Potato is yum

Potato is yum.

recent posts

Fun stuff (Coming soon)

  • Wind + Snow

    This morning sucked. It was snowing with 30+ mile per hour winds. I walked through it for twenty minutes. I even had to walk into the snow meaning it slapped my face and stung. It sucked. However, it made me think. As a writer, I like to write a lot of stuff I have experienced. So that could be from minor injuries to personal anecdotes to annoying grievances with daily life such as this. I write a story with a male lead and a close best friend because that’s what I’m used to. I know that feeling so that’s what I’d be best at writing? Right?

    From the wind and snow this morning I realized this was a pretty narrow view. Me experiencing the wind and snow this morning only really was concerned about the interaction between me and my suffering and the environment. A third person observer of me walking to class this morning would have noticed a struggling student barely standing upright slipping his way across treacherous roads to get to class.

    Now you may say “there’s no difference!” And you would be kind of right. Both describe my trip to class this morning. What’s different is the framing. I know a lot of people will now groan at this but framing matters a lot. In fact, debate has an entire topic just about winning framing because without a frame you can’t have a picture. When I frame my morning walk from the point of view of me in first person, the main focus is to push through the snow. The perseverance. The human aspect of the journey. However, this is just one way of framing the trip to class.

    If I frame my morning walk from a third person perspective, I see all the giant blocks of metal sliding across the road and barely stopping in time at the stop lights for me to pass. The giant patches of ice that I barely miss as I walk across the street. The other students next to me who also struggle through the snow with me. It goes from an individual feat of perseverance and human endurance to a scene that makes me seem small. Seem lucky. Seem extraordinarily vulnerable. Just one student in a sea.

    After thinking about it, I think I’m gonna need to start trying to write things from this higher perspective. It would be quite helpful. As a first attempt at this, I’m going to try and write my royal road contest submission with this in mind. Let’s see if it works out.

    Oh, and the snow really sucked. Sometimes I hate this city.

  • How I Deal With Ideas

    So I get a lot of ideas. In fact, I come up with probably 5 story ideas every day at least. I’ve made a post previously about why I throw out most of these because they are bad but never really outlined my philosophy for why I believe this is a good approach to ideas for writing and ideas of creative projects in general.

    When starting a project, you need to have some kind of emotional tie to it to keep yourself motivated no matter what happens in the project. You cannot get bored of the project. If you get bored of the project, is it really worth doing it? Of course, I’m talking about projects done as hobbies. If you do this stuff as a job you probably will have to utilize a different philosophy as mine revolves entirely around my enjoyment of creating as a means of having fun.

    So I said that whenever I get an idea I throw it out right away. This is actually not quite true. In my head is a bunch of ideas and projects I want to do at some point in my life. Let me just list out like the top 10 on my list right now.

    • Finish Fool In Space
    • Finish Royal Road contest submission
    • Titanfall 2 Edit
    • Counterstrike Edit
    • Youtube intro
    • Finish that compost bin in the backyard
    • Make a missile game using Conway’s game of life
    • Finish setting up the minecraft server for friends
    • Write a rougelike gun isekai litrpg

    So yeah. I go about my life with tons of ideas in my head at all times. You may ask, “How am I supposed to remember all my good ideas?” Well, that’s exactly why I don’t write down any of my ideas until I commit to doing them. If I think up an idea and instantly write it down, I’ve not let the idea pickle and mature in my subconsciousness. For all I know, the idea could be a stale specimen and be lost in the back of my head never to be remembered every again. Or the idea could be hidden gold with it’s true flavor being brought out by other specimens in the pot. The idea of not writing it down is to make myself need to remember my ideas.

    My memory is limited so there is a hard limit to the amount of ideas I can have at any given time. Human memory is also incredibly good at working on things while you are doing something else. I often am brushing my teeth and exclaim “Oh! That would be a great addition to that idea!” and then go into my brain’s memory and slightly alter the idea I had. A great example of this is my royal road contest submission. That idea pickled in my head for about four days before I committed on it. I usually would require an idea to sit in my head for 3-4 months before determining it’s readiness but the contest has a time limit so some concessions have to be made.

    The initial idea for the contest was “dragon rider dies and dragon mourns his death.” This could make an excellent story. I’m sure it could be great. But it felt to general. To grand. Too unrelatable. I didn’t have any personal attachment to the story. Why should I care? And if I don’t care about the story, why the hell should anyone else care? So then I thought about the idea. What was good about it? The dragon rider death part sounded great. The dragon mourning sounded great.

