DA:O - ... And Thus It Begins

If I die before I wake, I pray the Stone my soul to take ...

With a new ruler of Ferelden on the throne, the time has come for our final battles.  The rest of the game is divided into three recognizable parts.  Thus, for convenience sake, and in order to accommodate my graduate school schedule, Perra's story will also have three final entries.  Today's entry is particularly pivotal since it has a major impact on how the game ends.  The rest of this DA:O story is a mystery to me since I have no idea exactly how it will end.

There are spoilers after the jump.  Continue reading at your own risk. 

The Search for Fuel 4

My hunt for the perfect gaming tea continues. A month ago I reordered a larger package of Rum/Plum/Lycii Berries Tea and it is now a staple in my kitchen, but we all like variety, right?  This time around I went with a chocolate theme.  Below is my assessment of these flavors.

Orange/Chocolate with Rooibos Base - This is a very mildly flavored tea.  Despite its extra emphasis on the orange, it still does not taste extremely orangy.  I can tell that it is orange chocolate, but that is about it.  The tea is very smooth, and actually tastes a bit like orange/chocolate cream if that is even possible.  It is a pleasant enough tea, and I'll enjoy drinking this flavor but I probably would not order it again.  This could, of course, be an issue with the tea base I chose as well.  The Orange/Chocolate tea would probably have a bit more oomph to it if I had ordered it with a black tea base instead of red tea.
          Current Verdict -  Pretty Good.  Do not re-order.

Cranberry/Chocolate with Rooibos Base - This is an excellent tea.  The first time I ordered it, I said that it was a bit too dark flavored for me.  The flavor has since grown on me, however, and has since become another favorite.  It tastes equally delicious with or without cream, and with Design a Tea emphasizing its cranberry flavor per request, the chocolate flavor is prevented from becoming too overpowering or bitter.  This time around I accidentally purchased tea bags instead of looseleaf.  Since all the tea is mixed at the time of purchase, however, the only real difference is the amount of actual tea I received.  Next time I'll just have to triple check to make sure that doesn't happen again.
          Current Verdict -  Staple.  Re-order before it runs out.

Chocolate/Hazelnut with Oolong Base - I'm going to preface this by saying that I really don't drink a lot of oolong tea.  In fact, I can't remember the last time I drank it at all.  The decision to use it as the base for this tea was a snap judgment based on little foreknowledge of how the flavors might mix together.  That said, I really quite like this tea.  The flavor is a bit ... different then I had anticipated, but it is by no means unpleasant.  Only time will tell what my overall opinion of it will be, but right now the verdict is "tasty, but won't be re-ordering."  The tea is delicious, but it's just not necessarily what I was looking for.  Maybe it would taste better with a regular black base?  I'll get back to you on that.
          Current Verdict -  Good.  Possibly re-order with black base.

Let's Watch - Morrowind's E3 Trailer

I'm just going to leave this here.

Let's Visit - Ardalambion

Continuing along the vein of what seems to have become Academia Fridays, I'm stepping away from video games for a moment and venturing into the world of high fantasy/sword and sorcery.

From The Website - For the complete ignorants: Once upon a time - from 1892 to 1973, to be exact - there lived a man by the name of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. In 1937 he published a children's book, The Hobbit, that sold quite well. [...] In 1954-55 Tolkien finally published the ultimate fantasy novel, the trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Following Tolkien's death his son Christopher edited and published a constructed mythology, The Silmarillion, from his father's manuscripts. This provided the "historical background" for the two other books. Together these books describe an entire imagined world, complete with geography, demography, history - and languages. The languages are absolutely crucial.

Why study these languages? In my essay Tolkien's Not-So-Secret-Vice, found on this website, I list several possible reasons: "The very fact that no real Elvish grammars written by Tolkien have been published makes it a fascinating challenge to 'break the code'. Or it may be pure romanticism, a special form of literary immersion: By studying the Eldarin languages, you try to get closer to - indeed into the heads of - the immortal Elves, fair and wise, the Firstborn of Eru Ilúvatar, teachers of mankind in its youth. Or, less romantically, you want to study the constructions of a talented linguist and the creative process of a genius engaged in his work of love. [...]  though people have been studying Tolkien's languages quite seriously for decades, I found that there was relatively little information about these languages on the net. What there was turned out to be mostly amateurish, incomplete, inaccurate and outdated, or in one case - namely Anthony Appleyard's work - very concentrated and technical, excellent for those who are already deep into these things, but probably difficult to absorb for beginners. This lack of good information on the net was all the more surprising considering that the Tolklang list has as much as seven hundred subscribers, more than the regular Tolkien list! So I set out to make a site devoted to Tolkienian linguistics. An attempt is here made to extract the purely linguistic information from the published writings and present it in a form that is hopefully easily accessible.  (Excerpt from the lengthy page By way of explanation...)

