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A bit of site rearranging
The tag cloud I have on the homepage of this site was starting to get quite enormous, what with it representing three different games’ worth of tags now, as well as tags that aren’t directly related to any of the three Elder Scrolls games I’m currently playing.
So I did a bit of cleanup work on the site. Each game I’m actively playing right now now has its own landing page, like so:
Each of those pages shows its own playthrough and screenshot links, as well as its own tag cloud.
The tag cloud remains in place on the home page, but now it’s for tags that aren’t specifically related to any given game.
I’ve updated the site menus to reflect all of this. If you click on the Skyrim, Morrowind, or ESO menus now, you can go directly to the game landing pages from those menu items. Or you can use the actual menus below them.
I’ve also added a dropdown menu underneath Posts off the main menu as well, to include the “Modding”, “Other Commentary”, and “Site Updates” categories of posts, which I periodically do outside the context of game playthroughs. So if you want to see my modding commentary, such as for Steam Deck or in my Windows VM on my new Mac, or any other non-game-specific posts, that’ll be the place to look.
Any questions, let me know!
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Gaming surprise of the week No. 2: new M1 MacBook Pro!
I’d already called out in my pages for the Anna Play Skyrim site that I’d been planning to upgrade my primary laptop and get an M1 version of the MacBook Pro. Dara’s also recently upgraded her laptop, but I wanted one with the fancier M1 Pro Max chip, because I knew for sure that I wanted to game on it. And I also wanted 32GB of RAM.
The surprising part that comes in here is this: Apple dropping a bunch of security updates and Catalina, the version of the operating system my prior machine has, not receiving any. Apple never actually announces these things to the public, but that round of security updates strongly suggested to Dara and me that Catalina had fallen off their official support matrix.
Which meant that that machine, Aroree, is probably now unpatchable. Which is not acceptable for any machine actively talking to the Internet.
So I’d been setting aside some funds already intending to save up for the new machine. The security update situation, though, accelerated my and Dara’s timetable for when we were willing to get me a machine, too. I went ahead and ordered one a couple of weeks ago.
And now Apple actually shipped it to me this week, a whole week earlier than expected. 😀
I’ve gotten it set up now, including with a Windows 11 VM. Which means that this new machine–dubbed Lydia–is now in play as a thing I can game on.
I’d hoped to try to run Elder Scrolls Online on this machine, but that’s proving problematic. (More on this in my next post.)
So for now my primary gaming intentions on this machine are going to be Skyrim-focused. Primarily, that’s going to be Skyrim Together Reborn. I have STR functional on the Deck now, but doing it on the laptop will actually be better, because I’ll have a bigger screen and a full keyboard at the same time. And can plug in headphones for voice chat purposes.
That said, it’s also pretty much guaranteed that I will experiment with mods on this machine as well! It may be even better for modded playthroughs than the Deck, I dunno yet. It’ll be fun to find out!
I’ll be updating relevant Anna Plays Skyrim site pages to include this new addition to my gaming-capable electronics! And I’ll have plenty to say about the machine in general over on the main annathepiper.org blog soon.
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Introducing the Anna Plays Skyrim site
After spending many months writing up Skyrim playthrough posts for my main site of annathepiper.org, I finally decided I had enough content that it really warranted its own dedicated site. With this post, I’m pleased to announce that site is now live.
Its official title is Anna Plays Skyrim, and its official address is
https://skyrim.annathepiper.org/.All of the same content posted to my primary site related to Skyrim has been copied over to this new site. All the prior playthrough posts for Alarrah, Merawen, Delga, and Ysani are here, rearranged quite a bit to clean up the organization.
Notably, with the following changes:
- Since Alarrah’s playthrough was partially documented on Twitter before I started writing regularly WordPress posts about her, I created a bunch of backdated posts that link off to those Twitter threads. Which let me use the same tags on them that I did on all later posts for Alarrah and the playthroughs since. It also let me format Alarrah’s page the same way the others are done.
- All playthrough pages now have character pics, and a bit more information about each character, such as their backstories and where their names came from.
- All screenshot galleries are now moved off to their own standalone pages, for the sake of cutting down on general page length for any given page.
- This site has its own WordPress theme. The one I’m using is called Ashe Pro, which I liked well enough to pay for, since it has a lot of nifty customization options.
All future playthrough posts will be posted to this site rather than to annathepiper.org.
I have also set up this site to crosspost to Dreamwidth, so Dreamwidth friends, you should still see my posts coming over. Please let me know if they look weird.
I hope you all like this setup!