Brendan Sinclair (News editor) posted a blog about a homework recent winner of theHotSpot. If you haven't listened in to the podcast each week staff assign homework to listeners and the best entry often receives the GameSpot Homework achievement.

Brendan shared a Gears of War poem that is beautifully written. I wonder how many game related songs could be made from him! Check it out.

The Saturday episode of Today on the Spot plans to give away four hoodies that look just like the ones Sophia and I wore during the Halloween episode.

Here are some image captures of Vindictus' White Tyrant (polar bear) hoodie.

A good shot to display the inside of the flaps.

Sophia

Sophia and Jody

Good for hiding hands too, there are little pockets near the paw area of the hoodie as seen here.

Jody

Hello there! I wanted to make sure the followers of my blog were aware of two important things!

- Medal of Honor Game night (PC/X360) on Wednesday, November 3 starting at 5pm PT. Chris and Kevin plan to be hosting matches, and I'll be dropping by to play (if I can find myself a copy around the office or rent one at Blockbuster in time)

- TheHotSpot has a trivia question that will grant some lucky winners Medal of Honor schwag. If you're wanting to pick up the game yet and dont have the money, or you're lazy, try for the trivia. They plan to select the winners before the next episode (Tuesday morning), so get in your answers sooner than later!

If you haven't had a moment to be a part of the two little activities we have on the site in exchange of a Halloween achievement check it out.

Box Hunt Activity - Dedicated to games. All you have to do is respond with the list of the game names based on the clips of the box art.

Celebrity Guessing Game - Dedicated to the Off-Topic forumites and celebrity fans! All of you have to do is guess the latest batch 4 to receive the emblem. And, because I'm so nice I'll link you to the results page.

If you're still craving more achievements I'd like to introduce you to FrankeTOTS! GameSpot members who post feedback about our Halloween special will receive this special achievement! I'm also heariing some whispers among the office today about some Medal of Honor schwag in relation to the Halloween episode and an upcoming episode of TheHotSpot. If you already have the game or you're looking to buy it, the schwag just might have you grinning from ear to ear. So, pay attention to what you see during the Halloween episode, and you'll find out why I am connecting these two upcoming episodes soon enough!

Running the site as a solo community manager over the past few years makes things quite difficult. I'm pulled in every which way you can imagine and sometimes it takes me an entire weekend to catch up on things without getting any overtime pay and not all of the tasks get completed. There simply isn't enough time in a day. I enjoy working here and a lot of the tasks might be fun but I can only do so much to make a difference.

Now that time is becoming even tighter I need to cut back on some areas to focus on continued education. Working on days off can be a tiring tasks when it happens weeks if not months in a row. While I have others areas I'll be targeting to help ease the excessive work hours, one of the tasks I enjoy doing happens to be the weekly report. Many of you have noticed that I have been unable to be consistent with the weekly report for months now. I'd like to continue to offer these reports every week because your contributions mean a lot to us; however, the research it takes to read through your blogs, user reviews, and watch your creative videos takes time that I need to complete other tasks that happen behind scenes. After all, there are so many wonderful GameSpot blog and review writers, and only one JodyR!

With the limited time I have in a given week I have too much on my plate to offer these weekly reports at this time. I do plan to update the Spam Filter with general community news about changes or other happenings, and if I get a chance during a week I'll do a quick round-up of specific features. For instance, maybe I'll have a reviews round-up one week but for weeks in a row I will have no updates about this feature. I might also do the same for blogs or user videos, depending on the work load I have that week. I don't want to neglect the videos or member spotlight section on the forums page so if I stumble across people who deserve being featured I'll save their names to check for the best one at the end of the month. Sadly, this does mean that we only have 3 more member spotlights for the year.

I apologize for the inconvenience and hope for your understanding.

If you have been lurking on my raptr page or my achievements page here you might notice that I have been playing Dead Rising 2 quite frequently. As of last night I turned level 24 and I am hoping to get level 25 tonight (for an achievement!).

