Head over to the thread with the links to all the map downloads, and then cast your vote! You have one week to get to it.

Lots of our members here are getting in the spirit for Halloween. Check out this awesome costume:

Also, these two great carved pumpkins.

Now THAT'S thinking with portals!

Rock, Paper, Shotgun is at it again, this time with a chat with one of those wacky valve guys:

Quote:
Also, there is cake. Why's that?

Well, there are lots of message games coming out now. Like they've got something really important to get off their chest about the war in Iraq or the player is forced to make some dicey underwater moral choices. Really, just a whole heck of a lot of stuff to think about. With that in mind, at the beginning of the Portal development process, we sat down as a group to decide what philosopher or school of philosophy our game would be based on. That was followed by about fifteen minutes of silence and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake.

I was listening to a bit of Dragonforce while reading this, and the tempo of the music makes his frenetic commentary that much more absurd, err appropriate.

Update: RPS also interviewed two of the original folks who made Narbacular Drop and, of course, Portal.

Well it looks like the first bug of the new server has reared it's head. Apparantly the Signup emails have not been going out, I am guessing that the mail settings did not get setup right. We are working on getting this fixed ASAP. If you have registered within the past few days, try logging in as I have mass-enabled all of those account.

Sorry for the problems everyone!

EDIT Until it gets resolved, I have disabled email confirmation and manually activated all of the new accounts that have signed up within the last 4 days (when we moved servers).

EDIT Looks like we got it all resolved. Having sendmail actually installed helped!

Portal's been fantastically successful in one aspect, without a doubt: having a theme song that is irrevocably lodged in your brain. This is not the first time Jonathan Coulton, the man behind "Still Alive," has made catchy tunes As it turns out this "Geek Troubadour" is a veteran songwriter and gamer, which he discussed with MTV's Multiplayer Blog:

Quote:
Later in the year Valve invited Coulton to the company's offices in Kirkland, Washington. "They flew me out there at Kim's urging," Coulton said. "During the visit they sat me down and I did a little play-testing on an unfinished version of 'Portal' and just loved it. We sat down with Eric Wolpaw, the writer...Eric said, 'I always wanted to do a musical number in a game,' and I said, 'Oooh, that sounds juicy.'

He also has talked about Portal on his blog before:

"The character is this hilarious passive aggressive personality, which is obviously a perfect subject for me. I write about that sort of thing all the time. I got an advance copy of the game when it was nearly finished, played through it, talked with the writers, and tried to get inside this character's head as best I could. I bought my first ukulele specifically to record this song, it just seemed right for it. (Or maybe I wrote the song that way so I could buy a ukulele, hard to say.)"

And just as the ThinkingWithPortals community has started imitating the Portal mappers, the Victims of Science have imitated Jonathan Coulton (sort of) with their new song "The Device Has Been Modified." I only say sort of because they've replaced Coulton's guitar with a synthesizer for a nice stroll down Synth Street. It's the sort of thing you'll like, if you like these kinds of things.

(Hat tip: Rock, Paper, Shotgun)