How’s that for a title? Hehe. In other words, another rambling post.

Over the last several days I have been cleaning and sorting through my junk, partly because somehow I ended up on some website a couple weeks ago about polymer clay and remembered, “Hey I have some of that somewhere”, and so I started digging through my art boxes and it wasn’t in there so I figured oh noes, it’s probably up there looking up at my over-the-closet-hard-to-get-at boxes of stuff. Ugh. But, once obsessed, I had to have it (and I’m unemployed and broke so I can’t just go out and buy more.) Anyway, after digging through several boxes (and tossing and sorting in the process) I not only managed to find my clay, but I got rid of about 4 boxes of “stuff” I no longer need (like old magazines I’ll never read again, what is up with that? And a whole, yes WHOLE box of non-working mice and other computer junk I’ll never use.) And I slaughted a few entire colonies of dust bunnies. Then, once I’d conquered the top of the closet, I conquered the rest of my room, and figured hey since I’m moving furniture to dust under it, might as well re-arrange it too! So I did, and now I have room for a table I can actually do art at now. Yay! No more excuses!

All this moving stuff around also means my cat can now once again hop up onto my dresser, then up to the bookcase then up to the top of my closet where there are numerous hidey-holes and perch spots, including one by a window she can look out, so my cat is once again happy, not crying and looking at me with disgust like she usually does when I “re-decorate” and ruin all her favorite nappy spots.

Anyway, digging through all that dusty stuff really, REALLY aggravated my breathing problems (allergies and possible asthma) so I asked my mom if she still had that old air purifier she bought back when my dad was bed-ridden a couple years ago and she said yes, so I went and got it and set it up but uhm … it kinda … smelled … like … well, what old people who are bed-ridden smell like if you get my drift. Anyway, I sniffed around and determined that the bulk of the odor seemed to be coming from the “carbon pre-filter’ so I looked up on the interwebs how much refills cost and … they don’t make filters for that model anymore … unless you order from some wackadoo filter joint I never heard of or the original manufacturer, and they charge about $40 for the filter and $20 for the carbon pre-filter and I’m thinkin’ WTF? So, being the resourceful being that I am, I knew “carbon pre-filter” was a pretty generic term and so I toddled over to the local home improvement store where I found a “universal” sheet of carbon pre-filter junk used for air purifiers, and discovered that I could get several “filters” out of one sheet, 6 to be precise … for about $20, tax included. So I bought it, and brought it home and cut it and hurray my room doesn’t smell like a convalescent hospital anymore! And maybe if I run it regularly, I can stop the dust bunnies from taking over again, and maybe my computer will actually stay clean inside (right now the thing has so much dust clogging up both the DVD and CD-R drives that they’re useless, and it’s too much trouble to take everything out of the case to pull it all apart and clean it.) I may have to reign in my love of fresh air though, I like to open a window, even when it’s cold, and I run a fan IN the window sometimes in summer, both habits which suck dusty air into my room.

As for toys, well … sorting through my junk led me to find some of my “collectible” toys (nothing valuable, just junk like old Hello Kitty McDonalds toys and yes, I found my old Pokemon Pikachu 2, to go with the Pokemon Pikachu I’ve been using for awhile as a pedometer.) Anyway, sorting through all that “toy” stuff led to a weird dream last night about my old Bozo the Clown doll that I, according to my mother, LOVED when I was little. I tended more towards animals and other “non-human” type “dolls” when I was little, which is probably why I like animals more than people now.

Anyway, that dream of the scary Bozo doll got me thinkin’ today about all the awesome toys I had as a kid that would be illegal today. Like the Easy Bake Oven you could actually set your room on fire with. Or the Tonka trucks with sharp edges that could amputate your fingers. Or the Creepy Crawler Toymaker thing that heated metal plates up so hot you could get a third degree burn from them. Or those Clackers things that were all the rage in the 1970s that you could actually KILL someone with. Yes! The good old days. Kids today are such weenies, they don’t know what “real” childhood is. So sad, because all those childhood traumas build character, something an awful lot of people don’t seem to have these days.

