For every in-game Station Cash purchase of special Child's Play benefit items, SOE will donate $10 to the Child's Play charity.

The excellent bit about this — if it could be any more excellent — is that the items cost 500 SC credits, which is the equivalent of $5. You heard it right: SOE will match every $5 donation/purchase with another $5.

I, like everyone else, was quite wary of the Station Cash concept at first, but when you look at the available items, they're really no threat to the "pure" game world. Besides, this is a charity for kids…nobody loses here!

Peter bought me a load of SC for my birthday yesterday, and I had enough for 2 Bouncing Baby Bear Cubs (Riannon got "Bugaboo," and Dionaea will be getting "Boogaloo") plus a set of Ironforge Plate for Ria. Screenshots really don't do the set justice…it looks like it's made of pearl. Shiny!

I've been itching for some time to dig back in to my EQ2 Gallery project, and I finally got around to it last night. Still a lot of work to be done, for sure, but I'm chipping away at it.

Right now I'm polishing up the user management section. I'm probably going to allow users to register eventually, but first I want to make sure that *I* can add, edit, and remove users properly. With my experience in mySQL over the last year, I'm more confident now than when I started working on the site that I can make it do what I intend.

Once I start bringing portions online and opening them up to user submissions, I think it will be a great resource for the EQ2 community.

So I think I finally have this flu thing on the run. My doctor gave me antibiotics, nasal spray, and an inhaler, and my sniffling and coughing are getting slowly better — emphasis on the "slowly." The laryngitis is no better and I still have serious coughing fits, waking me (and the rest of the building) up during the night and rendering me practically laugh-less the rest of the time. Ok, maybe "on the run" is an exaggeration. :p

Meanwhile, it's back to the Moors of Ykesha in EQ2. Without the Frostfell Wonderland Village and all its shiny goodies to distract me, I'm back to running through the solo faction quests and the daily tradeskill tasks with Riannon, my main. I initially tried the daily tasks with Kharri, my Carpenter, but being as she's only a 50-something Defiler it was going to take me eons to get enough faction with Grobb and Tupta for the "fluff" furniture recipes. Ria, on the other hand, is capped, which gives her the option of adventuring to raise faction. I think she was able to reach the recipe-purchasing goal in only a day or two.

After a full evening of laid-back adventuring and questing, I'm up to 11k with the Guktan Guard, 14k with Clan Grobb, and 16k with the Survival Accord. I also earned a full Achievement Point — Ample Harvest FTW! — and cleared out a handful of quests from my perpetually full journal. All in all, not a bad night!

Frostfell has come and gone for another year in Norrath, and here's the final daily gift tally:

• Shiny baubles:
  • Blue: 13
  • Green: 14
  • Red: 13
  • Silver: 9
• Frostfell candles:
  • Sombre: 17
  • Stately: 17
• Frostfell snowflakes:
  • Etched: 4
  • Ornate: 11
• Purple wrapped gift boxes: 18
• Sacks of coal: 16
• Gigglegibber Frostfell stockings: 10

All in all, my girls totally racked up.  That's 142 daily gifts, an average of about 12 gifts per character. My only regret is not spending all of my E'ci tokens sooner…I still have more than a dozen on Ria, and a few here and there on a few other girls. I suppose there's always next year!

With the limited-time glacial furniture, portions our guild hall and all of my 5-room house have received makeovers and look pretty nice.