- Shazari on Flickr, used under CC

This is going to sound weird, but I need to gather 300+ bottle caps. You know, the plastic ones from 20 oz sodas or 2-liter bottles? Yeah, those. I also need them as soon as is possible.

Since I know I won’t drink 300+ sodas in the next couple of weeks, I figured I’d turn to you, my friends, and see if you could help us out – or help us out by passing it along to others who might be willing to send caps along. After all, I’m not asking for money or anything that many would value, but it would help us a great deal!

As to why they’re needed?

Well, I’ve recently started helping out with the Jobsite Theater group, which is a local not-for-profit theatrical group. Thanks to a combination of sponsored donations and ticket sales, they manage to bring some really great plays to the Tampa Bay area. They also have exposed audiences to brand new never-before-seen plays by promising new playwrights.  And much as I’m sure they’d love to, these aren’t folks who do this for a living. They have families and jobs and still manage to carve out large portions of their life for the joy of bringing good theater to the Tampa Bay area.

With that said,  we need caps to help create portions of the set for the upcoming production of boom! I don’t want to give away too many details on precisely how they’ll be used in the set;  it ruins the fun of seeing it. However, in exchange for your gracious donation of plastic bottle caps, I’ll post some behind-the-scenes photos out here of rehearsals; the Straz center; the cast; and things of that nature. I’ll also be keeping a running tally on how many we’ve received to date, for those interested. (Who knows, perhaps we’ll get buried in bottle caps within a week! It would be awesome – and greatly appreciated.)

So if you have a few stamps, a few caps, and would like to take part in this really strange but 100% serious call for help for a very deserving theater company, here’s where you can mail them to us:

As soon as I get 25 caps, I’ll post the first behind-the-scenes shot; so send those caps in and check back! (Or watch my Twitter feed.)

Thanks, everyone!

Only this time they’ve stolen Sony Online Entertainment’s figurehead for EverQuest II, Antonia Bayle, as their chesty lure. To add insult to injury, they’ve added in a charming blue halo around her breasts.

This has to be seen in its animated glory to be appreciated.

So, rabblerouser that I am – I captured the .swf file from the site and have uploaded it to my server to provide a stable, easily referenced version.

Talk about a sucky way to make a living. No, not me. I mean the people who invade other people’s accounts, steal everything they’ve worked hard to accomplish, turn it into virtual cash, and then sell the cash to someone who wants it.

This is why I simply cannot abide people who buy gold in games where buying gold is against TOS. Where do you really think it comes from? Even if they had nothing but bots farming it up in every single game out there, there’s no way in hell these companies can realistically supply the demand from people who want their MMO time to be easier. (C’mon. Easier? Really? I like harder MMOs. Perhaps I’m just an aberration.) So they invade people’s accounts, strip their characters, empty their banks, sell everything, transfer the cash, then leave the empty husk behind for the owner to recover.

Sure, I grok that everyone has to feed their family, but damn. Really? These people don’t aspire to make something more of themselves than to steal someone else’s stuff from a game? I can’t even imagine the ethical mindset of people involved in this trade. Does it ever make them stop and think that they’re taking someone’s time, not just their stuff? Do they really think this is a victimless situation?

Okay, so new start.  Same old me. Slight blog look tweak. For 2010 I decided to finally take the dip and change hosting companies since I’m so damned sick of how GoDaddy treated me as a long-time customer. (Don’t get me started or we’ll be here for hours.) So far, HostGator seems to be a better deal and pretty solid in terms of options and workings.

Now, as to the reboot…

This blog is likely to contain a huge mish-mash of things. Sometimes I’ll just post pictures. At other times I’ll probably ramble on about whatever I happen to be thinking about at the time. I don’t promise that it will be the most interesting read to anyone but me, members of my family, and perhaps the occasional odd person. I’m also not going to edit myself as heavily nor fret about what I’m posting and whether or not it’s as politically correct as what I’ve written in the last few years.

It will, however, be honest.

It may suck. It may not.

Guess we’ll have to see.