Stormblood [4.0]: Post may contain potential spoilers.
The Choler
I have no idea on what “The Choler” entails. You would think that’s a name, however I wanted to confirm if there was a definition. Checking with both Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com. Apparently, “Choler” roughly means anger or in an older context. Yellow Bile? I don’t know.
Lets look at it in what I presumed to be the modern definition of the word. If this statue was meant to be a symbol of anger, then clearly something was even more pissed off. Look at its head- I mean lack of head. The right arm appears to be missing as well. Oddly, the staff appears to be fine. I wonder if this was meant to be the symbol of some king or queen in the past. I know nothing of its origns, but if I were to take a speculative stance. This statue seems to be starkingly similar to the state of the resistance.
The Ala Mhigan Resistance currently has no king/queen nor its right hand man. However, what it does have is its land. Its origins. I feel like the staff embodies the land, while the missing head and arm is a sign lacking in direction. From my own perspective. It appears that very little of the people who inhabit the land have no direction nor goal.
Spoilers ahead
I don’t want to delve too deep into the histroy of Gyr Abania nor the Resistance. However, I want to say this. I feel that the characters involved in the resistance seems lackluster. There’s one character in particular that bears the brunt of this feeling. That is of course Lyse. Lyse is in need of a proper end for her backstory and development. The developers seem to have brought her development to an end and become some meaningless side character.
Its sad really since it doesn’t do the character justice in any way. I feel like she has a crucial role in the story of this expansion, but just feels left out for the most of it. I can’t delve into the specifics, mainly due to the fact that I haven’t played Stormblood in a while. Going off of memory alone.
Spoilers over
Anyhow, I did mention about the alternate definition of choler. I don’t know how bile can reasonably describe the statue. Maybe it eroded the statue and is a symbol of its destruction? No idea.
One last thing I want to mention before hopping onto an important subject. I checked out that tree after maintenance from yesterday’s post. Looks like the tree simply grew behind the structure out of the water. Nothing special. Although the trunk of that tree is insane and is oddly familar to that of another tree in Black Shroud. Its possible that the devs may have simply copy and pasted another asset and made some adjustments to it. No idea, but it feels similar.
Upgrading the Website
So did you know, that I mentioned in yesterday’s post about Page Bundles? If not, then I suggest taking a quick read at it.
TLDR: I had to redo how I made all of my posts and where I place my images at. All 267 posts.
Now I didn’t say when the changes were going to happen. Although, I kind’ve just did it… I do mean that I updated (nearly) every post today with the necessary changes. Obviously, it would’ve taken me hours upon hours doing it manually. So I just mostly automated the process it. Thankfully, I have a fairly standardize way of naming/making my posts, so it only took a few lines of code to make the needed changes. I think the whole process from making the code to updating my website, took about 5 hours. I think?
Honestly, I could’ve done it faster, but my paranoia on destroying my website was strong. As such, I transferred the updated files from my local machine to the server at about 10 posts a time. Double checking for no harm from my posts. That whole transferring process took about an hour or two. Although, my scripts didn’t account for all of the edge cases. Like posts with multiple images, or when the posts didn’t follow the standard format (this was more of an issue with my first 20 posts or so).
Eitherway, every post is completely visible with all images present. Funnily enough, if you happen to be visiting this blog during my updating process. You may have notice that my posts had duplicate images in them. That was due to the updated theme I’m using.
To be more specific, I updated to PaperMod’s 7.0 version. Looking at its releases. It appears that I was using the 6.0 version orignally. Anyhow, one the notable changes to this version, is that cover images will now display in the post itself. In the past, I had to manually add a link to the image in the post itself. While the cover image existed on the homepage only. Now that cover images display in the post. It results in my posts have duplicated images.
It was a fairly simple fix. All I did was use sed to delete line 30 for all of my markdown files. Unfortunately, I didn’t consider that my really old posts didn’t follow the norm. As such, there might be a post or two that I missed. This also means that when the sed command was used, it may have deleted some very important text. No idea if it did though, gonna have to check my backups.
