My PAX consisted of wishing I was at PAX and organizing my Saturday around watching the streamed D&D game. Even at that level, it was awesome. More podcasts please? Please? Will begging help? I'll beg if necessary.

Best piece I can give you is to take detailed notes on your recipes and processes, so you can reproduce them easier when you want. And don't be afraid to use malt extracts. All grain brewing can be difficult and equipment expensive. As for a funny/sad homebrewing study, my buddy and I started homebrewing together when we were in graduate school (pretty obvious hobby for a couple microbiologists). One batch we decided to make to a strawberry lambic with strawberries I picked locally. Unlike our other brews, lambics require additional bacteria cultures to obtain that lambic mankiness. So we make the lambic and it comes out ok. Then we go on to make the next batch, pretty much the exact opposite of a lambic, we make a steam beer. We make the batch and then go to taste. It tastes remarkably...lamic-y. Yeah, turns out some lambic culture was able to hang around in our equipment somewhere (I suspect a nozzle in one of our buckets). It was quite the nasty surprise. And a bit of a moral blow to guys really quite insane about our sterile technique.

I'm in much the same boat. I really, really want to play, but I don't have any friends in town, let along those that would want to play. So I'm left listening to the PA podcasts over and over, sighing dejectedly while staring out a rainy window.

Wow, first "Gibsonesque" in an earlier post, and now an actual Gibson quote. Much love, Mr. Wheaton.

...someday...to die. Also, points for Gibsonesque.

Does...does that reference have to do with shelf paper?

I'm a lifelong Cubs fan *hangs head* *sighs*

I completely ignore pre-release hype, and even early post-release hype. Fact is, for a large number of reasons I tend to get games much behind the purchasing curve. For one, the majority of my gaming is still on the PC and I wait for the first few patches to come out before I can even get an idea of what the gameplay would even be like. Secondly, the major input for my desire for a game is usually word of mouth. Either from friends I have in WoW or friends in other places, generally if a game is really good and worth playing, good press filters in by word of mouth. I do pay attention to Penny Arcade, I find their reviews to be, well, not unbiased, but biased like a normal person. They don't try to give objective assessment of games, but instead they give their impressions and based upon what you know of their personalities you can assess what you might think of the game. They aren't so much reviewers as proxy friends relating their experience. Though they do tend to focus more on multiplayer gaming aspects while the majority of my gaming is solo, so their influence is lesser. In total, I'm probably the guy the gaming companies hate. I will almost never be the person knocking on Best Buy's door, waiting to get that game the moment it comes out. I chalk it up to aging, having to be more responsible with my money and my time. I think the last game I bought purely on hype was Spore.