I’m starting to get a little bit… annoyed… with WordPress! If you can’t add a header to a blog template which gives you every indication that you can add a header, then they shouldn’t give you the dimensions of the header to make – should they? I wanted to make a few changes to “The Adventures of Darth Carla” (my alternate blog) this afternoon, so I found a (free) template that I liked, chose all my colours, organised my Widgets, did all the hard slog – looked at the header instructions (1000 x 250 pixels) thought “Yeah, I can make one that size!”, and I did. I saved it. I uploaded it. I instructed the template that that was the header to use. But. No header! I spent about 15 minutes trying to get the ruddy thing to display – nope, no go! (this isn’t the first blog template that has done this to me here at WordPress, either!) I can add a manual header (that is, write it in myself in the template set-up thingy using their fonts and colours), and what it displays when I do that is small... less than a quarter the size of the “recommended” header size that they tell you to make! All I can assume is that they got the header size wrong! I might try making a really small one tomorrow, and see if it’ll display that one… on the other hand, I might just try looking for another template – one that actually works! *grrrr!*
Anyway, as today was Sunday, himself and I traipsed off into Telara for another fun day of questing for fun and profit. It was a most successful day all round! We did finish off in Scarwood Reach this afternoon, having completed all the quests, won a special Achievement for earning three Hunting Tokens (for bringing back three “trophies” from certain Named Creatures* in Scarwood Reach), polishing off the final Rift and Rift Boss (the one I usually have to ask for help with – it’s almost impossible to finish solo!) and!!! Going up four levels! Amazing!! 🙂 When we finished Scarwood Reach we had the option of going off to Droughtlands or Moonshade Highlands. We opted for Moonshade Highlands and started off on the long, extremely convoluted and complicated, quest chain that starts off when you go and look at a strange Dwarven artifact – which magically transports you from your home city (Meridian, in our case) to Moonshade Highlands. Naughty Trion! They’ve gone and added an extra Porticulum to the mixture and not told anyone about it! (well, they didn’t tell me!) It caused a bit of confusion at one stage, as it was simply added to our list of known Porticulums – I thought it was the Porticulum almost directly below us being added (you used to have to go and talk to a Porticulum Master to open it and add it to your list, but that’s now changed – you only have to get within a certain distance from them and they get added automagically to your list) It would have been a lot easier if we’d known it was there… Oh well, my next girls through there will know and be able to take advantage of it… Better late than never, as they say in the classics… We’ve finished as much of that particular quest chain as we can for the moment, so next time we play we’ll go back to the Defiant end of Moonshade Highlands and just do “ordinary” quests until we level up enough to handle the rest of those weird Dwarven ones. Julian commented several times about how easily we were dealing with the mobs in Scarwood Reach – and so far in Moonshade Highlands, too! It makes me slightly uneasy – I’m getting the niggling feeling that something’s changed. Either we’ve been souped up, or the mobs have been made weaker – it never used to be this easy to level up, and I don’t think I like it all that much. There’s not much challenge any more! I used to dread it when himself insisted on going for yellow or orange quests (Green quests = fairly easy – mobs around your own level. Yellow quests = slightly harder quests – mobs up to 3 or 4 levels higher than you are. Orange quests = pretty damn hard (or they used to be!) – mobs more than 4 levels higher than you. Red quests = forget it Freddy! mobs up to 10 levels higher than you. Except in cases of Divine Intervention, you will die!) Now, green quests are hardly worth doing, they’re so easy. Yellow quests seem “just about right”, and Orange quests are very do-able and not to be shunned. So what’s changed? Where have the challenging quests gone? Have I, all of a sudden, become a Master Gamer? able to leap Orange quests in a single bound, and wave gaily at the Red quests as I sail overhead? I don’t think so… or is it that in order to attract more and younger players, Trion, in their wisdom, have dumbed Rift down to the point of “is it really worth playing?” And that would be a big shame…
Weigh-in this morning. I really didn’t think I would have lost anything this morning, so I mutely climbed onto the scales, fearing the worst. I went down to 103.0kg! Five points! I was stunned (and very happy!) I won’t make it to double figures by my Birthday, but I’ll be reasonably close (I hope!) I don’t expect this pleasant downward slide to last too much longer, but I might as well enjoy it while it does! 🙂
So tune in again tomorrow night – so you can commiserate when my weight goes back up again tomorrow morning (which it might! This is me we’re talking about, remember! 😉 ) or open the champagne if it goes down 🙂 Tomorrow is “Hair Day” and I’m looking forward to looking human again 🙂 Tuesday will see me getting geared up for… Wednesday… Oh, Wednesday! Bliss! The lift should be back in action! Which has given me a thought… When we’re going out, why don’t I… walk down to the ground floor, take the lift down one floor to the Garage (I’m not sure if the fire escape stairs actually go down to the Garage? Julian?) we go off and do our shopping or whatever, and on the way back, I get out on the third or fourth floor, and walk up from there! (as well as doing my normal, daily Stair Walks, not instead of them!) I’ll think about it, anyway – my knee is giving me hell on the going down bits. Hopefully I’ll hear something (please,please,please) about my nail polish tomorrow (I’m getting a trifle anxious about them – can you tell? 😉 ) I’ll let you know how my experiments with the template(s) for “The Adventures of Darth Carla” go – and I really must find the time to start writing it properly, and not just thinking about writing it! So until tomorrow night, bee good, don’t melt in this heat, and above all, stay safe! ciao, all! 🙂
*Named Creatures – special Elite monsters which have yellow nameplates (that is, they won’t attack you without provocation) and a little “diamond” icon next to their names. When you kill them, they drop a “trophy” object which you can exchange for a token. When you collect three tokens you get a special Achievement and bonus experience points.
My Word! 