    From there I remembered my experience of mourning loss and realized that throughout life everyone loses some number of close friends and family. It’s inevitable. So wouldn’t that mean a dragon would lose many riders in their lifespan? Wait… that’s a new idea! So from there I decided “Dragon rider dies and dragon mourns their first rider’s death.”

    From there I kept looking at the idea and thinking “How could I inject more of myself, my feelings, my experience, my essence into this idea?” Unlike Fool In Space which is an author self insert story I didn’t want this story to be a self insert. Instead I wanted it to depict a typical human experience. An experience that is deeply human and relatable. I quickly realized that I was onto something and began to write that I will submit. I’m not gonna talk about it anymore because I gotta keep some surprises for the contest. Maybe follow the royal road of my contest submission as I’ll be putting up chapters near the end of the contest. It’s much heavier than anything I usually write. It’s… different. Whenever I write the story my eyes tear up while smiling so I hope that paints a picture for what it’s like. A happy tragedy.

    I find that my method of cooking up ideas prevents me from being sidetracked by random ideas as I only take a new idea off the stack when I’ve determined I have space to commit to another idea. My philosophy allows me to let good ideas cook more if all my time is allocated. My thinking is that even if an idea in my barrel is better than the idea in my hands I’d rather take that better idea out of the barrel when it is fully fermented rather than partially through the process. Leaving it in the barrel wouldn’t do anything bad to the idea because even if I forget the idea, the mere existence of the idea would have changed the water in the barrel and influenced every other specimen.

    This ideas fermenting in a barrel analogy is kind of a weird one but it has helped me maintain focus. Maybe it’ll be useful for someone else. Who knows. This is just what works for me.

    Aight. So here’s the post plan:

    • Media Review
    • Launch Week Over For My Book
    • Wings Of Liberty Is A Masterpiece pt2

  • Humble Pi

    So I just want to give a little bit of insight into what I usually read as like… a paper book. The one I’m currently reading through is Humble Pi By Matt Parker. The book is an incredible presentation of mathematics in a easily digestible format with jokes and fun remarks scattered about to keep your attention on the subject. I find that many of these mathematics books are really good at keeping a steady pacing and leading the reader to continue. It kind of makes sense that these books are good at that since many have the preconceived notion that math is boring.

    Is math boring? Or is it the way that math is presented that is boring? I choose to believe it’s the presentation that is boring. But I’m a math major. I’m probably biased. The intrigue and attention I give to mathematics is going to be greater than the average individual however I really like the way Matt Parker frames mathematics by showing just how much mathematics is intertwined with our daily lives. And they keep you reading by telling us exactly how bad it would be if suddenly the math went wrong. While these kinds of books aren’t really a great study for my fiction books, the structure of a story with hook, promise, payoff still apply and are very strictly followed to keep a reader on the mathematics. Unlike a cool fantasy world that you can picture in your head, it’s very difficult to picture a 64 byte computer system and it’s internal memory. The structure of a story is very apparent and I’ve found the book to be a nice case study for my own work.

  • Book Launched 1 Week Ago

    Hi. So, as you probably know, I started releasing my book a week ago. It’s been going pretty good so far. I’ve finally settled in to college so I’m going to return to writing and crap and these posts will go back to their normal ranting volumes at least until midterms or something.

    So let’s just go over what went good and what went bad since we’re halfway through the two week launch window I set aside for myself.

    First off, I think the critique and readers that went through these first seven chapters have helped immensely in improving the quality of the work. The first chapter had a very high click rate compared to my past two books where the first chapter was kind of just not clicked on much. I think actually trying for a few seconds on that blurb and getting that cover done really helped to sell that the book is seriously being made and not being slapped together.

    I’m starting to do shout swaps on RR now and I’m fairly hopeful that this would help my story grow. I’m not really going for RS because at the end of the day this is just a hobby. I have no financial investment in the success of the story since I put all this money and time into it expecting essentially nothing. Obviously, hitting RS would be nice and all but I’m going to stay skeptical as I am a pretty horrible writer. If you look at the later chapters that went through less beta readers and such, you’ll quickly noticed repeated words, repeated phrases, and many more small oddities that reduce the experience. I’m simply a bad writer. But like… I don’t really care.

    At the end of the day, people on royal road are reading this thing for free so I don’t feel the need to go back and make things perfect. In the end most people probably wouldn’t care anyway. There’s not much to say yet because the growth is supposed to be fairly slow for the first week. This next week with all the shouts and such will be when the growth really matters. We’ll see how it goes.

