Stormblood [4.0]: Post may contain potential spoilers.

The Arms of Meed

This gotta be the best point of interest in this zone so far. It has green unlike the vast majority of the Peaks. Well I shouldn’t say that the entire zone is devoid of life. Then again, this whole zone suffers on the fact that it looks like one huge quarry. There could be other points of interests that are cool looking, but I have yet to see them.

You know? There’s something interesting about the tree itself on a second inspection. Unfortunately, I can’t explore around it due to the server maintenance. Either way, it kind’ve looks like the tree grew on top of the broken structure. You can see roots off the the side going down beneath the bridge and it makes me wonder a tad.

What if the tree is the cause of destroying this structure? Man that would be interesting to think about. Imagine a tree that someone planted on top of a building and kept it alive for years. One day that person no longer comes back to help the tree and it begins to start sprouting roots down below the structure. It reaches the water beneath the bridge and enables the tree to grow more. Eventually, it beings to destroy the very structure that it was planted from. Almost like a parasite.

Now I doubt thats what actually happened here. Its also likely that the camera angle makes it look like the tree was growing inside the structure. Looks like I’ll have to confirm my speculation tomorrow then.

On a side note. I’m getting an odd feeling that this might just be the only decent shot for the whole month. The Peaks and The Lochs are very rocky terrain with little vegetation. As a result, it doesn’t have the best look. Now there are some stuff in each zone that’s interesting to look at. Although, I gotta say. This and the next zone are my least favorite out of the whole bunch. Now that I think about it some more. I really didn’t do a lot of exploring in the next expansion either.

Either way, lets find out if I’m going to regret that statement in the future.

Encyclopaedia Eorzea

Why do I have to find out that there’s encyclopaedias for this game now!?! Well I suppose it ain’t too surprising all things considered. I did mentioned a bit ago, that I wasn’t planning to delve into the lore of this game till later on. However, with this new discovery. I might be very tempted to obtain these books and learn more of this world. As great as it is for using tools like wikis. Gotta say, I’m itching for a textbook right now.

Sadly, I won’t be acquiring one anytime soon. Main reason being is that of my finances. I could only realisticly splurge on an item like that, once or twice a month. I already bought Octopath Traveller 2 for this month and I want to wait on making any unnecessary purchases till next paycheck. Although, I could argure to myself that this is a necessary purchase for my blog. Then again… I realisticly don’t need it.

As such, I won’t delve into its secrets for now. I will say one thing that I’m hoping for from the two volumes. I hope that they will elaborate more on the geography of their continents. Its the one aspects that I feel is lacking in the games for me. Its possible that I haven’t delved too much into the lore to understand it, but I doubt that it explains everything eitherway.

Hugo Page Bundles

I don’t know if I got good news or bad news. I suppose its good news depending on the individual. I finally got a working solution to improve the images on this website as a whole. Unfortunately, it will require me to redo how I make these posts.

Currently, I simply make a markdown file in the /content/posts/ section for my blog. I then leave all of my screenshots (plus other images) in a static folder. I do a very janky way of lowering the quality of the images for the cover and the post as a whole, but they’re not adaptive to a device needs. As such, I occasionally run into issues where some images take a moment to load properly on my phone.

Now Hugo (which is what I use to make this website) has an image processing feature that can resolve all of my image issues. The only problem being that, you can’t use images in the static directory. They have to be “resources” in order to be processed by Hugo.

There are two ways to store images to be processed. That of a global resource directory, typically known as “assets” and the other method as page resources. Global resources is honestly the easiest way to achieve my goal, but unfortunately. I can’t find where this “assets” directory is. I think its meant to be in the root directory for the website, but it doesn’t exist for me. Not only that, I tried many other ways and it all resulted me in the same problem. I can’t find the assets folder. That means I need to use the second option.

Before I delve further about the second option. I do want to mention that in the public directory (which is where you folks are getting the wesbite from) has an asset folder and apparently has images in it. I don’t know if they are the same thing, but for some reason the very first screenshot is in it. Also, some other random image that I have no idea why its there.

Anyhow, the page resources route is an actual solution and it may appear to be best practice? I don’t know if its the proper way or anything, but if it works it works. There’s just one problem. A page resource only exists inside of a page bundle. Whats a page bundle you may ask? Simple. Its a folder inside the post directory, that possess an “index.md” file and whatever file that you want to call for in that post. (Technically, you can call for images from other posts, but lets ignore that for now.) It allows you to fairly easily call for hugo to utilize its image processing features.

To elaborate more on that problem. You might remember that in my post directory, I just toss a markdown file for my posts. Zero directories involved. The new approach will require me to create a directory for each and every… single… post… Today will be my 267th post for this blog and every single one of them needs to be updated to this new approach so that I can make my website run a little faster. Is it worth it? Well- Yes, what were you expecting my answer to be?

Thankfully, I have already considered on how to run a script updating every post into the new format. Its pretty simple. Unfortunately, not every post is created equally. Yes I can convert every post into a “Page Bundle”, but I will also need to include every image that a post uses into the same directory. The vast majority of my posts uses only one image, yet there’s pretty good chunk of them that uses multiple seperate images.

It won’t be too troublesome to automate every post, with the exception of the ones that has multiple images. Those I might just do manually. Essentially, it just boils down to too many edge cases for those posts to not make it worth while to automate.

There’s a fair amount more I can talk about this new method for my posts, but I’ll save those for another day.

Conclusion

That will be all for today. Hopefully, you folks found something of interest for today. Can’t wait to hop right back into FFXIV tomorrow. Oh yeah, I need to get Octopath Traveller 2 onto my schedule as well.

Anyways, I hope you folks have a good day/night!