Ding! Level 275, the old level cap! That means one thing: Odium!
More symbols, more daily EXP! And not only that, I have my second Legendary Additional Potential! As I still have all of my Additional Potential Cubes left from the Savior shop, there's a good chance to get my next item to Unique.
Now that I've hit Level 275, I'm aiming to reach Level 280 before Arteria hits. Currently, I'm at an average of 2% a day, so it is very likely to happen as 6th Job is a three-month update. Arteria isn't released until the second update, so there's still plenty of time with one entire month of Shangri-La dailies, a reduced EXP curve and higher EXP rates for pretty much everything. I'm definitely not going to reach Level 285 before Carcion hits, but I'm more than happy with the prospect of having two of three symbols unlocked at release day. Much better than what happened last time.
To give you an idea: one GIF takes between one and three hours to create after I've recorded it. I've mentioned that my Destiny blogpost would be under 50000 words. It's well past that now. Here's a perspective on how much it is: the completed works has a total of 98 chapters, and each chapter is about the size of this blogpost you are reading now. So yes, you could argue that the Destiny blogpost is worth one hundred monthly blogposts: that's eight years, in fact.
Certain chapters will contain multiple GIFs, some will not. It's safe to assume that I'll need over 70 of them, and with my ongoing health issues, I can only produce a handful a day. While I want to have this thing out as soon as possible, I'm currently facing the reality that it might take until the end of the year, in worst case scenario maybe even next year. I'm not even sure anymore if I can have this and the Crest of the Solar blogpost out before 6th Job arrives.
Right now, Maple's been exceptionally loaded on dailies because of several overlapping events. I'm currently playing between five and six hours a day now because Hyper Burning and Guild Castle are very time-consuming. This hasn't really given me much spare time to work on said blogpost, but thankfully most of these events will end early August. So I'm expecting to be able to pick up the slack next month. So, let's assume I'm able to produce at least ten GIFs a week - that would still require up to three months. Either way, I'll do my best to deliver on it. Speaking of delivering...
I do have good news. After messing around with my blog's source code, I've managed to add a table of contents feature to my blog. I have already updated several older blogposts to include one. You can see them for yourself:
- All of the published seven (of eight) 5th Job skill waves: V, Beyond, Nova, Ark, Black, Glory and Awake.
- Other blogposts: Upper Charge & Leap Attack, the Enrage 1/3 Split, Blink and Adventure Rings 101.
- Examples of blogposts without, but are planned to have one later: Ryude's Ruling, LEGO Inside Tour.
It might not be perfect, but it does the job. If it works, it works. And that's all I really need, to be honest.
Of course, the Destiny blogpost will have it now, too*. This is also why I haven't been able to get much work done on the GIFs. It took several days to find the right table of contents that suited my needs, to figure out how to get it to work, and to keep it from interfering with Blogger's core functionality. I went with this one. I initially tried the code as it is, but after I had an incident, I had to modify the code and define new headers for a cleaner environment. That did the job. Apparently, headers such as h1, h2 and h3 are already occupied by Blogger's source code for the blog's template, so these can't be used with the suggested code as is given by the tutorial. It will mess up the blog's appearance if you do.
*Yes, I'm implying here that the Destiny blogpost would've originally been without one, if it weren't for this. Pain.
But now that it's working, I think it's a great addition to the blog. I've wanted to have one for a long time, and for some reason, Blogger doesn't have one by default. The main reason why I picked this code in particular, is because it allows me to hyperlink immediately to chapters of choice (example), as seen with the hyperlink ending with #point(number). It's a very handy feature, especially in case of the Destiny blogpost, where I'm constantly referring to older blogposts. I'll update older blogposts to incorporate chapter-based hyperlinking where appropriate, in the future. And while there are several other features I'd still like to add (i.e. picture slideshow for LEGO posts), I'll leave that for another time.
Anyway, that's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!