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  • Murim Login and “VR” Webcomics

    For the longest time, I’ve been sort of against all of the stories that generally fall under the umbrella of “VR” webcomics. I have tried reading the OG “VR” webcomic which is that whatever painter it is called but honestly never found it to be a genre I would go out and try to find. Another examples from this genre that are pretty well known is Overgeared and many others. To be honest, I’ve read a crap ton of these “VR” webcomics and have just generally found the whole idea behind the genre kind of meh as a personal opinion. I can see the appeal but it’s not for me. That is, until I found Murim Login. So then that got me thinking, why don’t I like it?

    So typically, the “VR” element of the story is introduced as a way to essentially have two running stories that are connected by the main character. This makes the story much more difficult to follow because it literally is a story that goes through two worlds. Now this isn’t unheard of in fantasy where you could have different dimensions and such but one of the major differences between portal fantasy and “VR” is the lack of challenge in crossing between the supposed worlds. One of the big foundational ideas that a lot of the “VR” stories follow is the idea that you can just join up into the virtual world and there you go, instantly transported to a different dimension where a typical fantasy story would have some kind of mechanic that must be used to bridge the gap between worlds.

    We see from newer “VR” stories an attempt at putting some kind of barrier between the reality and the virtual world to add some kind of resistance between crossing the barrier whenever something gets difficult. To name a more traditional example, Ready Player One is a perfect example of a book that uses VR but adds friction between the worlds in the form of danger from the virtual world spilling over into the real world. This kind of barrier adds tension and makes the virtual world feel like it has actual impact on the character.

    Now when we compare Murim Login and Overgeared we can see how both use some kind of virtual world however the effects of the virtual world have a much more direct impact in Murim Login as the powers he gains in the virtual world transfer over to the real world. For the main character of Overgeared really nothing other than more wealth is transferred over. This makes it feel like the character in the game is a totally different character as the one in reality since the character progression of the character in both worlds is so loosely linked. I think this is the biggest reason why I tend to dislike these virtual reality stories which divide the real and virtual world without having risks or progression carry over between worlds.

  • Frozen Chicken

    I love frozen chicken. Okay so like imagine you got 3 tests tomorrow you gotta somehow get something in that stomach of yours and you really really really don’t want to eat some garbage junk food. That’s why frozen chicken is so good. I got this breaded frozen chicken from Costco and I think it might be the best thing I’ve ever bought for me to stay at least somewhat healthy when I’m needing to cram in a bunch of work. Just a few minutes in an air fryer or even in the microwave and I have a full meal with protein without any of the weird preservatives that are in much more processed meat snacks.

    I really think that for much of my life I have neglected the value of eating well and sleeping well. When I was in school last year I slept 5 hours a day and ate much less than I should have. Probably around 1700 calories a day on average. It was simply not sustainable and it was difficult to study or do anything productive during those days. Just by fixing my eating and sleeping habits I found myself able to work much more efficiently which led to gaining more free time for working out and other activities that improved my efficiency even further.

    Somehow, I think frozen chicken might have pulled me out of the depths.

  • Tropes Are Good

    When used right. So yeah. Their not always good. But it’s impossible to write any story without them so what matters is the execution of a trope. Okay so like why do I care about this random stuff so much? Well it’s because I’ve been writing this little book called “Fool In Space” and I’m using this website and these posts as a kind of advertisement for my book that will be release on January 4th. Okay I’m done with the shameless plug.

    What is a trope? Well to put it simply, it’s a common occurrences in similar stories that provide a framework for readers and writers to fill in a story. At least, that’s how I define a trope. Some might have other ideas. It’s impossible to make a story without a trope since the trope is often what brings in your audience. Without some kind of framework, why would a reader ever give your story a chance? They wouldn’t. You need something familiar to get a reader attached to your story but also need something to keep the reader to continue reading.

    So Mudkip, what you’re saying is make a story predictably unpredictable. That’s insane. A total contradiction. Well… yeah. That’s why writing is hard. It sucks. Why do you think it took me 4 years to write a hardly coherent book that I’m scared will flop? Anyway, let’s pull a trope directly from my story. So I’m pretty sure everyone has seen the “hidden OP” character trope that is often used in anime and webcomics. I decided to take a little piece out of this for some of my characters. So how did I do this?