  • Royal Road Magazine Contest Submission

    So yeah. I decided to do it. In the end I came up with a pretty decent idea (I think). So I’ll just lay it out there since I’m still trying to come up with the details but I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp of the goal of the contest so I’ll just run through my thinking on how I’m gonna go through and do all this stuff.

    https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/147184/lunar-tombstone

    So basically the contest is meant to be for the judges. Not for RR as a whole. I mean, I’m already writing so off meta and so niche as my main book that this is basically no different. I can stick to my style of deep complex stories where multiple developments happen in a scene. In my normal writing I often structure a scene to depict both a character and a plot development occurring at the same time. This is important for me as I am an extremely slow reader and I write my stories for slow readers. Putting more meat into less words is incredibly important to me as a writer since that’s what I prioritize as a reader. This happens to be exactly what is necessary for the contest.

    The limits for the contest are 8-40k words. I’m shooting for the low end of 8k words and will attempt to make a high impact story in 8k words. How is that possible? How am I supposed to fit a full character development and plot arc into 8k words. To sum it up, I have to cut my words in other areas. One of the biggest budget eaters in the wordcount is the worldbuilding. Worldbuilding can easily eat more than half of a word budget. So I decided to pull on literally every fantasy trope imaginable to reduce my worldbuilding to almost nothing.

    With this, I’ll have 8k words of purely development and basically nothing else. The judges also aren’t typical RR readers so my off meta writing that isn’t LitRPG or progfantasy will actually stand a chance. I hope that my writing ability can stand up to others though. I consider myself quite new to this whole writing thing. My chances are low but like eh whatever. It’s kinda fun to participate and I don’t really lose anything if I don’t make it. And in the end, gambling is one of my favorite activities. 99% of gamblers quit before they win big. So, I’m not gonna quit on gambling for this contest win.

  • Wings Of Liberty Is A Masterpiece

    I’ve done a post about the trailer for Wings Of Liberty where I went over the introduction of Tychus and how the camera/lighting built upon the anticipation for the story. But the only reason why the trailer was so successful other than simply being good was that the actual game itself was incredible causing people to watch the trailer to figure out what the buzz was. So, I’m gonna go over what makes Wings Of Liberty click to me. Major spoilers below. Please do not read this if you haven’t done the campaign. I will ruin many plot twists. It’s worth playing through it yourself.

    The characters of the Wings Of Liberty campaign is Raynor and Tychus versus Mengsk and his dominion. The whole story revolves around Raynor trying to free people from the grasp of the dominion while Mengsk wants to continue controlling the dominion with his iron grip to safeguard humanity the horrors of space. This whole story revolves around a huge grey area where Mengsk is obviously a bad guy since he has killed so many people and caused so much suffering but it’s difficult to say if it’s really Mengsk’s fault since without him many more would have died to the swarm. From this, the story has a large grey area that mirrors our real world. A lot of moments in history have these “grey areas” such as the actions of Stalin or dictator Mao when they came to power in the USSR and Communist China. Both enacted widespread policies that harmed many individuals but also played key roles in the industrialization of their countries. Without those two men, it would be hard to make a case that Russia and China would be as powerful as they are today. However, it can’t be said that they were good people since thousands suffered under both men’s rule. This is exactly the same as Mengsk and his dominion. In fact, Mengsk has this voice line that echoes his grasp as a dictator, “My Dominion. Right or wrong.” This mirror of history evokes very deep thought as people have the weigh the moral obligations over the nationalistic obligations. This conflict deepens the story as Raynor slowly picks apart the dominion and realizes just how much Mengsk was doing to try and defend the dominion that was slowly losing. Raynor find himself caught between the Zerg and the Dominion and has to go out and save colonies and people who the dominion gives up on.

    When you think about it, is it wrong for the dominion to give up on millions of human lives? Yes. But is it wrong for the dominion to give up millions of human lives to reinforce the already faltering defenses of key planets? Well, that’s a tough case to make. And there’s no clear answer for this question since the knowledge of what is true and what is dominion propaganda is extremely blurry. Almost as blurry as the politics of our current world. The parallels are shockingly close.

    Okay I’m now going to spoil a big part of the campaign. This is your last chance to get out of here and play it yourself. I highly recommend playing it without this spoiler.

    The relationship between Tychus and Raynor is truly what makes the campaign my favorite out of the starcraft 2 campaigns. Tychus and Raynor are friends with problems but still friends no matter what happens. In the first game, Raynor is forced to abandon Kerrigan which is the start of the whole rebel thing. Tychus strikes a deal with the dominion to help Raynor find Kerrigan and to eliminate Kerrigan. As the story progresses, Raynor and Tychus become closer and closer with the backstory between the two slowly being sprinkled here and there in small nuggets of information. By the time the climax of the story comes, the player is able to piece together all the events that happened between these two characters and really understand just how close they are.

