Second Life, Music, Stories & Whatever Comes Next.
Category
The part of the blog where Second Life stops being the whole story. Thoughts, family, real life, the things that hurt, the things that mattered, and all the pieces that somehow ended up written down along the way.
From The Personal Side
Family, real life, the things on my mind, and the occasional moment where everything goes sideways.
Lately
The Archive
Some places never quite let go of the people who once called them home. For our second Salem 2026 feature, Mackenzie and I step into Milkmotion’s The Drowned Village, bringing together ghostly fashion, forgotten memories, and Sleep Token’s Atlantic for a story about what remains when everything else has disappeared beneath the water.
Charlie Simpson’s career really should not make this much sense. He became famous in Busted singing enormous pop songs while barely out of his teens, walked away from one of the biggest bands in Britain to build Fightstar, spent years proving that move was much more than some temporary rebellion, stepped sideways into acoustic and folk-influenced solo records, made electronic music with his brothers, returned to Busted, brought Fightstar back too, won The Masked Singer dressed as a rhino and somehow arrived in 2025 behind another mask at the front of PRESIDENT. If you tried pitching the whole thing as one career before it happened, somebody probably would have told you to pick a lane. That’s probably all Charlie and I have in common, we don’t pick one lane.
When I published Project Icon on August 30, I really did think I was writing the final chapter of the biggest rebuild LuckySpiritor.Com had ever gone through. I had spent weeks pulling apart a website carrying more than fourteen years of posts, photographs, music, credits, categories, memories and whatever other pieces of my life I had decided belonged here, then somehow put all of it back together without losing the things that made it mine. By the time the new site went live, I wasn’t looking for another project. I wanted to use the damn thing. I wanted to take pictures again, write again, find the songs that somehow always become part of this place and get back to being a blogger instead of spending every night wondering what I could break by changing one more thing in WordPress.
I started this with 107,995 items in my Second Life inventory, which is probably the point where I have to admit that it stopped being an inventory a long time ago and became a storage facility. Fourteen-plus years in Second Life will do that to you.
Three posts into my first round blogging The Arcade, and somehow we’ve gone from sitting in a classroom, to having a pillow fight, to ending up out on a farm. There hasn’t exactly been a logical path from one photo to the next, but I think that’s becoming one of my favorite things about this round. I get a collection of things in front of me, start playing around with them, and eventually we end up somewhere I probably wasn’t expecting when I started.
September is one of those months that can’t seem to make up its mind. Summer isn’t really gone yet, fall isn’t really here, and depending on what time you walk outside you could probably make an argument for either one. I’m perfectly fine with that because I’m not in any particular hurry to say goodbye to summer. Fall will get here, it always does, followed entirely too quickly by winter, and I’ll have plenty of time to complain about that when I’m standing in virtual snow trying to put together another Christmas photo. For now, I’m hanging onto the warm weather for a little longer, and FOXCITY gave me a pretty good place to do it.
Thirty years of Skillet. Eight concerts. A storm at Summerfest, changing lineups, signed memories, Comatose, Monster, and a band that somehow kept becoming part of my own history. Now Scream and After The Storm bring the story right back to where it started: still changing, still fighting, and nowhere near finished.
Project Icon: The story behind why I built the blog I couldn’t find. I really thought I was going to make a few changes, which is probably the funniest possible way to start this, considering what you’re looking at now.
Every year when August 24th comes around, I find myself back here in one way or another. If you have been around this blog for any length of time, you already know what Kobe Bryant means to me and how much of my love for the Lakers can be traced directly back to watching him play.
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