Fair Warning: this post is about 3.4 years old, so some of the information might be a bit dated. On the other hand, this post was last modified about 3.4 years ago, so maybe it's up-to-date after all. In any case, please keep all this in mind while reading. Thanks for understanding!
A Quick Diversion:  

The Actual News:

Today is December 22nd, 2020… which other than being T-minus 3 days until Christmas, has no other major significance for most people. However, for me and this site, December 22nd is the anniversary of a very special Christmas present that an old PA! superfriend gave to me… and by “give” I mean I pay him for the privilege of having said present. … Er, let me explain!

Part of the joy of owning my own website is having to renew domain names every year. Of course I could renew them every two or five years… but what do I look like, Mister Moneybags?? Anyways, although this website is located at PokemonAaah.net, I have a few other PA! related domain names, namely:

Then of course there are all the various subdomains, like pokemon.nick15.com and old.pokemonaaah.net …. but those all generally link to older copies of the site.

But although PokemonAaah.net is the main domain name I’ve been using since the olden days, PokemonAaah.com was actually the first domain name I specifically bought for the site. I forget exactly WHEN I started using the domain name (a quick poke through the old PA! Version History might answer that)… but having it finally meant that the site was serious business. I also got PokemonAaah.org in order to round things out, but I gave up on that one rather quickly.

Unfortunately, however, through various mishaps and errors of comedic levels, I had lost the PokemonAaah.com domain name to cyber-squatters, which prompted me to begin using PokemonAaah.net instead, which is clearly still being used to this day. Now while I’ve grown used to using PokemonAaah.net for the site, there is something problematic about the idea of having cyber-squatters using the “more official” version of my site’s domain name… a problem which didn’t resolved during PA!’s original run. But alas, such is life, and I resigned myself to forever accepting that someone else will have control over my site’s domain name and any traffic confusion that might cause.

Fast forward to 2009, when I was randomly contacted by an old skool PA! superfriend and former staff member, one Joey M. Classic PA! fans might remember him as BassPikaMew, or some iteration thereof (BPMdotEXE, BPM_EXE, BPMomega, etc). Since the PA! days, we had become adults, doing our adulting jobs; I was at SFSU working on my Computer Science degree, while BPM ended up running his own domain name registrar, OmegaDomains.net (eh eh? Omega? See the connection??). Well as it turned out, by running his own domain name registrar, he gets to see which domain names are free and available… and lo-and-behold, the cyber-squatters finally gave up on PokemonAaah.com! He snatched it up as quickly as he could, then let me know that he’s had it and if I was interested in getting it back. My response to him, to put things mildly, was…

ABSO-SMEGGIN’-LUTELY!

lol, of course my jaw dropped when I discovered the news, so we got the domain name transferred over to my account at OmegaDomains, and I’ve been renewing it there ever since as my way of thanking him for catching that change, mostly also because I would have never thought to check up on it myself. (That said, I still need to transfer the rest of my domain names over to BPM’s service, but I’ve been too busy and poor to do it. I’m such a horrible friend ;_;)

So as it turns out, BPM was able to get it transferred over to me on December 22nd, which turned out to be maybe one of the best Christmas gifts I’ve ever gotten. Yep, sorry Mom and Dad, but it totally trumped the Combat Belt Batman toy you got me, even though I swore that I’d never get tired of playing with it. I only just renewed it today, which served as a friendly reminder of this story, and so I thought I’d share it with you. Now for the moment, PokemonAaah.com is currently connected to a version of the site as it existed on March 6th, 2001… but, I dunno, maybe I should reconnect it to this main site after-all. Lemme think about it.

But yeah, that’s the quick story about why December 22nd is so special to PA!, and where PokemonAaah.com was for a few years. If you want to give BPM your thanks for saving the domain name from the depths of internet hell, maybe consider getting your next domain name using OmegaDomains.net? His prices are actually pretty competitive relative to GoDaddy, and I’ve never had any issues with renewing or downtime. If anything, OmegaDomains is the Target relative to GoDaddy’s Wal-Mart. :P