Emote-ional

This Compendium of Emotes on the Lorebook ought to come in handy for Ales & Tales and other RP purposes!

Reminds me of when I first discovered the list of emotes in the chat line menu. Linett, who must’ve been at or nearly at the level cap of 50 at that time, went and found a quiet spot on one of the islands in Nen Harn to practice them all and see what they did. That was back before there were bounty quests in Nen Harn to bring some traffic over there to kill the turtles, so it was truly a nice, quiet island. Her lynx pet, Maenad, got targeted with a lot of emotes that day just so I could see the difference between the text shown when you emote with someone targeted and when you don’t have a target selected.

So, anyone have any good stories of when you discovered the emote functions in LOTRO?

Ales and Tales and Elven Hymns

Yesterday was a long day in RL as: (1) Grades were due this morning, and I still had a stack of freshman papers on Romeo and Juliet to finish grading Monday night; and (2) I finished said grading just in time for the annual Honorary Induction ceremony at school. We combine inductions of the various foreign language honoraries, plus Quill & Scroll and Mu Alpha Theta (math honorary) into one ceremony and we have it down to an art form, apparently, because we got the whole thing over with in about 35 minutes.

So after that as I headed home, I realized that I was not too terribly grumpy about a late night at school because, hey, I would be up till after midnight for Ales and Tales anyway, it being a Monday, so what did it matter if I got home late?

Okay, enough RL story, now for the main event!

The kinships of Blades of Justice and Talons of Freedom, or, as I think they should just merge and be called, the Taloned Blades of Free Justice, hosted this week’s party in their Breeland kinhouse, which is looking really good for having so recently been restored from the theft that victimized it.

Lennidhren approaches the cozy yet awe-inspiring kinhouse

Social Altoholic, Wishing LOTRO a Happy Birthday!

If there were a name for how I play LOTRO lately, it would be Social Altoholism.

I don’t actually need an excuse to roll a new alt, of course…after all, I have all nine slots filled on my home server of Nimrodel, and they don’t fit under the “Social” term because there’s seldom anything social happening on that server. (Linett once attended a very spiffy party at the Bree festival grounds, though. Fireworks and hide-and-seek. Heard about it in a Regional chat announcement and decided on the spur of the moment to go see what was going on, and it was a ton of fun! Nimrodelians, we should do that oftener.)

Lately, however, my altoholism has spread onto more than half of the other servers, and the root cause is from reading about all the great social events people on those servers have planned. Lennidhren first took up her staff and book on Landroval for the original Great Blogger Gathering, then there were concerts and finally Ales & Tales. But when, at the second Blogger Gathering, we discussed reprising that event on different servers…well, I went ahead then and started up alts on the home servers of everyone who expressed willingness to host one in the future. So I think the only servers I don’t have a character on now are…Vilya, Arkenstone, Elendilmir, and Gladden. If anyone on those servers is thinking of taking a turn hosting a Blogger Gathering, do let me know, and I will move an alt into your neighborhood post haste, oh yes I will.

Anyway, my Brandywine alt (Linnell*) came in handy when I saw an announcement on the forums about Brandywine’s traditional celebration of the anniversary of LOTRO’s launch, the Popul Festivus. Swallowing my impulse to nitpick the dodgy Latin there, I decided Linnell would love to take part in this huge server-wide party, and spent some time yesterday leveling her so she could get to the Brandywine bridge safely and be ready to run around in the races.

Axes and Ales and Tales

I meant to have my A&T pictures for this week uploaded yesterday, but quite forgot. Good thing I remembered today, though, because tomorrow will be busy: My Latin Club students are convening to hold a Roman Cooking Night! We did this for the first time last semester and it was so much fun, they requested a rerun & didn’t want to wait till the next school year. So we are cooking almost exactly the same menu, again. Bread Salad and various other hors d’oeuvres, Fish in Fresh Herb Sauce, Pompeian Bread, Asparagus, Lentil & Barley Soup, Squashed Squash, and Globi (Roman Doughnuts, rolled in honey! Really yummy!)

Enough about real world get-togethers, though; this post was supposed to be about a virtual one. So, clearly I am hooked on Ales & Tales and doomed to stagger half-asleep through every Tuesday till the end of the school year now. Okay, I exaggerate a bit; I function well enough on one night’s reduced sleep, as it turns out. So I plan to keep on attending these Monday night revelries. And here’s how this Monday’s revelry went…

(N.B. I’m going to experiment with photobucket thumbnails to avoid the horrendously large screenshots that you have to scroll to see… you can click to see them better. Please let me know in the comments if you like this format better or prefer the full size screenshots in the post so you don’t have to keep clicking on things!)

