Welcome back, Comrades! Would you like to serve your website, like a good TSA member? We are always looking for more crews for our Zeppelin Regiments, after all. If you don’t wish to participate… Well, we have ways of making you want to take part.

While you consider, read our weekly pamphlet on the glorious achievements of TSA in the last week and coming next week!

We encourage a bit of friendly competition between members here. Some are more challenging than others, though.

You’d best be quick as this one is closing tomorrow at midday. You can win yourself an Xbox 360 and Kinect, just by posting a comment on this post, which clearly makes this one of the more difficult competitions to take part in. Remember, you need to be at least a level2 user to enter though, meaning you’ve got over 250 TSA points. The prize was most generously provided by Windows Access All Areas, as part of their Blinging Down The House competition, for a student household to win a big assortment of great tech.

We have also embarked on the first week of the Dirt 3 Tournament. Monday saw us post the first round match-ups, which resulted in some hellishly tough pairings right away. If you want a sneak peak at how people have been doing, head over to the forum thread where results are all posted. Alternatively, you could just wait until Monday for a teensy bit of a write up on the front page. As an aside, I now dislike JamboGT, as he beat me yesterday afternoon.

If you are at Home, you should help with some Folding! Last week, we put as much of our combined industrial output towards the causes helped by Folding@Home. To encourage a few extras to join in, there were some prizes on offer, drawn from a list that included anyone that managed to fold one work unit for TSA by the end of Sunday.

Heedbaw and 3Shirts won this time round, getting £10 and £5 in Amazon vouchers, respectively. Keep folding, though, as TSA will be marching ever onwards and upwards to greater glories in this field, and Jas-n will keep leading the charge.

Finally, there’s a little reminder that our Summer of Raptr competition is running until the end of August. Head to that link, read what you have to do, and get yourself entered into both the TSA draw, and the main Raptr draw!

That’s a lot of clickin’ and a-typin’ to enter all those competitions. If you’ve tired of this, why not relax with some thumb twiddling, and button pressing? Actually, that’s pretty much the same.

Nevertheless, there are those friendly, funny, loveable, but slightly odd, members who regularly attend TSA meets who could use some more visitors. Just head to the Meets page to sign up, and the relevant thread in the TSA Meets forum if you have any questions.

This week, I’m going to push Brink quite heavily. At release, it’s a game that died down quite quickly, but of late it seems to have had something of a resurgence at TSA. Every Thursday evening, a healthy number of players turn up and give it a play, and with the Agents of Change DLC released a few days ago (and currently free to download), people should make an extra effort to give it another shot. Heck, I got tired of it myself, but you’ll probably see me down there…

Speaking of game revivals, m-lotsofnumbers-b is curious to see if anyone still has and wants to play a bit of Medal of Honour on Monday night. Is that you?

Don’t want to shoot anyone, and just feel like you want a hug? Well, ron_mcphatty has only just finished Portal 2, and wants someone to hold him in the co-op mode. It’s only on screen, and so fleetingly quick, but when you’re a gamer, you take what you can get!

Elsewhere, there’s the usual assortment of MS:A, KZ3, Dirt 3, GT5 and the SARBPC – Castle Crashers double meet disguised as other games on Sunday evening. So head down to Meet Town, and get friendly with the populace…

That sounded some how wrong.

Like stand up comedy, a bit of audience participation is always a nice diversion, which is why we have WeView. This week, Kris asked people to briefly review Dirt 3 in the forums.

There’s already several reviews already but like a hungry, hungry search engine, Kris wants more data! So, don’t forget to put your opinion down by tomorrow evening, no matter how much you want to type.

TuffCub’s Massive Poll is very popular around these parts, a fact he’s absolutely delighted by. He loves to whip his Poll out every so often. This time round, he’s rugby tackling and man handling the topic of online passes. The Poll itself closed on Thursday night, so just keep an eye out for the results. Also be prepared for some future surprise questioning, shall we say, as they can be gone quite quickly.

If you’ve read any of the Meet the Reader articles, then you’re bound to have seen barely coherent sentiments along the lines of “Lewis, why you no write more TSA?” Well he’s back and discussing the virtues of art in games. Give it a read, and fingers crossed he might write something else for you to read that isn’t about movies.

Really, though, where’s the competitive edge in reading some article when “FIRST!” is not an option? I want to show off how much better I am than everyone else! There-in lies the appeal of the TSA’s Fastest Platinums thread. A little repository where those who have earned a rare platinum trophy, or simply done it faster than the rest on TSA, get to gloat a little bit.

Obviously, nobody’s really saying you should rush through your gaming, but if you’ve got something you’re proud of, feel free to share. Personally, I really like seeing my name next to the Dead Nation, inFamous and MAG entries. I’ve fond memories of those games, and it’s good to know I’m so much quicker and better than you losers! Ha!

Here’s a few other highlights* from the last week:

• This one crops up quite often, but what games are you looking forward to the most this autumn?
• Bunimomike was having difficulty getting on TSA recently. So what else would we do but kick the man whilst he’s down, and post subtly childish mean things about how much he smells like wee whilst he can’t respond!
• There’s some more fun and frolics in the De-Motivational Posters thread. It’s a bit risqué, so enter cautiously… That link will head straight to some baby care advice, so it’s not all nonsense.
• Some people have been sharing their artwork again too. In particular, a shout goes out to CrawFail and his fantastic rendition of Solid Snake, both old and new!

Oh, and Personal Messages on the TSA Forums are back, just be sure to read this thread, so you completely understand they shouldn’t be used for posting personal info to one another.

Right, that’s your lot. Go on, get out of here! Before you go though, you should really say in the comments how awesome I am, and also what colour you want my hexagons to be next week. This week I went with green, in case you hadn’t noticed.

*Note that for threads in General Chat, these are viewable only to signed in TSA members. That forum is 99.9% unmoderated, so it can quite often contain strong language, and R-rated themes. I was going to say “mature themes”, but it’s far from mature.

Note: Unfortunately, two of the threads included in this round up were deleted yesterday due to a security risk they posed to the site. These two threads were, in a peculiar way, responsible for several people getting blocked from the site and we spent much or yesterday evening trying to fix that issue. There’s a brief explanation here.