    The final scene where Tychus chooses to help his friend becomes even more impactful through the hours of build up, banter, and backstory that was built up through the story. The characterization of both of the characters were so well done that they felt like actual real people with real problems. The final cut to black is especially jarring as the player know exactly what happened. I don’t feel sad for Tychus. Out of every story I’ve read or watched, they probably throw out the most banger one liners I’ve ever heard. From the “It’s about damn time” to “We all got our choices to make.” The final result isn’t all to surprising after it happens as we remember the countless foreshadowing scattered throughout the game in offhand remarks and such that this result was possible. Because of this foreshadowing, the ending doesn’t feel stolen or negative in any way because we know exactly what Tychus want and we know exactly what Raynor wants. From playing the game we also know the relationship between Tychus and Raynor. From all of this, the result of the final scene where Raynor carries his princess out of the cave is pretty predictable.

    To be honest, I wanted to write a whole lot more about this. But I quickly realized that I could write a whole ass article on this and I don’t really got the time for all that. So instead, I’m just sticking to the two things I liked most. If I decide to do a full in depth analysis I might write it up and post it in small parts. Who knows. I haven’t played Wings Of Liberty in like five years. Maybe I should do another playthrough.

  • Taking A Break Cause Today Was Bad

    Yesterday was the 71st consecutive day without missing a post on this website. That’s a fifth of a year. It’s a bit difficult for me to write something interesting every day especially on bad days. Today was one of those bad days. So I guess I’ll just rant about my bad day.

    So like today wasn’t bad because something bad happened. To be honest it’s really just that I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go to sleep again. So I ended up waking up today with my brain a mush and had to slog through the day. This happens maybe once or twice a year. It sucks. Well, can’t control everything huh? Sometimes the day just sucks. So yeah. No post for today because my brain just can’t right now. The planned posts for this week are probably 80% done so there’s some good meaty posts to dig into over the weekend.

    Man. Brain fog is one hell of a debuff.

  • Review of ‘A Mercenary’s Rebirth Among Nobles’

    So Asura has decided to add a bunch more webcomics. I picked one to review. There might be spoilers so you has been warned.

    So the basic idea behind the story is literally the title and doesn’t really deviate from that. Following common tropes, the father of the noble he regresses into is one of those “prove yourself” harsh families and his brothers want to suppress him. Like most regression stories the main way he gets an advantage is through future knowledge. I somehow feel like the usage of the future knowledge and the “rule with strength” trope are executed in a pretty good way that they don’t feel like their smothering the MC’s issues. It feels like the MC actually does have to use his brain to figure things out and the conversations are workable.

    The story only has twelve chapters so if my opinion of it changes I’ll make a new post about it. But for now, I would give it a 6/10 for story and 5/10 for art. Not bad and not good.

  • Not Enough Time!!!

    I have a big problem. It’s probably a common problem. I wish there were more hours in a day. But I really can’t change that because no matter what I do I’ll only have 24 hours in a day and I’ll probably spent 8 of those hours eating and sleeping. So how do I go about finding more time?

    There’s like two obvious solutions to this problem. Do less stuff. Do more stuff faster. But there’s another solution that a lot of people don’t consider. Just do stuff. What do I mean by this? So when I found I was trying to search for more time the first thing I figured I should do was figure out how to less stuff. This meant cutting out some stuff from my schedule and only doing the stuff that “mattered”. The issue is, how do you know what the most effective method of relaxation is? It kinda depends on the day so any plan you make would probably need to change. So like you can say “No youtube” but if you don’t feel like gaming or reading it might actually be more effective to watch a youtube video as a break. It’s really hard to figure out what to cut from a schedule because a lot of a schedule subconsciously acted upon from habits that have been formed. Habits are hard to break. I can never seem to break habits. So how do I spend less time on time expensive habits? I don’t spent less time on them. I instead frame it as spending more time on the positive habit of spending more time on more productive habits.

    The issue of framing is incredibly important and is so underrated. Politicians make a living by reframing world events to match their interests. We all know how powerful this ability is. So why not leverage this to help promote better habits? As a consequence of spending more time on productive activities, you’ll just have less time to spend on other things. The other option is to do more stuff faster. People often think “Ah, I’ll just multitask.” Uh. No. You cannot multitask. It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. You cannot watch a livestream while doing work. It doesn’t work like that. So how do you actually work faster? I found that the best way to increase efficiency is to focus on your mental and physical health. Sleeping 6-8 hours a day, eating three meals, walking for an hour a day, keeping healthy hygiene, generally staying healthy. By fulfilling all of your daily needs your brain will be more free to devote resources to the work at hand rather than worrying about the more mundane issues that you should be completing anyway.

