Particle animation, Materials, and emitter questions...

Working on an animated logo for my Outfit in Planetside 2. Have a few questions using Blender Render in v2.65 (will DL v2.66 later today/tomorrow).

Cycles doesn't do SSS, so using Blender Render. I need some good tuts on basic materials and textures. I still remember UV unwrap, but the rest is fuzzy, at best. Nodes is obviously better.

Can I use a photo texture and use it as an emitter? I am making an obsidian material and would like the "veins" in the rock to emit. Not sure how to do it.

I have particle sims down pretty well again, amazingly, but I can't figure out how to keyframe them to turn on/off in an animation? Hopefully this is an easy one.

For the texture problem; you can still do texture nodes as you used to be able to.
Split a node window, switch to texture nodes, and then enable them with Use Nodes.
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After you create your texture using masks, or whatever method you choose to use, you simply set to modify emission;
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You can now also create actual light with texture emission, unlike the faked effect in 2.49-
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The animation thing I'll have to play with for a bit. I haven't done any of that since 2.49. Give me a bit.
Question; do you just want to disable renderability during the animation, or actual emission? The first is easy, and I know how to do it. The second one, i'm not sure about yet.

If you just want to disable render, split an IPO window, and then hover over the render-active button in the particle modifier, and press "I". In the IPO window, a new curve will appear which will let you animate the value of that button. Cntrl-Click on the curve to add a new point. In the IPO window, press "N" to open the toolpanel where you can set the exact x/y coordinates of a selected point.
Note that the curve will snap to a boolean value system where 1 is on, and 0 is off.
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If you want to fade the particle system in/out, you could also do the same thing with material alpha settings, or perhaps particle draw size settings.
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Unfortunately I don't know if there's a way to actually stop particle emission.

Gonna have to spend time re-learning the basics of textures/materials, sadly. Shocked myself actually remembering UV unwrap at all, TBH.

Simply being able to set the particle sim to unrenderable at a certain keyframe is good enough, thank you! Hopefully I can wrap my head around that.