Rise of Isengard

It's now less than 2 months until LOTRO's next expansion, Rise of Isengard comes out, as announced back in June. I've tried to gather as much information as I can about what we can expect.

Three new regions will be added in the expansion -- Dunland, Gap of Rohan and Nan Curunir (which will include Isengard). Dunland will be located directly south of Enedwaith, with the other two areas accessible from Dunland. TheKhazadGuard has a nice map of the areas the new regions may cover.

There will be over 300 quests in the new areas, including new epic quests. The epic quests will allow you to choose between two paths to get from Enedwaith to Dunland, which will then join up again in Dunland.

There will also be a new 24-man raid which involves fighting a dragon called Draigoch.

Lion

So Wednesday was the big day for the release of OS X Lion. Along with (I'm sure) many other people, I haunted twitter for word that it was out, then spent a couple of frustrating minutes hitting reload on the App store, then the Up-to-date page, then the Apple online store, before I could get my code and start downloading (that was just me being impatient though; if I'd just waited five minutes everything would have gone perfectly smoothly). The download only took about an hour and a half, much less than I'd anticipated, so I was able to install before I went to bed on Wednesday night, although not much else. Everything went nicely on top of my existing Snow Leopard install.

There are a bunch of changes to the visual appearance of the operating system and key applications, but none of them have really jumped out at me. I'm not getting excited about them, but I'm not upset about them either.

I'm liking the new gestures in Lion and I'm glad now that I went for the Magic Trackpad. I have all the options turned on except tap to click, which has always annoyed me, since I have a tendency to hit the trackpad and then change my mind, resulting in a lot of accidental clicks. I love three finger drag though, saves a lot of the wear on my finger that concerned me initially about the trackpad. Discovered also that you can start the drag with three fingers and then reduce to only one finger to take advantage of the whole width of the trackpad. I still mess up occasionally with the natural scroll direction, but I'm adjusting to it very quickly and in the long term I think it will reduce the number of mistakes when switching between the computer and the iPad. The thumb and three finger gestures sounded awkward, but actually doing them seems pretty natural. My only complaint is that 4 finger swipe switches between full-screen apps but not between spaces.

On that note, it's taking me a bit to adjust to the new Mission Control and I'm not sure that it's an improvement over the old Expose + Spaces system. On earlier OSes I tended to have a lot of spaces and not many windows in each space, so I mainly used the Spaces functionality and not the Expose functionality. Combining them into Mission Control makes it more difficult to switch between spaces and remember which space a particular window is in because the spaces are now in a straight line. I'm wondering whether it's worth reorganising my system to better suit Mission Control, especially since I'm now on a bigger screen so the motivation to reduce the amount of stuff in one space is reduced.

My favourite feature of Lion is definitely the autosave. Combined with a new backup drive that is actually big enough to backup my whole hard-drive, I feel much more confident about my data (I'm pretty bad about remembering to save). It also reduces the number of dialog boxes I have to deal with if I need to restart for an update.

I was a bit sceptical about the auto-correct features being brought over from the iPad and the iPhone because of the notoriously bad corrects that it makes there, but it seems much better on the computer. I suspect it's due to the kind of typos that I make on the computer compared to the ones I make on the iPad - when I'm using a regular keyboard I'm more likely to transpose the order of letters, which auto-correct does a good job of fixing, whereas on the iPad I'm more likely to hit the wrong letter, or skip a letter all together, which generally makes it less obvious what word I was aiming for.

Overall I feel like Lion offers more for a new computer user, or at least a new Mac user, than it does for someone upgrading from Snow Leopard, since it requires some changes to the way you use your computer in order to fully utilise all the new features. If I'd had to pay for the upgrade, I might not have bothered, except that I'm sure future versions of some apps will have Lion as a minimum requirement.

Dance with Dragons

After a busy week, I finally got around to finishing reading A Dance with Dragons this weekend.

After all the anticipation, I was a little disappointed. The printed book was over 1000 pages, but not a great deal actually happened. In that way it reminded me a little of Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix (maybe it's something about the fifth book in a series of seven?). While the questions left hanging from A Feast for Crows regarding who was dead and who was alive were answered, nothing else was really answered or resolved. Things started to move right at the end of the book, but it seemed to be only so that there could be a new set of cliffhangers. I guess I just have to hope that the next book is better (and doesn't take too long to come out).

