The Curse of the Summer Solstice

Those of you on the keen cutting five or so micron thick cutting edge of 21<sup>st century zeitgeist will be aware that Update 25.1.1 of The Lord of the Rings Online rolled out of the Boston-based programming pits around 2:00PM (1900 UTC) on the 17th of December.

Those of you on the trailing edge of the aforementioned supernatural metaphor may be wondering whether a ghost or spirit could have a cutting edge. You may be thinking that that is a kind of exotic ghost that R. Chetwynd-Hayes could've come up. A ghost that could cut things. The more literary or literarily inclined of you will be wondering, I don't doubt, where the fuck I got that metaphor from and what the fuck I was doing using it here, which is supposed to be a safe space. "Wouldn't 'coal face' have been better?" you may be asking. Or might be. Whatever. You can do a million writing courses and still not know everything.

I just couldn't think of a better way to describe someone who's absolutely informed about the dernier cris these days. Although saying that they knew and could pronounce dernier cris might be another way of describing them. And why use French when I could say 'focail dheireach' if that's the Irish phrase? I'm not sure it is. I'm not going to look it up.

The secondary thing to take away from those paragraphs is that it's a pleasure to write in a meandering way for a change.

The main thing is that the LOTRO update was released. I tried to install it. I kept getting an error message saying something like 'Cannot confirm username. Absent data at lines [1] and [32]'. I didn't know what this was, but it certainly wasn't doing my updates. In the end, I thought the answer was to uninstall the game and give it a fresh go at doing an install. This would mean a 29GB download, but what the hell, I had plenty of data left.

First, I went to Apps and Features to uninstall the game. That was fairly straightforward and, it's a pleasure to note, the process hadn't changed much since XP. While that was happening, I fired up the Windows 7 machine (hereinafter MAINPC) because that had LOTRO on it, too. I had better update that, I thought, in case my darling Kelvatari got a bit of time to play and this new installation on the Win10 machine took a while.

I got the same error message. A lengthy bit of pawing through the written detritus of trhe Internet finally found me an explanation: the servers were down for an emergency patch. I assumed this meant as well as the update, and this seemed to be the case.

A few hours later I noticed that the message advising the servers would be taken down from 8AM to 12PM (1300 to 1700) now said that they were back up. Good. I could now reinstall on the Win10 machine (hereinfafter RIOMHAIRE). I downloaded lotroclient.exe from LOTRO.COM and set it to work.

While that was beavering asway, I updated the game on MAINPC, too. This provcess took about six minutes. I came back to RIOMHAIRE to see that the install process had stopped and the LOTROC client had closed down. I fired it up again, went through the rigmarole of telling it where the game files were and to repair them, and walked away to make a cup of tea or something—whatever it is I do.

I came back to find the lotroclient thing had shut down again. Now, it's not unusual for Win10 to just shut things down for no reason that we poor money-paying bastards aren't allowed to know, and my days of being able to understand a technicla article are way behind me, not to mention the piles of crap out there posing as informative articles (not unlike this one, you m(ay)ight be thinking), so I just shrugged and fired up the process again. Then I wandered off to do whatever.

The fifth time I started up lotroclient.exe, it stayed up, so I wandered off to watch the news, some other programs, take a phone call and whatever and around 10:30PM (1130 UTC) I came back to see how it was in stalling. It was incredibly slow. Glacially slow. If I hdn't known better I would've thought the NBN had slowed to... 256K/ps? That could't be right. A quick trip to speedtest.net confired this. A very slow check of the email confirmed that Internode had throttled me. Throttled? Moi???

Apparently all my installing of LOTRO had used up 120GB in a few hours.

I chcked lotroclient.exe again. Holy crap. The installer was installing the same file over and over again for some reason. The LOTRO folder on RIOMHAIRE had multiple copies of the same file, CLIENT_CELL_3.DAT in numbered 'parts'. Numbered from 1 to 144, at whuich point prsumably it just overwrote the low-numberd files. The 360MB file must have been downloaded and not 'finalized' (as they spell it) more than 300 times. Fucking hell.

I had to buy an extra 100GB of data from Internose to cover the 49GB I had overused by this rigmarole and to leave myself with sensible Internet speeds until the plan rolls over on January 6th next year. Then I had a fitful night's sleep non-CPAP compromised sleep.

Despite all this crap I still dragged my sorry arse off the Sealy this morning and preapared to have another go at installing a game which, to be honest, gives me less grief on installing than Windows does. A quick start of lotroclient.exe showed me that it was up to its old tricks, so I cut that short before my usage exploded again. Then it occurred to me that I had a working copy of LOTRO on MAINPC. I could just could just copy those files over to RIOMHAIRE and that would work, right?

Now, there's an immediate flaw in this plan: it makes sense. And nothing that makes sense will work with Windows. Things like file permissions and compatibility issues and whatever else make the simple act of copying someting you own into a Sisyphean assignment straight from the minds and morals of whatever Lovecraftian horrors out of Redmond buld Windows the way they do.

However, it should be realtively easy to copy files across from MAINPC to RIOMHAIRE over the network, right? Yeah, right...

I could see MAINPC on the network as a media device, but I couldn't get to an files on it. From MAINPC I could see RIOMHAIRE, but I couldn't even connect to it. It asked for my username and passw2ord. Username? Password? How could I find those? When had I even set up a ussername and password?

Jesus Fucking Christ.

Why is it that Windows, which emphasis connectivity over the Internet, even though back in the day Bill Gates ignored it, makes it increasingly difficult to move files from one PC to another over the same fucking network? Or is it that I don't know what I'm doing? I choose the former, because even if I didn't know what I was doing, there was no way I could fucking find out!

So, in a step back to the 14th century, probably accompanied by bubonic plague but I don't know yet, I got a fucking gflash drive out, copied the files off MAINPC and then put them on RIOMHAIRE.

I was stunned to discover that, when I fired up lotrolauncher.exe off the shortcut, the damn thing fired up!

LOTRO 1; fuck you Windows.

And the solstice hasn't even got here yet.</sup>