To celebrate the triumphant announcement of Blizzard's Diablo 3, I'm going to spend the rest of the evening lazily sweeping my mouse icon across hordes of the undead and breezily gelatinating them. Which is to say, I will be jumping onto Battle.net to play Diablo II. Right now.

Want to come play with me? Sure you do. Diablo II is one of the most addictive multiplayer games of all time. After seeing that trailer, you're sure to have the itch. I'll start a game called BBG on US East US West Ladder, password BBG. If you've still got Diablo II, just jump on in. If that game fills up, I invite you to start up bbg2/bbg, and so on. Any game that starts with bbg will be a Boing Boing Gadgets game.

Hope to see a cluster of able warriors in-game. The loot really does improve the more people there are playing.

Update: Joel has been convinced to sell a couple fillings and buy the game, so we're going to play in a couple hours. Rob may be convinced to come along too. If you want to buy the game, you can get it as a digital download from Blizzard's site. You need to get both the core game and expansion for the digital downloads, not the Battle Chest. Hope to see you guys then!

Update 2: Blizzard's having some issues with propogating new CD keys to US East, so we're moving to US West. And we're going in now!

It is perhaps no secret that Joel, Rob and I all carry within our bloated, bile-filled bellies the absorbed fetuses of our doppelgangers, all of whom — in another universe, perhaps — could have been hired to run the entirely theoretical Boing Boing Games. Unfortunately, we were born instead, but we still hear something burbling seductively in our guts... our deformed gaming brother Belials, singing embryonic siren songs, lulling us into the sweet cel-shaded oblivion of just one more round of Team Fortress 2.

We want you to help us C-Section ourselves, bringing our stinking, mewling gamer twins to the light. We want you to play video games with us. Shooters. Role-playing games. Turn-based strategy. Real-time strategy. MMORPGS. SHMUPs. Team-based tactical. Adventures. Simulations. LARPs. Board games. Fighters. Pinball. Stealth. Survival horror. Text adventures. 4X. Tower Defense. Music games. What have you!

Here's how to play with us:

Steam: Join the Boing Boing Steam Group to play any Steam-supported game with us (or other Boing Boing readers).

Xbox Live: Of the BBG editors, Joel's the only one with a functional Live account. His Xbox Live ID is Joelev. Rob and I murmur uncomfortably and promise to get our accounts reinstated soon. Drop your Xbox Live handle in the comments and we'll update this list with other Boing Boing readers.

Reader XBL GamerTags: o DUNCAN o, twoborgz, McSway, Jennatar, ApeData, reesocles, ridestowe1

That's it for now. It's a start. But we want to hear from you. What we want to know is this: what games would you like to play with us? What other useful community information can we put here? We're amenable to nearly anything. Suggest it in this thread and, if we can, we'll give it a try. If it's a success, it'll be added to this canonical gaming post.

If the Mother Boing asks,interacting with our readers is part of our jobs. Help us slack off just a little while longer, for fun and profit. Tell us what games you want to play with us in the comments.

If anybody would like to join up, I'll probably be farming some of those Pyro achievements.

We have started a Boing Boing group on Steam. Our page is right here.

Also, the new "Meet the Sniper" video (above) is so amazingly amazing it's amazing. I want Valve to make a whole Team Fortress movie now.

PROLOGUE

The MOSCONE CENTER in SAN FRANSCISCO. A crowd gathers to hear the elocution of JOBS.

CHORUS: O for a Muse of fire——but an improved iPhone will suffice. The warlike Jobs isn't on the vast fields of France, but today his company's latest toy goes international in a big way: faster internet, lower prices and a shopful of new software are this stage's imaginary puissances.

The stage is set, the lights are dimmed, the audience murmurs impatiently. But the tragedy and ecstasy of this year's WWDC can be staged for neither the hoi polloi or the gentry without strapping a scented toga around our play's missing actor: you.

