Potato is yum

Potato is yum.

recent posts

Fun stuff (Coming soon)

  • My Book Launches This Week

    Um. Yeah. It’s time. Well crap. I’m really not ready for this thing but it’s kind of like a bandage where it’ll just get more painful if I take it off slowly. So like…. I’m gonna just let it rip. No looking back. I’ve got the whole thing setup and have started setting up the patreon. I wonder if anyone is actually gonna read this thing. That would be incredible.

    I guess I should do my little elevator pitch for why you should care about this random dude’s book.

    So the book is basically my story going through boarding school with a scifi twist from my favorite games and stories such as titanfall, halo, starwars, warhammer 40k, and many others.

    Aight, that’s it basically. Launch is on January 4th. Please check it out if it sounds interesting.

    https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/117862/fool-in-space

  • How to have fun playing Counterstrike

    So you want to have fun playing the single greatest game of first person chess? Well. That’s great because this guide is made just for you. To start with you need two important things. You first need to find the worst webcam microphone possible. Next, you need to learn an optimal way to play the game.

    The most difficult part of this guide is defining what fun even means. Winning? Maybe. Getting kills? Sure. Cursing out teammates? Hell yeah. Throwing the game? Up to you. Well, there’s one strategy that can do all of these things at once. It’s called the mid rush. No matter if you’re T or CT run it down mid every round. How is it fun? Well running it down mid is actually a winning strategy in most cases. Does it get you kills? Hell yeah it does. Curse out teammates? You can curse out that idiot who is sitting in window and didn’t trade you when you died top mid. And if they get mad tell them I said you could do it. They shouldn’t have missed that awp shot. Throwing the game? Rushing too far up mid is throwing so just keep running forward through mid if you don’t see anyone peeking mid. Simple way to throw.

    How do you flame your teammates? The best way is to learn some russian or chinese. Actually, chinese is getting more common so I would recommend that. Ragebaiting and cursing is a very difficult art form and takes thousands of hours to manifest in a usable manner. The best way to get better is to start earlier. In fact, this is exactly what valve’s goal is with cases. Start them young they say. I too think you can get a knife next case. 99% of gamblers quit before they win big.

    Are you tired of premier? Well so am I. Instead join me on competitive office. Competitive office is a work of art that is worth studying. I too sometimes lodge a vending machine in a door using a machinegun to push it over. What? You’ve never seen a bulletproof vending machine? Pfft. You’re missing out. Office is the perfect map for me to let out all my frustrations from working every day. Just by trashing my workplace I can already feel the large quantities of dopamine flooding into my brain. It’s great.

    So the real question is why do you want to have fun playing counterstrike? The fact you’re playing this game means you’re suffering. It’s okay. You’re not the only one. I’m also trapped in the addiction.

  • Solo Farming In The Tower

    I have loved this series for a while and am honestly surprised that Asura decided to pick up translating this one. Apparently the previous translator has made a large amount of money and decided to do other things with their life. Good on them I guess. The old translator did an incredible job so I hope Asura continues the great work as many of the jokes and much of the humor was a nice change of pace compared to other action webcomics where the jokes were about questionably funny things like appearance and such. I’ve already covered some other questionable jokes in webcomics such as the Charlie Kirk assassination joke and I’m thinking of making the long post this Tuesday on jokes and humor in art. Anyway, let’s get back to the review. As usual, between the separator sandwich is spoiler stuff. I try to avoid spoiling much but I do this because I have a visceral hatred for people that don’t give warnings for any level of spoiler in my reviews.

    So this story is kind of like an action webcomic masquerading as a slice of life webcomic. It follows pretty much every indicator of slice of life with cozy farming and everything and then hits you with like 5 chapters straight of combat action with just 2-3 chapters of farming rest stuff. These numbers are more similar to an action webcomic than anything meaning the pacing is actually quite fast for your typical tower comic in general because it swaps between this combat and farming thing meaning most combat is brushed over relatively quickly to move right into the next segment.

    The way the system is done is pretty refreshing as the progress of the character is done fairly well and the introduction of new characters is spread out to not overwhelm the reader. Overall it’s a fairly cozy action webcomic and is a great read to check out with 100 chapters in it’s first season.

    I would give it an 8/10 for the story and a 6/10 for art.

