LoTRO, Why do you hate me so?

First, I have to say, LoTRO is awesome! I know a lot of my friends don't exactly like it, but that's because they're WoW addicts and honestly don't give other games a decent chance (I know this, because I've done it myself too. "Nothing can compare to WoW!").
Anyhow, Nate convinced me to download the LoTRO trial (I've wanted to try it, but never thought about actually downloading it...silly me.), which took about, 4 hours I'd say, to download the normal version (3.9 GB, high res is almost 7 GB I think!). Anyhow, my video card is the minimum requirment for LoTRO, so the first thing I did once it was done updating was crank all the video settings as low as they'd go, just in case, and I figured if it worked fine I could turn some of them up a bit.

For the first little while, things ran smoothly, no noticeable lag or problems with the graphics (besides them being really blurry from being on the lowest settings possible) and I fumbled my way through to about level 3 before suddenly all the movement on the screen stopped. For a brief second, I thought I was lagging, until a mass jumble of insane colors showed up across my screen...and let me tell you, I was not happy.
Now, I'm not a computer genius or anything, but I can figure out when my video card is being worked too hard, so I managed to exit LoTRO and restarted my computer. I've never really had problems with games not working on my computer, so I thought maybe if I just update the drivers, that would solve the problem. So, I updated as many as I could (some hadn't been done in a while, to be honest) and restarted and tried LoTRO online again. Things worked fine, and I thought maybe updating the drivers had fixed the problem. But after about 20 minutes or so, it happened again and I had to restart again. After a few more random tries, re-checking the video settings, updating the driver for my monitor even, it would still do the same thing after about 15-45 minutes, so I gave up and went back to my normal game, WoW.

I've only ever had minor problems with WoW, and these all happen after major-ish patches and are solved fairly easily and fast, so I was surprised when suddenly characters on WoW were showing up as straight black, and instead of seeing smoke from fires, I saw huge black squares swirling up the screen. I thought this was weird, and thought maybe WoW was conflicting with LoTRO, but didn't want to uninstall LoTRO yet since I hadn't even had it 24 hours. I closed down WoW, and noticed that my whole PC was being incredibly slow, so after I restarted I opened WoW again to see if it would happen again. After about half an hour, the same thing happened again, but I wasn't able to exit WoW at all, so I had to restart the computer. This time, I uninstalled Lotro and got rid of all the files (/cry), restarted the computer and tried WoW yet again. Same thing still happened, and an error report window for WoW came up. I sent off the error report, and this time my PC wasn't lagging, so I opened WoW again so I could see what my video settings were at, but instead of opening, I got an error message saying the I needed to have DirectX 9.0c, and should update my graphic drivers. Finding this a bit weird, since I knew I already had to had DirextX 9.0c to run a lot of things I use, and since I'd just updated my drivers not even 12 hours earlier, I tried to update them again, just in case. But, there was no update at all, so I rolled it back and restarted my PC before opening WoW...

Now, it's working, I think. I've only played for about 45 minutes and so far everything is working just fine, but I don't think I'll really know until I try to play for an hour or two, since the game ran fine for at least half an hour to an hour each time before it crashed.
What I'm kinda confused about is my drivers. Did they somehow get rolled back without me noticing, is that even possible? Or is my PC just too old and not working as well as it should be? Did LoTRO do some serious damage to my video card, or was it just some weird mistake?

In any case, Nate said he might send me his old video card, which is a nice upgrade from my current one, so maybe that will help. It's a pity though, LoTRO was so fun, even though I only got to level 7. but I had a lute! I mean, even WoW doesn't have musical instruments that you can actually play yourself. I was so excited...booo.

The Waldo Ultimatum

Honestly, this makes me laugh so hard, especially when they're standing around the monitor, "No he's at the North pole!", "That's a giant candy cane.."


The Waldo Ultimatum - Watch more Funny Videos

My Home

Today mom and dad decided to sell the house for a lot cheaper than they'd originally had it listed as. It's really depressing to think that we don't have a home to go back to anymore. It makes me so sad to think about it, and I really can't explain it. I feel really sad, and grumpy. I don't want to feel this way on my birthday.

I always just figured that mom and dad would always be there together in that house, no matter what. If I get married and have kids, we won't be going there for holidays, we won't be able to go back to a familiar place from our past, where we spent most of our lives. And I miss Amigo, I really wish we could have kept him, and I'm so angry that dad wouldn't. What an ass. He can put up with Sharon's dog, and their stupid cats..but not OUR dog? What an ass. skjhdkssgggg

Happy Birthday to me.

I'm 21!

Yay! I'm officially 21 now! /cheer

To be honest, it isn't really that exciting. However, last night I did get some nice flowers...

...and a WoW time card! Yay! Dan and Daphne also took out me and mom for my birthday supper, which was really awesome of them. So I had a pretty good evening. :D Thanks guys!

Hair Trials

Yay, today we did the hair trails for Daphne's wedding, I'm seriously really happy with how mine turned out, even though it's not the same as what I showed her that I wanted done, haha. I feel very princess-y, and it's great.

Continue Reading?

No, YOU RP or shut up!

Grrrawr.

I had a pretty really good day at work today. I went into work in a good mood, and it lasted the whole day, even though I had to work this afternoon and I was really hoping that I wouldn't have to. But, I also got off work at 3pm, so it doesn't seem like I spent my whole day cleaning up after other people. Haha.

Anyways, I had a good day, until I logged onto WoW, I guess. I always try to talk to people that I find interesting or that don't mind babbling back and forth while questing, but I guess maybe I should quit doing that. One person basically told me to RP or shut up, which made me feel really sad. He seemed like a nice guy, and it was nice to just randomly talk to someone...but I guess he didn't enjoy it that much. Damn RP servers. What's so wrong with wanting to just talk? Oh well, it's not even a big deal, but for some reason it really upset me. I guess because it made me feel like I must be pretty boring to talk to, so he had to get rid of me somehow. And I'd already stated that I didn't RP, so maybe he used that card on purpose.

Annnyyyways, Phase 3 opened up last night, I was really excited for it. I don't know why, it was just neat to see all these alliance & horde at Quel'Danas, all waiting impatiently for enough people to do the dailies to push it from 99% to 100%. It was super laggy, and people flagged themselves on purpose and stood around the questgivers. Each time I went to turn in a quest, I heard people dying and saw skeletons on the ground EVERYWHERE. Which is really kind of funny, I did about 5 quests there and handed them all in without flagging myself even with all the flagged horde. Good times anyways.