I'm late with it because I was busy in LotRO last night. Still...

For Young Ones fans..
House!
House!
House!
Oh you're made of stone.
But you're not a lone-ly House.
I am here!
I've got myself a walking, talking, living, walking, living doll!

It's the lads' House!

Or you can take a look at The Kebab and Calculator.

After waiting so long, I was a little surprised that I ran out of things to take a look at. I've gone through and looked at former houses of folks and generally sifted through all of the updates. Fun!

In addition to there now being a lot of UK cities, The Netherlands has some updates and the USA also got even more coverage.

Google slipped in an Easter Egg into the imagery for a street in Pittsburgh. It was clearly just as obvious as the images around their main campus near San Francisco that it was a setup. I'll start you on your way and you can find everything on your own if you like, or you can just open up the text and see everything I've found.

Here we are at the beginning. Just keep going east down this street. Some things are obvious, some are not.

The people who did this called it Street With a View. Their website includes credits and a list of scenes.

A 'making of' video about the project.
A video of the car passing, made from the fire escape.

( Under here is a list of things I found with links. Only look here if you want spoilers )

This post will have a few tidbits up front and then discuss the new Warden class.

( I should cut this because it got long. )

Earlier this week, Turbine released people in the Moria closed beta from our NDA. People who read this probably had an idea, at the very least, that this is what I was doing. I'll take some time to talk briefly about the expansion in general first.

Keep in mind that beta is still going on, so some of this might change before it goes live.

I was worried the place would be dull with every cavern looking like another. Their lore people kept after folks that this was a KINGDOM enough so that the important caverns are vast. They are also distinct. I know right away where I am when I log in to the game, even without looking at any map names. If you want to see what some of the areas look like, my LotRO image page which is a bit sparse at the moment. I also have up a video of my Warden in action. I'm fighting an admin type who is in a heavily modified troll. I'm sorry the video is in WMV format and nearly 3MB, but all I have is the Microsoft Movie Maker. I'm actually killed by the fall before I hit the ground. This is also an issue in Moria as the dwarves did not believe in railings.

Most of the primary content was designed to be solo content, with the ability to group up to make things go faster. In addition to the basic sets of quests, there are a lot of excellent solo-only instances, 3-person instances, and 6-person instances. Some of these are very challenging and a lot of fun to complete. They've also introduced 'hard mode' in some of the instances, requiring you to complete certain parts of the instance in a short period of time.

The legendary weapons do add a new wrinkle, but you WILL have to take your time to level them up before they get really great of course. You can level up six at a time and need not have them equipped for that. The legacies (bonuses) on each weapon are random, so you'll just have to work at it to find one you like. The relics that you slot for additional bonuses will be mostly up to you, however. You'll receive a Third Age weapon as part of the book quests, and will easily be able to get more later. Second Age weapons are rarer, but worth the upgrade when one becomes available to you. I saw some First Age weapons shown in chat, but I have no idea what one will have to do in order to get one of those. I can only presume they'll be in live, too.

I watched a section of the ending of the landing online. It makes things so much more interesting to watch the telemetry room while everything is going on.

Here are two more ads, both of which were in pretty much every Dragon Magazine that I recall reading. I didn't really count my reading experience complete until I'd run across them.

( The two ads.... )

I've been going through some of my old stuff, ostensibly looking for things to throw out. Of course I throw out little but spend time perusing old magazines and game books. Some of the ads amuse me, so I'll be scanning ads in over time and posting them now and again.

( GenCon #18, 1985 as seen in Dragon Magazine )

It was a strange week in some ways. Work's fine, though my coworker who broke his arm throwing a baseball was still out all week.

Friday we went out for BBQ at Willard's. Yah, it was pretty awesome as always. I had the blackened tips platter, mmmmm! Got to see a Lamborghini Gallardo in the parking lot. I suspect it was a rental, but ya never know I guess.

Friday was also the latest installment of the Weird Drink Day. Last time we had yogurt soda, which was soundly declared even worse than the pine bud drink I brought in. This week's offerings were varied. The sugar cane drink was unpleasant. The Turkish sour cherry drink was awesome. Then, we brought out the interesting one. Someone has a friend who imports coffee. She persuaded him to give her a bag of Luwak coffee. At $35 for a 2oz bag, I doubted I'd ever bother trying this stuff. As it turns out, coffee that's been eaten and then pooped by a civet isn't bad. The coffee drinkers really liked it, though even they didn't think it was worth the prices being charged. I thought it was good coffee, but I'm not a big coffee drinker so it didn't impress me much. I drank it black and it wasn't bitter, I must admit.

There's one item to check off off of my list of things I considered doing but didn't think I ever would. :)

On my way home, I found my supermarket had definitely had a Friday 13th as they'd lost power for several hours and blocked off access to their freezer section so customers would't pick up anything that'd unfrozen on the chance it had spoiled. whee. Thus I'm having some of their soup and Campbell's chili this weekend. Although the Campbell's Firehouse Chili is more like Garden-hose chili, it's very tasty all the same.

I've not played my 50 Hunter in LotRO much lately. I got sick of trying to get into raids. My minstrel, though, is almost 40 now.

I forgot to say that before, but figured it was worth saying it on its own. :)