With only a few more hours to go, the Humble Indie Bundle V is inching towards $5 million dollars. As of this writing the total number of payments made is at $4,969,788.10 on the sale of 584,349 bundle purchases. The pay-what-you-want DRM free bundle is doing so well because of the games in it and the price people are willing to pay for them: the average price currently stands at $8.50.

Aisha Tyler, the co-star of the popular FX animated series Archer, has a word or two for YouTube and Twitter commenters saying derogatory things about her being a fake gamer and her E3 Ubisoft Press Conference performance: I was a gamer before you were born. In an open letter on her Facebook page Tyler explains in great detail why she's a real gamer.

With 11,638 backers, the Kickstarter for Isle of Wight-based video games developer Stainless Games has successfully funded Carmageddon Reincarnation. The remake of the popular racing game that encourages using your car as a weapon against innocent bystanders has raised $445,895 (as of this writing). The developers were asking for $400,000. The project still has eight days to go before funding closes.

On behalf of everyone here at GamePolitics we wish our readers a safe and happy holiday. We hope you are enjoying your extended weekend (assuming you had an extended weekend and didn't have to work for the "man" today) and are out having fun on the unofficial start of summer.

I won't rehash it here, but if you want a detailed explanation of what Memorial Day is all about and why it is a very important holiday to a majority of Americans, then you should check out usmemorialday.org.

Business publication Fast Company has unveiled its list of the Top 100 Most Creative People for 2012, and many familiar names have made the cut this year. The list, which the publication calls an "annual celebration of business innovators who dare to think differently," honors Double Fine's Tim Schafer, EA Sports executive vice president Andrew Wilson, and SuperBetter Labs Director of Design Chelsea Howe.

Advocacy groups Fight for the Future, Democrats.com, The Liberty Coalition, and the Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA), have banded together to create a new website called Privacy Is Awesome, to fight against CISPA and the Senate version of the bill, SECURE IT Act. The site is designed to teach netizens how to defeat the bills in five easy steps:

The winners of the National STEM Video Game Challenge were announced today at The Atlantic's Technologies in Education Forum in Washington, DC. The competition was designed to motivate youngsters throughout the country to promote the importance of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) by making video games.

Season two of the ultra popular Fallout-based fan web series, Fallout: Nuka Break, will get the help of Fallout: New Vegas designer Chris Avellone and the original Fallout lead programmer Tim Cain - if they can raise $120,000 in their latest Kickstarter appeal. Both have agreed to sign on to season two as writers and designers and make guest appearances if the creators of the show can raise enough cash.

How long does it take to complete the single player campaign in Diablo III on Normal difficulty? I have no idea, but it took Level 32 Barbarian Yoshichan 12 hours and 29 minutes to beat Blizzard's freshly released game. This NeoGAF post (thanks Eurogamer) shows off a final shot of the Barbarian character's stats.

Prototype 2 creators Radical Entertainment is working with the BC Cancer Foundation to raise money for the fight against cancer as part of the Ride to Conquer Cancer event. The team taking part in the Ride to Conquer Cancer, Radical Riders, hopes to raise $50,000 in donations to support the organization and to further research against the disease. Prototype 2 producer Jon Lim and lead animator Gerald Sombilonare are both taking part in the charity ride.

Andrew Eisen, E. Zachary Knight, and I have been toying with the idea of doing a podcast for quite some time, and after much discussion, consternation, and a couple of dry runs with the process of recording and editing one, we've finally come up with our first episode. We're calling it the "Super Podcast Action Committee," mainly because we like the idea of being part of a Super PAC, but without all the red tape and influence peddling.

Yesterday we reported that THQ would shift the focus of Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online to an offline game, and as a result, would lay off 118 employees from its Relic and Vigil Games studios. While that was horrible news, developers have reached out to those displaced workers to offer them jobs in every corner of the country via Twitter.

While many of us wait to get our hands on Raspberry Pi - the tiny $25 - $35 computer - one person that got his hands on it has used it to create a ZX Spectrum emulator. Andy Taylor (the guy responsible for the UK Computing Museum) has ported Fuze, an emulator for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, to Raspberry Pi and has put a video of it running on YouTube.

The fifth annual Life. Love. Game Design Challenge is officially underway and entries are now being accepted. The game design contest was created by Jennifer Ann’s Group with the goal of promoting games that deliver awareness on the dangers of teen dating violence. This topic is particularly important to the group's founder, Drew Crecente, who lost his daughter.

Mojang's ultra popular sandbox action building game, Minecraft has been downloaded 25 million times. Of those downloads, about 5 million were eventually converted to the full registered game, according to a report in The Financial Times. Through game sales and merchandising developer Mojang has managed to rake in $80 million. That's pretty impressive for a privately held company.

