I love media. Really, I do. I love music, movies, TV, games, magazines, websites, podcasts, etc. At times, it’s even clear to me that I might go a bit overboard in the amount of media I consume in a given week, but this past week, I went cold turkey. I had access to nothing, zip, zilch, nada…

and it sucked!

Catch the full story after the jump…

I went to Boy Scout Summer Camp as a parent/leader with my son. Seven days of nature, camping, hiking, learning skills appropriate for scouting, playing on the beach, etc. It was great in some respects, but torturous in other respects. As a blogger and podcaster, I thrive on scouring through the latest gaming news as it’s made available, cherry-picking the best nuggets to put the Sarcastic Gamer spin on. Last week, however, I experienced full-on withdrawal. Through all of it, my one tiny lifeline was my cell phone. If I went to the very end of camp, practically hanging off a cliff, I could just barely eek out a signal. It was enough to talk on if the planets were aligned correctly, but mostly, it was just enough to send/received text messages.

I knew with an entire week to go, I needed to pace myself in terms of my phone’s battery. I didn’t even bother bringing my phone’s charger since I didn’t think I’d have access to electricity to charge it again anyway. Two days passed and I was doing pretty alright. Then I remembered that the Playstation Blog guys were supposed to be releasing a video walk through of the upcoming firmware 2.40, so I sent a text to Frawlz to see how things were going. What happened next only made my condition worse…

Me: Text me if any huge PS3 news is announced. I have an intermittent texting signal in certain parts of camp.
Frawlz: 2 things… Live video for the 2.4 update. The trophies system we saw is real. There is a two part official video out by Sony.

Um… thanks? His answer, while completely accurate, only served to make me want to know more. What was in the video? Did it look good? Did it look lame? What does the community at large think? So many questions, so little battery life (with days of camping still ahead of me.) I waited a couple more days before asking

Me: Anything else big and exciting happen this week?
Frawlz: Ha! They pulled the update because it was bricking systems. Lol.

I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. Every attempt to get a nugget of information to ease the withdrawal, only seemed to make it worse. I was fully aware of how pathetic it was to be sitting in a beautiful campground in the Pacific Northwest, no more than 50 feet from a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, wondering to myself what I was missing in the day to day “gaming news” world I frequent. One of the most important events to date in the PS3’s timeline just HAPPENED to coincide with my son’s camping trip. Surely there are other big things that won’t coincide with camping trips of mine… I mean it’s not like e3 will happen during my camping trip next week…

Wait a minute…gah!