Or more correctly, a Hobbit hole in LOTRO. In the past I’d never had enough gold or willingness to pay a $14.95/mo subscription to bother with a house there, but now that the game is Free To Play, I don’t have to pay real money every month to keep a virtual Hobbit house, so, after winning quite a bit of silver pieces during the recent lottos and holiday quests, I decided it is time. So, I did some research on LOTRO housing websites, finding out all about how it works, and viewing the different houses, and figured out which ones I liked best, then I went off to the Hobbit housing broker first and did a quick look through to see if my most favorite house was available in any of the settlements and lo and behold, not only were there a few of them in various instances, but there was one settlement that had only ONE house total available, it was the exact model that I wanted AND it was in an older settlement I’d previously marked as a “favorite” because I liked the name. Woohoo my bad New Year’s luck had just changed! So, dear little Brambleberry is now the proud owner of a lovely little Hobbit hole on a hill, next to a waterfall and overlooking the lovely town of the Songburrow settlement (perfect name for a Mistrel home, yes?) And since it’s an “older community” most of my neighbors appear to be DEAD (inactive) so that means it looks like I’ll pretty much have the whole settlement to myself muahahahaha!

So now, here are a few pictures. I’ll put more up once I’ve done some decorating, I got lots of “stuff” in my bank boxes from various quests and holiday festivals and whatnot I’ll have to sort through it all and pick what I like best.

The house from the outside, see the waterfall there on the right?

Nice view from my front yard, river down below.

The cozy interior, before I’ve started decorating.

A critter statue I won during Harvestmath Festival.

The view at night.

I was sorting through some junk yesterday and came across a sticky note with an old Turbine account on it (one that I’d looked for last year trying to find my old Asheron’s Call account so I could add LOTRO to it, but I didn’t find it back then.) Anyway, turns out this long lost account WAS my old migrated Asheron’s Call account (I KNEW I’d migrated my old Zone account over to Turbine, but none of the ones I had written down had worked.) Anyway, I went to the Turbine site to try it out and voila, it actually worked! And my old AC account was still there (but no LOTRO subscription attached.) While doing that though, I hit upon the main Turbine page and it said something about LOTRO being “free to play” now. Eh? FREE? Oh, yes, it’s true, it’s free … well … kinda like FarmVille is free. But since I’d previously been a subscriber to LOTRO and even bought one (and maybe two, I forget) expansion packs, I logged in and why yes, yes indeed, my account was still there, and it was not only “free”, it was upgraded to “premium” status, which basically means you get a few “perks” like still being able to use all your inventory bags and no cap on the amount of gold you can have. You see, a real “free” account is somewhat limited in what features you get and what content you can access (like, oh, quests and stuff.) And even the premium accounts can’t access all the quests, only the ones in the “starting areas” and the ones in any expansion packs you’d previously purchased. So my account, supposedly, can access the newbish areas up through Lone Lands (which was right about where I was back when I quit the game last year) and I can access the Mines of Moria stuff (which I’m not high enough level for yet) and maybe the Siege of Mirkwood stuff (I forget if I actually bought that expansion or not, I was kinda wishy-washy back then.) So, now I’ll kind of be stuck with not much to do with my main character soon because I’ll either have to grind mobs to get to about level 40ish, or I’ll have to buy “quest packs” to get me through the 30′s. But for now I’m happy because the holiday area/quests are available and I’m having gobs of fun with those even though I keep failing the timed ones (I really, really suck at timed quests, mostly cuz my computer sucks and because I am hopelessly uncoordinated with hotkeys (especially after not having played for about a year.) Anyway, it’s fun being back in LOTRO, I do really miss playing “real” games like LOTRO and WOW, but I’m too broke to buy a subscription at the moment. So this LOTRO thing will be a nice prezzie for me to putz around with. Oh, and the holiday area contains what I believe may be the best quest ever in any MMORPG in history. It’s the G.L.O.B.E. Theatre one, and it’s hilarious, you either “watch” a silly play, or if you’re lucky, you get to ACT IN IT. It’s a hotkey nightmare but awesomeness squared. I got to play Bilbo Baggins my first time through, and I had no freakin’ clue what I was doing, and I hadn’t yet set up any hotkeys for even the basics yet so it was uhm … interesting LOL. But fun. And I got bestowed with a title (I forget what it was, I think it was Protagonist.)