  • Practice Fight Scene Writing

    I decided to do some practice for my book by spending exactly an hour every day writing one scene. Basically, every day I think up something random and figure out a way to include all the major aspects of a fight. Stakes, payoff, all of it.

    Because I’m trying to do all of it in an hour, there is extremely limited wordcount to fit the whole scene into it. The average wordcount is between 500 to 1k so I have to hit every story beat in a pretty short span of time. It turns out that this challenge is really good for getting good at writing stories.

    I decided to put these up on RR to help make myself actually follow through with this daily challenge. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to read it because it is just unedited practice but we’ll see if I can continue this.

  • Asura’s Quality Improving?

    So I’ve noticed a noticeable improvement in Asura’s translations as of late. This is quite a welcome change as they used to have probably the highest standard out of all action korean translators with some of the most dedicated translators. As of late, Asura has been picking up two to three new IPs every month. The hitrate of these have been surprisingly good with the most recent wave of new additions being incredibly well done.

    Many of the longer running series have also seen a return to the previous high quality translations Asura was known for with series like Nano Machine getting fixes on a few chapters that had english translation on top of the characters that hadn’t been erased. This looks pretty promising and I’ll likely make a few posts on the new additions to the site as most of these additions are quite good.

  • Prosperous Universe Commodity Sim

    So I always loved the idea of legalized gambling. I mean, the stock market. Well. I’m a broke guy so I wasn’t able to play with money until very very recently. So instead over the past few years I’ve been playing with a bunch of virtual money on a game that accurately simulates a space economy and has won multiple awards for how realistic it is.

    This is the trading panel I have designed for myself to profit off SF fuel. From this program I was able to risk free practice gambling for when I got real money to waste on the actual game after I actually had money to waste. I think this is actually quite fun and educational. I went from around 5k to 1 million from flipping the margin of fuel which is a high volume commodity.

    I think this game was a very good first step into investing and really helped me understand what hedging is and how to do a cost benefit analysis of setting up a supply chain. The logistics networks in the game also helped me better understand the complexity of trade in a much more simplified and risk free manner. Losing a bet in the game doesn’t cost me anything but maybe a week of relatively safe margin flips.

    From this program I branched off into EVE trading and developed my gambling ability but I really feel like this program is the program for people to get into investing and finance.

  • The Delusions Of A “Magnum Opus”

    I make stuff because I really like other things. This is pretty common actually. I am confident in saying that the most common reason people get into some kind of art is because they are inspired by some other art in some form. And yes, I consider politics a form of art since it’s basically just professional rage baiting with structure and big money behind it. Ahem. Back to the point. Everyone starts making stuff because they have this idea of some kind of initial dream in their mind.

    For me, I’ve gotten into many different creative outlets. Let’s just go through the list and put in the “dreams” while analyzing just how delusion I am. To be clear, it’s not bad to be delusional. Like, you need to be some degree of crazy to waste this much time of your life get into creating.

    The first creative outlet I attempted was violin. When I was probably four years old I saw one of my pre-K teachers playing that wooden thing and foolishly pointed at it and looked up at my mother while in her lap. That one choice has probably costed my family more money and more suffering than my entire education up to college. Anyway, I thought that wooden thing looked really cool and wanted to play whatever nice sounding thing the lady was playing. Once I got to somewhat know violin I set my sights on the little Paganini. If you play violin you know what I’m talking about. For those who don’t, Paganini wrote some of the most advanced violin pieces requiring combinations of techniques that are practically inhuman. The little Paganini is a heavily simplified version of his piece which is still considered extremely difficult. I had my goal set and I was pretty confident I could do it… until I started actually realizing just how violin was. You see, when you talk to the “best” about “good goals” they’ll tell you the goals for being in their level. My parents and I were talking to contest winners, professional soloists, big concert violinists. There is an uncountable number of people in the world who play violin but there is a very finite number that play in major orchestras. This dream I had was pretty unattainable for someone like me who wasn’t planning on devoting my life to that little wooden box. The source of this delusion was asking for goal advice from the wrong group of people. I found the best way to learn the art but the people who can teach you to make an art form probably don’t see it in the same way as you since they have to be that much better to be able to teach it. To this day I still haven’t gotten around to the little Paganini even though I should be capable of playing it. Over the fourteen or so years I gradually realized that fixating on a single piece kind of killed all the fun in improving my technique and such and decided to pick out my pieces based on where I’d end up playing things. As such most of the pieces I know now are either pop songs or old folk songs to be played with friends or for the older folks in my family gatherings. In the end, I gave up the dream. A pattern that you will soon see is quite common among the forms of art I pick up.

