Last week I ended up getting access to the Shadowlands beta and while I haven’t done much testing so far what little I have done has been interesting. The first thing I noticed has been the reintroduction of several spells, known beforehand of course but still interesting especially since I now get to consider where in my toolkit those spells fit in and more importantly where I get to bind them—for this it will actually be rather nice to have the beta so I have all of that figure out before I have to stumble around with it on live.

With this introduction of several new spells looking for keybinds, I ended up rather sorely missing Clique since it meant that several keybindings I was used to being able to access were no longer accessible to me leading to something of a dearth of available binds; drawbacks of beta-testing I suppose.

Finally, actually getting into the content and playing it, once more the lack of haste hit me though for some reason not quite as badly as in the transition between Legion and Battle for Azeroth (except when I played Shadow for a short while, there it felt really painful to have almost no haste).

What I have done on the beta so far is the second evening of raid-testing the past week as well as a couple of introductory quest runs into Torghast, and so far it all seems rather promising if a bit disorienting with the aforementoned lack of certain keybindings leading to rather more relearning than usual. Of course, the content is all new and I haven’t really had to bother with the daily grind aspects of it so I guess there is a certain tendency towards optimism in it all, but it does somehow seem surprisingly nice even if I am still not quite sold on having to give up on transmogs I could be interested in, in order to enable me to actually get the abilities that I feel benefit me the most which is a situation having to choose a covenant still puts me in.

Also, there is a smaller irritation I have with the covenants, namely the flight between their base of operations and what seems to be the central hub of the expansions, I’m not sure the extra travel between these two places which will both be visited rather frequently by players is completely justified.

Beyond that, it’s a bit too early for me to give any more concrete feelings on the new expansion and it is all still a work in progress I endeavor to help make better where I can find the time so I’ll reserve final judgement for the release version but I do have a hint of more optimism in me towards the new expansion than I had previously, we will see how long that lasts.

Inspired by my playing a lot of RPGs lately, I ended up organising my first actual round of Dungeons & Dragons in a long while, five years or so. As often happens with these things when one self is the initiatior, I had the role of Dungeon Master and wow, I was so stressed going into this even though these are people I know well, but once we got rolling it all ended up quite good as these things tend to. Though to be quite honest, we had a longer break at one point and I think we should have just ended the session there, it went on a bit too long and the concentration was severly lacking after the break.

Despite the not quite as successful latter half everyone seemed to enjoy the session overall and we are planning to do it again some point this year hopefully, though for that I think I really need to be a bit more prepared and have more of the world thought out so I’m more ready to respond to the whims of the players since I encountered a place or two where in hindsight I’m not happy with how I played the situation out.

Having played both of the Pillars of Eternity games, I rediscovered my liking for RPG games and went looking for other recent examples I could get into playing and after a bit of experimentation ended up with Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It hasn’t yet drawn me in quite as well as the Pillars games but it has still been quite enjoyable so far though it does certainly feel like a much less polished experience—this game was unfortunately quite known for the amount of bugs it had at launch, and even now some of them still seem to plague the game. The one I most recently ran into that is now making me consider how to proceed is that one of my companions’ pet now simply spawns in the middle of whatever map I happen to be on and is uncontrollable, essentially completely removing the pet from the game and consequently making that companion quite a bit less useful, which is especially unfortunate for me since that was one of the companions I had been quite regularly running with up until now.

Beyond that, the writing also feels quite a bit more cliché, with the game focusing a bit too much on the beauty and prioritising that for both the female companions as well as some of the other NPCs one runs into in the game, especially in some of the dialogue choices the game puts on you.

Still, the kingdom management aspect is actually a nice feature of the game I find, and at times I even find myself getting somewhat annoyed having to go back to questing due to some timed event or another pressuring me away from that part of the game and I think the balance between the two is rather nicely achieved where there are multiple things to keep tabs on and you have to prioritise what is more important at any given time.

The less nice thing is that some of the tools the game gives you for keeping tabs on things are rather poor, namely the way the game indicates quests and where in the world you are actually going leaves something to be desired I find. I’m not saying there needs to be an arrow pointing to every single thing in the world, but when I get a prompt in the dialogue that an NPC pointed out a location on the map to me and I then go to look on the map and see no indication what this “new” location is since I’d already discovered it on the way there, it does get a bit annoying to try to puzzle out what the game wants me to be doing. Most of the time the game does have some indication when hovering over a location of the map that a quest takes place there, but not always, and once enough of the map is discovered and the game suddenly decides to send you off into some far-flung corner of it having some option to just click in the journal to have the map display the relevant part of the map would be a rather nice feature to have. Not having this included might be an intentional decision though, where the game tries to emulate some of the older style of RPG where there were fewer UI elements helping you along but those games also tended to have a bit more thorough descriptions in the text where you could ask where something was supposed to be located, and intentional or not it’s not really a design I agree with.

Despite these flaws, it is a game I definitely want to go back to at some point, when I either figure out how I want to deal with the bug I encountered or when it ends up getting fixed. Despite the clichés, I do want to see where the story ends up going even if the general direction of it seems somewhat obvious.