A Few Thoughts of My Own - Oh Ardalambion ... where do I even begin?  The average person casually surfing the internet for information on Tolkien would probably pass this website by without much of a thought. No one, after all, will ever accuse it of looking attractive, professional, or even reliable at first glance due to its use of eye searing green, red and yellow lettering over a mottled field of electric blue and navy. Appearances, my friend, are not everything.  Turned off by its looks, this hypothetical surfer would have thoughtlessly passed over what is quite possibly the most valuable resource around for J.R.R. Tolkien's languages.

I will admit from the get-go that my love of this website is tinged more than a little by a heaping dose of nostalgia.  When the first Lord of the Rings movie reached theaters almost ten years ago, I was only slightly interested in the trilogy.  I had read the Hobbit a few years prior and loved every second of it, but for some reason reading the trilogy itself was like trudging through thigh-deep mud.  That all changed with Peter Jackson's interpretation of the saga.  Coming out of the theater I was so invigorated by what I'd seen that I shut myself in a room and plowed through the entire series in a day and a half.  That taken care of, I hit the net fully determined to learn everything and anything there was to find about Tolkien's languages and the tengwar writing system.  Leaving tengwar for another day, let's focus on the languages.  Imagine how disappointed I was to discover an utter dirth of reliable knowledge available on the interwebs.  Most websites repeated the same lines about Quenya being high elven and Sindarin being grey elven, but they had little to offer beyond that.  Ardalambion, a site I'd previously dismissed, on second-look proved to be a completely different story.

My warm, fuzzy feelings for this site in no way change the fact that it is undeniably valuable to any Tolkienian linguistic enthusiast.  Home to a Norwegian gentleman named Helge Kåre Fauskanger, this website is clearly a labor of love.  Unlike most LotR sites that sprang up in the wake of Peter Jackson's films, Fauskanger's site is truly scholarly in nature.  Moreover, it was in existence well before 2001 and remains an active site when many have been long since abandoned.  Most people generally know Ardalambion for it's Quenya Course which introduces you to high elven through a series of twenty downloadable lessons and exercises.  This course is indeed singularly impressive, but it alone does not define the website.  I've never had a knack for learning new languages, but that doesn't stop me from appreciating them from afar.  For this alone I am tremendously thankful for Mr. Fauskanger's website. Below are a couple of links that continually stir my interest.  Maybe you will find something there that excites your imagination as well.

Newest Content - 21 December 2010

Practical Neo-Quenya [downloadable file] - "my comments and observations on the largest Neo-Quenya translation project I (or anyone?!) has ever undertaken, the rendering of the entire Johannine corpus of the Bible into a form of Quenya."

Items of Interest

The Lord's Prayer and Hail Mary (Quenya): Syntactical and Etymological Analysis  [downloadable file] 

The Writings of St. John [downloadable file]- "a Neo-Quenya translation of the entire Johannine corpus"

The Qenya Lexicon Reviewed - "comments on Tolkien's earliest Elvish wordlist, as published in Parma Eldalamberon #12"

The Evolution from Primitive Elvish to Quenya - "A Comprehensive Survey. (This treatise [...] attempts to list the sound-changes that occurred as High-Elven was evolving from the earliest forms of Elvish. This is a revised, updated and expanded version, edited by Vicente Velasco and incorporating his extensive annotation on my original treatise (still available as an RTF file)."

Suggested Conjugation of all known or inferred Sindarin verbs 

Reconstructing the Sindarin Verb System -"The Reasoning Underlying the Suggested Conjugation"

 Image: Ardalambion 

Let's Visit - Goodnight Dune

Goodnight maud'Dib ...