We need your help. If you care at all about Apple, why not join the Boing Boing Gadgets crew in the #boingboing IRC channel to discuss Steve Jobs announcements in real-time? It starts at 1pm EST. We'll take the best IRC comments and make them the chorus in our Neo-Ovidian masterwork, The Keynote, starring Steve Jobs (A God), Marvin Batelle (A Time Traveler) and Julian Sands (An Inexpensive Actor).

For more details on how to join #boingboing on IRC, check out this post for detailed instructions or simply click this link to be whisked away via handy Java applet.

Places to follow the keynote:

Popular Mechanics liveblog (Hey, Pete!); Engadget; Gizmodo; Summize Twitter Aggregation; Twistori; CNet; Alleged live stream at iPhonealley; Macrumors; TUAW; Live stream on Yahoo.

Update: The curtain rises on The Keynote! Behold! Our tangle of thorns!

The network is Freenode (chat.freenode.net), while our room is #boingboing.

To connect you'll need an "IRC Client," dozens of which are available for almost every computing platform, including mIRC, Trillian, and X-Chat 2 for Windows; X-Chat Aqua and Colloquy on OS X; and IRSSI and other favorites on Linux and other UNIXish environments. You can also use the Chatzilla plug-in for Firefox or simply use the Freenode java applet to connect.

To register your nickname, which gives you the ability to send private messages and reserve your name from use by others, type "/msg NickServ register [choose a password]" when connected to the Freenode server. Don't share your password with anyone!

To wonder if IRC is an antiquated old protocol far past its prime, consider that Douglas Rushkoff was lamenting its death in '96. Boing Boing Gadgets loves to serve you Yesterday's Future Today!

You came, you saw, you conquered. You backstabbed engineers, uber-ed pyros, farmed medic achievements and beat mesomorphic Austrians clean to death with baseball bats... all while the Boing Boing puppet masters clapped their hands in fey delight at the gladiatorial orgy they had Nero-like decreed.

And now we're ready to declare our awesomest player for last weekend's Boing Boing Team Fortress 2, with the adjective "awesomest" decided entirely by Happy Mutant whim. This player will receive a Neuros OSD video storage device. And by consensus, our winner is... Bunnystew. At over 10 hours logged into our server, Bunnystew was this weekend's most committed Boing Boing Team Fortress 2 player, by far. Congrats, Bunnystew! Drop brownlee at boing boing dot net an email to receive your prize.

For the rest of you guys, don't fear: we've got the server for a little while, and we'll schedule matches every weekend until we give it up. Thanks for playing, guys! See you this weekend.

You are cordially invited to an orgy of cartoon mayhem: Valve's superb Team Fortress 2 is on free play this weekend to celebrate a new update, and we've got a 26-player server set up and ready to roll. What with some interesting comment threads here this week, we thought you might like the chance to reach through the internet and kick our asses.

All you need is the steam client, a half-decent PC and and a good internet connection: download what you need at the TF2: Gold Rush Update site.

Here's how to find us. Open up Team Fortress 2, click Find Servers and then check the "Custom" tab. Our server name is Boing Boing Team Fortress 2. Our direct ip, if you need it, is 208.167.248.53:27015. The password is "jackhammerjill" without the quotes. That should bring you in!

The server's up and running now! We're looking forward to being stabbed in the back, immolated, uber-charged and exploded by all of you!

Weekend Schedule: (The server's up 24/7, but it's good to set gathering times for optimal slaughter)

Friday 4 p.m.-late, just dicking around

Saturday, 4-7 p.m. EST, kill kill kill

Sunday, 4-7 p.m. EST, awesomest player wins Neuros OSD DVD organizer!

Flickr pools don't populate themselves, and without them, fastidious bloggers actually have to scrounge content for a living. So as a friendly reminder, Boing Boing Gadgets has three Flickr pools, each a pure and nurturing hollow in which the seed of an image might grow into a full-fledged post. Our pools are:

• Electro Selectro — Vintage ads and inserts from the far flung, four-color past!

• In The Year 2000 — Our Retro-Futurism Pool. Discover the time-machines dreamed up by 17th Century Polynesians!

• Boing Boing Gadgets — our stock image pool.

This week, we'll be high-lighting some of the better images to come in from In The Year 2000, so why not join up and deposit something retro-futuristic for the smug bemusement of us, your fellow post-modernists?

#boingboing regular Dean "Mustard Hamsters" Putney has built a robotic rig that frames his school's chalk board, invited his mates to come draw on it, and will now attempt to stitch together the world's largest image, projected at 40 gigapixels.

He's streaming the attempt live from his site, which will now break. Go Hamsters!

I chatted with him about it in IRC:

[joelev] what's the one line description?
[joelev] You're going to tak ea series of images?
[joelev] and then stitch them together?
[mustardhamsters] how about Largest Digital Image Process Video Stream
[mustardhamsters] yep
[mustardhamsters] i built a robot to do it
[joelev] how do you know it's the record image?
[mustardhamsters] current is 16 gigs
[mustardhamsters] ours is a projected 40
[mustardhamsters] gigapixels
[mustardhamsters] we're doubling it
[joelev] you have a machine with enough ram to do that? :)
[mustardhamsters] i'm buying a solaris sparc server
[mustardhamsters] 10 processors
[mustardhamsters] 20 gigs of ram
[mustardhamsters] two raid cases each with a dozen 18 gig scsis
[joelev] bitchun
[joelev] I have to leave soon
[mustardhamsters] i can tell you about the whole process in a minute or two, i'm setting up the camera now
[joelev] but I will make a post
[mustardhamsters] best part about it: $500
[joelev] Godspeed!

I've got to pop out for the evening, but you can join him in #boingboing on freenode.net if you want to chat back.

Giant Photo: Second Attempt [MustardHamsters.com]

In 60 minutes, we'll be hosting the second weekly game on Boing Boing's official IRC channel, #boingboing on FreeNode IRC. This week's game? Rule 34 Challenge. The game starts at 1pm PST / 4pm EST / 8pm GMT / 9pm BST.

Rules Rule 34, as all men know, is the cosmic rule that demands that porn can be found on the Internet to fit any concept. The rules are simple: numerous times over the course of one hour, I will shout out the Rule 34 Challenge. Contestants will then scramble to Google to find an image or link that puts that person, character or concept in pornographic light. The first three people to present an appropriate link in channel will get points. At the end of the hour, we will add up the points and have our Rule 34 Champions! And we'll knock up the chat log so everyone can bask in our depravity firsthand.

Needless to say, this game will be NSFW.

So, How To Play?: Use an IRC client (or follow this handy-dandy link to a Java client that will run in your browser) to join #boingboing on Freenode. (chat.freenode.net)

Since you will need to be able to private message people in game, register your nick by typing "/msg NickServ register [choose a password]"

Once you've done that, message me that you want to play ("/msg Brownlee I want to play!"). I'll send you a message back, confirming that you're in.

This game won't have any player limits, but you'll still have to message me to play.

See you there!

This hovering space-wagon is a fantastic space age concept car designed by Syd Mead for US Steel in 1961. Knowing full well that the future would all be about electronic rave picnics on the surface of extra-solar alien worlds, Mead saw fit to install a fairly bitching DJ mixer in the back of the vehicle. The gentleman in the mustard slacks at the forefront of the image appears to be some sort of Venusian: notice that his scrawny, horrible legs appear to be twice the length of his torso. Thanks for uploading it to the In The Year 2000 pool, Grain_Edit!

In the other pools: despite highlighting it on Monday, this week's Electro-Selectro entries were pretty dry. However, props go to J_bary for uploading this image of an electronic nose from the 1950s that sniffed out power-line leaks. Sometimes the most boring things are fascinating: who knew that electrical maintenance men used to use soap bubbles to detect power line leaks before this high-falutin' electronic nose gadgetry revolutionized the industry? Thanks, J!

We have a name for the 21st century where I come from: the suppurating asshole of space time. For reference, imagine flipping through an American History textbook, just lazily skimming around, then... WHAM! Goatse.cx. You now have a good idea of what the history books of the 31st century look like: an engorged, inside-out historical sphincter stretching between the knuckles of 1983's break-dancing revolution and the emergence of robo-break-dancing in 2176.

Now imagine being sucked into that pulsating Goatse vortex and you've got a pretty good idea of what it felt like when I woke up naked in an Oklahoma field surrounded only by belching cows and clouds of dissipating purple chronatons. Yes, it's an ugly analogy, and I'm sorry to labor it, but short of cramming the monolith from 2001 down your throats, it's the only way I can make you monkeys understand what it's like to be trapped here.

The name's Marvin, by the way. Marvin Battelle. I'm Boing Boing Gadgets' "band manager," whatever that is. And I am from the future.

Despite the grousing of a small stable of #boingboing dissenters, last week's Pre-Cogs vs. Replicants game was a smashing success. The Replicants were thwarted, the opalescent offal of their chest cavities disgorged by the disemboweling of our canny Pre-Cog. If you're interested, you can download the official transcript log at the end of the post.

This week, we're going to do a different game: Rule 34 Showdown. Rule 34, as all men know, is the cosmic rule that demands that porn can be found on the Internet to fit any concept. The rules are simple: numerous times over the course of one hour, I will shout out the Rule 34 Challenge.

"RULE 34: Portal Weighted Companion Cube Humping Turret!" I might cry. The denizens of #boingboing will go scrambling to find a link that illicitly matches the challenge. The first three people to come up with separate links and images for the same concept will be awarded first, second and third place points of decreasing denominations. At the end of the hour, the person with the most points will be declared the official RULE 34 PORNOGRAPHER OF #BOING BOING! At least for the week. And to make it all timeless fun, we'll knock up all the links we accrue in the official transcript of the event.

This week's game will be held on Friday Night at 4pm EST / 1pm PST / 9pm GMT. If you want to hang out in the channel before the game, you can get more information about connecting to Boing Boing IRC via a dedicated client here, and there is also a Java chat applet with which you can connect. Hope to see you there!

precogrepgame.rtf [Download]

When Joel and Rob and I meet at the Korova Milk Bar for some milk plus or synehemesc or drencrom or whatever it is we're washing down the ultra-violence with that night, our discussion — as it often does — turns away from the topic of miniature bowler hats and Beethoven and instead meanders over to our third favorite topic: the Boing Boing Gadgets Flickr pools.

Are you familiar with them? You should be. Have you ever inserted your ovipositor into our Flickr's welcoming moistness and evacuated your PNGs? You should. Here are our pools:

• Electro Selectro — Vintage ads and inserts from the far flung, four-color past!

• In The Year 2000 — Our Retro-Futurism Pool asks the timeless question, first put forth by Descartes: "What if Cave Men Invented Ray Guns?"

• Boing Boing Gadgets — The flotsam and the jetsam of BBG's Flickr pools. Anything cool and remotely gadget related goes in here if it doesn't fall into the other two categories.

This week, we'd like to encourage you — o, our special little droogies — to check out Electro-Selectro. It doesn't get enough love. Join! Upload images! Comment! As you surf Electro-Selectro, you will viddy yourself very clear, running and running on like very light and mysterious feet, carving the whole face of the creeching world with your cut throat britva. You will be cured all right.

At the end of the week, we'll post the best image uploaded to Electro-Selectro, accompanied by a perverse and profane caption, translated into Nadsat and neatly laid out in a sinister-looking Helvetica font. Hope to see you there.

Electro Selectro [Flickr]

Join us tomorrow at 8PM Eastern as we hold a live discussion with author, teacher, and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff in the #boingboing IRC channel, to talk about some of the work he's doing to move his studies in a "'new' direction," to focus less on the tech/media sphere and towards the nature of money and corporatism — and whether that's a new direction at all! (He's already start discussing this with other like-minded people on his new discussion board, Corporatized.net.)

