Today Is The Greatest Day I've Ever Known

Well my daughter is doing much better and should be coming home today.  Taking off with the boys to get some breakfast, then hopefully we can pick up the girls.

Today's post is the main lyric from Smashing Pumpkin's song Today from Siamese Dream.  This album is one of the defining albums of alternative music and 90s music in general.  The song was a huge radio hit when it was released and helped push the pumpkins into the mainstream.  If you don't already own it and enjoy alternative or 90s music, you deserve a facepalm.  :-)

Sorry for the short entry right now, hopefully when the wife gets back I can think and actually do a real write-up on something.

Dancing On The Corpses' Ashes

Like my friend over at Nothing But Randomness, I am trying to update this each day.  Hoping once my wife and daughter are out of the hospital I can meet that goal.

Anyways, in other news, the title of today's post is from the best song from At The Drive In's album Relationship Of Command.  The song is called Invalid Letter Dept.  It is about about the rapes and murders that happened in the town over the border from El Paso (Wiki Link).  Very hard hitting and disturbing.  I discovered this band quite late and actually heard of them after I got into The Mars Volta.  This song has several lyrical hooks and some very nice instrumentation.  I especially love the piano interplay at about 3 and a half minutes.  A calming few moments in between chaos.  Very fitting for how I feel today.  At The Drive In is a little more straightforward that The Mars Volta, but there are enough similarities there that I usually classify them both in my Experimental Rock grouping.  They are also my favorites in that grouping.  :-)

I'm making a note here "Huge Success"

Steam has Portal up for free until May 24th.  This is an excellent single player game.  It is short (I think I beat it in < 3 hours) but it was a blast.  The thing that really shines about the game, other than the awesome portals or puzzles, was the sense of humor.  The computer was hilarious and creepy at the same time.  Also, the closing song is one of my favorite Jonathan Coulton songs ever.  Supposedly, the next installment will have some sort of multi-player.  This sounds interesting, but I doubt I would get much use from it.  I hope the single player component is as strong as the first.

You can get the end song from Portal from Amazon for 89 cents.  I downloaded it tonite as I seem to have mis-placed my copy.  Worth every Penny.  Still Alive

Hello

So I decided to start the blog over again after some encouragement from a friend.  Guess I'll kick this off by giving a short introduction of myself and what the blog is supposed to be for.

My name is Mike but for the last three years I have gone by Trog online.  I am an all around geek who specializes in music and gaming.  I am also a happily married father of 3 too-smart-for-their-own-good kids.

Music.  My passion since I was very young.  After I got past pure Top 40 and rap as a teenager (thank you mom, dad and Walt), I got into Rock.  Any kind of rock really.  I also dabble is a little blues, a bit of jazz every now and then, classical (as long as it is piano focused), country (mostly just Johnny Cash tho) and, once in a great while, rap.  If I had to pin down a favorite sub-set of rock, it would be a toss up between alternative and pop rock.  I imagine most of my rants and reviews will be focused on music.

Gaming.  I am a social gamer who just likes to game.  I play board games, card games, mini games, pen and paper rpgs, ccgs, computer games and console games.  Over the last three years I have focused most of my game time into World of Warcraft tho.  In WoW, I have really found what I was always looking for in a game.  A place where I can be social and progress at many different fronts when my attention span wanders.  I lead a guild on Area 52 called Guild Name Goes Here.  I am sure there will be WoW geek-outs here too.  :-)  From time to time, I play other games (Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 mostly), but WoW seems to suck most of my game time.

Family.  Mine is insane, but then again, I can be sometimes too.  So I can't really hold it against them.

In closing, I just thought it would be interesting to list out my playlist while writing this.
Algebra One - Fireball (from The Sub City: Take Action Sampler)
Automatic 7 - Pretty In Pink (nice cover from Before You Were Punk)
Sloan - Money City Maniacs (from their album Navy Blues, friggin love this song)