The rest of this post is going to be chock full of spoilers so stay away if you haven't read the book.

Wicked

Last night my parents and I went to see Wicked at Burswood. This was my second time seeing it; my first time was in Sydney in 2009.

It was even better than I remembered - I think most of my memories have been superseded by listening to the CD a few hundred times, so I'd forgotten about a lot of the funny dialogue that goes in between.

I know a lot of people aren't fans of the Wicked music, but I love it. Even though it does lose something by not having the choreography, I still love listening to the music.

After I saw Wicked the first time, I bought the novel by Gregory Maguire, but I found it very disappointing. It's a lot darker than the musical, without any of the humour that really makes the musical, and there are significant divergences in the plot. It's actually quite a literary book - makes me even more impressed that someone was able to look at it and get the idea for a brilliant musical out of it.

Overall I was very impressed by the Australian cast - for the most part it was the same as the group I saw in Sydney, but where it differed I think both alternatives were equally strong. Although Bert Newton got a lot of cheers I think he brought down the overall quality of the performance - he can't really sing at a Broadway musical level. I'm also not sure if his voice was still recovering from his bout of pneumonia; it sounded hoarse on some of the low notes and the speech pathologist in me was yelling that he shouldn't singing if his voice sounded like that.

On the whole it was a wonderful night. I hope that someone produces a DVD of Wicked at some point so that I can watch it over and over to my heart's content :)

Initial Thoughts on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II

Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll know that the final Harry Potter movie came out on Wednesday (well, here in Australia at least; for some reason we got it ahead of the US and UK). So my sister and I (and Hedwig) trotted off to the midnight screening.

My very brief review is that it was awesome and I want to watch it again :)

I know that while I was watching the movie there were things that I wanted to blog about. Of course, by the time the movie had finished I had no idea what they were, and sleeping on it has made my recall worse, not better, so I will probably have more to say another time, but for now here are some thoughts I had on the movie.

Warning: Spoilers for book and movie abound.

My New iMac

My new iMac arrived today, a little earlier than expected (total time from order to delivery at my door was 5 days, including the weekend). So I've spent the last few hours setting it up and trying it out.

First impression: wow, it's fast! Granted, I'm upgrading from a 5-year old model, and in the last few months (since my original iMac's hard drive went), I've been using a 5-year old MacBook with orange juice in its innards, but still, massive improvements. No more waiting for apps to load, no more horrid beach balls. I've even noticed improvements in webpage responses - a problem that I'd attributed to our internet connection but clearly was due to my system really not being up for the challenge.

I was running Snow Leopard on the old computer so no surprises as far as the operating system goes. I'll qualify for Apple's free Up-To-Date Program once Lion comes up, so there'll be a new learning curve.

I already had a full keyboard from my old iMac, so I got the mini keyboard (similar to a laptop keyboard) for this one. The space saved on the desk is nice, and I don't use most of the extra keys on a full keyboard anyway, but I may miss the forward delete key. I figure I'd rather have two different keyboards than two similar ones, and I can always switch them around further down the track.

I ummed and ahed for a while on the Magic Mouse vs. Magic Trackpad decision. I eventually decided to go for the trackpad on the grounds that Lion is going to use even more gestures than Snow Leopard does, so the trackpad will let me try out all the funky new moves. Plus, I'm used to using my iPad/iPhone, and using a trackpad on a laptop, and I do have an old-style Apple Mouse I can fall back on if I need to. I'm still not sure that I made the right choice - using the trackpad all the time feels a little wearing on my fingertips, but I'll see whether I adjust as I use it a bit more.

Now I face the overwhelming task of moving all my data over to the new computer. I have the files on my MacBook to copy, plus the Time Machine backup of my old iMac, frequently containing different versions of the same file (although sometimes the MacBook is more up to date and sometimes the backup is more up to date). Still not sure what the best way to tackle it all is, but I guess I'll get there eventually.

Awaiting A Dance with Dragons

After almost six years, the wait is nearly over. Well, to be honest my wait has only been about 18 months, and that has been long enough, so I can only imagine what it has been like for those people who've been reading A Song of Ice and Fire from the start. But for all of us, A Dance with Dragons finally comes out on Tuesday.

