Sweet Lindsay Lohan, has the grid been temperamental the last couple of days! First, the regular Wednesday blackout of the grid, so that an updated game client can be introduced, stretched from its usual three hours to an excruciating nine or ten; and then when they did finally get back online, suddenly many basic in-game interface functions were found to not be working. That's certainly the case with me; over the last day I've been trying to get around to some of these story ideas that keep piling up in my Moleskine, but between the map not working a third of the time, the search engine another third, and the teleport function the final third, I like many others am finding it impossible to even get around in the metaverse these days.

So patience, dear readers; I'm going to give it a couple more hours, and hopefully Linden will have things worked out by then, and we can all get back in again in a smooth and bug-free way. By the way, I have some cool things coming up here for the blog soon, including:

--A review of artist Scott Brooks' new show (very creepy portraits you simply must check out), hanging simultaneously at a gallery in real-life Los Angeles and at Concussions Gallery in the grid;

--An interview with blues musician srv4u Conacher, who's about to record his first live CD in real life but has decided to do it at a Second Life concert;

--The first of ITG's "Meet Our Neighbors" series, where I actually meet up with the people who own the land around our magazine's in-grid headquarters, in this case with an avatar designer who sells models of children, knowing specifically that they're sometimes being used for controversial "ageplay" sexual fantasies;

--Hopefully coming soon: Our first article in December's ongoing theme of roleplaying, which will be a first look at the often-praised 'steampunk' community of Caledon; possible interviews with the founder of Ars Virtua, novelist and comics writer Warren Ellis, 'virtual landscape' photographer Marco Manray and more;

--And of course the return of ITG's weekend shopping report, this next time covering such places as KK Outfitters, Roxee & Rummage, Musashi-Do and more.

All this will hopefully be coming in the next couple of weeks, plus the long-awaited release of issue 2 of our monthly magazine (yeah, it's about time), followed up shortly (around December 10th) with issue 3, covering the articles published here in November. I'm very happy to announce, by the way, that issue 2 is the first to be designed by Lonely Planet's Steven Cann, ITG's newest team member, and that it looks fantastic; I've run some small screenshots of a couple of the pages above, just to give you a little tantalizing first look. Anyway, Steven and I are in the process of setting up a good working schedule (tougher than it sounds when you live exactly halfway across the globe from each other); we're going to get in a pattern soon where each monthly magazine will be first available one week into the following month.

By the way, Steven is just about to found his own SL magazine, called "Second Nature" and mostly geared towards photography and nature/travel writing; I'll be doing an interview with him soon here about that, as well as his time at Lonely Planet, his indie-rock band, and what it's like to be a SL resident down under. We've decided to form a little independent advertising federation for our independent publications; once we get the details worked out, you'll be able to pay one special price to get two large ads in both our magazines at once. We're open as well to hearing from other unrepresented SL blogs out there, who would be interested in going in on such a federation; just let me know of your interest at inthegrid [at] gmail.com. Here's hoping the grid will be working well again sometime soon!