Today is a glorious day, my friends. Today shall forever be known as the day The Astringent Gaming Journal reached 11,111 views.

According to our stats, we reached 11,111 views earlier today. Now, that doesn’t mean that we get 11,111 hits daily (though that would be beyond fathomably epic), but that 11,111 different people have looked at the site. Of course, from a pessimistic view, it could also mean that one person has been reading our site from 11,111 different computers…. Hmmm….

That said, thank you to everyone that helped us reach this milestone, or our one incredibly dedicated fan who has nothing better to do with 11,111 computers. To that individual: we’ll take you out for dinner every day this year.

We can’t put everybody we’d like to thank in this post, but for starters, special thanks to:

Rob, for putting together our site in the first place (and for helping us with an unannounced project of ours…)

Gretchen, for having to put up with me every now and then, and for our wicked avatars

Tucker, for helping us organize our interview with Brittani Johnson (we’re still the only site with an interview)

Megan, for our pictures at the Borderlands launch party

Brittani Johnson and Michael Hill for agreeing to do interviews with us

Subtcomics for advertising us

“The Nexus”, for unofficial promotions, and for sticking by us, now matter how ridiculous our ideas may be at times

Jimmy John’s, for fueling our insanity and filling us with food at 2 in the morning

Big Mike’s 24 Hr. Coffee Shop, for fueling our insanity past 4 in the morning

Our parents, even if they think the site is silly

And of course, the readers, fans and everyone that we’ve gotten to play with on Steam

I feel like I’m forgetting something important….

Oh, and AO, I suppose…

All joking aside, a huge thanks are in order to everyone at All Originals. AO was one of the first places to feature us when we were just taking off. Since then, the two communities have interacted so much; we’re privileged to have friends like AO on the net. Thank you to everyone who either runs, or plays in (or both) the AO Server Community. You guys are awesome. And as a special gift to you:

Well, here we are, at milestone number… ah, who cares. It’s hard to believe that we haven’t even been live for a whole year. Since our launch, we’ve accomplished much more than we intended: Borderlands Extravasplosion, TAGJ Steam, TF2 Fridays with AO; we have a new addition to the crew- Indie Specialist Steven Gibbons/MasterOfOrigami. Ha, and to think, we still have all of 2010 to go…

As you know, we at The Astringent Gaming Journal love to pull things out of a hat that many people either:

A. Didn’t see coming, or

B. Weren’t expecting us to pull off so early.

So, in traditional fashion, we have more surprises for you, starting with that newfangled YouTube thing that everyone is talking about.

We have not one, but two YouTube channels! The first one is the official channel. This one, run by me, will have any video reviews or vlog posts that we decide to do. Also, I will try and have video reviews for the Retro Corner, along with normal posts. The second, run by OriginOfBob, is none other than our very own TAGJ Starcraft II channel! This will contain Origin’s walkthroughs of the upgraded races in SC2, as well as replay commentary on matches of past and present!

Sometime this year, we’ll have our very own EVO Tournament! Super Street Fighter IV is a must, and maybe we’ll throw in some Marvel VS Capcom, and some Arc Systems greatness into the mix as well.

A good while back, we mentioned the outline of something we christened “The Astringent Gaming Community“, the ultimate network of games that you choose to be featured in the community. Great thing about it, it’s run completely by you guys, the gamers. We’re just there to make sure that it doesn’t collapse, and to play of course. This is still in it’s early prototype phase, HOWEVER:

There is one more thing we have up our sleeve; if you’ll notice, there’s a new addition to the pages at the top of our site…

That’s right, welcome to our forum!

11,111 views, 127 posts later, we’re still here. Once again, thank you to everyone who’s made this possible. We do this for you guys, the gamers. If no one read the site, well…. eh, we’d probably still do the site, it just wouldn’t have any heart or drive behind it. So, thank you again, and onward to more reviews and news, straight to you.