That’s what I wondered today, after a quick trip to the room on the second floor of my house, where I usually sit when working on designs or planning to build an item. As I was about to sit on my favorite chair, I took notice of an item that wasn’t supposed to be there—another chair, a very simple one this time. It’s supposed to be mine, except that I absolutely don’t remember having ever owned it. There’s also no way of knowing who or what dropped it on my floor.

The mystery probably won’t be solved, but it may be the first sign of some ghostly activity in my house. This could be fun. Perhaps next time, the ghost will drop different kind of furniture?

Exploring and travelling in Second Life has this that you never fall short of new builds, areas and curiosities to discover. However, it also keeps you far from home… and home, sometimes, can reveal itself as being surrounded by many good builds and interesting places as well. These shouldn’t be overlooked, right?

Right under my nose – so to say – lies this nice place, carefully “hidden” on top of the huge mountain that is the center of Varney. Oh, I never found anyone living there, or at least wasn’t lucky enough for that, but there still is this vibrant atmosphere about it. These pirates, mind you, they even have a sauna, and large towels on their wooden floors, in case they’d like to sunbathe under! As for the housing itself? Among wooden huts and various green leafy trees, what more could one ask? “Appropriate furniture” is not an answer, since they have it too.

There is more to see in Varney, namely the excellent build of my good neighbor Hiro Pendragon, which is a pleasure to look at – and makes me feel each time like seriously rebuilding my own house and store, in order to make the landscape more pleasant to look at from his side on things; unfortunately, this also always makes me feel soblank regarding what to do, as I don’t feel that I could really be on par with my meager building skills I don’t have the time to develop. Blech. At any rate, if the sim has known changes like any other sim, I must say that our little corner of paradise here is most welcome, and that I should really take some more time to regularly visit what new builds and other wonders may lie there.

And you… What’s on your doorstep?

Phooey. I thought I’d get a chance to update and log in a little early morning today, but ‘lo and behold, the automatic updater first refused to fire up, then downloading the installer from the website directly kept on freezing at 90% of the download, leaving me alone in the cold.

Since it seems I’m out of luck, I’m going to finally update this blog to the latest WordPress build, play with the CSS, and change some colors and font sizes here. I don’t like these pale greens, they’re a bit depressing.

Posting an entry yesterday made me realize that I had grown tired of the old layout on this blog (which perhaps was also playing a small role in why I wasn’t updating it that much, among the vast sea of other things). Thus I made another change. WordPress Strayhorn’s users have created more themes in the past few months than what was at my disposal when I switched systems back in February, and there’s now more choice than ever; it was a good moment to jump on the opportunity.

The current template probably isn’t definitive – I absolutely love tweaking a theme when it comes to colors, fonts and images, since often what I like about it is the way the various elements are implemented, and not the “little details”. I’m not too fond of the pale green-ish tints, I admit. When I have more time (and don’t have to monitor a heavy forum upgrade every two minutes), I’ll add some more tweaks to make this place more enjoyable.

If it’s more enjoyable, perhaps I’ll also feel like writing more… who knows!

Even though I haven’t been in SL much these past weeks (... months…), I’ve still somewhat kept in touch with some of the blogs and what was happening in world. Thus, there was no way I’d pass the opportunity to pick up a copy of Cory Doctorow’s book, if only out of curiosity after having read some of his posts on Boing Boing. Of course, having grabbed in some five minutes ago and still waiting for it to fully rez in my home, I don’t have much to say about it yet. This will come in time.

Now, will I read it? This is a question to which I can’t answer. I’m interested in reading it, that’s a fact. I’m not sure if I’ll have the opportunity to do that in Second Life much, given the time it takes to rezz pages, and above all, not be interrupted. I deeply dislike being interrupted when I read, so in the eventuality I’m found tagged “Busy – Reading”, this is what it means. On the other hand, the prospective of such a media for distribution of a book is quite a novelty regarding the world of “games” and “virtual universes” at the moment, and it’s exciting to hold this copy of the book. A virtual copy, but a copy nonetheless.

I’m even tempted to go to the signing on July 24th, although 11 PM my time on a Sunday evening doesn’t bode well for me to be able to log in sigh The bane of not living in a US-friendly timezone, I suppose.

Ah, well. This can still be interesting. Much interesting.