Also, I just realized tomorrow is tax day. Fitting!

I'll be moderating the interview — I'm really looking forward to asking some questions I had about his fantastic comic series Testament — but I hope to incorporate your questions for most of the discussion. If you can't be on IRC for the talk, feel free to leave questions for Doug in the comments of this post. If you are following in real-time, you can also send me questions via private messages in IRC. If you can't make the talk live, we'll be posting a transcript.

Boing Boing IRC: Bringing You 1996's Web Technologies Today!

More information about connecting to Boing Boing IRC via a dedicated client. There is also a Java chat applet with which you can connect.

Just a reminder, guys: we'll be hosting our first IRC event in #boingboing in 30 minutes, at 1pm EST. The game is a variant of the popular Mafia/Werewolf social game called Pre-Cogs versus Replicants.

If you want to come and observe, jump on an IRC Freenode server and join #boingboing, or just click this link to use a Java IRC client. If you want to play, check out the description and rules in our official announcement thread, then join the channel, register your nick (/msg NickServ register [choose password]) and then message John Brownlee that you want to play (/msg Brownlee I want to play!)

Hope to see you there!

Tomorrow, John Brownlee will be hosting "Pre-Cogs vs. Replicants," a version of the popular "Mafia" (a.k.a. "Werewolf") social game in the #boingboing IRC channel. Remember, he who lies best lies last.

Game: Pre-Cogs vs. Replicants (a variation of the Mafia party game.)

Time: April 10th at 1pm EST

Place: #boingboing on FreeNode IRC

Setting: The sinuous, slithering bowels of Grope-Kant University: a festering intestinal track four years long in which the turgid philosophical constructs of pimpled undergrads are broken down into a semantic slurry suitable for the suckling of tenured flatworms. Within this excretionary system exists a small nodule of scientific inquiry: Grope-Kant U's Department of Bio-Chemical Engineering, comprised of twenty two researchers tinkering with the building blocks of life.

For most of these free-thinkers, the goals are modest, albeit perverse: mongrel dogs that can be milked by obnoxious assistants into ejaculating ambergris. Supple, disembodied female breasts, suitable for playing bocce on the Quadrangle. Xenuvian tomatoes that scream when they are sliced. And, of course, a wide variety of mutagenic nostrums that, slathered appropriately, allow for a variety of surprising genital enhancements especially aimed at Caligulan jousters and pole-vaulters.

But lurking amongst this constabulary of perverted old men, three academics toil on works of quiet yet resplendent genius.

Two — eager to improve their French kissing with first-person clinical analysis — have secretly grown genetic replicants of themselves, pleasure models to be sure.

The third, quite by accident, has pricked himself with a roux of chemicals with the interesting side effect of psychic pre-cognition.

And although, at first, this accidental pre-cog's aims for his new mental powers are limited entirely to trying to figure out if girls really like him, the surprise discovery of two brainless corpses crammed into a mail chute — their faces ripped off; their formulae for genetic cloning inserted into clammy, puckered orifices — will quickly transform this nebbish professor into a warrior of destiny.

Rules and how to get on IRC after the jump.

On our "In the Year 2000" Flickr pool update with the picture of the Epcot concept painting, Willykea left this comment:

Miraculously, on the day this was first posted I was cleaning out my garage and found a box containing a thick, full-color brochure from 1982 announcing the opening of Epcot. I immediately thought of boingboing. I was shocked when I saw the headline "Incredible Epcot Concept Painting" the next morning and the associated picture that I had just been admiring the day before. The brochure was buried under a pile of old letters and memorabilia that I had held onto for almost 30 years and I found it a few hours before someone posted the picture of the painting online - amazing coincidence. I went out and bought a scanner so that I could share some additional images from the brochure with you guys

Willy, you rule! (You should scan in and upload even higher fidelity versions, though!)

Bill's Public Gallery [Picasa]