Saturday we made it back to PAX with the idea of spending the day in panel discussions. We of course ended up wandering the grounds taking everything in again (the people watching is nothing short of epic), playing more games in the exhibition hall, and only made it to a couple of panels before calling it a day. The first panel we attended featured prominent members of female-oriented gaming communities, talking about how their communities......

Seattlest took a break from the HQ today to head down for some early time at the Penny Arcade Expo. We wanted to get our pass and our bearings a bit before the bulk of the crowds arrived, and it's shaping up to be quite the weekend. Lines were already long, crowds were building, and the swag was flowing freely. It's nerd nirvana, and you won't want to miss out. Seattlest spent most of......

Bumbershoot has completely dominated the press this week, but for gamers, this weekend holds importance because of the Penny Arcade Expo, the gaming convention run by the local crew behind gaming/geek culture comic Penny Arcade. The Penny Arcade Expo (aka PAX) starts tomorrow (tonight if you include the pub crawl), marking the the fifth anniversary of the event, and as with every prior year, it looks to be the largest yet, with an expected......

One of the highlights of this past weekend was heading down to the Northwest Pinball and Gameroom Show, held at Seattle Center. For an entrance fee, attendants got free access to over a hundred games, mostly pinball, with a few video games mixed in. It was a great way to kill a few hours, and to even learn something, with seminars featuring Steve Wiebe of the documentary King of Kong, and pinball designer legend......

Who knew? Seattlest tends to be slow on the uptake when it comes to going out on weeknights. We're the first to admit that, most of the time, we'd rather sit at home and watch reality television or satisfy our unhealthy workaholism well into the late night hours. Weekends are for going out....but, last night, in a rare fit of early-week fun-having, we rounded up as many of our favorite girlfriends as we could,......

Last night at Benaroya Hall, author Richard Powers read from a new short story called "Modulation." It was classic Powers; a dense, far-reaching, and meticulously vivid tale of a computer virus that infects music player devices via filesharing sites. He weaves the story around four different individuals: a Japanese hacker recently released from prison and now employed by the RIAA to huntdown filesharers, a Brazilian journalist researching soldiers in Iraq who blast ear-crunching music from......

Redmond native and actual Guitar Hero Carrie Brownstein did some work on the advertising of the game Rock Band. You might have seen these commercials; four rocker-lookin types sit around and cut on each other in the jaded and weary fashion of musicians on the road. That's not her work, thank god. She was on a different team pushing a different concept. Anyway, she's got an article up at Slate today about her experiences with......

It's official, Seattlest has a new love: The Georgetown Liquor Company. The draw? Well it's got the words "liquor company" right there in the name which should be enough, but we know that you, our dear readers, demand more substance to make a recommendation valid. Thankfully, when we showed up we found that it's got a well-tended, full bar, all the excellent food is vegetarian and it has old-school console video games like the Atari......

Before she came out, walked to center stage and stole our hearts, we were lucky to have made it to the Moore in time to catch the last couple songs from the ex Moldy Peaches guitarist, Only Son. Actually it was more like two songs and a story. A story put to music, told pretty much off-the-cuff and in the first-person about a guy in a grocery store. He sees a girl. She's cute, but......

FESTIVAL: The first-ever (official) Lebowski fest in Seattle kicks things off at the Showbox. Tonight's the chubby dance-rock of the oft tighty-whitey-clad Har Mar Superstar and a screening of the Coen Brothers' classic. Tomorrow's bowling with The Dude at Kenmore Lanes. Wear your best bathrobe and pound some white Russians, or you'll be out of your element, Donny. 8pm doors // Showbox // $15 MUSIC: We still haven't gone to a show at the......

"I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, care if I'm old." Perhaps Kurt Cobain didn't care about aging, but we think he would care if he knew that Breed would end up as the soundtrack to Major League Baseball 2K7. The soundtrack also includes the Stooges and the Pixies. You can hear the whole thing here. Baseball video game soundtracks have advanced somewhat since the days when......

Before we begin, we'd like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family of James Kim. We are not, by any means, trying to discount that tragedy by juxtaposing posts about the Kims with more light-hearted posts. It's the nature of doing a compilation such as this one: we're trying to give a full slice of the goings-on in the Ist-a-Verse: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Londonist wants you to know where......

Best thing we learned at last night's quiz: Gabriel Garcia Marquez looks like "Agatha Christie on a bad day." The Old Pequliar's own version of Ken Jennings, Hüsker Don't, returned to the playing field last night and promptly (well, in two hours) won by 7 points over Who'll Stop the Crane? Seattlest is currently in negotiations to produce Win Hüsker Don't's Money -- stay tuned. Oh, and where are the video games? Round 8, people,......

