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I read the Golden Compass because I am a lover of great children's literature. I haven't had the heart to see the movie because I was so terribly excited for it, but I heard it sucks compared to the book. And the book is genius. I don't want to ruin it.

I loved the concept of the daemon though. I love animals and ever since I was a kid I imagined animals to have special souls and magical powers. So the daemon concept really hit my childhood sweetspot.

Anyway, I saw a few SLers took the daemon quiz, so I thought I'd take mine to. And guess who I got?

Crazy, huh?

I read Deux Looks today and heard about Abby. She was born with a malignant brain tumor. She's now 7 months old  and has just completed surgery and is undergoing chemotherapy. Her parents were told she wouldn't survive one month.

Abby has a fairy godmother in SL - Alyssum Therian. She's been trying to raise money to help Abby's parents out during this difficult time. Right now you can go to her store, Love, Aly and buy this cute little elf outfit for only 100L. All of the proceeds go to Abby.

This is not the best photo of this adorable little ensemble, but you can see the whole thing over at Alyssum's blog.  You are also most welcome to throw extra cash into the tip jar, or hell, forgo the elf outfit and just donate at Love, Aly.

Truth is, there are so many people out there who need help and support this holiday. There are very personal reasons why Abby's story affected me so, and maybe it does you too. In any case, I hope that we all remember to stop and buy elf costumes or donate time to soup kitchens or buy toys for the kids in hospitals and go walk dogs in shelters and visit elderly folks in assisted living programs.

We're not always going to be so damned lucky, you know? We need to stick together people. Stick together.

Halloween, originally uploaded by Sable Slade.

Just a cute shot of my dear pal Sable I caught on Flickr.

A Vision of Hell, originally uploaded by Khamudy Mannonen.

Wow. You may remember the series of posts I did on "Fight for Topgol" where I bitched incessantly about the casino causing lag. Well I must say, even back when we had soul sucking second life hating lag 24/7, our plight in Topgol never reached lows such as this. My sympathy to the landowners who aren't mindless resource hogs. Shout if you want any help kicking campers in the face...

The Irony: Playboy Bunny Nude, originally uploaded by VintFalken.

Special shout to my girl Vint Falken on her comic representation of Irony. She should have been included in my "Second Life Comics" post a couple of days ago but I was a lame ass and forgot to include this. Like everything Vint does, this two-panel comic inspires both giggles and ideas, with eye soothing photoshop work to boot. I hope to see more like this from Falken Industries in the future!

Okay, I think it's official now. AN Hosting sucks ass.

I have never dealt with so much downtime in a hosting service, ever. Add to that the fact that their customer support department, while very nice and quite responsive, is inept. Now you have every reason to move your shit to a new service.

For example, when trying to get assistance for configuring an addon domain, I was told I had to upgrade my service to host the addon. Being a dumbass, I did it even though I didn't think I needed to. I was right--I didn't need to. The service person was proactive enough to contact me and let me know about the error, which I appreciated. However, he then downgraded my service plan farther than my original plan. Then the company kept the money I paid (upfront) and when I contacted them about a) restoring my service to my original plan and b) getting my money back, the poor bastard on the other end of the phone was so confused I had to walk him through the situation at *least* five times before he understood that I didn't actually owe them any money. And then he still had to get his supervisor on the phone.

Folks, that's just one episode. I have at least four other stories like that, and I've only been with these people for about 10 weeks.

To be perfectly honest, I can deal with inept service people, I really can, because they are fast to respond and I get a tremendous amount of storage space and very liberal policies regarding my content for the price. It's the fact that I'm diligently trying to build a readership for mygdala.com and every week now it seems there's a new "power outage" in a "remote facility" (Is my server in Uzbekistan or something? I think it is, actually...) and my site goes down like it is as I type this.

And every time it goes down, I feel I wanna break my laptop over some Russian dude's head.

Thanks for listening to my bitching and moaning--again. Question I have is, does anyone out there have a hosting service they really love and find reliable? Because if I'm going to move all my shit, I really need a place that kicks some serious ass. Price is less an issue now than space and liberal policies regarding content. (By that I mean, I can post whatever the hell I want as long as I'm not breaking any laws).