The regular Weta newsletter talks about the restoration of Hobbiton as well. The team at Weta including Daniel Falconer are happily involved in modelling a collectible sculpture of Bag End at them moment, which should be ready for purchase in 2010. “>Read Weta’s “News from the Shire”.

Tourists at Matamata’s Hobbiton will soon see Middle Earth come to life before their eyes, according to a recent report on Stuff.co.nz. Vic James of Red Carpet Tours says he is “delighted” by confirmation that Lord of the Rings tourists will continue to be able to visit the site of Hobbiton as filming approaches.

Hundreds of items of science fiction art and collectibles created by Weta Workshop began their journey to China Friday night for a fundraising exhibition set to be visited by up to one million people. About 150 paintings by artist and Weta designer Greg Broadmore, along with props and rayguns, would be exhibited in The Exceptional [...]

The folks from WIFI, a network of independent film artists based in Wellington New Zealand, send this in: We recently did an interview with Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger from WETA and we thought you may or may not be interested in sharing it with the TORN community. PS:Keep up the fantastic work!!! PPSS: We recently [...]

TheOneRing.net is going talky! Talk radio to be specific! We’ve joined forces with BlogTalkRadio.com to produce TheOneRing.net Talk Radio Show. A show dedicated to all things Tolkien, and then some! Check out our profile page here. We will have alternating hosts and a ton of interesting guests for you to listen to. You can participate to! [...]

Long weekend = BBQ + lots of time to game. And for me in real life, some gardening to do - have a bushel of jalapenos, tomatoes and limes to go box up and distribute to family and neighbors!

New LoTRO player here, have been playing for a couple weeks now with my constant gaming companion and boyfriend, on Landroval. We’d just jumped ship from EQ2 and decided to try LoTRO again. We’d played the original beta but didn’t get into the game back then. It’s been great fun here now though!

We rolled on Landroval as we generally prefer RP servers, but haven’t gotten much of a chance to RP ourselves in game yet. Part of that is because the sparkle of “newplayerdom” has us running around in an ADHD state - always out in the wilds and rarely standing around in town - and the other part is that frankly I’ve been a bit timid because of the lore aspect. The last time I read the LoTR was when I was 13 and I certainly never studied it at length; with being in uni I just don’t have the time to add additional studies to my repetoire. I need to find a Cliff Notes version somewhere, lol!

I’m quite proud of what little we’ve accomplished so far in our short time though! By level 18 we both had our first player houses. Granted, they were the cheap standard versions, but still a place to lay our pixelated heads at night. With the Summer Fest going on we were able to snag a few pieces of furniture for our newly rented and empty homes so it worked out well. Also the housing storage chests made it SO much easier to trade crafting materials to alts for when we work on our crafting.

As far as the social aspect, we’ve had about zilch community involvement thus far. With the two of us playing Warden and Captain, we haven’t had a need to group for any content thrown at us so we have done no pick-ups whatsoever. And no luck yet on the kinship front. Hopefully that will change as we progress a bit further and meet some great people along the way.

On the bright side, this game is awesome for exploring! Yesterday I ran myself, in all my level 22 glory, to Rivendell from Bree with nothing more than a blank map and a general idea of what direction to head simply because I wanted to see it. No stable masters unlocked either so it was a long hike. It was worth it though as I happily located the gorgeous Last Homely House (library OMG!!) and discovered some sort of armor traders there with what I assume are endgame set pieces. Good things to look forward to later on down the road.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!