I’m sitting here at the Giant Bomb offices in Sausalito, CA, staring at an impossibly large Mac monitor that is leaving me with a severe case of display envy. Across from me, Jeff and Ryan sit fiddling away on their laptops, listening to LCD Soundsystem, and messing with chat clients and live stream technologies as they prepare to get their GTA marathon on.

I hadn’t necessarily planned to get all “OMG MIDNIGHT LAUNCH AWESOME” for GTA IV, but the more I see of the game, the more I can’t help but feel like I need to be playing this immediately all the time forever. So in about 20 minutes, we’re going to saunter over to the Marin City Best Buy and hop in line with the unwashed masses so that we can partake of the Grand Theft Auto madness for as long as we can possibly stay awake tonight. I feel sort of weird not just going home to play myself immediately after plucking it off the shelf, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to experience some marathon action with the posse here. Plus, if it’s really the life changing experience the critical brain trust would like you to believe it is, I somehow doubt I’ll mind seeing the first few hours twice.

Best part of the night thus far was when, after partaking of the local Outback Steakhouse and before returning to record the first portion of this week’s Giant Bombcast, we stopped by the BB to see what the situation was, and when faced with a rather general question of what supply was going to like, the zit-faced manager kid went all salesman on us and was like, “We’ve got a lot of copies, plus as a cool thing we’re going to have some really nice laptops and HDTVs out for sale as well.” You know, because they don’t normally have that stuff. I really wanted to ask if the game would somehow play on the laptops, but decided it was best to just leave that bad boy alone.

You know, now that I think about it, I do need a MacBook…no. Not tonight.

If you’re up at the required, retarded hour to check it out, be sure to come watch Giant Bomb’s GTA IV marathon, which I’m sure I’ll only be a vague presence on, but regardless, IT’S FUCKING GTA IV. Also, look for an Album of the Month post sometime this week, provided I don’t find myself hopelessly lost inside Liberty City for the next several days.

UPDATE: OK, so I ditched those suckers and went home with my copy to play. Watching them both play simultaneously was going to kill me to death. Good times here I come!

3 hours of work. Fully worth it.

Props to ZZoMBiE13 (AKA Paul) for the character designs, and Clint at EyeSpy in Petaluma for the work.

I guess you could also call this “I Get Awesome E-Mails, Vol. 2.”

As you may or may not have noticed, I recently got my very own Passive Aggressive Note. Before I go any further, a bit of added backstory.

This popped into my inbox in December, back when I was still at GS. I remember getting it, reading it about three or four times, trying to figure out if someone was playing a joke on me, showing it to a few other editors, having them gawk at it for a while, and finally coming to the conclusion that it might just be the best piece of individual hate mail I’d ever gotten regarding a review. It’s just so, so classy. From the acerbic tone to the weird bit of “woe is us” pity partying slathered over the whole thing, not to mention the misspelling of the game’s title in the subject line, it’s just such a phenomenal piece of irrational writing all around.

So, with the thought in mind that I might be leaving GS at some point, I forwarded it to myself, and then kinda forgot about it when I, well…when I actually quit. About a month or two ago, I started digging through my inbox looking to clean it out, and rediscovered this little sparkling gem of ridiculousness, and thought to myself, “You know, this is pretty passive aggressive. Hey, I know a place where this sort of passive aggressiveness will be cherished like the sparkling diamond it is!” and promptly submitted it to PassiveAggressiveNotes.com. Then I kinda forgot all about it again until a week ago when Kerry from PAN wrote asking if she could link to the original review. Now it’s up for all to see, and apparently, a few people noticed.

I’ll be honest when I say that I think calling this sort of thing “news” is a bit dubious. I submitted the note just because I thought it made for a decent piece of entertainment. I wasn’t trying to out anyone as being jerks or make some big statement on behalf of game journalists who get constant barrages of undue shit from publishers. I just thought it was funny. But then I see threads popping up on Neo GAF and other random places and I find myself realizing that, A. I grossly underestimated the size of PAN’s audience, and B. people seem to be rather hypersensitive toward anything involving perceived conflicts between the media side and the publishing side of the biz these days. Why? I can’t imagine.

It was interesting getting a bunch of notes from people either saying they thought it was awesome that I had something up there, or occasionally asking me if I was worried that I might piss people off by going public with something like that. Honestly? Not really. Like I said, I didn’t submit that note with any malicious intent. I just felt like sharing a piece of stupidity from my personal files. If I happen hurt Majesco dude’s feelings or something, I’m terribly sorry. Maybe I’ll send him a nice basket of mixed-fragrance soaps, or let him borrow my Maybach that runs purely on my own sense of self-satisfaction. Its highway mileage is totally tits.

Oh, and the best part of the whole story? I was in a job interview when I found out about the Joystiq news story. One of the fellows I interviewed with earlier in the day comes running into the lobby right before I leave and says, “Dude, you’re in the news!” Always a fantastic way to make a good impression. Fortunately they were cool about it, but Jesus effing balls, man. Talk about bizarre timing.

