Moved to Wordpress

I moved my blog over to wordpress, I will no longer be posting on this blogspot!  :)

http://mylamalinalda.wordpress.com/

Tolkien Artist Fridays: Angela Rizza

I'm actually getting my Tolkien Artist Fridays post up kind of early this week! This week I'm going to be talking about one of my favorite artists, Angela Rizza, you can visit her official website here. Her style is very recognizable, she has a real talent for lines and making it flow within each piece of work, and the colors she uses! They're vibrant and make the subject matter really "pop." You can read more about Angela in this interview I did with her for Middle-earth News.

This illustration of Bilbo is one of my FAVORITES. There's something so fantastical about it, like I can feel the wind blowing through the grass and flowers.

Seeing Lothlorien

Last week I finally made my way over to Lothlórien in LOTRO, and I love it!! The quests are pretty easy, mostly due to the fact that I'm about 5 levels higher than the area (because of festivals mostly). I got to meet a lot of characters including: Haldir, the Fellowship, Galadriel and Celeborn. I've already seen the Fellowship but that was in Imladris, so it's been a while!
Lothlorien may be the most beautiful place I've been to in the game (not counting the Shire!!), the colors change drastically throughout the "day." I completed most quests so now I'm going to move onto Mirkwood, and then Enedwaith and Rohan. I must get my war steed!

More photos below the cut.

Reading Goals for 2014

I used to read a lot years ago. When I read Harry Potter for the first time, I breezed through them in no more than two weeks. I banged out The Hunger Games once in just a night. I loved reading, I'd sit or lay down for hours reading. It was just nice to be quiet and relax while losing myself in another world. Because of many reasons I don't want to go into, I slowly stopped and now it's difficult for me to just take time out of my day and read. (Though I read A Storm of Swords pretty damn fast!)

I've started many books and never finished them, and now my list of "books to read" is getting ridiculously long. Today I logged onto my Goodreads account in lord knows how long, and cleaned some things out and added some...

I NEED TO READ MORE. So I want to make a goal for myself, to make more of an effort to read for the remainder of the year. My class schedule this fall semester will be keeping me busy, but I'll still have time to read. I mean, if I manage to have time to watch cartoons on Netflix I should have time to read, right? Right.

The majority of books that I want to read are in the fantasy genre: A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin, the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy by Tad Williams, The Death Gate Cycle series by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind...and books by Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones, Jim Butcher...and more, I have to do some research.

Gotta tear myself away from Netflix and spend some of this summer reading.

Book Haul: July 25, 2014

Went to a bunch of second hand shops with my dad today and got six books! There wasn't much in term of Tolkien, but I'm pretty happy with this haul.