8bitjoystick called Seattlest out yesterday (which we love, btw, whether you do it on your random blog you expect us to magically find, or you have at us in the comments or you send us email. Please, tell us what we're missing and we'll consider it internally and then publicly enumerate the reasons why you're wrong.), and, befitting a blog about video games, 8bitjoystick is all over us for our lack of video game coverage.......

We're anxiously awaiting the 2008 movie based on the WTO events in Seattle, although we hope "The Battle in Seattle" is only a working title. They're filming right now, but don't rush to the window hoping for a glimpse of one of the stars - We think they're in Vancouver. Yesterday four new actors were added to the project. Charlize Theron, Woody Harrelson, Ray Liotta are in it already. Andre Benjamin and Martin Henderson are......

Microsoft has had a Halo movie in the works for a while now, but it looks like it was killed this week. Universal was supposed to produce the Redmond-written script, a budget was set of $145 million and no less than Peter Jackson was set to produce, but late last week it was revealed that the studio wanted to renegotiate terms and Microsoft bailed. A great post on the subject at GigaOm asks, "The real......

Police attribute an arson in the Central District last night to a fight over an XBox. From KIRO: Police said two men argued over an Xbox and a 20-year-old left. He returned at about midnight and apparently set fire to the back porch at the home in Seattle's Central Area, police said. He then called the family in the home to taunt them, police said. Everyone got out safely. What's unclear is this: Was the......

If you are anything like some us at Seattlest, you've wasted months, if not years, of your life playing video games. Oh, for all of those hours. The things we could have done. What better way to celebrate that time well spent than by visiting the Pacific Science Center's Game On! exhibit? It runs through August 31st and "gets you up close and personal with the games, how they're made, where they came from, and......

Once Leilani Lanes closes, the 32-lane West Seattle Bowl will be Seattle’s biggest bowling alley. Despite its painfully bland exterior, WSB has a cool, architecturally unique interior. A central walkway divides the building, with lanes 1 through 14 on its north side and lanes 15 through 32 on the south. A high arched ceiling covers the north lanes, while the south lanes have a typically low, sound-reducing ceiling. We suspect the incongruous overall design......

“The sun never sets at Sunset Bowl.” So says the ad in the Stranger, though if the present trend of alley closures continues, we fear the Ballard alley could also go the way of Leilani Lanes (and, uh, the British Empire). The questionable slogan refers to the 24/7 hours at Sunset, which is always hopping whenever we’re there, though we don’t bowl at 4 a.m., either. Still, it’s probably Seattle’s best known, most beloved,......

Where were you when you heard the news? In 1965, at the peak of bowling’s popularity in America, the city of Seattle was blessed with 25 bowling alleys. They weren’t a novelty, as they’re often perceived today, but common neighborhood establishments with thriving league play, receiving regular coverage in local sports pages. However, after Leilani Lanes closes this spring, just five Seattle bowling alleys will remain. That’s hard to believe, especially considering the area’s bowling......

Seattlest decided that we were going to relive our undergrad experience not long ago. We slept until noon and then sat around in the kitchen waiting for lunch to be served, but apparently Seattlest's fiancee ignored the hair nets and recipies we'd left out and had gone to work. We ate a few slices of the pizza we ordered at 3am but were either too stoned or too wrapped up in video games to eat......

Saturday October 1st is the International Mountain Biking Association's annual "Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day". Plenty of research shows that parents who lead by example and participate in sports and outdoor activities will have kids who do the same--so get off the couch, turn off the XBox (you're 37 years old for the love of God), and go plunk your offspring on a set of wheels. Don't have bikes of your own or easy......

Kids love bad ideas. They can’t get enough of them. They will spend all summer inside playing video games, they will throw rocks at the girl they like, and they will borrow their dad’s car and try to take the miles off by running it in reverse. However there are some bad ideas that kids just don’t like, for example the WASL. Nerds aside, no kid likes sitting in their second period class taking......

Nate McMillan-- our favorite Sonic of all time-- is now the coach of the Portland Trailblazers, a thought that is harder to swallow than Paul Bunyan's left boot. And this on the same night that the Mariners leave Kansas City losing two out of three to the punchless Royals. We once again question why we are sports fans. It's almost like we told ourselves, "Hey, we need one more thing in our life that we......

The wildly popular and absolutely hilarious online comic Penny Arcade is penned in Seattle; Fremont and Kirkland, last we heard. It's mostly about video games so if you play video games religiously there's a good chance you follow the strip religiously. If you follow the strip religiously than you've already heard that the creators are coming out on the bright side of a long legal tunnel involving their books and their rights to publish......