So RPGs have been a hobby for me for years.  A cousin introduced me to the Palladium Fantasy RPG and the Palladium world in its various incarnations has been my favorite ever since.  Today Palladium has an entire Megaverse of content but that old Fantasy RPG has its place in my heart.  However, I moved and it's been hard to get a Rifts game going either as a player or a GM since then.  Setting up a webcam and Skyping just didn't work.  Years passed again.  For a while I played various incarnations of D&D with my local friends in my new home.  Every other week I'd troupe over to a friend's and we'd sit down at the table and roll some dice.  But time passed, we got old, had kids, moved out of state and had various mid-life crises.  We tried long-distance playing again.  Again the webcam came out and failed.  After some fumbling around we started to use an online gaming platform called Fantasy Grounds combined with Skype.  It started out a bit clunky but after a few years the D&D ruleset and more specifically the 5e ruleset because very polished.  It's endorsed by Wizards of the Coast, which seems very wise considering I have pretty much bought all the content at least twice so I could have the hard copy AND play online with the reference material.

And yet... and yet... what about the game system I actually gave a darn about?  Well, Palladium is still coming out with content but without people to play with, I really haven't kept up.  Every few years I would sit down with a serious face at my computer and Google up a storm trying to find some way to play Rifts online.  Roll 20 had some online games but I had invested too much energy in Fantasy Grounds to redo it all in Roll 20. SO fast forward a few weeks ago.  I sit down, do another search and I get a reference pop up.  Someone named "Damned" had made a very flexible ruleset for Fantasy Grounds.  It's not perfect but with a little bit of spit and polish, it may just work.  I dug into the tutorials for extensions, stumbled around a bit in the xml and lua files and came up with a slight modification that I think will work with Fantasy Grounds and Damned's MoreCore ruleset.  Fortunately, Damned is very responsive to questions.  I feel a bit guilty for wasting his time but with his help, I have something I put together with an online tutorial on YouTube.  I still don't actually have a campaign to play but it was fun to put together.  If this interests you check out my Youtube tutorial!

The DiskStation I had... died.  I was even notified of the time of death since Synology tells me when my DiskStation is offline.  This only really matters since I have this website on the darn thing.  I only had it a year but I bought it used, so I was pretty worried when it went down.  Amazingly Synology is pretty awesome when it comes to replacements as long as its within the warranty period.  If your reading this you may have realized that it is now up and running.  Everything was saved except the internet/network settings.  Unfortunately every time I mess with those I want to throw the darn thing away.  Entering various settings over and over until one finally works is one definition of hell.  Finally, I switched two cables around and I was live.  I guess I lack some basic understanding of the details;)  Hopefully, it will be a few more years before it goes down again.

I was late.  I completely missed my December publish date.  I almost missed my revised date of late January but I barely made that one.  All of these dates are self-inflicted so I suppose there is no harm.  Moving into the new house has been a roller coaster.  It required a huge change to my lifestyle, which I won't get into, but has generally been positive.  Except on my writing schedule.  It has definitely hit that harder than I thought.  Back in June, I was writing very quickly.  In fact, I had started two other projects (a children's book and a litRPG story)and had been making great progress on everything.  My latest schedule hit was due to both my girls being sick and having a water leak (which turned out to be in the yard).  The girls are actually easier to take care of when they are coughing and listless, except for keeping mommy and me up all night.  The flipside is that since they are coughing on us I expect we'll be sick in about a week.

I haven't touched my website in several months, so I was worried that I would completely forget how to use it.  Having worked with it for a few days I can thankfully say that it mostly came back.  I even found that Goodreads has new widgets that allow your book reviews in Goodreads to be viewed on your website.  That is more than Amazon allows.  See my blog for a slightly more in-depth description of my tears of bitterness.  

On the downside, I realized you can't blog directly in the Joomla editor because if you take too long you get logged out and you lose your blog/comments.  Yes, this is my second attempt.  If you are reading this and you want to leave a comment...remember to write in WordPad or something and THEN copy the test into the comment field.  Just saying.

Of course since the last time I used Joomla it has started saying that PHP 5.6 is outdated and to switch to PHP7.2.  I installed this and have been trying various tricks to get Joomla to use it.  Unsuccessfully.  Running a server on a Synology box has been fun and educational but it has moments of frustration.

I moved to a rental house about two weeks ago.  Talk about a real pain in the butt.  Aside from the packing and unpacking and hauling stuff around in a truck having a Joomla website and NAS has been more of a pain than I thought.  My new provider is AT&T.  I moved in on a Wednesday and had internet service for about a day.  During this time I wrestle to get the port forwarding to work.  I thought it was a heat issue.  The router was in the garage with a temperature of over 105 degrees F.  AT&T came out about four days later and moved it inside.  It was up for about a day.  Four days later AT&T comes back out and changes all the wiring from the service connect to my house.  Service is up for about a day and then crashes hard.  Four days later AT&T comes out and changes the router and tracks the issue to the connectors at their service.  I am finally up.  Yay.  It takes about a week to get the NAS and Joomla up due to some odd issues on the brand spanking new router they gave me.  I feel like AI spent weeks playing wack a mole but everything seems to be working.

Just found out that this K2 Blog/commenting functionality has a RSS feed option.  My pseudo dumb blog can now be a RSS.  They grow up so fast. (sheds a tear)  Seriously though I have been trying to get RSS feeds to show on the website.  The free versions are really finicky and most feeds come out as errors.  I would love to show Palladium news and Dresden news but I get errors with the ones I am using now (Simple RSS).  The Wizards of the Coast RSS shows up nicely as do the pictures in it but not much else.  Apparently, an extra space in the link can ruin the extensions day.  I had RSS Factory once, which read everything but wouldn't process images.  I had to roll back an installation to an earlier backup and when I tried to re-install it I got an error.  The restoration left stuff in the table it didn't like;)  I lost some nice extensions due to this error.  OSMap, EasyFrontEndSEO, JCH Optimization.  All of these get an error now when I install and choke without fully installing.  I suppose the moral of the story is to uninstall the extra extensions and THEN restore.  I had to restore the Joobla installation due to HD Videoshare acting up.  It didn't work and my browser suddenly said my page wasn't secure even after I removed it.  Ugh.  Yendif Video is less feature rich but is easy to configure and doesn't freak out my security settings.

Two weeks ago I installed Joomla and my productivity has been destroyed!  Mostly because I have been having fun fiddling with it to create a website.  The last web site I had was maybe 15 years ago and was just an html page I threw together in Word.  Now content managers rules and static web pages drool!  Honestly, I only have about a dozen pages so static would have been fine, but Joomla is fun and getting together a nice looking page with only free extensions has been a hoot.  Frustrating sometimes but generally fun.  I sorta had the idea of honing my skills so that I could make a functional business page for my wife, who is a videographer.  However, she doesn't like personal information about us to be on the web and won't show any video clips from the events and weddings because they belong to her and the clients.  All good and reasonable but there's not much you can put on your webpage to advertise after that decision has been made.  Still, I had fun.  Now I need to get back to work on my books!

Even though WordPress is my official Blog I am trying to implement a simple comment system and notice system specific to this site.  I am presently using the basic K2 implementation.  This is tricky because the documentation assumes you know more about how to set it up than I really do.  It forces Captcha on you.  I had to figure out where the settings were and how to link it to Google.  Fun stuff.  Next, I need to figure out how to get K2 to register users.