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!

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!

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: