Yes, yes. I’ve been hunting again and have nearly finished the STEAM hunt. Some recent experiences while online seem to be leading me in the direction of adopting a more steampunk-inspired persona, or at least to get out of my comfortable habits (and out more).

I enjoy light role-play and can crack on a bit in Victorian idioms, and the little puffs of steam coming from my hat amuse me no end.

I recently bought a car from the famous Curio Obscura shop and have been teaching myself to drive; this hasn’t been terribly successful but it has been a lot of fun.

Here I am with my little car at the recent Cafe Wellstone Dancing Liberally event, where everyone came with (or as) their favorite guilty pleasures. I should have taken more pictures – my favorite costume spotted was the cute Hershey’s Kiss one.

Actually, I spent quite a lot of time at Curio Obscura. It’s a very entertaining place, especially when the trick posing stands (used to immobilize one’s avatar so clothes and accessories can be tried on and adjusted) turn a person upside-down and dump them in the middle of the floor below.

This is what the shop looks like from outside – when I went there, the link I had takes you straight inside, and there are no windows, so you have no idea of what the structure looks like. But when browsing upstairs, I came on a kind of control panel with lots of knobs and buttons and stuff that looked like organ stops. The seat said “sit here” so I figured it might end up having me play a tune. No, what happens is it forces your perspective so that suddenly you seem to be outside, looking up at the shop, which is revealed as a rather scary self-motive prim-harvesting mechanical crustacean. At least, that’s what I presumed from the look of the big sawblade and pincer. Anyway, the eyes glow and change colors, not sure why the effect shows the eye color in two places.

I’m close to hitting my limit on my Flickr account, and realized that some of my uploads to Blogger seemed to be hitting a free Picasa web album, so today I downloaded Picasa onto the new computer and struggled a bit with figuring out the file structure, organizing pictures taken inworld on the new machine, and so on.

It’s not perfectly easy to use Picasa/Blogger, and I wish my image settings were “sticky” on the web album page, but I’m getting used to it.