What do I post after going silent for well over a year??!? Well, it goes something like this:

My good friend Gloobert sent me an email and it deserves to be seen by others. I'll get his permission later:

I finally thought about looking up some of my recent faves to see what they were all about...live.

Twi the humble feather

Bob Log III. Lyrics shmyrics, just love the sound.

Ratatat. I don’t have this track on the stuff I bought from Emusic. Must get.

And finally a little country fried goodness:
Blitzen Trapper

Blitzen Trapper (more)

Thanks! Great, fun stuff.

I just had to post on this day. The big "777" of the century! I have nothing else to say besides "yay!"

I just had to drop a link here, mostly to remember where it is. You ought to check out some senior citizens rocking some Sonic Youth like you've never heard before. I genuinely dug this clip... a lot.

Yes, I'm not dead. No, I'm not dead... hmmm. They both seem to mean the same thing. Either way, I'm not dead.

My point is that I've not updated anything here in an awful long while... if you hadn't noticed. In fact, I'm not sure who "you" are if you're even here, since there's nothing much of a regularity about this site, so I don't imagine people are rolling through here regularly. Maybe I can change that, but I'm not sure yet.

I have a lot of sites running at the moment, and the others (non-Pointless Rant, I mean) are needing of my attention ATM. ATM = "at the moment", in case that caused you trouble.

Well, this is a random rant to say I'm still around and there ought to be some manner of posty things coming up in the nearby furturity. I'm not commiting to much here, I know, but it's a start.

If you want to know what I'm working on, check these out:

Game Dev School [www.GameDevSchool.com] - Game development articles and video game development school information. This is also my personal space for my video game design journal... which needs updating too, btw.

Pointless Games [www.PointlessGames.com] - Free online Flash games and fun posts about games. It's getting to be a pretty sweet little community of gaming freaks!

MassMOG [www.MassMOG.com] - Massively multiplayer online game (MMORPG or MMOG, they're often called) news and information.

No Soup [www.NoSoup.com] - At the moment, this is my personal journal/blog about my progress learning about stock market trading and investing. I'm learning the InvesTools investor toolbox and reading a lot of books about stocks & options trading. This blog will be my journal tracking my progress.

Noavel Headstall [www.NoavelHeadstall.com] - This will be a site dedicated to info and sales of the incredible Noavel horse training headstall that my brother Gary is working with and selling. It's really sweet if you're into working with horses. The site's not really going yet, but I figured I'd tell you about it in case you might find it interesting enough to go back to soon. There will be a lot of info there soon-ish.

Sheesh!! That's a lot more than I expected... seeing it in a list like that sure makes it look like a lot of projects! That's also not even the full list. Dang-o. There's other stuff I'm doing that I'll talk about later, but for now, I'm putting a period at the end of this post.

WOXY.com is a fantastic radio station. If anyone remembers when they were on the air in Dayton, OH, as "97X, the future of rock & roll", you'll know who I'm talking about. The music pouring out of WOXY is incredible.. and abundant.

After the radio station frequency was sold off, the original 97X (which I was streaming on the 'net for a while) went away for a bit. The station was resurrected on the WOXY.com domain and has been streaming high-quality alternative rock & roll free to lucky listeners all over the Web. They play new artists very frequently and the pulse of the "alternative" scene is well within their grasp... forget that, their feel for Damn Fine Music is impeccable! There's even another stream they set up for older catalog music called WOXY Vintage. Great, great older tunes when I'm in the mood to reminisce... or to discover older stuff I wish I'd have known about back when it was new.

Well, I love this music stream, as you may see by now. They have live DJ's from when the station was on the airwaves and they're all fantastic. Seriously, go check out this rare gem of excellent music. NOW!

Now for the reason I'm posting this... they need our help to stay online. The switch to "user supported" status is underway and they're looking for subscribers. I listen to this station very near all day, every day and I can't imagine going back to the way it was for me before I found WOXY! To put together a similarly amazing variety of music while I work at this darn computer machine all day would be impossible. I don't want this history-drenched beauty to fade away.

Please, please go check out their music streams to see what you think about it. If you like it, SUBSCRIBE!! These are some fantastic people who've worked very hard over the years to assemble the most incredible music collection I've ever seen. What they've done for the indie/alternative rock scene should not be underestimated.

Well... short of begging some more, I think you get the idea. WOXY.com rocks! I don't want to live without it... I will, but I don't want to. $10/month is so close to nothing for what I get out of this station... listen to it for a few hours or a day, but sign up soon, before it's too late!!