A fresh update to the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter page from InXile front man Brian Fargo details what can be possible and what the company won't be doing no matter how much money they manage to raise. First the one thing Fargo says that they won't do (or have no plans of doing) is creating console versions of Wasteland 2.

In an editorial on Huffington Post, Activision Blizzard CEO (and co-chairmen of the company's charity, The Call of Duty Endowment), says that American corporations are not doing enough to help veterans returning home from two wars only to find a job market that doesn't want to hire them. This new battle at home, as Kotick calls it, puts veterans in a higher bracket of unemployment than the national average.

How fitting, then, that the Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser is the proud new owner of the Brooklyn Heights mansion at 70 Willow Street where Truman Capote once laid his weary head after a long night of socializing with New York City's who's who. The house that once belonged to the author of the gritty true crime bestseller In Cold Blood sold for $12.5 million according to city records obtained by The New York Observer. It was also apparently the most expensive real estate purchase in Brooklyn history.

While I’m not going to make a habit of posting a news story every time the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter hits another milestone, it's important to pass along news that the game has been fully funded, which means it will actually be made and someday you'll be able to play it. InXile had asked via its Kickstarter appeal for $900,000. Just two days after launching the campaign they have managed to raise $1,044,997 from 18,695 backers.

A homeless man managed to slip into the Warner Bros. Lollipop Chainsaw press party in a San Francisco night club last night. According to an unnamed source speaking to Computer and Video Games, the homeless man managed to slip into the event with a gaggle of journalists who were there to interview Lollipop Chainsaw and No More Heroes creator Suda 51.

Mojang front man and Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson announced via Twitter that he has shared $3 million dollars in dividends with the rest of his team at the company. The money comes from sales of Minecraft in the last fiscal year.

"Before tax, my dividends from Mojang for 2011 was about three million dollars. I chose to distribute that to the other employees," he tweeted.

Game audio news web site NUBUWO is making a last minute appeal for help it reach its final funding goal of $12,000 before 2:00 am ET.

OnLive is hosting free demos beginning this week (and running until March 11) that showcase the work of all of the Independent Games Festival nominees via Facebook. The Indie Showcase will run until March 11 and includes 16 games: Atom Zombie Smasher, Be Good, Dear Esther, Dustforce, English Country Tune, Frozen Synapse, FTL, Lume, Nitronic Rush, Once Upon a Spacetime, POP, SpaceChem, To The Moon, Toren, and Way.

The Reddit community has been at the forefront of protesting against laws that seek to undermine a free Internet such as SOPA, PIPA and ACTA. Now a group of Reddit users are drafting legislation. For reals. 

You wouldn't know it at first glance, but EVE Online creator CCP Games is a money making machine. According to an Industry Gamers report, the company managed to rake in $66 million in 2011 - we assume - solely from its space-themed massively multiplayer online game EVE Online. The company, which is based in Iceland and is privately owned and operated, did not disclose details on its earnings.

Vox Games has launched over at The Verge, offering what can best be described as well-crafted and thoughtful long-form journalism. The gaming hub features top talent from such publications as Joystiq, Kotaku, The Escapist, and more.

The grand prize winner of DICE's 2012 Indie Game Challenge is Closure, a puzzle-platformer developed by Eyebrow Interactive that lets players manipulate light and shadow. The game's developers took home a $100,000 Grand Prize. Puzzle-platformer The Bridge and procedurally-generated musical shooter Symphony won two awards each. Nitronic Rush won the Gamers Choice award, an award chosen by fans.

Double Fine's Kickstarter campaign for the "Double Fine Adventure" game project has surpassed $1 million. Originally they were asking for $500,000 in funding but within eight hours of launching the appeal they had raked in well over $800,000 for a point-and-click adventure game and a documentary to be filmed by 2 Player Productions. Earlier in the day Tim Schafer said that any money over the initial amount would be used to bring the game to other formats.

Double Fine's Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert have proven that using crowd-sourced funding can be successful. Last night the company launched a Kickstarter page asking the community for $400,000 to create a new point-and-click adventure title. Around $300,000 of that will go towards development, while $100,000 of the money will be spent to create a "making of" documentary series about the game by 2 Player Productions.

Indie Game: The Movie had a decent showing at the Sundance Film Festival, and now the documentary about the life and craft of several prominent indie game developers is heading to South by South West (SXSW) as a "Festival Favorite."

In case you don't know much about it, Indie Game: The Movie is the creation of first-time filmmakers Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky who follow indie game developers Edmund McMillen and programmer Tommy Refenes (Super Meat Boy), Phil Fish (FEZ), and Jonathan Blow (Braid) at key moments in the game development process.