Back in the Saddle

This weekend we finally got the finishing touches (for now at least) on our game room – just in time for Update 11 in LOTRO! It’s been tough not being able to game (well, I was playing Pokemon White version on my DS, but that’s it) for nearly two weeks. It’s one thing not being able to game if you’re on vacation or something, but if you’re just sitting around the house all day? It’s painful. We ended up making the ‘desk’ out of a kitchen counter exactly as long as the room and it’s held up by L brackets. It’s… not exactly level. It kind of bows down in the middle. But for our purposes it doesn’t matter too much. And you can’t tell when you’re sitting at your computer. It’s not like all the pens/pencils roll into the middle or anything. We also got some really fancy pants desk chairs! They are San Marino RaceTec chairs. No, we didn’t actually pay that much for them (yay, haggling!) They are super comfortable and I love that the back pillow can slide up or down and that you can adjust how much the back of the chair pushes forward. It’s nice because we can both have the same exact chair but can adjust it to ourselves (which is important because Nav is very tall and I am very short – so where we want more cushioning is very different!). I also got the whiteboard I’ve always wanted in my battle station! So here’s a pic along with a pic in the other direction of our new cat, Nyx, on her strategically placed bed:

Still to do: Paint the walls (we’re thinking a dark grey to match the table top), get some blinds for the window/get rid of the curtains, put a mini fridge under the desk, I want to get at least one (but maybe two) more monitors, and I need to get a new keyboard soon. Right now I have a Logitech G19, which has been really great for the past 4 years. But because of all the travel I’ve done with it it’s starting to get a bit wonky. Like all day yesterday for some reason it wouldn’t load my M1, M2 or M3 profiles, even after I disconnected it and restarted the computer. This morning when I booted up my PC? They loaded just fine. I’m looking at getting a Corsair K90 keyboard. It’s a mechanical keyboard, has backlights that match my color scheme (very important!) and I have always been a big fan of the Corsair brand (except for when I tried switching to their Corsair Vengeance 2000 wireless headset instead of the 1500 wired one I had been using and its software continually caused my PC to bluescreen, but whatever).

So I was very glad to have all of this set up for yesterday because, yay updates! Of course the first thing I went to was Lalia’s Market. I saw it on Bullroarer before I had to pack everything up for shifting, so I knew it was awesome. When I heard about it, I was just so excited. This is a great direction to take cosmetics in, I feel. I know it sucks having to pay so much for them in Mithril Coins (which means spending real money), but I would honestly much rather Turbine focus getting money from things like horses and cosmetics than more game-play central things like armour, high-end potions, etc. I especially love that they have gloves, shoulders, legs, chests, boots and helmets as separate purchasable items. That was something I was disappointed about with the original implementation of mannequins – you either had to buy the whole outfit or nothing. I love the mix and match! And of course I bought a pair of boots, gloves and shoulders within minutes of stepping foot into the market! I decided to make a new outfit for Cithryth for questing in Wildermore. It needed to be warm (because snow) and tough because “wild” is right in the name of the region! So I put this together:

Scout’s Weathered Leather Jacket – black

Ceremonial Shoulder Guards of the Porbad

Ceremonial Secret of the West Gauntlets – black

Ceremonial Boots of the Gambler

Cloak of the Unwelcome Guest – grey

Shaggy Roan war-steed hide – black

Simple Tail – black

Burglar’s Saddle

Burglar’s Caparison – black

Burglar’s Gear

Captain’s Halter – black

Captain’s Leggings

It kind of reminds me of the Night’s Watch from Game of Thrones… but I think that’s just because of the black and the snow. Something I noticed in Wildermore that really intrigues me are the horse blankets that the horses in towns have:

They seem to come in all the regular dye colors… and I really want them! Or something like them. I’ve always really wanted a very plain blanket, easily dyeable blanket as a war-steed caparison. The Guardian’s Caparison is the closest I’ve found, but then you get the big red and white shield on the horse’s chest, not to mention you’d have to buy the whole Guardian Steed to get it.

To Your Battle-stations!

Riders of Rohan is coming out in just 10 days! I’m sure many are prepping by getting their crafting all the way up (what I spent my day yesterday doing in between chores!), doing instance runs to get the best gear for now, etc. However something I always find interesting is people’s computer set ups. It’s where we spend all this time while gaming and I feel like a person’s desktop area and setup can reflect something about how they game, or even who they are maybe.

