Heads up, peeps – episode six of the Tubenauts podcast (“2Shoats1Crate”) is up and ready for your listening pleasure. I host, we talk about benefactoring and shoats, we interview Trustee Marc Adams. As usual, it is full of win! Listen here.

We also got blogged by community liason Joe “burdenday” Wagner!

While preparing for this week’s podcast recording, I realized I didn’t post about last week’s! D’oh. The shame is on me.

Last week’s discussion was a review of The Week of Order, a comparatively calm stretch of donating crates and donning armor as people burned through the mines left behind in the aftermath of Chaos Week. It’s just like the moments after the last, huge blast of Fourth of July fireworks have gone off, and the wind changes, bringing the scent of burnt powder and smoldering paper remnants, which drift down to where you sit cringing on the grass, hoping they don’t land on your blanket and leave burn marks.

This week we talked about missions – specifically, “what’s their deal?” There were some hilarious moments, including a movie announcer intro and a Miss Teen South Carolina acceptance speech, and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as.

Give it a listen.

I’m back home after my travels. I kept myself busy on the plane by writing out blog posts. Wasn’t that thoughtful of me?

Anyway, this week, the Tubenauts gabbed about PMOG’s player-generated Chaos Week, a celebration of all the mischief-making classes in the passive gaming world. User drudge (who couldn’t be reached in time for the podcast, but who I tracked down for this entry), came up with the idea after a discussion about a massive amount of mines on Google.com:

“i figured i could get like a handful of desroyers in my minign services thread to help me mine the badge sites…then i thought why just limit it to a handful of desroyers and just the badge sites

so i decided to try and get everyone involved on the chaos, i figured a day woul dbe too short and peopel might miss the chance, so i figured a week would give everyone a day to create chaos

i also figured it would be a great way to sorta keep the fictional aspect of the Torch of roder and Torch of Chaos going, keep epople in the CHAOS or order mindset and to have fun with it”

Many players stocked up on tools like mines and weapons, and added the “mine me” tag to others’ profiles, in preparation. But when those tags were removed, a player created a form for people to submit the names of “deserving” mine targets.

In the podcast, the Tubenauts discussed their strategies for participating in Chaos Week; my favorite was passing mines via crate to Shoats so that they could join in on the action. I asked drudge what he had done in advance of the event:

“as far as preperation goes, i saved up all my mines, portals and nicks. i bookmarked every forum thread that had peopel stashing creates so ic ould just open all 52 tabs up at once and easily check every page for free crates, did that to like 3 forum threads, i bookmarked every known torch of order participant who was being public about it and flaunting their goody-2-shoes around, i also bookmarked every staffers page/trustees. i got all the badge sites bookmarked as well so i could make sure to leave 10-20 mines each day one very badge site.”

I received a couple of tags and mines, but because I was away during the week I didn’t see much action. Luckily, I’d just received my Normandy badge a few weeks ago, so I did get to experience a bit of the Chaotic fun, but I am sad that I missed out on the madness. Thanks to the Tubenauts for filling me in – you guys are the bomb! (Ho ho ho.)

Greetings, gentle reader,

I have visited distant lands, and while the challenges of surviving the journey have prevented me from posting here, I have much to share.

Last Tuesday I recorded a PMOG podcast, as a member of the Tubenauts, and it is about 20 minutes of pure game-related hilarity. Check it out here, and listen to the June 18 posting. It’s had over a hundred downloads so far…not too shabby!