…Because Erollisi Day is coming to Norrath again! From February 4 through 16, you can participate in special quests and earn tokens to spend on lovey-dovey goodies for you and your home.

You can learn more about this year's festivities at EQ2Players.com, and get some in-depth details about the crafting side of things over at EQ2 Traders.

I've been immersed in the EQ2 Nights of the Dead celebrations for the last few weeks. The haunted house, haunted mansion, and trick-or-treating of years past have returned, and new for this year is a spooky hedge maze, the Hollow Hedge. All of the events are fun and not too grindy — you might find yourself wanting to run the events dozens of times to get your fill of all the goodies up for grabs. These range from a new appearance-only armor set to some appropriately ghoulish house items.

In other Halloween News, the Super Spooktacular in Free Realms is still going on. You can earn lots of cool costumes and prizes, and the quests to get them are short, sweet, and fun. Most of the festivities center around Sanctuary, although you'll find celebrators through Sacred Grove who will point you in the right direction.

This wasn't planned, but I noticed that my dog Moxy is dressed up as a Gay Pride parade! /thumbsup

(That's totally my Froglok Conjuror's catch phrase.)

I can't believe it's been a whole month since I've posted anything. It's not like I've been slacking, either…I've put in enough hours on a recent corporate project to warrant browsing for a laptop of my very own. Yvria, my Weaponsmith in EQ2, hit level 80 last week. Kharri, my Carpenter, finished her crafter epic yesterday. I'm steadily leveling up my combat jobs in Free Realms, one at a time. My Animal Crossing: City Folk town is still chugging along, and I log in daily to keep all my flowers watered and stuff.

With the weather changing from summer to fall, I've had a fibro flare-up or two that's slowed me down for a few days. Right now I'm suspicious of some intense coughing fits I've been having recently. If I feel myself passing away, I'll let everyone know well in advance. No, you can't have my stuff. :p

I've decided to move my guild's website from Dragonfly CMS to WordPress, since I've been really getting into making new themes lately. I'm even seriously considering making a WordPress port of Roster Master as a plugin, but we'll see how that goes when I have more time to concentrate on it.

I'm designing an AION website for an ex-EQ2 sig artist friend. It's going to be way cool and will be launching before the game is released later this month. The AetherNet — keep an eye on it!

I made this today on a whim…just had a picture in my head and wanted to try to recreate it. It's 1680×1050 (widescreen), but if you'd like a different size, let me know.

The other day, I finally got my character to level 20 Brawler. It's taken a long time — mostly because I preferred leveling the non-combat jobs, and now most of them are capped — but being level 20 in at least one combat job has been quite rewarding.

First of all, three-pip difficulty dungeons don't faze me in the least now, and one-pip dungeons are WAY too easy. Sure it takes a little time to get through the three-pips, but I can typically do a run without using all my potions and only losing one or two knock-outs.

I remember that as a Brawler in my teens, three-pip dungeons were pretty hard to do, if I could do them at all (even with help from Peter), and I'd go through a stack of potions and most of my knock-outs. It was really frustrating, but I don't blame that on the game at all…I just wasn't strong enough to do them alone.

Maybe now I can finish that tough boss battle to save the Queen…whee!

Watched this week's So You Think You Can Dance competition and results shows this evening with dinner, and I couldn't help but notice that Caitlin in her pasa doble garb bore a striking resemblance to a certain elf us EQ'ers are very familiar with:

Well, at least it's born in Free Realms…I have no idea where it was born elsewhere. :p

Yesterday, Free Realms introduced guilds (official notice here), and of course I had to login immediately to try to get a good name. Creating a guild is incredibly easy; anyone can do it. No, seriously…ANYONE. All by themselves. No fellow players needed. I'm sure there are going to be loads of "guilds of one" out there, but hey, it's a kids' game, so everything's pretty simple.

Once you create your guild, you're given a temporary guild name consisting of the founding character's name. In my case, it was "Seagoat Skyrune's Guild." Original, right? Then comes the task of picking a good guild name that won't get auto-rejected OR manually rejected by the guild name reviewers.

First I tried "Elemental." Auto-rejected. Not sure why, but hey.

Next up was "Jumjum Bandits." That one got manually rejected…I think it was the "bandits" part, but who really knows for sure?

Finally I tried "Twilight Alliance," and that one stuck. Yay! Third time really is the charm, I guess.

Coming soon: Guild halls!!

Those of us who actually stayed up-to-date on the concert knew that it may start 15 or 30 minutes late, so we weren't nearly as frustrated as the kids who were ready for it to start at 4:00pm Pacific on the dot.

While it was disappointing that they showed up, played the one song, and then left (with encore performances at 4:45pm Pacific and again at 5:00pm Pacific), it was still a lot of fun. Here are a few of the screenies I captured during the concert:

I finally got around to updating my Characters page…everybody's there, so keep an eye out for me in-game.

I've been puttering around in Free Realms since shortly after it launched, and I wanted to share my thoughts on the game.

Up front, I want to point out that I'm a Station Access subscriber, so all the Members-only content is open to me. This post is written from that perspective, so if you're not a Member, realize that not everything that is mentioned below applies to you.

First of all, I'm having an absolute blast. I've only got one character so far, but that's really all I need at this point! You can do anything in the world — literally; every single occupation in the entire game world is open to any character at any time. I've unlocked most of the jobs, although there are only a few that I've leveled up in to any degree.

When I initially heard about some of the mechanics in FR, I thought for sure they would be deal-breakers for me, the die-hard EQ2 fangirl. The opt-in combat system sounded really flaky: where's the adventure in that?? Having multiple jobs (or classes, if you will) available at all times for a single character seemed pointless: is it really better to be a jack of all trades than a master of one?

Let me just allay your fears now: there are NO deal-breakers here.

I find the opt-in combat system to be a relief, actually. I love exploring and questing, and if I don't want to fight, I'm actually kinda glad that I don't have to. In EQ2, I do most of my exploring in zones that have greyed out to me, so I'm not sure why I thought FR's combat would rub me the wrong way.

I'm also happy with the fact that I have so many different career paths open to me. They're all leveled up separately, so in a way, it's like have a whole bevy of alts rolled into one character. I can tell right up front that there will be a few that I favor over the rest, but they all have their usefulness and they're all fun in their own ways.

For those who would pooh-pooh the "cartoony" style of the game art, keep in mind that this is a game geared toward young folks. Being an artist myself, I personally find the graphics really pretty and very appropriate for the genre. There are lots of sophisticated subtleties thrown in there, so don't ever think you're just looking at a hole in a dead tree trunk; you might get a nasty surprise:

While there are plenty of polygons, the only real pixels you'll see is when you're fact-to-face in dialog with an NPC of the larger variety (like trolls.) The smaller races are quite charming, and the humans are very attractive. There's plenty of humor for us grown-ups too: quest names have been the main source of my laughter so far, such as Peavey's Big Ad Venture, as well as the odd EverQuest homage, like an NPC named Murdunk.

This game won't appeal to everyone, but I believe SOE has done an admirable job. It's beautiful, clever, and most importantly, fun. If you haven't given it a try by now, I strongly encourage you to.