My girlfriend and I moved into our current place just over four years ago. In that time, we have cleaned out our garage a total of zero times. Add to this the fact that we found it necessary to bring along a lot of useless garbage from our past that could easily have been tossed or donated before we moved in, and the result is a garage you literally could not walk more than a few feet in before bumping up against some box full of action figures or ancient computer parts or old closet doors or stacks of old comforters or so on and such…

A few weeks ago we made it our mission to clean this fucking thing out, and after a couple of days of hard labor, a $20 entrance fee to the local dump, and more “Ack! A spider!” exclamations than any reasonably masculine male should ever utter, the place looks almost usable. After this weekend’s garage sale, it should be entirely usable.

I kind of hate garage sales. I suppose I don’t mind hosting them so much, but every time I go to one, I’m utterly amazed at the kind of garbage people expect others to buy. Even looking through my crop of crap, I have a hard time believing people will actually fork over for most of this stuff. Then again, every time I do go to one, people are always buying the most ludicrous garbage, so maybe I’m just not giving my particular cache of crap enough credit.

Some of the highlights include:

• A BMX style bike I bought from a buddy of mine a few years ago for like $100 mostly because he was desperately trying to move to Florida and needed cash. I rode it around town a few times, but it was a little low for my tastes.
• Several video games, most of which were sent to me for review purposes. Want a copy of Insecticide for DS, or Conflict: Denied Ops for the 360 on the cheap? I’ve got you covered. I’ve even got a copy of Duck Dodgers for the N64 I’m selling for $3. How’s that for a deal?
• Several terrible novels, including the worst book I’ve ever read in Nick McDonnell’s “Twelve.” If you’ve ever wondered why most 17 year olds aren’t given publishing deals, this half-baked, insightless tale of drugged out WASPS is a pretty good example.
• A lot of coffee table books given to me as gifts over the years that I frankly can’t quite understand the reasoning behind. I don’t remember ever expressing any interest in R. Crumb comics at any point in my life, so why do I have a gigantic collection of all his shit?
• All my old Dilbert, Garfield, The Far Side, and Calvin & Hobbes books from when I was a kid. Because you really have to be like eight years old to find Garfield funny. Now Garfield Minus Garfield, that’s another story.
• Action figures galore. For some stupid sentimental reason, I didn’t throw all of these out in my later teen years when I really, truly should have. My SF II and WoW figures will remain unditched since I still kind of like having those on display, but all my old wrestling figures, comic book figures, GI Joes and such from when I was a kid, those need to disappear. Some kid somewhere wants a Rowdy Roddy Piper and a Wolverine just so he can finally answer the age old question of who would win in a fight. My money’s on the Hot Rod.
• CD books. Because seriously, who still has CDs?
• Wine glasses my dad dumped on me. Because seriously, who drinks wine?
• Guitar Hero controllers, because I have eight dozen of them. Somebody’s going to take this shitty wireless ANT Commandos PS2 controller, or somebody’s going to die.
• A Lazer Tag gun I bought at the Grocery Outlet a couple of years ago because it was a fucking Lazer Tag gun at the fucking Grocery Outlet. Do I need a better reason?
• A pair of gun-shaped lighters that came my way via the folks at Midway to promote Stranglehold. They’re kind of cool, but there is absolutely no reason why I would want to keep those.
• DVD movies that I either bought better versions of recently (IE Scarface, Battle Royale) or got for free and have no intention of ever watching again, like Existenz (pretentious), Free Enterprise (awful), and the first two Saw movies (boring). Great stuff, I know.
• Old baseball and comic book cards that I have no intention of sorting. Someone’s going to pay me a few bucks and get a very big box full of crappy cards. Or they’re going in the trash. Don’t worry, all my good baseball cards (the McGwire rookie, Griffey Jr. rookie, etc) are stashed elsewhere. This is the dregs.
• More old t-shirts, sweatshirts, shorts, pants, shoes, coats, and hats than any human being should have the right to own. The sad part is that even with all this clothing purging, my closet is still basically full.

There’s more, but those are the disgusting highlights. The one real bummer about all of this is that I have to be up at like 7:30 to make this happen. I guess it’s not such a huge deal, since I sleep in pretty much every other day of the week, but I just don’t want to be a total zombie. Fortunately, I have a secret weapon. Remember those awful Mini-Thin Rush energy shots we made Ryan review on the Giant Bombcast several weeks ago? Yeah, I have a second one saved up for just such an occasion. If anyone wants to see what a deranged lunatic looks like, swing by my place tomorrow around 8:30. I imagine the cops will have been called, and fires will have been set. Good times.

UPDATE: 11:05 AM

The gun nut who lives across the street bought the Stranglehold gun lighters, peeled the logos off of them, and then proceeded to fake shoot at neighbors driving by. God bless America.