I will admit that maybe some of this functionality was in the original game but I only played about 45 minutes of it to know what it had to offer. Dead Rising 2 offers something different than other games because of the interesting weapon creatons, and the combo cards that are collected to share what kinds of things you can make. Making my first lightsaber out of gems and a flashlight was an amazing achievement in itself! I also realized that mixing a drink like wine and beer helped during boss fights. I wont give that away but try it if you play the game! ;) Oh, and running around with a wheelchair, vehicle, or maintenance bucket is a nice way to run faster to a location while killing some zombies in the process.

I have reset the story about twice now and since I ran into some baddies that have been hard to defeat last night I have plans to restart the story as level 24 again tonight. The restarting story feature sounded not so appealing at first but I have come to realize that many times I'll walk away from a game from it taking too much time to kill a boss, which makes it less fun. I also like an additional way to earn money to cash out by playing some games of Terror Is Reality 17.

I'm curious to hear about any tips you might have or stories to share as I am sure there are numerous ones worthy of sharing! Anyone with the best story will receive a Dead Rising 2 lenticular style magnet! Moving the magnet around it says Dead Rising 2 on top and then converts to Punk Drunkers.

It has been quite some time since I posted the tip of the week in the community news. This week's tip is about user reviews, which I know many of you will enjoy since you're all fanatics of reading other people's opinions about the games. We also had numerous people not realizing what the purpose of this feature is about, even if there are rules described on every submission page. ;)

On a side note, I did a lot of hunting for blogs from Sept 17 to current today so I have plans to bring back the weekly report tomorrow for sure. I am not for certain when the community spotlight video segment on Today on the Spot will return, but thanks to those who ask about it. We'll see if we can get that going again now that the video team have numerous live events out of the way.

During the times I have done research for the weekly reports (or in this week's case, finding cool blog writers) each week I might track a user to see if they have interesting blogs worthy of a mention. I have noticed some people cringe and they will private message me to ask if they have done something wrong or if I am monitoring them for something. The thought that staff will be following them makes them think that we are often considered like a cop out to get them for violations. Scenarios like these happen frequently enough for me to realize that they do not know me at all. When I do receive a PM about this I reassure them it's related to them having blogs that might be worthy in a future weekly report. Might I add, this week's report was replaced with a Blog Bunker Extravaganza as I thought the time digging up the past month's worth of blogs was extremely important. One a related note, you can also see the spam filter blog (community news blog) on all forum pages now (not just the forums directory), which is super exciting news!

To give you a little background about how I work with this site's community might be different than other community managers. The last thing I do is let a severe abuser know I am on to them. They will know immediately that I am on to them and to be honest, many users are given the benefit of the doubt than some might think. If I am tracking you that's because I believe you are an important contributor to the site. Some users also do not know about the "editorial" drop down menu, which allows staff to read the blog for a potential mention in the weekly report (which is also used to select the Soapbox users). In addition to the editorial blog flags I'll check my tracked users list to catch any blogs I might be missing out on.

Now that I have shared my side of the story I would like to know how many of you thought I was out to get you when you found out that I was tracking you. Have any stories to share? :)

The word classic and style is often confused on the site as a censor bypss, but the reality is you can use it, you just have to be a scientist to do so. Well, maybe not a scientist, but understanding .html would help a great deal!

Some of you use a number 1 or lowercase L for the letter i, but if you checked the .html code and removed it from the words classic or style, you'd fine that you can use the word just fine.

As you might see, right now I am able to use it, so do a test yourself and report back to see if it works. Here is a tip I shared with a user a few minutes ago.

The flags occur when classic or style has .html around it. The way to get around it is to simply paste all of your editorial in a notepad text file. Next, copy from the text file and paste that into the blog (this strips any code around the text). You should have no errors when you post it.. You may also click the .html icon in the wysiwyg editor and remove any .html around the word classic or style.

To to this test run? Simply type in a sentence with classic and style in your blog and click SUBMIT. Did it not allow you to submit it while sharing you censor bypassed? Now, if you want to do a little experiment add a link or italics or any kind of .html code to see if that gives you the error.

If you really want to help your followers who track your blogs, share this tip with them as well!

If Kerrigan wins this round, she'll be up against Darth Vader. For the fans of Kerrigan or haters of Darth Vader being in this competition, what does she have against him? I'm thinking that she knows how to say the word no like a villain would. Anything else I should know? :)