    When I first went to boarding school I slept 5 hours a day, skipped breakfast, only walked 15 minutes from my dorm to class. Studying felt horrible. I fell asleep in some classes. My physical condition was pretty horrendous and might have (probably) contributed to me becoming dangerously ill. After leaving boarding school, I got my shit together and started taking care of myself. Not only did I start to have more fun playing games or socializing with friends, my work also improved in quality and quantity. My brain simply was simply more capable when it was sufficiently maintained.

    The issue with these two solutions is that it takes quite a long time to see results from them. And long term results are had to justify. I know that. I’ve been there. I’ve been in those trenches before. You know you have a problem but it seems to far gone to get out of it. So what is something you can do right now? Just do stuff. As I started setting healthy goals to develop various important skills I realized that I was spending maybe a third of my waking hours on my phone scrolling through youtube shorts. It was actually kind of ridiculous. I’d sit down at noon and then look up at the clock four or five hours later and realize it was almost dinner. What had I done between lunch and dinner? Basically nothing. What could I do during that time? Literally anything. So that’s what I did. Literally anything. I picked up so many creative projects so that I never lacked something to do. I now always have something to work on. I don’t have time to waste since I have set ambitious due dates for every project. If you’re having trouble coming up with fun projects or interesting media to consume then check out a bunch of the other posts on this site. I do a ton of stuff. Probably too much.

    So… I started with not enough time and I still don’t have enough time in addition to 5 new projects on my plate. Is this really the solution? Yeah. Failing to finish a personal project won’t hurt anyone. You can just push it back a few weeks. Missing a deadline on a major project or not studying for an exam will screw you over. By keeping your brain active and thinking it’ll be fairly simple to swap out these projects for activities that are more important. And, you’ll never have enough time because the internet is designed to take all the time you have. So, you may as well spend your time on yourself to improve your skills.

    Oh yeah. Post plan:

    • Humble Pie
    • Wings of Liberty is a Masterpiece
    • Media Review
    • 1 Week Since Book Launch + Future Plans
    • Royal Road Magazine Contest

  • Andor Is Good

    I’m not gonna lie, when I made that first starwars post I had only reached episode 8 of the 2nd season. And at that time I was completely taken in by the story. The more I sat through the final four episodes of the show the more I could see the parallels between the story and real life. From a few articles I could tell that these parallels aren’t an accident. So yeah. I’m gonna go through the ones I especially like and stuck with me after watching the whole show. So spoilers after this line. You’ve been warned.

    I want to first start this by saying I’m not a binge watcher for media that encourages deep thought. Andor is a show that I consider one that provokes deep thought and as such I only watched an episode every week for my mind to mentally reset and process all the events of the previous episode. I think this improved my enjoyment of the show as I was able to go into every episode with a fresh head open to thinking through the ideas presented before me.

    Episodes about the stolen space ship was a pretty great hook for me. I did not remember much from the first season except for the prison break and the poor guy that couldn’t swim (I didn’t cry. I promise) so having a very quick reintroduction to all the main characters was very welcome. I found that the portrayal of Cassian and Bix as unstable just trying to get by in life was incredibly relatable. When I think about it, aren’t almost all of us rebelling in some way during our lives? From malicious compliance, internet piracy, to simple boycotts and other actions we also in a way do these “acts of rebellion.” And just like Cassian and Bix I wouldn’t say any of us are fully in control of our lives. Of course, Cassian and Bix’s instability is amplified to accelerate the story and portray a stronger image but the messaging from their characters stick in my mind as “normal people trying to get by” which is something not many other shows (I watch) do.

    Last time I made a post about Andor I mentioned the childhood banker friend. But before we go through that, let me compliment the characters. I suck at names. I’m like seriously bad. I can’t remember almost any of the characters. But these characters were so well done that I can remember nearly all of them. They all feel so distinct. So human. The flaws of each of them is put on full display and amplified to really make them more memorable. Like the senator has to make her speech about Gorman even though she knows the empire is gonna try to stop her at all costs. Whenever we saw the senator on screen the word “safety” seemed to be eating away at her. Luthen repeatedly mentions her safety at the cost of her friends, her allies, everyone around her. Right before the speech she looks around and realizes nobody around her is truly on her side. Everyone is working for something else. Something she doesn’t understand. And she’s scared of it. Scared of the rebellion. Scared of something new. I think the senator represents so many people in our society scared of change, scared of the people changing around them. Yet just like everyone today, to survive she pushes forward.

    Holy crap. Uh. So I wrote more than expected. Sooooo we’re splitting this post in half. If you couldn’t tell I really loved the show. It was incredible.