I received a heart-wrenching email from AuroraX this morning:

Hey Foo Mo. One of the members here called ImpulsiveNinja (real name Jason Huffstutler) is going through an extremely rough time in his life. He is 17 years old and his dad is dying. His dad has had hepatitis for years now, and it has finally overtaken him. He is in the hospital in a coma and on life support. He will not be able to recover, and the only way he will live is if he stays in a coma and on life support for the rest of his life. Their family has made the incredibly hard decision that his suffering should end, and they took him off of life support today. He is sedated so he will not feel anything and he will pass peacefully, but he isn’t expected to live more than 24 hours. Jason aka ImpulsiveNinja has been a member of the community for a little while now, and he really looks up to you and the other leaders here, and it would mean a lot to him if the podtacular community did something kind for him during this terrible time. I don’t mean anything big, just something so that he knows we are there for him during this time.

Jason could use our help. What I plan on doing is making a collage card of some type with names, notes, and graphics from his friends at the Podtacular community. If you would like to add something to the card, please put it in the comments along with your gamertag and/or name. If you would like to send a graphic please send it to podtacular@gmail.com. I’ll add all of these up shortly and send them to Jason to let him know we care. And please, if you’re a praying person, pray for Jason and his family in this extremely difficult time. AuroraX will be visiting him soon and will keep us updated.

UPDATE: ImpulsiveNinja sent me this message:

Hey foomo, I can’t thank you guys enough for what you are doing. I thought i should let you know. Tonight, at 9:00 P.M. (today is September 1st) my father passed away.

Godfree at Gamertag Radio just informed us that Gamertag Radio has been shut down without warning by his hosting company and held at ransom to bring it live again. Here’s the email they sent him:

Your site gamertagradio.com was suspended because it consumed an excessive amount of resources. One of our techs was doing a routine check on the server, and your site was consuming more than 4.62% of the servers RAM, more than 1.93% of the server CPU and more than 14% of the server MySQL resources. Our policy is 10% of the entire servers resources.

O RLY? Maybe you could have told him about this hidden fee so he could decide whether he could afford the price hike before you instantly dropped his site after four years and demanded more money to bring it back up? That’s what I call extortion. If you’re with me, why not contact midphase and leave them a poignant note about their shady business practices?

UPDATE: Liquilife at Uncle Gamer Radio is temporarily hosting Gamertag Radio until they get a new host. It still sucks what Midphase did to him though.

Thanks to our buds at Microsoft and the Gamerscore Blog, you can now set Podtacular or any of our fine affiliates at the Gamercast Network as your gamerpic… for free! Just go to the marketplace blade, then Themes and Gamer Pictures, then New Arrivals and you’ll see the Gamercast Network pics there under Community Gamerpics. Be sure to download them and set them as your gamerpic to show your Podtacular pride!

In other news, the Achievement Junkie and Sarcastic Gamer podcasts have joined the fray of pwnage that is the Gamercast Network. Welcome to the new guys and be sure to check out their podcasts. There’s a reason they were selected from the throngs of gaming podcasts on iTunes.