Lennidhren arrives at the kinship hall of Axes and Tales, where a greeter awaits, offering PIE! Yum.

Ding!

I’m very lazy sometimes about leveling Linett. Though she’s my main character, she’s been ambling along through level 64 for quite a while now, while I’ve been rotating through the alts and otherwise amusing myself by putting off her final “ding”. Maybe it’s Peter Pan syndrome and I just don’t want her to grow up? Anyway, Volume 3 Book 1 threw so many Orcs and Angmarim and such in her path (not forgetting the huge chunks of XP for quest completion after recruiting each Ranger…) that she finally made it to 65 tonight, just as she finished slaying the last two Angmarim between her and Halbarad in Tham Umdur.

See the quest rings? Halbarad’s literally right around the corner waiting for her to turn the quest in. Neat timing, if you ask me, that she managed to level with the last two mobs in the cave!

Ales and Tales at the Party Tree

*yawn* I stayed up way past my bedtime last night. Apparently Ales and Tales is rather addictive – even without the use of real Ale, y’know. The Tales themselves – and poems and songs and dances – are the addictive factor. So, after attending my first Ales and Tales on Landroval as Lennidhren last week during spring break…I gave in and stayed up late for it last night even though school’s back in session now. I ended up shutting down my computer just about five hours before I had to be up, so I’m a bit drowsy now at the end of a day of teaching, but it was worth it. The Party Tree in Hobbiton was a most fitting place for….well, a party; and we managed to stay out of the way of the dance instructor this week (although we could still hear him calling out his instructions, as well as the labourers setting up for the party…don’t they realize it’s too late to decorate when the crowd’s already there, and well into the festivities?).

Silver Lining Screenshots

Something’s slow tonight, whether it’s the servers or my own Internet connection, so as Linett made her way through the tunnels of Laenan for the first task of Volume 3, dispatching the Orc raiders there went kind of haltingly with long pauses sometimes in between attacks. Frustrating – until I realized that Linett and her foes were poised there – I mean – POSED there, just waiting for the photographer to get the shots she wanted. I couldn’t continue the fight while waiting for the lag to pass, but there was a silver lining to the time spent waiting. Time enough to rotate the camera view around to see something other than Linett’s new cloak, and get in position to fire off one of her flashier skills just in time to get a screenshot of it. Here are some results…

Linett, Champion of Eriador

Finally, thanks to spring break and Inspired Greatness, Linett has completed all 15 books of the epic story, Volume 1! I’m so glad I finally got to play through the whole story, because that was truly…epic.

(And now, the classicist behind the keyboard feels the urge to perform literary analysis along the lines of identifying what makes Narmeleth’s story so epic, and how the Shadows of Angmar epic compares to the standards like the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and of course the Thebaid…yes, the Thebaid, I had to translate large swathes of it for a class, a couple of years ago. And I taught the Odyssey to my freshman English classes this year, and next year will be teaching the Iliad and various other awesome literature to two sections of Classical Literature, yay! But I think I will spare you the literary analysis for now, and go on to pictures…)

The rewards for completing Volume 1 are spiffy indeed. I love the horse (Linett’s amassing quite a collection of steeds, but mostly festival mounts, so the grey horse is a nice, elegant alternative to all those technicolor saddle blankets) and am very pleased with the cloak also! It goes nicely with the robe Linett picked up from whichever book was in Forochel, which she has now dyed umber to look like so:

Ales and Tales

I’ve never before made it to Landroval’s weekly gathering of story and song, Ales and Tales, because it’s too late for me to be up on a school night. Getting to bed after midnight and then being up before six…I’d be falling asleep in front of my students. But this week we’re on spring break, so Lennidhren joined in the festivities at Thorin’s Hall. It was quite merry, but don’t take my word for it – see for yourself! I think I will just let the pictures tell the story this time…

Spring: Sprung, Sung.

Lennidhren’s a very bookish, old-fashioned Elf, and a bit of a wallflower. On the other hand, let there be a merry tune playing, and you might think she would fit in quite well with the frivolous young Elves singing “Tra-la-la-lally down here in the Valley” at Rivendell. So this year during the Spring Festival, she has made the rounds of the dance teachers of Middle-earth to learn the latest steps. Tonight at the Green Hill Music Society’s “Spring Has Sprung” concert on Landroval, she finally got a chance to put her dance steps to use!

It was a fun concert, with some very lively Hobbits (well, and others, but Lennidhren is a bit Hobbit-shy) and fine music. Apparently there was also a poem recited by the fair Dovie at the intermission, also; however for some strange reason, Lennidhren was unable to hear a word the young Hobbit was saying. Very strange, as she was still able to hear the audience’s comments.

Without further ado…pictures!