    First of all, I had to understand what made the trope successful. To break it down I looked at countless different media and found some similarities. Each of the characters that hide their OP power do so because of a reason that is tied to them as a character and not a plot point. This also helped reinforce my understanding that it’s better to build a story around characters rather than characters around a story. Personally, I give quite a lot of power to my characters. If I think my character wants to kill someone, they will kill someone. However, I carefully tuned my characters in such a way that I have the freedom to put them into situations where their development as a character progresses.

    Okay back to the trope thing. Hopefully I stop getting distracted. I’ve already spouted my hate for the use of the phrase “that person” as a horrible feeling trope. However, I’ve decided to use “that person” as a means of letting the reader paint a picture in their own head of the hidden powerful person in question. In my case, that would be the main character’s mother. Throughout the first five chapters, we never meet the mother but my main character and his father constantly ask each other “What if mom finds out?” painting a picture in the reader’s head that these two are screwed if mom finds out. I think this application of the “that person” trope is able to perfectly mix with the hidden OP character trope to make someone mysterious while also not annoying the reader as the main focus of the story at this point was never on the mother as a character but rather mother’s power over the family.

    I find that these two aspects of the character that is called mother are different. Just like how a businessman treats a politician and a policeman differently, one who is in the face of family would act differently than one who fears the power of another. In this case, the two characters fear mother’s power in the military rather than mother as a character which is clearly articulated through the dialogue. By doing this, I manage to somewhat eliminate the annoyance of “that person” while maintaining the promise of the “hidden OP character” trope.

    Anyway, I hope this helps anyone else who is trying to write. I’m relatively new to this thing so I’m just spouting what I’ve found. That’s it for me today. And PC now half works so that’s good.

  • Advertising Books Is Hard

    Aight it’s that time of the week again where I desperately try to plan something and inevitably fail to correctly plan out my time for various posts on this website. I’m thinking of sticking to smaller and simpler posts this week as my book comes together and some other things in life have cropped up. I’ve been quite busy and writing a book is really hard.

    Let’s get to the matter at hand for why I’m so busy. So I’ve set aside $500 for the publishing of this book. And since I’m self-publishing the main source of revenue for this book will be through a patreon that I start at the launch of the book. This means to break even I would need times of people paying me $10 a month. Assuming I’m shooting for the book to run 10 months I would need at least 1 new member a month. Since I write 1 chapter a week I would need to have 45 chapters ready to break even on my investment. Out of the $500 I’ve spent $300 on my book cover and this website meaning I’m left with a little less than $200 on advertising. If I got an ad made by my cover artist I would only be able to afford 1 custom ad. That’s for sure not enough since each ad costs $55 to put up (not including tax) and most artists don’t do commercial use commissions under $100. This puts me in a difficult spot. On one hand I could expand the budget but I really am not confident in my ability to break even. After all, who wants to read a book written by someone as crazy as me?

    Contents for this week:

    • Tropes Are Good
    • SFM Is Stupid
    • One Punch Man S3 Is Disappointing
    • I Love The Starcraft2 Cinematics
    • Frozen Chicken
    • Media Reviews

    Aight that’s it for me today. I didn’t find the time to fix my PC yet so every 10 or so minutes it gives a memory error and blue screens. Well whatever. Still works. Right?

  • The Best Direct Strike Mutations

    So I play a lot of starcraft 2 and one of my favorite arcade games is Direct Strike. Now a lot of people will start calling me names for this but hear me out, it’s the best game to play while I sit around on my computer waiting for someone to hop on a meeting that they arranged but didn’t show up to since I can still play the endgame while doing work since the endgame of each matchup is pretty much solved.

    So the additions for the weekly brawl this week is 3 mutations that give extra starting cash and the one that makes every wave go at the same time. This is crazy fun because now all the players smash heads at the same time making it actually kind of difficult to hard counter a team unless they totally screw up their initial units.

    I honestly didn’t expect to have more fun this week than last week with the 3 aura mutations but I’ve already played over 30 games this week when usually I just play 2-3 games and then the novelty dies off. The amount of times I screamed, “MORE SPLASH” in the chat is hilarious. Ah and if you see swimmingkip on your team say hello. 🙂

    If you haven’t tried the weekly brawl yet, it’s worth a shot. Oh and the coop mutation this week is also pretty fun. Just make sure you keep track of the candy otherwise your mineral lines will get destroyed in the blink of an eye.

  • Surprisingly Good Murim Webcomic

    Surprisingly Good Murim Webcomic

    Whenever Asura releases a new webcomic my expectations are generally pretty low. At this point I pretty much expect a 6/10 webcomic from them. Something readable but nothing that I would keep up to day on every week. To my surprise, Asura recently added a pretty good webcomic to their collection.

