Been a while since I updated the blog, so I thought I would. First, an admission of guilt. If you haven’t been following the front page, I’m twittering (or whatever) now. Since I’m lazy, I’ve been updating that more than the blog.

Otherwise, the whole buying a house thing has consumed a lot of my time. The rest, really, has been Etrian Odyssey (yes, still) and Rock Band 2. But, those are going as you would expect: awesomely. The house thing is more interesting, and on the subject, I’d like to thank Tobi Silgman with the Stark Company and Christopher Ohly with UW Credit Union for helping me through the process. Both were very professional, skilled, helpful, etc., and did a great job for me under a unique situation or two.

On the house thing, I moved the first set of stuff there today, and took a bunch of pictures. It’s really awesome. And then, leaving, I smashed the car into a pole while backing out of the driveway. Now I’m down one tail light. More moving next week, I’m hoping to be fully in there by the end of October. Crazy. A month and a half ago I was only scarcely looking at buying a house, and now, here I am.

I think my favorite thing about Gen Con is that I can haul back a bunch of books and ride the high for weeks, maybe months. Today I finally cracked open Cults of Freeport, a supplement by Green Ronin for their Freeport setting, which is well-written and interesting stuff, especially if you like the idea of a Cthulhu/pirates mashup.

(Total aside: what is it with me and Cthulhu hybrid games/settings? CthulhuTech is bliss, and I really dig the obvious Mythos references in the Freeport setting. If there were benchmarks for modern day Cthulhu cultists…)

Not sure if I’ll use anything directly from the book for my True20/Freeport setting, but it definitely gets the gears turning. Also worth checking out is a tip or two for running 4th edition D&D in Freeport, hinting that they may make a 4e guidebook one day. That has the potential for fun stuff.

Otherwise, more house prep work, and more gaming. Slowly getting the ball rolling again on the play-by-IRC/wiki game in my custom/Freeport setting hybrid, need to do some plotting (and maybe even real writing!) for CthulhuTech. Awesome times.

I think the whole house-buying thing finally set in today, meeting with my buyer’s agent whom I am surprisingly well-connected to (well, if two independent acquaintances count). Not one of those “oh crap, what am I doing?” moments, but certainly “oh man, this is the real deal.” I hope I didn’t look too much like a deer in headlights.

Things are coming along nicely, though, in that they’ve started and I haven’t gone screaming for the door yet. Paperwork to read and more people to talk to, though. Buyer’s agent has been awesome so far, truth be told; I’m really quite excited.

Also about houses, House starts up again in two weeks. I really need to fix the media PC by then.

So I did that thing I mentioned in my last post, with the aggregation. The front page now combines RSS feeds from my blog, gallery, and wiki, and my page on Delicious in addition. More to come, likely.

Also, hooray for others making an edit or two to the wiki. Friend codes (thanks, Nintendo, for the most annoying online experience, by the way), but more interestingly, Dan has touched the CthulhuTech section a little bit, which I’ve been negligent in updating. But thanks for that, and stuff. There are CthulhuTech things I’ve been meaning to put up that I have yet to.

Also, the front page has reminded me of how much MoinMoin’s RSS feed sucks. I wonder if I can replace that…

Taking a lazy Sunday to play around with the website. Finally installing Planet, which I plan on making my front page once it’s ready — the idea is it can assemble all of my RSS feeds, so the front page has a rolling view of everything I’ve deemed important enough to promote, like the blog, but for all of my updates.

After that I don’t know what I’ll do, but on the list is fixing some minor CSS quibbles here and there.

Oh, and on a totally unrelated tangent, I haven’t beaten Final Fantasy IV (DS) yet, but I’ve gone and picked Etrian Odyssey back up, trying to get everything completed.

Why the hell doesn’t CAcert scream up and down that your SSL certs are going to expire soon, so renew them now before you forget, you lazy admin? I’m a lazy admin and forgot that my SSL certs were going to expire.

I was feeling kind of nostalgic today, after the house poking around, and I always enjoyed driving Wisconsin Highway 33 (which has terminus points in La Crosse and Port Washington!). In fact, I think taking that 4 – 5 hour drive from one end to the other was my favorite part of living in La Crosse, to the point that I had often gone out of my way to start my drive at one end, so I could say that I drove the entirety of 33.

Anyway, nostalgia. I “drove” 33 again today by turning on satellite view on Google Maps, zooming in as close as I could for each location, and scrolling from La Crosse to Port Washington. Fun times.

Now that I’m looking for a house, I’m kind of regretting that large payment I made towards my student loan a month ago because “the money was just sitting there.” Doh!

Picked up, among others, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. Have only paged through it, but it’s pretty interesting so far. Unapologetically changed the physical landscape, dropped a lot of deities, killed off Mystra, dropped the Weave, so on and so on. Am I going to run it? Dunno. But it’s tempting me, in that “ooh, it’s the Realms” way, changes or not.

Need to read more (also reading GURPS stuff). Maybe I’ll dust off the Undermountain campaign…

Gen Con ‘08 was awesome. Got Vade Mecum, hooray for in color from a new publisher. Played lots of D&D, didn’t suck in the Championship, picked up some Saga Edition books in case I have time to get that started again, and even bought a couple or five anime/Jpop CDs. And of course dice.

Best year ever? Maybe. Only took a couple pictures though. :( There are a bunch of others, people should upload.