--Luap

I finally had to put this idea into practice... welcome to the first installment of This Week In Spam! Sure, I might miss a week here/there, but I get so much spam every day, it wouldn't be for lack of content.

With all the newfangled techniques spammers have to try getting through blocking & scanning software, there are some funny bits that are put into circulation. I figured this site would provide a great forum to post a little window into my Inbox. It's always annoying to sort through all the spam (a lot still squeaks through the spam filters,) but occasionally I get a gem. This will be the place I'll (try to) collect some of it. So, welcome to the first episode...

Subject: Be a chic master. Pick these superb watches.

(Nice! A watch that will allow me mastery over females?!? Tell me more, you've got my attention, spammer!)

1250+ high quality watches, all from high-status companies.
Our wristwatches have 'manager' scrawled all over them!
Ahh.. now ya lost me there. I don't really want a watch that has the word "manager" scrawled all over it. You had me at "chic master" but lost me on the deluge of "manager" text. Delete.

However, the spam filter evasion text is an interesting read:
moulleen "he sheerness can, indeed," said rollout tip, gazing
she macrander must do something brave or shillalas mildblowing surprising, and no chance for distinguishing leaving the giant cherries to dactylomegaly pound the path behind

So it's a bit messy, but there's a fantastic bit in there... a new word for me that I must thank the spammer for pointing out:

dactylomegaly, dac·ty·lo·meg·a·ly
n : abnormally large fingers or toes

Nice. "Macrander" and "shillalas" don't come up on Dictionary.com, which was a bummer, but we're left with abnormally large fingers or toes, which is just grand.

Thanks spammer. The first episode of This Week in Spam found its muse!

Well, in case you tried visiting my site over the past couple days, you'll see that we're not gone... it was just a major server malfunction. Ya know.. the "web server" that's supposed to "serve the web", or somethin' like that. It had food poisoning or something and had to stay in bed for a couple days. All better now! (I hope.)

Thanks for visiting and sorry about the outage. I'll get back to work now so I can post some random bit of crap that you can't live without.

Okay, I'm not sure if the new AO (adults only) rating for GTA: San Andreas wasn't more appropriate for the game in a lot of ways from day one, but the whole issue is ludicrous in general to me. The story revolves around the latest GTA's unlockable "hot coffee" mode, which is basically a mini-game where you get to directly control sexual acts with Carl's girlfriends. The mode is not very easy to enable for PS2 version, but the PC version is no big whoop... which is where the whole thing started, I think.

Now... the merits (or morals?) of having an interactive sex game, whether blatant or implied are certainly questionable for a huge commercial game like this. The game did have a MA (Mature Audiences) rating already which is s'posed to be 17+ and all that, which seems pretty obvious that we're dealing with adult themes here. However, that's still not the part I want to talk about...

Here's the deal: yet again, our (American) society generally seems to think consenting sex between legally-aged adults is vastly more evil and horrible for our culture than gang members going on wild shooting rampages popping the heads off of various people with big guns. Grand Theft Auto is not a pleasant, cute experience in the first place... and the thought that something like consensual sex is "the last straw" for so many folks just burns me.

I'm sure I could think of more to say on this (and likely something more eloquent) but I think I'll just go fire up the PS2 and run around in Los Santos for a while on my bike. Sure, I might be forced to take out a handful of rival gang members or maybe I'll steal a car or two, but I'll be damned if I even THINK of admiring the tush on that beautiful woman in the park! What do you think I am, some kind of social deviant?! Sex is for hardcore criminals, man! They can lock you up for that shit.

Very funny, I think. Revisit the horror that was Jaws... highly condensed and reinacted with rabbits...

Jaws in 30 seconds, with bunnies.

I'm filing this under "complaints" mostly because email is roughly a general comlpaint for me. It's a great thing in my life on some days, but the hassle and crud from things like spam and random blarg just get in my skull with a fervor to block my synapses! I like the overall control over a conversation and the timing of responses, but I need to change something or I'm likely to just pull the plug on all my email addies and start over with a clean Gmail account or something!

So... here's the interesting bit, and the point of this post: I was checking out this blog post called "Five fast email productivity tips" and it's gotten me started again on trying to reform my email habits.

I've talked about Gmail as the possible solution before, and I sure thought IMAP was the answer (don't have time to explain that one right now.) However, I'm just thinking I really only have time to start at the core of my problems and start altering how I manage email in the first place! I am going to work on some of these changes (mostly inspired by that article) and I'll see what happens next. Maybe I'll get around to posting some of what worked for me (assuming something DOES end up working!) but I'm not gonna promise. Heck, I'll prolly be too busy deleting spam to have time to finish this train of thought! BLARG!