I'm pretty sure most of you out there do not know me, i'm not that active on the D-toid blogs and I have been to the forums like once. I love this site and enjoy the content daily but I do so from a PS3 so it's kinda impossible to blog frequently when I have another blog to keep up with as well on another site.

If you have happened to glance at my bio or previous posts you can probably pic up that I'm a huge nerd that has always wanted to write about games.

Now just updating a blog on a semi-weekly basis is fun and all but it has no purpose to it, I set up the soapbox, get up on in, then just... fizzle out. Nobody's really listening and I have no real drive to do it so my stuff either is too short or too long and overblown.

Anyway.

Last week I was sitting in my room, bored as hell. I'd just sat there listening to Podtoids (I'm a HAWP and Rev Rant fan but I've never sat down and actually done an entire Podtoid in one shot, PS3 doesn't really cater to podcasts cus you cannot just jump to the part you stopped at, you gotta fast forward for half of the time elapsed in the podcast) but now I had just run out of stuff to listen too.

I decided to do something random so I turned on the 360 with the express purpose to go into Halo 3 and forge a huge pile of explosives and set it off... always worth the effort.

Thing Is I never got that far, as soon as the MSN messenger linked to my gamertag signed in a friend of mine from GT popped up.

Can you be in a podcast

What
I'm starting something called Lo-Ping, "A goodly place for game blog and news"

I asked him why me and he explained he was starting a gaming podcast and he needed guest stars. I felt a abyss in my stomach form, I do not have Skype on the family laptop and my paranoid parents will not allow me to bring it back to my room for fear of me spilling something on it or dropping it (due to the fact I've broken in like 2 mics and a controller in like 3 years that's a bit extreme but seeing as 100% of our income relys on this computer I can see why they'd freak)

I had actually head my head in one hand and said "I'm really sorry man, I mean this is something I would love to do, I've always wanted to do something like this but I just can't be on a podcast. I can write for it or something but I doubt you need a writer for something like that.

Oh, it's got a blog section too, blogs every 2 days and a podcast every friday

Pick any joyus fanfare you can think of and that's essentially my mood right when I saw that.

I went to the laptop and pounded out something for a "Meet and Greet" he was holding as the first blog and there I was, a "Contributing Writer/ Xbox 360"

Funny thing is except for my ODST review and a upcoming article about the Indie Games channel I tend to lean towards whatever news tickles my fancy, not just 360. Best thing is the editor really doesn't care what I write about!

And here's the topper, I may not be able to be there when they record the podcast, but I came up with an idea...

"Hey I got an idea about the podcast"

?

How about I record something like... random news story of the week and you can just insert it between break segments in the real thing.

Sounds good

For those of you wondering, Lo-Ping is a chinese phrase that (i'm told) translates to "To discuss/ criticise". And seeing as the guy that started it is a PC gamer the obvious Low Ping wordplay is too much to pass up. The next logical step was to pick a mascot, he decided to go with pandas, which I kinda like and I even butchered my old ODST signature to fit into the Lo-Ping style.

Before

After

So there you have it, not only do I have a reason to get out of bed in the morning as far as writing goes. I've got a news segment in the weekly podcast. This may not be the dream job of being paid to write about games and the culture surrounding it but it's a start.

Yeah, I'd say its been a good week.