Outside of that. You may have noticed of that little trademark message below the image. Thats another inclusion that 7.0 offers. Cover images can now have alt text and captions for them. I’ve been meaning to add the whole trademark message for quite a while, since technically I didn’t make the game. I doubt there would’ve been legal troubles for me in the future. I still wanted it there in the event something happens. The caption will be retroactively added to posts containing screenshots/videos from FFXIV on a later date.
The important question
So one important question remains. Was it worth it?
I would say yes. Fun fact, my homepage is currently sitting at about 150kb in size. I had to upgrade hugo for my theme to enable image processing support for webp. Only using png files for the covers would’ve resulted in 1.5mb. However, for whatever reason the performance would tank with Pagespeed Insight. I decided to use webp, since I already had it setup and gave my website a score of 100. (Although, it doesn’t like the fact that my images are lazily loaded). There’s just one problem.
Sure have a webpage size of about 150kb is great and all. Sadly, it also decided to take my image quality down with it. I’m not entirely sure why. Based on reading the html file that handles cover images. There doesn’t appear to be anything that alters the quality of the image. Although, I’m not familiar with html all that well. The PNG version were fine, but also have a large footprint to contend. Personally, I like to delve a bit deeper into improving the image quality, so that people aren’t required to click on the image to get the full version.
Linking the original image
Actually, I just thought of something. What if I link people the PNG version of the file? I mean this is something that I wanted to do for a while, but never really thought of it in this way. To be more exact, I wanted a dedicated button or something to clearly tell people that said “Hey here’s the High-Quality version of this image”. Because of that, I never really thought about just making a simple hyperlink to the actual file. So as a test. I’m going to make a link down below on the original image for today’s post.
I might’ve did a typo or something there, so I’ll update the post as necessary. The main reason why I want to do it this way is for a simple reason. I don’t want people trying to load the original image even if they have incredibly fast internet speed. I would like this website as a whole, to be easily accessible by any device. People dipping out all because I have 5-6mb image forecfully loading, ain’t a great way to maintain retention. I want people to have the option where if they want to see the original they can.
As a result, I wanted to make it blend with the theme as a whole. Make it feel like its meant to be as an option. Not some janky approach that feels outdated. So for now, I’m going to take the janky approach till I can cook a more appealing solution. I’ll likely have the link right about the disclaimer for spoilers or something.
Conclusion
So that will be all folks. I do hope that some of this stuff was atleast interesting to you. I probably shouldn’t be putting this hugo stuff in the same post as the screenshot, but I think its fine. I don’t know why, but it feels like something has changed with these posts. Its hard to say if its coming from me or just the simple fact that there’s more words on screen. I’m not 100% certain. Maybe its just the feeling of satisfaction with my efforts. I did invest a significant amount of time in improving the backend of this website without too many hiccups.
Although, I was tempted to introduce some of my visual changes to the website. Sadly, I have yet to find a way to improve the website visually. I do have ideas. Just my main concern is that of accesibility or readability. I won’t delve too much into that idea, since I want something functional before getting opinions. (Although, those reading this post, probably won’t be able to give me said opinions.)
There’s one thing that I will say. After spending over 260 days with this blog. I’ve begun to start discovering a direction on where I want to take this. I don’t think its the right time to mention it now, but I will say that its weird in a way. Not the idea itself, but the journey of reaching to this point in time. Being able to see my posts over the course of nearly a year now, is an almost surreal experience. I wouldn’t recommend this path to many people, but it has helped me in a way.
It helps establish consistency in my life. Knowing that there will be another post tomorrow and so on is a peculiar thought. I just never expected myself to do something like this. I have thought about doing a journal/diary of my life in the past, but this method is a far easier way to delve into my life without ever needing to talk about it. Its not a bad thing in my opinion.
Its just useful being able to see your mindset and thoughts of the past and compare it to today. There are parts of my mind that has clearly changed while other parts clear haven’t. Like that time when I discovered that I still kept using “To be quite honest” for nearly a decade now. Although, I don’t think I used that phrase this time.
Sorry for the tangent, I just felt like that something should be said was all. Anyhow, I hope you folks have a good day/night. May another day gets etched into your memories.