Drake-bane

Posting here again is an incredibly surreal experience for me. A part of me feels like it never left. The rest feels like it's forgotten how to do everything. The last time I wrote a post was back in January of this year. Can you believe it's been eight months? Originally, it was my intent to leave LOTRO entirely, as I had been fed up with the development of the game, the mass exodus of players I knew, the rampant negativity of the official forums, and cosmetic blogging had become a chore. You'd think I'd have been over this MMO entirely by now, but I discovered that I could never truly bid farewell to Middle-earth. Casually leveling my baby Beorning without any attachments to other players allowed me to experience and appreciate the early areas of LOTRO for the first time in years. I fell in love again, having a second romance. It also doesn't help that Tolkien's lore has been a part of me since I read the Hobbit nearly 20 years ago. And then there are the other reasons included in the last post I made.

An Unexpected, Yet Temporary Return

Good morning everybody!

I bet you're surprised to see a post appearing here (assuming I'm still in your RSS feeds). This certainly makes that gigantic farewell post feel anticlimactic.

After careful thought and certain circumstances, I've decided to return to cosmetic blogging, though it is most likely a short-term, temporary thing. Unfortunately, there is much more to this decision than I'd like to admit, most of it personal. I'll tell you a few of things that led to this unexpected return.

First of all, I suffered a significant reduction in hours at work, leaving me with some financial strain and much more free time. That's something I hope to have fixed soon by looking elsewhere for full-time employment. Second, I just had my car's transmission rebuilt. Good grief, those are expensive. Third, within the past few months, I had a rather sizable amount of money stolen from me, some of which I have recouped. I had to cancel all my game subscriptions (FFXIV especially) and seriously curtail my spending. This has led me back to F2P games, LOTRO in particular. Lastly, a small part of me never stopped outfitting my characters. I've slowly been leveling my Beorning since January (she's somewhere around level 40), dressing her up from time to time. You'll get to see those outfits soon. That's as much as I'm willing to say here. The rest cuts too close to home.

Blogging, for me, is very time consuming. Just collecting screenshots could take two or three hours. That's why I retired in February. I can't promise I'll be posting on a schedule and neither can I tell you how long I'll be hanging around. However, let it be said writing and creating content for Material Middle-earth brought me joy in the past and I hope it will continue to do just that. And I need a little of that happy in my life again!

See everybody around!

~Nathrien

Here's a vintage picture from 2010 of Nathrien!

Melody of the West

My grey ship has arrived and it's time I sail into the west, away from LOTRO's shore and towards Valinor.

Four years ago, I started dabbling in cosmetics. Three and a half years ago, I began to share outfits with some close friends, embarrassed to admit I played "virtual dress-up," as I had once put it. Three years ago, I began sharing them with all of you...and it's been a glorious three years.

It's with a heavy heart I make my final cosmetic entry here at Material Middle-earth. I thought it appropriate to end on an outfit using the same location and similar colors as my very first--sea blue and the elven homesteads in Falathlorn--which can be viewed here.  Even though this blog opened with a cosmetic contest I held for Forgottten Darkness in April 2012, it wasn't until June that I mustered the courage to post my own creation.

There have been 150+ posts here, ninety percent of which have been outfits. The other ten has been about beta previews and updates regarding cosmetic additions to the skirmish camps. I honestly never expected to reach that number. From June to December of 2012, I was an outfitting machine. I had a new outfit every two to four days (some of which I think are absolutely ugly...and it's not because I was new to this) and I quickly burned myself out after making fifty-something outfits. I returned in April 2013, just in time for a server fashion contest and the release of the Wildermore zone...and then a computer hardware failure left this blog suspended until September. I returned again and managed to ahdere to a weekly posting regiment on Saturdays, which has worked very well. I've never felt any pressure to make an outfit or haphazardly throw one together under that system.

Hobbit-skald - Pennycandy of Gladden

This here is the final outfit request I'll be honoring. As you know, Saturday will be my final day updating this blog. I understand that there are other creations that some of you would have liked me to make, but I'm out of time. It's taking all of my willpower to stick to my guns and retire, as planned, this weekend. Thank you for strongly encouraging me to continue, but the longer I stay, the harder it will be to leave. Let's get back to the outfit, shall we?

I had a brief conversation with Lilyrose, the leader of Rangers of the West on the Gladden server. Some of you may recall that I've had the pleasure judging two server fashion events hosted by her wonderful kinship between 2013 and 2014. Anyway, she was wondering if I could make some sort of warrior-skald outfit. Usually she dons her Draigoch set and charges headfirst into battle on her hobbit mini. I'm hoping this gives her (and other similar halfling characters) another combat-ready option.

Revisiting the Early Days of MME

As promised in late November, I've gone back in time to 2012, taken old outfits from this blog, and reposted them here in bigger, brighter pictures with much improved graphical quality. It was difficult to choose from over fifty outfits, but I narrowed that list down to eight. With each picture, I've included the name of the outfit (most sound soooo corny!) and a link back to the original post for the dyes and skins. I almost changed some of the pieces, but decided to leave them as is.

Normally I post new outfits on Saturday, but I thought this would be a refreshing change of pace.

You might be wondering what was my reasoning for doing this? Here's my first reason. I never had the followers in 2012 that I have nowadays. When Material Middle-earth was in its infancy, I was lucky to get a hundred views a month. Nowadays, it nets at least several thousand. By not establishing myself on Facebook until late 2013 and Twitter in 2014, many LOTRO players didn't have the chance to see my early work as it was posted. I am hoping, today, that you'll join me on a sentimental journey and see where it all began. And for the second reason, this week's entry allowed me to exhaust whatever marks, medallions, and dyes remained simply by recreating these.

Also, don't forget that next Saturday I'll be posting my farewell entry with a new outfit! Before then, I'll be honoring one last outfit concept from a follower. If all goes well, that ensemble will appear here on Wednesday morning.

The War-forged Defender