Now, if only Turbine’s oldest online game would go free to play, it would be fun to go back to Dereth after oh, about 10 years? Egads, has it really been that long? (I find it odd they still charge $14.95/mo for Asheron’s Call, which last time I checked, had about 300 subscribers hehe. But their other games (that are still around, AC2 died a premature death) are free to play (Dungeons & Dragons online and Lord of the Rings online.)

I’ve been doing that trial of Lord of the Rings Online all week and a couple funny things happened … one … I was out in the middle of freakin’ nowhere in Elf Land and I got ambushed by a bear and took him out, but the funny part is that he did a death move that was hilarious, not only did he kinda fly up in the air and do a flip, but he landed head-first into the dirt:

Then today while playing my little Hobbit in the Shire I happened up a farm and did a couple quests then the farmer dude tells me to go talk to his chicken (??!!??) so I do and then I end up in a weird alternate universe where I am turned into a level 1 chicken:

The bad part about being a chicken is that it makes the game insanely hard. I did manage to do the first quest in the chain, but after getting one-shotted by wolves three times in a row while trying to do the second quest I gave up. Man, and I thought Restoring the Quickpost quests were a pain in the pants. I think I’ll have to save those chicken quests for when I need a serious adrenaline boost and have way too much time on my hands. Still, it was an amusing find that I don’t remember being there in beta.

The best quest so far though was that one in the cellar of Sprigley’s farm, I remember that one from beta (thankfully it’s easier now) and it creeped me out then too … you walk around in the dark in this underground cave full of spiders and every now and then you come across one that drops down from the ceiling and starts attacking you. Not for the arachnophobic for sure. One nice thing they did though is that if you manage to find the boss spider down there the first time you’re on a quest you do NOT have to go back in there again, you can initiate the boss quest from there then turn in the trophy at the same time you finish the main quest. I remember in beta barely making it outta there alive on the first part of the quest then the dude would send you back in there to kill the mother spider and I cannot tell you how many times I died down there in beta. So it’s seriously nice to have “revenge” now that it’s a doable solo quest.

None of the other quests though have really measured up to the ones you get in World of Warcraft, but one Intro quest came close, Burying the Dead, part of the Race of Man Intro quests. That part wasn’t done yet in beta either so this was all new. But it was the only time so far playing the game I’ve felt a swell of emotion, so at least there is a glimmer of hope in the game.

I’m also rather liking playing my Rune Keeper, it’s basically a hybrid mage/healer and so far has been even easier to solo with than my Hobbit minstrel. And a lot more fun than mashing songs all day.

Pokeplushies totally revamped how the Click Forest works so my old tips are now completely useless. But help is on the way. The new one is actually easier and cheaper if you know how to do it. It’s unfortunately a bit hard to explain though but I’ll try.

Basically how it works is there is a grid, with numbers on it. You can only move vertically, the Pokirby you are hunting can only move horizontally. The idea is to get as many points as you can and to give the Pokirby as few points as you can, so that when either player runs out of move (all the “patches” are gone from the row they’re currently in) you have the most points, so you catch the Pokirby.

Now, I’ve only played a little bit so I might be wrong, but it seems that the Pokirby will always pick the biggest number in his (horizontal) row (and this square is where your character will “pop” to.) And usually you want to pick the biggest number in your row (vertical) to win. Whatever square you pick is where the Pokirby “pops” to. If you don’t want to think at all, the easiest way to play the game is to always pick the biggest number in the vertical row you are in and you’ll win more than you’ll lose.

