This weekend, Lincoln Russell did a quiet feature update to Icrontic.com.

Three major new features: Icrontic Blogs, Icrontic Directories, and completely revamped user profiles.

Read, and enjoy!

Interested in contributing news to Icrontic? Members with over 100 posts on the forum now have access to write posts for the site. The posts must be edited and approved by staff before publication. To contribute, first read a quick summary of how to write news, then click the Contribute link under the News forum. I’m excited to see what happens.

I cannot tell you how badly I want this game. ArsTechnica gives it a “Seriously why haven’t you gone out and bought this yet?” out of 10. 

The thing that actually intrigues me most is the $300 drum kit and the trainer mode. $300 would cover 2 months of drum lessons from a professional for one of my kids. I believe in the power of video games, and I am pretty sure that a committed student with a $300 kit and Rock Band 2’s trainer mode could actually learn to play real drums. According to the reviews I’ve read, this is a very accurate assessment.

Now, to use that “righteous purpose” as an excuse to buy the game and a $300 game peripheral is another matter…

Nah, of course we’ll have to go out and get this for Oktoberfest 08, right? right? At the bare minimum we can get the $60 game and the new $70 guitar, that’ll get us by. 

The track list also looks impressive. Man, I can’t WAIT to play “Carry on my Wayward Son” by Kansas, “You Oughta Know” by Alanis, and “Man in the Box” by Alice in Chains. 

Any Icrontians going out to get it this week? Apparently the new “challenge” mode is the bomb-diggity.

There is nothing quite like attending an Icrontic event. There’s always something awesome going on, involving somebody, well… awesome. Whether it be impromptu “Run to Meijer at 2am to buy Rock Band”, taping people to objects, spontaneous deep frying of food in driveways, or just a lot of great times with great people, IC events never fail to please.

With that in mind, be sure to remember that we are having our second annual Oktoberfest celebration. This year we’re gonna be getting a half barrel of Kuhnhenn’s All Hallows Ale for the celebration (that’s 126 pints, ma’am), which is one of the best beers Kuhnhenn’s has ever produced.

Whether you are an old Icrontic fixture (I’m looking at you, Ghoosdum), or a complete newb (I wanna see some 0xDECAFBAD at this shindig!), you really should consider flying your autumn ass out to Warren, MI for what promises to be an incredible party. (more…)

We’re now running on Wordpress, which is at least the sixth content management system (CMS) we’ve used over the years, but only the second commercial one (We had a brief and disastrous honeymoon with E107 in 2003). So, why’d we stop using our custom system? Mostly because of usability: it’s easier for our authors to write in Wordpress. Wordpress has a lot of features that we’d never had time to add on our own, and it offers a great framework for adding features of our own. (more…)

It hit me the other day: Furniture sucks. Hard to clean, expensive, hard to move, and neverchanging. For example, let’s look at the Big Red Couch at ICHQ. It’s been around forever. I believe I paid something like $800 for it when we bought this house in 2004. After all the ICHQ flophouse parties, (like the IC LAN, Oktoberfest, St Patty’s day… you get the idea) and all the couch-crashers, it fell apart. The arms are worn through, the padding on the arms is gone, it has dog hair all over it, it’s just generally sort of beat up. Repairing it would be really expensive.

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Icrontic will be unavailable for two hours starting at 12pm EST on Saturday, September 13. I’ll be using the time to upgrade our content management system and forum. And installing ninjas.

I’ve had a project kicking around in the back of my mind for a few years now. It recently came up again and I decided to really move on this.

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Icrontic is now on Flickr. If you have a Flickr account, and you’ve got pics of Icrontic events, please feel free to add them to the group pool.

DJ Thrax - a pic from our Flickr group

Please tag your photos with the word “Icrontic” if you do choose to upload them. Also, tagging your photos with important words like “beer” or “chicago” or “LAN” or whatever is going on in the pics is cool too.

Enjoy!

http://www.flickr.com/groups/icrontic/

(Ed note: Check out these moves while I revolve it.)

I’m pretty sure this is the first time we’ve done this, but since we’ve entered our 8th year, it’s time to put some big boy pants on and take a survey of our members and readers.

We would REALLY appreciate it if you could take 5 minutes out of your busy day to take this completely anonymous survey. You don’t have to register. You don’t have to log in, you just click the answers and go. There are only 10 questions.

It’s very important to us that you take the survey and that you answer honestly.

Thank you thank you thank you!

On August 8, 2000, a kid named Keith “Mortin” Whitsitt published an article about his new computer on apushardware.com. Eight years after that first article, here we are. Eight years old on 8-8-08. I’ll take all the luck I can get.

Every year we haphazardly slide into the behemoth that is the IC LAN, and every year we come away glowing, grinning, laughing, and recalling all the great memories we made. When over 50 people congregate at ICHQ for a week(end?), amazing things happen.

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Clutch has been around IC since he was a kid, and now he’s all grown up and livin’ the Icrontic life:

Her mom is throwing us a house warming party on the 14th at their house. And that is the night I am going to pop the question to her.

And today, in the forums, he made his announcement:

SHE SAID YES!!!!

Congratulations Jeremy, from all of us at Icrontic

The Well c.1989 = Icrontic c.2008 (except our haircuts are better).

As most of you know, the always-epic Icrontic LAN is coming up fast. As in previous years, there are always companies that step up to support our community and sponsor our event with prizes to give away. This year, Icrontic would like to extend thanks to:

OCZ Technologies

Sumo Lounge Furniture

Noctua

Sony Style

For supplying Icrontic with some swank prizes. Thanks!