    The webcomic I’m talking about is Rebirth of the Divine Demon which is a story about some guy who was really powerful that ends up dying and then enters someone’s body and decides to live in that body. The story follows many common tropes and doesn’t really innovate on anything however by following the common tropes the story avoids many potholes on the path that many other Murim stories trip on. It also helps that the art that was done for this webcomic is incredible. I am tempted to even say it is on the same level as Nano Machine which is an incredibly high bar to meet. There’s no spoilers in this so you may continue without worry. 🙂

    The story doesn’t let itself get bogged down in backstory by only including brief flashbacks to history that span at most 1-2 panels with longer backstory embeded inside of scenes where the main character is also trying to figure out the world alongside the reader. This makes the backstory introduction feel very natural and maintains interest by keeping it short and to the point. I often see murim stories go through and explain the backstory of a villain that the main character take 2 frames to walk up, slap, and kill them. Why spent five panels developing a character that doesn’t actually matter? It’s honestly a waste of time. 5 frames isn’t enough time for me to form any real connection to a character and simply knowing a character’s backstory won’t make me feel any reasonable amount of empathy for them. As a reader, I develop my connection with characters through that character’s interaction with other characters. I very much appreciated the author’s respect for my time as a reader by cutting out much of the unnecessary filler by either not asking about it or making the main character cut off what could have been a monologue.

    I also really appreciated the semi-predictable payoff cycles in the story. From the nature of it being a murim story, we already know the main character will be able to get to the end of each arc and win. It’s kind of obvious that the main character will need to power up and as a reader I always have some idea in my mind for how I think the main character will power up. However, the author always manages to make some kind of plausible twist that made my prediction only partially correct. This would give me validation because I was right but not bore me because there was something more to what the story had to offer.

    The characters felt very real. This was complimented by extremely detailed art that helped to solidify the disposition of each character making many of these characters feel like they were actual people and not puppets dancing in a plastic stage.

    Overall, I would give this webcomic an 8/10 as it is excellent but doesn’t bring anything new.

  • My PC Killed Itself

    So yeah. My PC up and killed itself yesterday morning. Honestly I’ve been expecting this to happen much sooner but I really didn’t expect it to just end itself right in front of me. Anyway, here’s what happened.

    My computer has always been a bit… troubled I guess you could say. I’m able to afford a better PC but my penny pinching self have always said if I could throw that money into stocks or investments it would be better than throwing it into a PC. As a consequence of that, I’m still using the PC my father gave me 7 years ago. Alright so the specs on this PC are actually quite workable.

    NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, Intel I7-2600K 3.40 GHz, and 16GB of 1333MHz DDR3 memory.

    Now this PC isn’t bad but uh… it’s a little old. I recently upgraded the old Intel I5 to this new CPU and something got screwed up with the memory because my PC has started to give me memory errors. I kind of just looked at all these errors and shrugged because ehh, still works.

    Well, now it doesn’t work. Oops.

  • Royal Road Link

    I was pretty busy today so uh I’m just gonna put out the link to where the book will be launched. The cover and stuff will be changed since the artist I hired should be finishing the actual cover soon. The current launch plan is January.

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

  • One Punch Man

    I love One Punch Man. In fact, I would say it’s the best anime for someone first getting into anime or webcomics. It’s that good. I think there’s a few reasons for why it’s just so good.

    The first is that the story is OPMC with no limitation. There is nothing stopping Saitama from just walking up to every enemy and slapping them. And well, that’s kind of exactly what he does. Every time we see a new villain we see them with the knowledge that Saitama is gonna walk up and slap them. What the story does is build around how we get to that slap. How Saitama gets involved and how other characters interact with these villains.

    In the Anime, this is solidified right in the first few episodes where each episode introduces a villain, shows them doing evil, shows someone failing to stop them, then showing Saitama accidentally pass them by while living his daily life and demolishing them before either continuing on with his life or crying at how easy it was. On paper this might make Saitama seem like a flat two dimensional character. However, the story subtly builds substance to Saitama’s character by showing bits and pieces of his daily life showing he has normal struggles just like the average human allowing us to emphasize with him.

    On top of this, the animation and facial expressions are made in such a way that the humor of his failures are taken to the extreme. One of my favorite is when he realizes that he might miss a sale in the market because he was busy fighting a monster that could level a city. This is the kind of worry that I have as a poor college student which makes it incredibly hilarious and relatable since I’m sure many viewers would have a very easy time understanding that feeling.

