It’s been a very long time since I’ve done anything with this site. I took a fairly long absence from LOTRO due to technical difficulties with my computer, and have only recently started playing again. Since I’ve been gone, many things have happened. Several festivals have come and gone, the Riders of Rohan expansion has been released, and Turbine has put forth a Mac client,  to name but a few.

As for me, I moved into a new house in June, and started dating a wonderful girl. Recently she expressed an interest in video games, and we played through LOTR: War in the North together. We had a blast, by the way. War in the North rekindled my interest in Middle Earth, and since I had not noticed any problems with my computer lately, I tried playing LOTRO again.

Since my girlfriend had suddenly taken a liking to co-op games, I thought LOTRO would be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, she has a 2009 Macbook Pro, and I didn’t want to deal with all the headaches of trying to get it running on her computer. I was reading through Casual Stroll to Mordor, and lo and behold, I saw an article about a Mac client!

I figured it was worth a try. I took a day off of work, and spent the day downloading the almost 20 GB client onto her Macbook. It didn’t work. I did some reading in the Mac client forums, and found that she had a version of Mac OS X that was too old. So I decided to pay fr an upgrade to Mountain Lion for her. After spending the majority of the day patching, downloading, installing, and upgrading, I finally got LOTRO running an hour or two before she got done with work.The Mac client has worked very well, overall, since then.

As for my laptop, it worked for a while until my computer began overheating (which is what caused my absence in the first place). I decided to try a creative solution. Since I play on a laptop, I decided to hook up my laptop to my flat-screen TV with a VGA cable, using the TV as a super-sized monitor. I then put the laptop on a chair, and put a fan next to it blowing directly at it (see picture). I did have to go out an invest in a wireless keyboard and mouse, but I was able to pick one up for pretty cheap.

It worked like a charm. My laptop hasn’t overheated since, and I get to hear the LOTRO soundtrack through decent speakers instead of my wimpy little laptop ones.

So now, we play LOTRO sitting next to each other on my couch, me on the large TV and her on her Mac. She has already fallen in love with Turbine’s take on Tolkien’s world, and after a visit to my family’s house for Thanksgiving, my sister will be playing again too, it seems.

And so, after rediscovering my love of LOTRO, I have once again started blogging about it. Cheers!