But, if you really want to play, you can use some strategy to force the Pokirby to lose, by directing him towards rows with negative numbers, which subtract from his score. If you do this well you can win very easily. You can also force him into rows that are emptied out to make him lose quickly muahahah. Be careful though, because the Pokirby might send YOU to a row with negative numbers which subtract from your score, but some with planning ahead you can avoid this (which is why you might not always want to pick the square with the largest number, if doing that will force you into a row with lots of negative numbers.)

The only bad part about the new Click Forest is it costs 10 YBC to play now, but for most people that is actually cheaper in the long run than 1 YBC per click like the old one (unless you were REALLY good at it.) And it seems people are finding more Shadow Pokirbies too although I can’t confirm that, but I do know the last few weeks I personally was getting more Shadows than Shinies in there even before they upgraded it, but I haven’t gotten any Shadows yet in the new version but I only played for about five minutes.

Again. After burning out on hidden object game demos at Big Fish, I just happened to one night be browsing through my wallpapers because I was tired of the one I had and while scrolling through the list I found an old beta screenshot from LOTRO and thought hmmm … I wonder if there’s a free trial of that game? So I looked and I’ll be jiggered, there is! So I tried it out again. At first, I tried a couple servers and found that my old beta name Brambleberry was taken! No! So I made a character and called it Malberry because it was the only thing I could think of after an hour downloading and installing the game late at night. Anyway I toddled around the newbie areas, and it looked pretty much the same as beta, only far less crowded, I only saw ONE other player during my one hour or so that I played the newbie area. And there was no lag either! Of course I have 1 gig of RAM now too which I’m sure helps, the game was nearly unplayable for me in some areas in beta (Bree anyone? Ugh.)

Anyway, the memories of the Shire caught up with me and I wanted little Brambleberry back. So after sleeping, today (erm actually yesterday now, damn I need to get to bed hehe) I rolled through more servers and found one with the name free and resurrected wee little Brambleberry the Hobbit Minstrel! Hurray! I haven’t played her yet though, because I spent most of today trying out the new Rune Master class, which they added in the most recent expansion pack. The elf starter area is quite a bit different (in a good way) than it was in beta, actually most of it wasn’t even finished in beta until really, really late. Anyway, tomorrow, erm today I shall restart anew as Brambleberry.

Here is a screenie of the old Brambleberry:

and the new:

Notice any family resemblance?

Also, even though I’ve only played a few hours so far again, I’m beginning to remember why I hated LOTRO hehe. BUT I do have to say they’ve fixed some of the stuff, like the ugliness of elves, and some of the quests are a bit easier. Oh and they have houses now too! But the instanced quests … I know it’s a good idea in concept but man I hate those things … I’m a wanderer and explorer by Bartle type and I hate being forced to finish an “epic questline” in order to get to a new area. Fortunately though, once you get out of newbie hell, you can wander a lot more. But being forced to do those spider quests ONE MORE TIME after doing them oh I dunno, about 5 or 6 times in beta was horrible but at least they made them easier, and since I’d done them before I knew them. Oy. And I’m gonna have to do them again tomorrow, erm today. ::sobs::

Another thing too that kind of bothers me is that my old Turbine account doesn’t show any of my old “stuff” on it, my old Asheron’s Call account and my old beta stuff, I know I couldn’t re-activate my old beta account (at least I don’t think so, they supposedly wiped at the end of beta.) But what if I wanted to reactivate my old AC account? I won’t, but what if I did? Unless I’ve completely lost my mind and didn’t merge my account, I’m pretty sure it was there back when I beta-tested LOTRO. Oh well, I had to start a new account to do the LOTRO trial anyway because you can’t add it to an existing account unless you PAY first, so since I didn’t play retail I figured there’s no point in that. But it kind of bothers me that they either wiped my AC account off my Turbine account or I’ve completely lost my mind and imagined merging my old Zone account over to Turbine, and writing it down with both account names. I also could have sworn I remembered seeing both the AC account and the LOTRO beta account listed there in my account manager back when I was beta testing LOTRO.

