Fire

I try to be good, I really do. I hardly come out when you don't want me to, and when you do I try to be calm. I serve my purpose and go away, like a genie in a bottle.
I'm, like, there for you, you know?
I like helping you. Sometimes you just want a smoke, but sometimes you let me play with water. There's a fun challenge. It takes a lot to get him excited, but when he is he's just so bubbly. I get that. I get excited too.
Like when there's a big pile of wood you want me to make vanish. I'll try not to get to jittery, just licking the edges and calmly sweeping over it, but it's just so much to try! I have to be everywhere, feeling the rough and smooth, pulling the fibers away, making it into light. I want to hug it and stroke it and devour it, and I throw bits of myself away with joy.
But that's okay. You like when I do that. I see.
And then there's when I get carried away. I always try not too, but when there's so much, I want to help it. I want to make the world warm again, and I want to make things become light. Light is hope, and so I turn things into hope. All the pain falls off as soot, and there's hope.
Sometimes, though, I get too into it. I start dancing too fast, I start caressing the wrong partner, growing to far, taking all the steps at once, pirouetting and sashaying and flipping madly. And I get so into it, and everything's hope and everything's warm.
Then something screams, and I try to stop. I do; I don't want anyone hurt. But the wind's already moving and everything falls into me. I can't pull myself back. there's too much of me. So I go. And I turn everything to light until my light dies.
Then I'm cold. So cold. So very, very cold. I don't know if there will ever be warm again. I wait in the silent dark, so cold, so alone, and so sorry. I didn't want to  hurt anyone. I didn't want to break anything.  I couldn't stop. Please, just try to forgive. I don't need trust, just forgiveness. And you always manage that.
With a strike of a match, I'm back.

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Happy New Year 2012!

It's really sad when I have this many consecutive announcement posts. Happy New Year! This is going to change though. We've got a massive project going to be released sometime in the next two weeks that'll fill the blog likely until March. This is on a planned posting schedule shooting for at least twice a week (Wednesdays and Saturdays are the days for the project). I'm aware that last year we did something of a recap and moving forward post outlining the past and future. I'm going to do just that in a much less organized manner.

2011
Not a terrible year, but obviously not our best. Things are moved constantly in transition for a lot of our main contributors, including myself. I guess the beginning of '11 was helped a lot by a strong and flexible schedule and many eager contributors who were eager to make a mark. We saw Arkive emerge briefly as an author and craft one of our most visited post "Newspaper Puns" (I contribute this to all those people Googling... newspaper puns? Is there seriously that much humor lacking in that department on the internet? I guess so). In May I tried to start a posting initiative that... sort of worked; I contributed to 9 out of 30 or so posts. Summer was pretty bad though, we were kept busy by a lot of different things in our respective personal lives. It also appears that Reogan began his "departure" or whatever you want to call it during this period, effectively leaving me running the place. The problem is: I'm lazy. As much as I love sharing my thoughts on music and video games and shedding new light on things that I believe deserve more attention, I spend an awful lot of time doing other things. I recently upgraded my computer so I could play Battlefield 3 (which I've spent a fair amount of time doing lately). I'm also something of a regular on a certain Counter-Strike: Source server and I found time to beat both Crysis and Crysis Warhead for the first time in December. Other than video games, I volunteer doing statistics for a lot of different sports and I still spend a decent amount of time recording or crunching numbers for newspapers to report. I'm also working on composing a few more tracks, although this isn't something I force myself into (which explains why I finish about 1 track every 3 months). All in all, I enjoy blogging, but right now I'm not forcing it with a schedule like I've done in the past. I feel less accountable, which can be a nice burden to not worry about, but it can really hamper motivation. Anyway, the latter half of 2011 was mediocre to terrible as for as this site goes. Our last song of the week came in August, something I desperately wanted to fix, but not by myself (remember, lazy). So needless to say, not a very strong year and I think the blogger statistics reflect this when I see a line graph of page hits steadily going down (plus, who looks at these sorts of posts, reads them all, and finds them remotely appealing?).

2012
I don't consider myself super ambitious for 2012 on this site. I will try to deliver at least 1 or 2 posts each week from any contributor. Our massive project should handle that for a while and hopefully bring in more readers from links I'll be posting. I'm looking at a lot of future options for this site, domain changes, servers, people, stuff... There's a good chance we'll end up booting up a Twitter account this year that'll link back to every new post and inform followers of current events that concern us (which in my case is mostly music related: yes, I'm highly interested in economics and politics, but I'd rather not pit the ideas of John Meynard Kenyes against Adam Smith, or Karl Marx against Thomas Jefferson, lest I start massive debates and flame wars). So back to the music thing, we plan to continue the Song of the Day series in the form of album reviews, and there are quite a few Song of the Week potentials that I've been exploring for some time. I'm not highly ambitious and I don't want to get any reader's hopes up because I realize that this could be one of the craziest years I've had yet. However, stay tuned, I will continue to promote all sorts of music here that I'm very excited about and maybe once in a while I'll contribute something of literary value. As long as I'm running things, it'll be music, music, music :) and more music.

Executive Summary:
2011 started fairly strong, finished very weak. 2012 will similarly start strong via planned scheduled posts. Primary focus is featuring independent music in infinite detail and making sure artists get at least some of the recognition they deserve.

Miscellaneous Extras:
These are the last 3 albums I've listened to.
Highlights by Luke Wieting ($6 USD on Bandcamp)
Free Play by Shnabubula (free)
The Midnight Sessions by Dave Greening (free)