I re-read the first 4 books a few months ago, but even when I was reading I had trouble keeping track of who everyone was and where they were up to. The fact that A Dance with Dragons runs mostly concurrently with A Feast for Crows is going to make things even more confusing for me. So I'm going to make myself a little cheat sheet. Maybe it will be useful for someone else.

Note: Major spoilers for the first 4 books. Minor spoilers for A Dance with Dragons (mainly with regards to who has POV). Information that I couldn't remember off the top of my head is from A Wiki of Ice and Fire, but any mistakes are mine.

Glitch

The other game I've become addicted to lately is Glitch. It's a browser-based (Flash) non-violent MMORPG with a quirky sense of humour. It's still in Beta but due to open 'Summer 2011' which I hope means soon (while it's still in Beta it's only up for a few days at a time; we're in the middle of 10-day downtime which is going ever-so-slowly. My only fear about launch and constant up-time is that I might never get anything else done...).

My little Glitchling is called Snowdrop (what a surprise). She's level 26, lives in a biggish house in Kajuu with a pig called Glorious (I caught a pig that someone else named and haven't bothered to rename it yet). Her best skills are in cooking and cocktail making but she dabbles in a bit of everything. She likes working on projects but tends to be eternally broke as a result.

If you play, send me a friend request and say hello :)

Lord of Ultima

My earliest memories of Ultima are seeing my brother and sister playing on the family's communal computer. All that I really remember of it was the gargoyles, so it must have been Ultima 6. By the time they moved on to Ultima 7 I was taking part too (where taking part meant sitting and watching, and occasionally taking notes). I remember thinking that Ultima 7 was an impressive game because it came on 7 floppy disks. When I was a little older, the early Ultima games were rereleased, so we played those too. I even played a bit of Ultima 6 by myself, but then I managed to kill the talking mouse and decided that I preferred computer games as a spectator sport.

Eventually I got into the swing of playing computer games by myself, but by then Ultima had moved past the isometric style that I'd grown up with and seemed to be require a level of coordination that I just don't possess :)

And then last year we discovered Lord of Ultima. I didn't have any experience with the MMORTS genre, although I'd played Civilization and Age of Empires (again, mostly as a spectator sport), so I had some idea of the basic concepts. And I loved the idea of being able to play with virtues and moongates again without needing twitch reflexes. And then... well then I got addicted.

I started on World 7, but after 3 mergers I ended up in a dead-end alliance while another group won. In the meantime I had started on the first Australian server, World 22, which remains my main server. I'm in Crimson Thorn, the third-ranked alliance on the server, and I think we're doing pretty well so far.

I also have an unfortunate habit of starting a new server whenever there's downtime, so I'm also on World 26 and have a small presence on a couple of newer servers, although World 22 is where I spend most of my time (and all my diamonds).

If you play, give me a shout-out (I'm Snowdrop, easy to remember).

Here are some of my favourite resources:

The most important supplements to the game are the two Greasemonkey scripts - LoU Tweak and LoU BOS

A close second would be the LoU Flash City Planner (FCP) which lets you manually plan cities. I used to use LoU City to generate my resource cities (with the options use_slots=90 num_cottages=20 placement_schedule=F,*2,WSI,*100) but recently I've been using the  LoU Optimizer. I find it a bit fiddlier, and it doesn't provide an FCP link, but it seems to produce better results.

For general information, the official LoU Wiki is usually pretty helpful. The forum thread Fundamentals of Lord of Ultima is a very thorough strategy guide for new players, although it's probably a little overwhelmingly technical for brand-new players.

My best tips for new players would be:

• Start on the newest server in your timezone (the game should recommend this by default anyway), otherwise you will have too far to catch up
• Do the tutorial. It's not the best source for information, but it gives great quest rewards along the way.
• Join an alliance run by an experienced player. There's enough people on their second (or third, or fourth, or...) server that letting the blind lead the blind is a waste of everyone's time.
• Ask questions. The wiki is helpful for the basics, but if there's something you don't understand you're much better off asking someone in your alliance (or in world chat, or on the forums) than making mistakes that could take weeks to undo.