(Update: iTunes support kicked in! Hooray!)

First things first: Idle Thumbs is back in podcast form. Go check it out. If you never knew Idle Thumbs existed in the first place (a likely scenario), feel free to read on for some self-indulgent history and explanation:

In 2004, as part of a team of mainly San Francisco Bay Area- and United Kingdom-based writers, I helped launch Idle Thumbs, a gaming site that (we think) at least partially succeeded in its goal of delivering video game writing simultaneously entertaining and informed. It’s hard to pin down what exactly the Thumbs ethic was (there was more than one heated argument to that end) but it definitely had one.

At least, for a little while. As it turns out, that sort of endeavor is difficult to maintain indefinitely, particularly when you’re doing it entirely in your free time. On top of that, the limited-but-fairly-unusual exposure we got through the site became for many of us something of a springboard to other (paying) jobs involving games. (more…)