So here are some pictures of my battle-station. I apologize for cell phone pictures. I do have a nice digital camera but it seems that I left the charger for the battery at my parents house. So cell phone pics it is.

  To the left is an overall picture of my battle-station, complete with a flag of Rohan. That flag has hung above or near my battle-station for the past four years. As many know, Rohan has always been my favorite area of Middle-earth. I’ve got two monitors, and I can’t imagine using only one at this point. It is so incredibly useful, even in (or maybe especially in) gaming. I use the software Rainmeter to show system info, a nice big clock and weather on my smaller monitor while I’m playing. I can also have a bunch of communication programs open on my other screen so I don’t miss it if someone tries to contact me while playing. A second monitor is also incredibly useful for editing and writing research papers, as I have also come to find out.

My headset is a Corsair Vengeance 1500 and I love it. I’ve never been a fan of over the ear headsets, especially big bulky ones, but I guess it was just a matter of finding the right ones. The sound quality is really great and most importantly they are very comfortable. I have a small head, so often times these kinds of headsets really weight on my ears but these don’t. The cups around the ear are also velvet, not faux-leather like many. I always hated when I had to use Nav’s Logitech headset because the faux-leather would get hot and stick to the sides of my face. Blegh. The velvet on the Corsairs is much nicer, I think.

Speaker wise, I just have some crappy Dell speakers from the desktop I had when I was in highschool. They still work, they just aren’t great or anything. I like having speakers besides my headset because sometimes it’s nice not to have that big heavy headset on all the time. Like I said, the Corsair is the most comfortable headset I’ve come across thus far, but it still is a big bulky headset when it comes down to it. It’s also hard to validate buying any new electronics that require an electrical outlet. Electrical outlets in New Zealand require a different prong arrangement than here in the US. Since I’m moving in a few months, I might as well just wait. The down side is that anything I get will be more expensive.

Specs wise on my computer, I’m a terrible person. I only had it put together a year ago and I can’t even remember what all went into it and I had to look up all my e-mails to see what I got. Last September I hired a fellow student on campus to build it for me. Originally I was going to was going to wait until December (when Nav was coming to visit the States) for Nav to build it, but I was impatient and saw an ad for this guy. It went ok. It wasn’t expensive, but it took much longer than anticipated and there were some problems with some of the RAM sticks not working. Luckily it was all within Newegg’s return timeframe and I didn’t have to buy extra parts. So here are my specs:

CPU – AMD Phenom II X6 1100T
Case – Corsair Special Edition White Graphite 600T
RAM – Corsair Vengance 8GB (2x4GB)
PSU – Corsair AX650 650W
HDD1 – Western Digital Caviar Black WD7502AAEX 750GB 7200 RPM
HDD2 – Western Digital Caviar Black WD2002FAEX 2TB 7200 RPM
Graphics card – HIS IceQ X Turbo H695QNT2G2M Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Motherboard – GIGABYTE GA-990XA-UD3 AM3+ AMD 990X

Nav is basically the one that chose all the parts for me. While I like to think I know a lot about computers compared to the average person, I don’t know anything when compared to actual, full-time IT workers like Nav. I basically chose the case, but Nav approved it. He has the same one in black. We have matching Portal stickers on them too :) Mine is the blue shown below and his is orange.

My keyboard is a Logitech G19. I love the extra programmable g-keys on the side and being able to choose the colors that my keys light up. Currently it’s set to blue to match my white/blue theme. The little screen on the keyboard is also pretty nifty. You can set it to show a clock or some games have software for the G19 already. For example when I play LOTRO it displays my morale and power, the time, and my location. You can also set it up to work with Ventrilo, which is super helpful. It displays the channel name you’re in and flashes the person’s name when they speak. Apparently you can also watch movies on the little screen but that seems a bit silly.

My mouse is a Razer Naga in blue. In retrospect, the 12 buttons on the side are kind of excessive. However they can be pretty handy when doing UI or inventory management. I think the point of the side keys was to have you map your attack keys to them (1 through = ), however I have them mapped to various panel shortcut combos (like inventory, wallet, character panel, traits panel, legendary weapon panel, etc). Like I said, it makes going through all of those kind of screens faster, because I usually am going through my inventory with my mouse anyway.

I think it would be cool to see other bloggers post their battle-stations in preparation for Riders of Rohan. I always love seeing how people have their layouts (If you do to, I highly recommend browsing through r/battlestations – it’s awesome!), but when getting ready for a release your computer feels so much more important all of a sudden!