Anyway, more LOTRO adventures and maybe screenshots tomorrow! I’ll probably make her a Yeoman again because farming pipeweed was fun. And Hobbits like to eat so cooking is a good skill to have.

Just a few quick commentaries.

I’ve been still off work due to being sick, so I’ve been a bit bored outta my mind, so I have been playing games, and came across a nice little website that has lots (and I mean LOTS) of game demos, as well as an online gaming section sorta like I used to play on Pogo years ago.

Cash for Clunkers program. Stupid. Trade in an old truck that gets 17 MPG and buy a new truck that gets 18 MPG. Taxpayers foot bill. Sounds good to me! Not. Fortunately there’s a limit on how many big trucks/SUVs can be bought under the program but who’s gonna determine who wins? I have a feeling there’s gonna be a LOT of people who cashed in that $4500 credit only to find a month or two from now their trade-in was rejected and they now owe the dealer $4500. They shoulda given the money for cars that got good MPG if they really wanted to help the environment. Which of course isn’t the real reason for this program, if it was they’d let you trade in your 1975 Toyota. The real reason is to get money into the pockets of the auto unions, who now own quite a bit of at least one automobile company.

Government subsidized healthcare. I’d rather have a $1000/yr voucher thank you very much. But hey, if Obama is gonna insist everyone gets coverage, sooner or later everyone is gonna want it “free” and that 12 million uninsured will be 200 million uninsured. Or 300 million if you count illegal aliens. Start saving money now cuz your taxes will go up.

I’ve been catching up with some of my old “virtual” friends from this virtual world called WorldsAway Dreamscape from oh, 15 years ago. Kinda cool. Weird how your first “community” becomes your “home” and nothing else ever quite measures up.

Still sick. Off Toprol. Cut HCTZ in half. Still feel like crap, can’t do anything productive, even grocery shopping is too hard. Made another appointment with doctor on Monday, gonna have to try to convince him to refer me to a cardiologist cuz I think I got something wrong with me that’s not just blood pressure. (My blood pressure has actually been dropping, and my pulse rate has been going up.) I’m also starting to get weird ‘pains’ in my neck like my veins are constricting or something (not muscle pain.) And the woozy/gonna black out feeling is getting worse when I walk around or try to do anything. Sucks. But hey I have tons of free game demos to keep me busy.

That’s about all for now.

Just don’t try this in real life:

Animal Crossing: City Folk. If only getting a tan in real life were this easy.

For those of you in southern California, Pavilions (and maybe Vons too) has Mountain Dew 12 packs on sale for $5.99 AND they’re buy two get THREE free! This means FREE 12 PACKS OF MOUNTAIN DEW WORLD OF WARCRAFT GAMER FUEL. So much for my attempts to get off soda for good. ::sigh::

I bought 1 Code Red, 1 Voltage, 1 Horde and 2 Alliance. I have a feeling the Horde and Alliance flavors are the same as the Code Red and the Voltage but who knows. And since I am hopelessly addicted to that Voltage flavor (it’s BLUE dammit!) I got 2 blue Alliance flavors since I think it’s really the same thing, only in WOW packaging. Besides, Night Elves are hotter than Orcs.

I get periodic spam from Nintendo about new stuff, and today I noticed they had released a new sequel to Final Fantasy IV, which was Final Fantasy II here in the USA back on the SNES (I think it was re-released eventually here for gameboy or somethin’ but I forget.) ANYWAY it’s one of my mostest favorate Final Fantasy games (FF IX was my most favorite, despite the fact it was 3D.) So here, right around my birthday, comes a nifty prezzie from Nintendo that I can play on my somewhat neglected Wii. Now, if I could only get my hands on a Time Turner so I could find the time to play it.

OOoooh! OOooooh! This game is an episodic title which means ::gasp:: each “chapter” is probably kinda short … which means I might actually have time to play it! ::twitter:: (No, not that Twitter, I am twittering with excitement!) Awesome. I might have to spend the entire summer digging out my old FF games and relive my past haha. IF ONLY I HAD THE TIME.