A Wedding, A Steam Sale and a Dog

These are the three main things that have happened since I last posted! I got married to my kinleader that I met through LOTRO, Navthalion. The much-looked-forward-to Summer Steam Sale occurred. And Nav and I got a dog to go along with our cat. The wedding was great – it was a very simple courthouse because we aren’t into big parties or ceremonies or anything like that. I’ll only post the one picture from it (above) because I don’t think people care that much! This is a game blog after all, not my Facebook! But after the wedding we went to the Hobbiton set in Matamata. I brought my Rohan flag and those of us from my kin there took a picture:

So now we have evidence of four Windriders of Rohan gathering together in the closest-to-real Middle-Earth you can get! It was pretty awesome. I hadn’t been to the Hobbiton set since they finished the set – if you remember I posted some pics from July and November of 2010. The finished product is absolutely amazing. The most amazing part, to me, is the incredible gardening they have going on there. They have expert gardeners growing extra large plants just so that everything has that over-sized-because-we’re-hobbits type feel. Also, the food at the Green Dragon pub is amazing! I had the beef and ale pie. Sooo good! It was a chilly day when we went so a nice warm meat pie was perfect. They also have a resident cat there named Pickle who is such a sweety. Click the picture below to get to a small album of Hobbiton pics!

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So once all the family and friends and kin-mates left, we got back to our computers and realized the Steam Sale was going on. In the past I’ve never really gone crazy with the sales. I think the main reason is because I’d usually never buy something that I only kind of want in passing. However now that I’ve been making videos, I’m always looking for games to potentially do LPs of. So basically this year I went kind of nuts. For me anyway. I got Anodyne, Bastion, Binding of Isaac, Borderlands 2 (for both me and Nav), Fez, Gnomoria, Home, Mount and Blade (plus Warband and With Fire and Sword), Terraria and Tropico 4 (with a big bundle of Tropico 4 DLC). Quite a haul, I must say. I haven’t played a lot of them at all. I’ve played nearly 3 hours of Fez, a couple hours of Borderlands 2 with Nav and Farwing, and a few minutes of Terraria, Gnomoria, Binding of Isaac and Anodyne.

Regarding my videos though – I should be recording and posting again within the next week or so. As I mentioned in my last post, I was having a bit of recording difficulties. I thought I had it solved however when I went to continue my Don’t Starve series, the problems continued. So I got a new hard-drive, new recording software (DxTory) and new editing software (Sony Vegas). Probably tonight or tomorrow I’ll be re-installing Windows so I have a nice clear build to work with and we’ll see how that goes. My current plans for my YouTube channel are thus:

  • Continue my Don’t Starve series
  • Start a new LOTRO Let’s Play – I figure most of my followers know and like my LOTRO outfits and content and would like to see more LOTRO content. So why not start a class that I haven’t really played before? It will either be guardian or Lore-Master… or maybe Rune-keeper! I’ve played the RK a lot but… I don’t remember how to play it :X
  • Start a series on city-building/god-games. City-building games are what got me into PC gaming when I was a kid. And I’ve mentioned multiple times on this blog how much I love the genre. So it seems fitting to do a series on different city-building games!

Oh yeah, and then we got a dog. His name is Bucky. We thought about re-naming him Bilbo but we didn’t really want to have to re-teach him his name while also trying to toilet-train him and teaching him not to mess with the cat. The cat, by the way, is still quite uncertain about the dog.

My Pictures of the Hobbiton set – July and November 2010

At midnight last night I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. As usual, the teams at WETA and Stone Street Studios and 3 foot 7 Productions have done a really fantastic job. I was able to visit the Hobbiton set in Matamata, NZ while they were beginning to rebuild it for the film. At the time I had to agree to a contract saying that I was not allowed to post pictures online because at the time it was still not certain if the film was going to go off (This was in July and November of 2010 – the actor’s union issues and Guillermo del Toro pulling out happened around these times and so it was tricky). I was able to see firsthand there the amount of work the people were putting into the set. It was incredible. So many tiny details! I remember walking by a man painting lichen onto the doors of the hobbit holes by the Water. You never see close ups of these holes, but they still put those details in. Now that I’m allowed to share them, here are the some of the pictures of the Hobbiton set that I took on July 1, 2010:

The Party Tree

The Green Dragon

Bag End at the top of the Hill

Hobbit holes along the Water

And in comparison, my pictures from early November of 2010:

Overview of the Hobbiton set