In short, quite a bit has been going on.. and yet nothing has been going on.

Second Life is teeming with change, some possibly for the good, some possibly for the bad. From closing the teen-grid and allowing minors into the main grid, to allowing users the ability to choose any “screen name” they want.. even if it’s also mine. Closing down the so-called “Orientation Islands” and just dumping raw new users into live music venues and events.. talk about your disruptive influences. Many people were lauding Philip Rosedale’s return as CEO of Linden Lab.. I guess they forgot the kinds of things Philip always pushed for. Disruptive Technology indeed. Meanwhile it seems that there’s trouble brewing for one of the third-party viewers…

With all this upheaval, I’ve been taking a break. In a bit of depression, I’ve been seeking to salve that hurt with some retail therapy/collecting.. seeking out more of these silly “Pirates” cards. My collection has grown well beyond the boxes of the last post. But in my random searching, I found an auction on ebay, with a pretty decent price. Unfortunately when the cards arrived there were MANY FEWER cards sent than had been pictured in the listing. Very disappointing, that.. and I left my first negative review on Ebay. First time since I started using the service in 1999.

Probably the best thing to happen all week, was going out to Evolution Gaming in Eugene. That’s the place where Kim found out about a weekly Battletech gaming group.. and she and I decided to go see the games in action. She of course jumped right in with her encyclopedic knowledge of which mechs have which weapons and so-on. I instead chose to sit back and just watch the game being played.. and try to get a feel for how it all worked. I still think it looks like a bit of a dry game, but it was really enjoyable to hang out there.. so much like the gaming room at one of the San Jose cons, around back near the anime room..  it felt like home. I sat and read a book for a bit, talked dice and hexmaps with the shop’s owner, picked up a couple of GURPS books.. and generally had a fine time, even though I was something of a wallflower there. I may just have to start playing.. as an excuse to get to know some of these people.

I finished reading F.M.Busby’s Slow Freight, which was much as I remembered it when I first read it. I’m taking a short break from that world, reading his Islands of Tomorrow before returning to the sequel to Slow Freight, Arrow from Earth. I’m about 2/3 of the way through Islands of Tomorrow, and I already find myself wishing that Busby had started writing sooner in life. Well at least I can enjoy what he did write.. and it will be some time before I’ve read them all.

Jason came over on Thursday.. that was exciting. Originally our unplanned “getting together and hanging out” had originally involved the idea of hitting a thrift store or two on the bus, then snagging something to eat. Kim decided she wanted to come along, so the three of us made use of her car, and hit several thrift stores. I picked up a manual crank card shuffler (I can’t shuffle cards worth a damn) and a couple of small kitchen items.. and a Star Trek story record. While one of several different records produced by Peter Pan / Power Records in 1975, sadly this story record was an exact duplicate to the one I already owned. But hey, for thrift-store prices, I’m not complaining at having a spare.

The only other thing of major importance (and you can tell how thrilling my life must be) is that I’ve been considering placing an order for custom engraved dice. Chessex offers the service for a remarkably approachable cost. It was the owner at Evolution Games who pointed the option out to me. I’ve been looking for “something special” in terms of the 6-sided dice used for the Pirates game.. Maybe some dice with skulls on them… I’ve been kind of driven and non-committal at the same time. But the options for skull dice honestly aren’t terribly great. The best dice I’ve seen lately were a limited edition set produced for Warhammer, and a set made by Q-Workshop for a game called EarthDawn. Both are really nice looking, but they’re also quite expensive. Contrasting against the cost of a single run of 10 single-custom-face dice through Chessex.. well I’m considering it. I’d considering doing a smaller run of 6-sided customs.. but at a 10-die minimum.. $6 per die seems pretty extravagant. I could see doing it if I were prototyping a boardgame or something.. I just want some dice that look cool. It’s kind of a shame that the dice market is so small.. there’s not much competition to keep variety up and costs down.

Anyways, there you have it, or most of it. Kind of a downer of a week. I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on my past.. on my family past, things lost, friends left behind.. etc. Depression.. meh.

I’m gonna go shoot some klingons or something.

Well, okay, no I haven’t.

This weekend was really weird though. A rough attempt of sorts, to take an impromptu vacation from my work in SL. Things had been getting a little “Writer’s Blockish” and I decided it would be good to step away from the virtual world for a while, and take a little time for myself.

Friday and Saturday, of course, I spent much of the day working on bringing my website back to life. I’m pretty pleased with the way it came together, but I’ve still got some work to do, fleshing out some of the “About” pages, adding in some links, some sidebar widgets, etc. Still, it’s nice to have something that feels like “home” again on the web.

Saturday evening, I ended up going to bed a bit early. After working on the webpage, I decided to try and play a little “Star Trek Online“.. but my heart wasn’t really in it. I did create a new character though.. not sure if I really *WANT* to start over from the beginning though. Kim (my housemate/landlady) had had an extended “day out” herself, and had come home with a couch. After I helped her in with the couch, we sat for a little while and talked, listened to the music drifting apparently from a nearby park on the river, and wound back down. Soon after I went to bed for keeps, and woke up pretty darned early on Sunday.

Kim did too.. and we ended up travelling across town in search of wine-making supplies for her (no luck there), and ended up visiting a few thrift stores and used book stores. Kim’s been reading the Mechwarrior/Battletech series of books, and I’m still trying to collect the works of F. M. Busby. At the end of our trip, I had scored 5 more Busby books, as well as two “Red Dwarf” novels, and a novel tie-in for the “Myst” videogame, which I’m quite excited about.

Later that evening, we were both possessed of the hunting bug once more, and went to our local ShopKo where we found some great clearance packs of the “Pirates of the ____” constructable ship, card game. We’d given the game a play a time or two, and have both been becomming quite fond of the game, and it’s fiddly little ship models. Part collectable, part board game… and all fun. We scored a dozen and a half packs there, and then swung by Fred Meyer because I’d be needing a new storage box for my cards. (these collections grow really quickly).

My card boxes for my "Pirates" cards.

Monday (today) on the other hand, was mostly “back to work”. I can’t go into the details, but suffice it to say that I had a pretty taxing day, even though I accomplished relatively little, the steps taken today were pretty significant steps towards my greater goal. Mostly just a lot of comparing of similar things, and decision making. Regardless of the amount of actual “work” involved, it was a taxing and tedious excercise.. and I’m looking forward to getting to bed here soon.

I’m tired.

I dunno what started it really. Long ago I used to have an account on LiveJournal. I kept it up fairly regularly, unitl a friend and I had a falling out over some potentially “Not Safe For Work” content that I posted (a picture of my Second Life avatar). That pretty much began the end of my journal. I tried several times over the years at LJ, to “spin off” my adult content into other blogs.. but everything just became too complicated to bother with. Along came Second Life, and well that was the end of my days with LJ. Even my personal webpage went dark in favour of the work I was doing in SL.

As part of building a business in Second Life, I once again saw the value in having a webpage. A place where people could view my products, a place where I could link to images.. and last year, Eclectic-Randomness.com was born. At the behest of a friend, I experimented at length with using WordPress as the “engine” to drive the site. Of course it wasn’t long until I began trying to shoehorn in posts of a more personal nature. I tried creating a special “Blog” category for my personal posts there.. but they didn’t really belong.

Last month, “Dr. Cheese”, my friend of many years, finally decided to dust off his own website (Cheesius.com), and begin posting content there again. As these things so often happen, it wasn’t long before I was looking with regret at the shell that my own homepage (zebragrrl.com) had become.

After a particularly difficult week working in Second Life, I decided that I needed to take a little time off and work on my own webpage.

It’s still not QUITE finished.. I’ll have some work to do categorizing posts, importing some of my older blog contents, etc.. But it’s starting to look like a “Proper Blog” again. We’ll see if I end up posting regularly again or not.. but at least the site is usable again.. which means there’s at least a chance.