Like a lot of gamers who spend half their lives online, I’m a big fan of game podcasts. I listen to them at work, I put them on when I clean the apartment, I work out to them and hell, I even play games with a podcast on in the background. I’ve always found it the best way to keep up on my gaming news and overall goofy game culture pontifications without losing track of the rest of life.

In reality, I probably spend as much time surfing game sites and listening to podcasts as I do actually playing games. Really, keeping up with the whole multimedia blogosphere surrounding the games industry is as much a game (a metagame?) as anything you’ll load up on a machine…

It’s been about a month since the epic closure of Electronic Gaming Monthly/the gutting of 1Up.com. You’ve heard of it, of course, if you spend any time at all reading gaming sites, but I’ll reiterate: 1Up was awesome, they had great editorial and a stable of truly excellent video/audio content. But their parent company (Ziff Davis) was bankrupt, and they sold the site to UGO (a Hearst property), and in the ensuing kerfluffle, most of the staff was laid off, the magazine was dead, and most of the audio/video shows were canned. Outrage ensued.

Well, here we are a month later.