    The overall design of Saitama as a character also helps with the very simple appearance in comparison to the incredible detailing of other characters. And the use of this detailing often is used to highlight some of the humor like in the hammer scene where Saitama manages to grab the hammer and the overly detailed swing emphasis the comedy of the situation.

    The story does it right by making the story not about Saitama’s strength but a story about Saitama as a character and showing him lose part of himself (heh see what I did there?).

  • Breakers Treats Us Like We Are Stupid

    I couldn’t finish it. I literally couldn’t. I said I’d write a review and usually I make sure to read all of the story that I can to make sure I can give a full opinion and analyze why I have that opinion but I really just couldn’t continue reading it.

    Asura recently added a new webcomic titled Breakers. When reading the synopsis, I really thought that I would enjoy this webcomic and honestly wasn’t expecting to be unable to finish reading all 29 chapters that are currently out. I managed to get to chapter 15 before I couldn’t continue.

    So is it bad? No. It’s just not for me. Why? From now on there will be spoilers. Skip to the next line if you want to avoid spoilers.

    So right from the start we notice that this story is an isekai story where the main character has some kind of broken advantage over everyone else with the addition of the MC having prior knowledge about this supposed game he was isekaied into. This doesn’t actually mean anything bad but generally puts the story under the banner of OPMC, progression fantasy, and isekai which have many overused tropes that require some thinking to stand out as a story.

    Let’s hit upon the first issue. The main character is OP and the story shows us this right from the beginning by showing how skilled the MC is at the game they are playing. This tells us the MC is high on the competence value. The story then throws them into the game as the supposed “weakest character” but the MC literally looks at their traits and goes “oh gee I’m so OP.” This is supposed to mean they will be OP but their strength comes from the speed of their progression. This actually seems like a great way to balance an OPMC and it’s basically the same formula Solo Leveling used when choosing the weakest E-rank as the start of the story. However, there’s kind of a big problem with the execution of the supposed “weakness” of the MC in Breakers. They really don’t seem weak at all.

    We’re thrown into a situation where the MC and his little group is attacked by an enemy group. Initially this seems like the awakening moment that we saw in Solo Leveling where we build empathy for the pathetic MC and then watch as an external force swoops in to save the MC. From there the rest of the story focuses on the progress of the MC attempting to gain enough power fast enough to stand on their own. This is the expectation I have for a story with the set of characteristics Breakers presents in it’s synopsis and initial chapter. However, this kind of doesn’t happen?

    The MC somehow gains the power to solve their problem during the first fight meaning I really can’t see them as weak no matter how much they keep saying they are week. The art really tries to depict them as weak but the art can only go so far when literally every single plot point is trying to show how powerful the MC’s abilities and intellect is which allows him to maneuver his way to a win. This really makes it difficult for me to go, “Ah yes. This main character is weak and has to get stronger quickly to survive in this world.”

    Despite the MC’s obviously increasing ability, we never actually see him fight because he’s supposedly, “super weak.” which honestly feels ridiculous since many parts of the story make no sense. Almost all the problems introduced in the story are solved in a chapter or less and almost all of them feel like a two dimensional problem.

    What do I mean by a two dimensional problem? They literally feel flat like they have no substance. So what does that mean? Alright. So the issue the MC runs into is that his sister is captured by the enemy. Great. This is an incredible problem that the MC can use to grow and overcome. Wait. He just looks at a minimap and that’s it? That feels kind of lame… there wasn’t any difficulty! Oh wait, he gets caught by the enemy while escaping! Oh but it doesn’t matter because he can now use his other incredible ability to steal powers to get out of all his difficulties. The character technically grew more powerful but the characterization of the character didn’t grow a single bit.

    Every time in Solo Leveling he had a power up, we saw the development of a new person. The old E-rank falling away to make room for the shadow monarch. And then it all culminates in the realization that he had become the shadow monarch and was the shadow monarch the whole time with that ability hidden inside. This kind of story has substance. A three dimensional character which I can dig into. However all of the characters in Breakers are flat as paper. There’s nothing to dig into.

    Now this doesn’t mean Breakers is a bad story. In fact, some people in the comments on Asura seem to like this story a lot. However, it’s not for me. I like thinking about stories. I like deep connections. I like watching a character develop as a person. And I’m tired of all these system stories that seem like copies of each other.

    My final verdict? 4/10

    5/10 art

    3/10 story