes about video game playing bums who are too lazy to get off their asses and do what they’re supposed to do. He even made it the topic for the call in portion of his show.

So I just want to say to Mr. Shea that last night about two hundred video game playing bums got off their lazy asses and raised $17,000 for the Children’s Hospital, and they did it in the space of three hours. In other words, we really don’t need to take any shit from some guy who was too ugly to get on TV.

-Gabe out

I heard that they were playing the BJ show from yesterday again this morning so I went down to my car to listen to it. They actually lied about how our phone conversation went. His producer claimed that he asked me what went wrong and I just babbled that I didn’t know what happened and refused to take responsibility. The truth is I told him that we dropped the ball and I apologized. I honestly don’t know what more I could have said. It was a mistake and I said I was sorry.

I listened to part of his show and BJ was certainly pissed off. He said that I was not honorable because I didn’t keep my word. He said that people like me are losers and unsuccessful. He said the way I behaved was representative of guys all over Seattle who eat granola, wear fleece and play too much X Box. What a fucking ego on this guy. I mean, he’s on in the middle of the Goddamn day on a station that my auto seek skips right over.

-Gabe out

Okay, so I was just on the BJ show. We yelled at each other for a couple minutes and then he hung up on me. That was super fun.

-Gabe out

I just wanted to make sure that everyone saw these new screens from Wipeout Pure for the PSP. The Wipeout series has always had a special place in my heart. I can remember when Tycho and I got our first apartment all we had was a TV, a Playstation with Wipeout and a bean bag chair.

For all my talk it didn’t take long for me to fall to the dark side. I was only a couple hours into KOTOR 2 when I started threatening to kill people.

-Gabe out