    The second creative outlet I attempted was drawing. I always wanted to draw one thing and that is eyes. Someone told me that the best way to improve as an artist is to develop some kind of fetish. I guess I developed an eye fetish. I started drawing eyes on literally everything but really just wanted to eventually draw this space marine. In reality, this whole drawing thing started from my first shot at animation but that fizzled out so quickly so we don’t talk about it. The drawing was pretty short lived and all it took was someone looking at my sketchbook full of eyes and going, “ew”. The dream of drawing a space marine kind of shattered right there at the slightest negative push. I think this happened because something in me felt that I was so far away from where I would need to be for my dream and it felt hopeless. So, setting the dream ended up killing the motivation.

    The third creative outlet was game development. I’ve had this dream game in my mind for so long. I even drew assets for the game and everything. I did a crap ton of research for unity vs godot and a whole lot more. Once I sat down to start making my dream game I quickly realized how hard it was to make a game. After completing tutorials and such I would go back to my planning files and say, “Hmm, doing that is hard, what if I tried this instead?” After going in a development hell circle for over two years I looked back at the original document and realized that basically the whole dream game had changed. Was it my dream anymore? Did I even want to make this game? After I found myself asking if I even wanted to make it I realized that my dream game wouldn’t be as much fun as I had thought it would be initially. After two years of learning game design and game development I took a good look at my idea and tossed it in the trash. The dream I had made was made by my fairly incompetent self and the dream game idea was not as glorious as I had thought.

    The last creative outlet was video creation. I was actually a fairly prominent figure in the rust building scene and at one point decided I was going to make a documentary on the history of rust building. I did nearly a hundred hours of research and started to learn a ton of video editing things to do the project. However, as I got further and further into it I realized that to make the best dream video I would need to have a whole lot more practice. I thought I could actually do the dream this time unlike my other creative projects and pushed out an announcement to my rust building community that I would delay the video to increase the quality of the video. From then I started getting my hands on video editing software and scripting along with studying professionally produced documentaries. I very quickly realized just how big this kind of project would be. There’s a reason most documentaries have pretty massive teams behind them. It’s hard. While this dream is still ongoing I really don’t know if my personal skill in video editing and 3D animation software will ever reach the point where I can make my supposed magnum opus. I think my wish for the quality to be professional is pretty delusional but that’s my wish so the project will probably be stuck in limbo for a few more years.

    As some of you know, I’m currently entering writing. This time, I have no project as my dream. Instead, I’ve set my dream to be completing at least one book. I no longer wish to fall into some massive project I can never finish nor do I want to expect great results from what will be my first creation. I expect it to suck. I might have a really big ego saying this but I love consuming every piece of art I make. I literally go back and eat up everything I’ve made like it’s fresh bread out of the oven. So, even if nobody else reads my book, at least I’ll still be able to read my first completed book and enjoy it whenever I want.

    Thanks for reading. This post has much more rambling but probably has more of the me voice in it than usual. I’m probably going to talk more about some of my other weird projects like gardening or woodworking since I do a crap ton of different things. People often ask me how I find time to do all this. I don’t. I have no time. I wish there could be 48 hours in a day. AHHH.

    Oh. I almost forgot. Post plan this week:

    • Media Review
    • 1 week until my book releases announcement
    • Prosperous Universe Commodity Market Sim
    • How to have fun playing Counterstrike (Satire)

  • Battlebit’s Gameplay

    So now that we know the devs aren’t dead or something I guess I could actually say what I think about the philosophy behind battlebit as a game. When the game initially released it was hailed as the “battlefield killer”. Well, that aged poorly didn’t it. Battlefield six was incredibly successful and I think the gameplay of battlebit and BF6 kind of align.

