Oh yeah, another thing since I've dusted off this account.

I'm back on the beat with the Newgrounds Police Dept. Yeah, TailsPrower and Lizzardis remembered and reinstated me, so I'm now back with the crew, and I'm ready to blam and protect, and keep the portal crud-free.

Looks like I'm going to have to buckle in for the long hall, do more voting, and I've been busted down to police officer due to NG's reformat some years ago, but I got time.

Noticed my whistle level's still kind of down. Got to shore it up if I want to work my way up to the Elite Guard. (Thanks for the tip sheet post, Sheizenhammer!)

Dang, this site could use a little more decor and color, too. Anybody got any interior design tips?

Don't know if anyone is going to actually read this stuff, but here goes anyway.

You might have noticed that my action's been a bit on the sparse side if you compare how long I've been signed on here vs. how much voting and reviewing I've been done. Well, it seems China's gum'mint in all its infinite wisdom has blocked out Newgrounds some years ago. Well, at first, I thought it was a shame, but I had to focus on meatspace life anyway.

Then in the wake of the 20th anniversaries of June 4, 1989, and its upcoming 60th anniversary of the founding of the nation's Communist government in October, it's been going into extreme lockdown. The Net Nanny went especially rabid out west in Xinjiang, where the Uighur riots happened: they've got no internet AT ALL now, no mobile phone service, and they can't even have international calls. And word is this is going to last until October.

It finally hit me in the face how ridiculous this had gotten when I went to Weird Al Yankovic's web site and saw that three of his four external social pages (Twitter, YouTube and Facebook) were completely inaccessible by simply clicking on. (MySpace is there, but it's in Chinese.)

And in June and July, when they had alternating blocking out Hotmail, Bing, and MSN and all of Google's stuff, I figured enough was enough. And I finally broke down and shucked out the shekels for a virtual private network (VPN). It's a bit laggy, so I can't instantly load videos on demand, but hey, before I'd gotten NOTHING.

The bottom line: I may not be around as much as before, and classes in the fall will make this doubly so, but at least I'm back. Hi again, Newgrounds. :-)