Having recently played Pillars of Eternity 2 and following that the first part as well, the story in those games has gotten me thinking a bit since it ended up speaking to me surprisingly strongly—probably partially because I was so engrossed in the games.

Now, I’ve been somewhat nihilistic for a long time, not really believing there is some great meaning to the universe and our place within it though that doesn’t mean there aren’t causes or values I hold important or even that I don’t feel that the world would be a better place if some of those values were universal (if maybe a bit boring).

But at the same time, it has left me without any sort of driving force in my own life, without a reason to do and achieve things which has meant I’ve been left just kind of floating around without purpose which does mean it is somewhat hard to motivate myself to participate in society as well as actually having dreams and goals. This, along with recent events in the world, has left me with a lot of thinking to do along with a search for that meaning to call my own. I expect this introspection will take some time, and I’m not sure I can say I’m looking forward to it though I think it will prove quite interesting and valuable to me going forward.

So it’s been about a year since I started using WordPress instead of Hugo to publish this blog, and it’s been quite a nice experience so far. I like the editing workflow, that I’m actually reminded to certain things like specifying tags and publish date when I do press the publish button, and that I can schedule posts so I can write when I feel like writing and still end up with a somewhat regular cadence of when the posts actually end up getting shown on the site.

The sligthly less rosy part of the whole thing has unfortunately been the performance, specifically the performance for anyone else than myself since the site gets hosted locally to me. Now there are some things I’ve already done to alleviate this, like using caching in WordPress so that the pages get rendered faster and using Cloudflare in front of the site as a CDN and cache to hopefully deliver the content from a location closer to the reader but it’s still quite slow because in the end speed of light is a thing and the caches don’t last forever. Also, only the assets and not the pages themselves ended up being cacheable with the free Cloudflare plan, so the main content of the site ended up being served rather slowly anyway.

Then, at some point, I remembered looking into Ghost, which is another publishing platform which remains more focused on just the publishing part than WordPress and while looking into it again I discovered a keyword which lead me on something of an adventure: headless CMS. What this specifically means is, that the CMS part is just there for managing the content and then provides an API which a frontend of your choosing can then use in order to render out the actual site—so a greater separation of duties in a sense. Classically in publishing systems, the CMS is responsible for both the whole content management part and the presentation part but this separation of the two means one can take a static site generator like Eleventy or Gridsome, query the API of the CMS for the actual content and still generate the site statically which allows it to be deployed more easily.

Since this site is mostly just me writing for the fun of it and the more interactive parts like comments haven’t really proved that used implementing this approach for the site was something I set about exploring, and what an exploration that was. It all ended up being somewhat more complicated than I expected, partially because the WordPress REST API isn’t necessarily set up for all the functions required for this sort of thing—ended up needing to install another plugin for authentication against the API so that things like site settings could be retrieved through it, normally only the session cookie based authentication is implemented—and another problem ended up being content management since I want to then also deploy the media I might embed in posts so that they don’t end up still being queried from the WordPress server and that use-case was surprisingly unsupported in many of the static site generators I looked at, not even through plugins. Now, of course, most of them support some form of filters or mapping or the like with which I could create this functionality myself without too much trouble, but I wanted something where someone else had (hopefully) figured out the edge-cases for me so that I didn’t have to go around thinking about file I/O and the like.

This lead me to settle on Eleventy which allowed me to reach my goals with the least amount of fuss—which is kind of what it bills itself with as well, “Eleventy is a simpler static site generator”.

Once that decision was made it was a relatively simple task of configuring Eleventy to query the WordPress API in order to fetch the posts and then display them in a near identical manner to the current site, with the biggest differences being the lack of comments because the site is now static as well as removal of some of the shall we say bloat that WordPress as well as JetPack include. It’s all well-intentioned and I could remove it if I liked so this isn’t a criticism of WordPress by any means—and in the case of JetPack I even chose to include that—but it’s still nice to see the site in a somewhat leaner form than it was before.

Getting the category-pages working however, was a bit more of a struggle—mostly because I’m somewhat stubborn however (and also not that familiar with Eleventy)—because I didn’t want to end up retrieving the pages from the API twice so I needed to figure out some way of providing two different collections while only retrieving that data asynchronously once. In the end however, I just ended up retrieving the data twice since that seemed to be the way Eleventy preferred handling this usecase, and in the end it’s just text so it shouldn’t lead to all that big of a transfer anyway.

After that, I simply needed to find a plugin for WordPress that triggers a webhook when a new post gets published so that the hosting for the static site knows to rebuild, and the process is essentially complete. For this I settled on Notification since it seemed on the surface the cleanest and simplest implementation and it looked like it would likely remain supported in the future as well—always a concern when adding a new plugin.

All in all, the process wasn’t perhaps quite as straightforward as I would’ve wanted but still easy enough to get everything going after I stopped being stubborn and just used the systems that actually provided the features I wanted (Eleventy, specifically referring to the local image support) instead of considering developing plugins of my own. From what I can tell the site also feels quite a bit snappier even for me so that’s a big plus as well, hopefully it ends up serving any potential readers better as well! Regardless, it was a fun journey.