    The new updates to battlebit attempt to polish the sound and visual clarity of the game. This is something battlefield somehow does incredibly well with the little triangle marking enemies at times where they are obviously marked. BF6 somehow does an incredible job at this spotting and makes the game much easier for a casual to play. I’m used to big combined arms games like planetside and appreciated the ease of spotting in planetside. However, planetside is an old game with many other issues that make much of the good things it does irrelevant.

    The snappy gunplay in battlebit was something I really liked and was mildly disappointed to see it slowed down in the playtest. I felt like I had to track ahead of my opponents to get kills and it felt clunky and slow. Looking at the comments, this is likely a result of the server lag and memory leak but I hope the devs consider going back to the more fast paced formula that worked in the original release of the game.

    One of the other things I feel is missing is the existence of any amount of cohesive squadplay. I know that battlebit has roots in milsim gaming and I feel like a beacon system similar the planetside might help with improving the cohesivness of squads instead of everyone just balling up on a point and using squadmates as spawn points.

    Some of my favorite memories in planetside were made in a squad of twelve dudes inside of triple fighting off an entire platoon of 48. The benefits of skilled cohesive squadplay in planetside were well established but not necessary to have fun and for every hour of sweating in triple was an hour of turning my brain off and following the zerg. I’ve seen people hate on the milsim roots of battlebit but I kind of want to see a bit more of it. Maybe in one of the playtests. Who knows.

  • A Few Hundred Words Of A Guy Who Really Hates SFM

    At this point I’m going to have to make this a weekly thing because this software is actually making me so mad that I might end up writing a whole hate post every week just for source film maker. So basically I started doing my project yet again and as expected I get a memory crash and have to figure out a way to shorten the recorded segment which I end up managing to do. Once I record the shortened segment I go playback and realize a bunch of textures are missing. Well, alright.

    So, I exit the program and try to reload the save since that’s how I almost always fix the textures and then it memory crashes yet again for a second time. Whew okay this is still within acceptable levels of jank. It is SFM. I rerecord the segment I want and start to playback and for some reason one of the bones is frozen. The lighting is all doubled. The sounds are screwed up? Okay. That’s weird. So what did I do now. Well apparently I recorded using the wrong view model so the whole thing is just off.

    That one is on me I guess. Still though, mildly aggravating. I redo my recording for the 3rd time and finally it all appears to be great. Time to export movie. Aaaaaaaand after like three minutes my computer blue screens. What. Why? Ah, something something drivers poop. Ugh. Okay an hour later after figuring out whatever that mess was I somehow managed to get a third of the scene I had planned finished. But now I need to record the other two thirds because I chopped it up to fit within the memory limit.

    Ugh. Pain. Well, it’s not like any other software could do better. I guess you don’t need to make a good product if you just make the best product your consumers can access. I’m so screwed.

  • Webcomic Review Of “Heavenly Demon Wants to Be A Chef”

    So Qi scans is a relatively new site and is the result of a few prominent Chinese translation teams coming together to form one team. Some of the webcomics that they have put up are not formatted correctly and there are a bunch of minor issues with the site even after a few months from when the merger happened. Anyway, I assume not much will change so I’m going to start going through the list since it seems like Qi scans is here to stay.

    I’m not an avid fan of portal fantasy and am generally pretty neutral when it comes to OPMC and the likes. Like all my reviews I’ll put up a warning here for spoilers. You can skip to the next separator if you don’t want any spoilers but there isn’t really much that I’m spoiling so it should be pretty safe to read.

    The premise of the story is that some OP cultivator guy gets transmigrated into a portal fantasy and his only interest is his hobby of cooking horrible monstrosities. The story plays into one of the more typical methods of limiting an OP MC which is the trope where they want to avoid attention for some reason or another. In this webcomic, the reasons behind hiding a pretty well established and the threats are fairly understandable making me feel like the application of this trope is actually surprisingly well executed.

    One of the biggest differences between this story and other action related OPMC stories is that this webcomic has the focus on the cooking rather than the action. The cooking drives the story and the action is almost always an afterthought to what the cooking will be. The amount of information fed to the reader is also done in a manner that prevents becoming overwhelmed and sets a very nice pace for the story.

    While the art is not exactly unique, there is nothing inherently wrong with it and each panel feels like a great deal of care was put into it.

    Overall I’d give this webcomic an 7/10 with 7/10 art. The only issue being the extremely predictable and repetitive nature of the story.