Idle Thumbs will be conducting its first (and possibly only) ever live panel during this year's PAX Prime show in Seattle. Three-day tickets to PAX itself are likely to sell out this week, according to the expo's official Twitter feed, so if you want to come see us do a live cast and most likely see me perform a song, get on that soon.

What: Idle Thumbs Live Show at PAX Prime
Who: Chris Remo, Jake Rodkin, The Return of Nick Breckon, Other Guests?, You
Where: PAX Prime in Seattle (get your tickets at the official site!)
When: Sunday, September 5, 2010, 2:00PM
More Where: Wolfman Theatre
Games: Video

Tell your friends. And people who listen to Idle Thumbs, but aren't your friends.

Update: PAX has run out of 3 day badges. Passes for individual days are still available, however, including Sunday.

Update: We'll be meeting at the Crossroads Irish Pub. It's only a few blocks away, on the corner of Beacon St and Massachusetts Avenue (Google Maps link). For anyone who wants to head straight there, we'll be there around 7:30. We'll still be meeting outside the convention center at 7:15 and walking over though (see below), so meeting us right outside PAX for the walk or just to say hi is okay too. See you guys tonight.

As noted on The Idle Thumbs Podcast Episode 4: Super Expert Pro, Jake and I will attend PAX East this weekend, and we'd like to meet up with some Thumbs.

During last year's PAX Normal, we met up with a few dozen Thumbs and had a good time hanging out at a bar. Can we repeat that success? It's a mystery.

Who: Chris Remo, Jake Rodkin, and YOU
When: Saturday, March 27, 2010
Be more specific: 7:15 PM, Eastern Standard Time
Where: At the main entrance of the Hynes Convention Center at 900 Boylston Street in Boston, Massachusetts
Be more specific: It's the front door with the large awning (apparently)

If you plan to attend, feel free to RSVP to our electronic hotline, and we will endeavor to keep you updated if any details change.

Also! If you are a resident of Boston or environs, please contact us with suggestions as to a good nearby alcohol-serving location that you think might not be completely packed to the point of impossibility. During last year's PAX meet, our intended venue could not hold us, and the group nearly disbanded before an alternative was fortunately found.

VIDEO GAMES

Prior to the launch of the blog, I was linking visual material discussed on the podcast in a dedicated forum thread. Going forward, I'll collect it here on the front page, with a link to the corresponding episode's discussion.

Unfortunately, I haven't yet had time to edit, encode, and upload the Resident Evil 5 co-op footage we captured, but I'll get on that this weekend. Until then, peruse these other fine materials. Also, we've had requests for a blog RSS feed: here it is! Enjoy.

Jeff Goldblum

Jeff Goldblum approaches the security checkpoint. Soon after, the man in red proposed to Nick Breckon the theft of Gold Jeffblum's shoes.

The cast will be a day or two late this week, as Nick and I are out of town, so why not catch up on our surprisingly existent PAX coverage? In retrospect, we should have spaced it out more -- from what we can tell, many of our readers were overwhelmed by so much Thumb in such a short span of time.

We did three audio interviews at the show, first speaking at longest length with adventure game legend Ron Gilbert (The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, Humongous' substantial catalogue, etc.), mainly about his upcoming RPG/adventure hybrid DeathSpank but also about the classic Monkey Island games.

Next up was Valve writer Chet Faliszek, currently working on Left 4 Dead 2 and also known as one of the Old Man Murray guys, the other one being fellow Valve writer Erik Wolpaw. We talked about Left 4 Dead 2 as well as, of course, football and Civilization IV.

Finally, we chatted with BioWare's Mac Walters, lead writer on the upcoming Mass Effect 2 and a senior writer on the original Mass Effect, in our briefest (and probably most on-topic) show of the three.

Each is available in the archives, as well as through RSS and iTunes.

If you actually read this blog, you've probably already seen the PAX meet write-up, but just in case you haven't, you should! We've added a few new photographs from an attendee.

Finally, as a few of you know but most probably don't, Idle Thumbs originally began as a feature- and news-driven site comprised entirely of words and images, way back in the misty bygone era of 2004 or so. One of our first interviews consisted of Jake and me sitting in a Bay Area coffee shop with Ron Gilbert for three hours, talking about video games into a tape recorder. The proceedings were laboriously transcribed into three parts over several months.

Because they are now somewhat topical again, but simultaneously against my better judgment and professional self-interest, I am linking to them here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 (the pagination links within each article work, but the internal links to the various parts do not under the current site).

These transcripts are painful for me to read, as Jake and I come off as unprepared and amateurish beyond belief, but I am so surprised that Idle Thumbs ended up interviewing Ron Gilbert again five years later that I have persuaded myself to let them be experienced once again.

[Update: New pictures added below, thanks to forum member and attendee H. Helluva.]

During BlizzCon, Nick and I posted a spontaneous Twitter message offering to hang out with any Idle Thumbs readers attending the show. Having conceived the idea 98 minutes prior to the "event" itself, it was a decidedly informal affair -- three extremely friendly Thumbs showed up and we talked about Video Games. We did it again the following evening, to similar results.

The fact that anybody showed up at all made us consider attempting something more organized at the upcoming Penny Arcade Expo. We tossed around some location ideas and fairly arbitrarily came up with some plans.

Much credit and appreciation must also be given to developers Frozenbyte, Zombie Cow Studios, Riot Games, and Stardock, who hooked us up with, respectively, download codes for Trine, download codes for Time Gentlemen, Please!, beta codes for League of Legends, and 10% discount coupons for Impulse to give away during the meet.

But our plans were insufficient and we were characteristically unprepared. As it turned out, some 40 Thumbs showed up -- several times the number we had estimated based on RSVPs.