I figured that I would feature Goodnight Dune today just in case you have somehow managed to miss it.  For those of you who do not know, Goodnight Dune is a parody of the beloved children's bedtime story Goodnight Moon.  Written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, Goodnight Moon was originally published in 1947.  As far as I know, it has never been out of print since.  The original children's book was about a little bunny who notices everything in his room before saying goodnight to the objects and falling asleep.  In Julia Yu's version, a little boy rabbit goes through the same motions but his room is populated by objects from Frank Herbert's Dune.  The little boy's room is also noticeably a bit scarier with the presence gom jabbar on disembodied hands and (adorable) sardukar hanging about.

A personal favorite of mine, Dune is quite possibly one of the best science fiction novels ever written.  No one knows what the late-Frank Herbert would have thought about this take on his classic novel.  I do know, however, that if Yu can work out the copyright issues and get her version published, a host of little geeklings will find Goodnight Dune on their bedside tables.  After all, it is our duty to indoctrinate them while they are young ... right?  Right??

Read Goodnight Dune Here  

DA:O - Things Fall Apart

Let's Do This

The Landsmeet this time around was very intense and yielded completely unexpected results.  From a game play standpoint I have no clue how things turned out the way they did.  I do not know if it was Perra's status as a dwarf or a couple of choices Perra made (like fighting instead of giving herself up for arrest a few posts back), but that doesn't really matter since I wasn't going for a specific outcome anyways.  It just happened that most of Perra's decisions aligned with my past playthroughs.  While unexpected, this episode was particularly interesting for me since it almost felt like I was playing a brand new game.

You will notice that this post, like some previous entries, now has a jump break.  I figured that it was probably the best thing to do despite my distaste for "jumps".  I always have spoiler warnings, but something might be given away anyways when people are scrolling down to the next entry.  With this in mind, from now on any post with spoilers will have a jump break and a spoiler warning just to be fair.  All other posts will remain in their current form.

I'm giving you a heads up that the next part of Perra's story will be up in a week's time.  With multiple significant deadlines coming due and a symposium presentation this week, I will have no chance to play DA:O until the weekend arrives.  I do, per usual, have other posts lined up for mid-week though so don't forget to check back in to see those.

There are numerous spoilers after the jump.
Continue reading at your own risk.

Let's Watch - Skyrim interview with Todd Howard

Here is a little extra to hold you over until tomorrow night.  This was a rather insightful interview about how mini-quests will be doled out, a refined magic+melee combat system, and real time conversations.  Between this and the recent news that Bethesda has eliminated the Myticism school of magic, it sounds like a lot of good things will be happening in Skyrim to make game play more natural.  Generally I'm against change for change sake, but it sounds like most of the basic game changes this time around have a very specific purpose that addresses a very specific need.  For instance, I don't really mind the way current Elder Scrolls conversations happen, but the way their new system is described makes a lot of sense from an immersion standpoint.  Bethesda got a little bit sidetracked with Oblivion, but these changes and their decision to remove auto-levelling [YAY!!!] make me feel like the company is reconnecting with their core fan base.  More attention seems to be given those who appreciate Elder Scrolls for its unique role-play experience, instead of spending time catering to an audience who insists on instant relatability and having their hand held.  Bethesda seems to be finding a careful balance that doesn't alienate either side, but lets the role-players know that they have not been forgotten.  If that doesn't thrill you to the bone, then their claim that Oblivion sacrificed what made Morrowind special certainly will.  (Morrowind, of course, being the gold standard to which all Elder Scrolls games should be compared.) Only time will tell how well everything is executed, but the more I hear about Skyrim the more I am excited about its possibilities.  All I know is that I'm going to need a better video card ...

Perra will be taking over very late tomorrow night when she reports back in from the Landsmeet.

P.S. - Can I talk for a moment about how psyched I am that crafting (specifically cooking) will now be in the game?  I do not know if that means that a reality option for eating/drinking will exist (like it did in New Vegas), but I certainly hope it does.  That would be one less mod I'd have to download.  As much as I appreciate those who build the reality mods, hunger mods always seem to wig out on me after a while where food stops being as effective or I'm cursed with perpetual hunger.  Those bugs probably had less to do with the mods themselves though then they did with a possible mod conflict that Wrye Bash/Mash couldn't detect/fix.