Potato is yum

Potato is yum.

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Fun stuff (Coming soon)

  • I’m Writing A Book

    As the title says, I’m writing a book. This might sound a bit crazy because it is a little insane. Anyway some posts on this website are probably going to start being utilized to talk about my book. I’m going to continue doing webcomic and anime reviews and I’m probably also going to help advertise for some writing groups that I’m a part of.

    If I’m going to be real, I don’t really get why anyone would want to read a book written by a pessimistic weirdo like me but I guess an idiot can make gold given copious amounts of time. I’ve been working on this book for the better part of a year and actually started this website with the intension of using the website as a way to expand upon the book. I really have no idea what I’m doing anymore and am probably going to have to figure a lot of this crap out.

    Either way, I’m down $500 with three months of my savings gone so let’s hope this whole book thing works out. If it doesn’t I’m probably going to go back to my spreadsheets. Ah yeah I should give a list of what to expect on the website for the next week.

    • Wednesday
      • Review of Asura’s Breakers
      • An update on my SFM failures
    • Thursday
      • Why One Punch Man S1 is so good
    • Friday
      • A little bit of my book
    • Saturday
      • Review of One Punch Man S3 till now
    • Sunday
      • Review one of my top 50 webcomics
    • Monday
      • Andor is a really good series
    • Tuesday
      • Likely just a post that will outline the posts for the next week.

    I’m reducing the number of posts because I need to make more time for finalizing the book. It’ll realistically not change much since it’s not like I write that much to begin with. Quantity in writing is not really my strong point anyway. Being coherent in my writing for multiple paragraphs is even harder especially when I decide to just sit down and ramble for a few minutes which is often the case. Many of the posts just go through some very light editing and much of what you read is basically the same as how I speak it. Anyway, there’s some cool topics to look forward to in the next week and I am very excited to share the initial chapters of my book.

  • Short Chapter ≠ Bad

    One of my favorite webcomics of all time is Nano Machine which has been getting shorter and shorter over the past year. But actually, has it been getting shorter? The average number of panels is less than at the beginning of the series but not by any significant quantity. So why do people complain about the chapters being short after the number of panels have been down for months?

    It isn’t uncommon for a webcomic to release shorter and shorter chapters as the buffer publishers build up are depleted. Typically, an artist and author along with their production team finish 30-40 chapters before even the first announcement for the webcomic is made. From there it depends on the studio how many chapters are completed and the rate in which they are published.

    Currently, Korean publishers mostly follow weekly and biweekly releases while Chinese publishers follow 2-3 releases a week. If you actually sit down and think about it, it means these teams sit down every week and finish hundreds of full drawings a month. The only way this is profitable for publishers is for artists to get paid almost nothing for their work and it is actually fairly well known and well documented the state of living for artists in Korea, Japan, and China. When you consider this, the shrinking chapter size after the first 30-40 chapters is a pretty obvious result of how these stories are published.

    So we have a little bit of a shrink in chapter size. That explains a large majority of “short chapter complains” So what? Why do people think the size of each chapter has changed so much even though the quality and length for a webcomic like Nano Machine really hasn’t changed. Well, when you read a webcomic you aren’t just reading words. You’re reading art. So many people scroll past all of the incredible art without realizing how much time and effort goes into the art rather than the little text bubbles. If you just read a webcomic for text bubbles you may as well go read a book instead. The whole point of a webcomic is to leverage a more direct form of visual media to paint the picture of a scene faster and more effectively than a book could ever hope to show.

    So, next time you come across a “short” webcomic try to enjoy the media for what it is. A comic.

  • It’s Okay To Do Nothing

    I’m not exactly the best student out there. Everyone that knows me probably knows how laid back I am. Being relaxed doesn’t mean I don’t try to optimize. Optimize? Optimize what? Everything. Optimize my time. Optimize my food. Optimize my fun. Optimize my optimization. Optimize. Optimize until I don’t have a speck of waste.

    Now Optimize doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun. Quite the opposite in fact. Optimization could be a reason to have fun since I would need a break to be optimal. So it’s necessary to play video games or watch youtube for four hours in order for me to maintain my “mental health”. Right?

    Yeah. No. That’s not what mental health is. So why am I even writing this? Well. Because to hell with optimization. To hell with mental health. To hell with all of it. It doesn’t matter. People say to meditate and focus on the present. That’s great if it works. But, it still doesn’t solve the heart of the issue. The issue of trying to “make the most” out of “something”.

    After I got stuck in the hospital and wasn’t able to go to school, go to work, go to the gym, do anything, I realized how much optimization was ruining my life. You don’t have to do anything. Meditation is just a blueprint for doing nothing with extra steps for those that can’t wrap their head around the idea of doing nothing. Doing nothing is okay. I meditated and found it did nothing because I was still trying to optimize my meditation. It sounds stupid because it is. So here’s my tip.

    Do nothing.

  • Limiting An OPMC

    I’ve read a lot of webcomics in the past few years and some of them I feel get very little recognition for how great they were. Among my list of favorites is Drug-Eating Genius Mage which is a webcomic translated by Asura a few years ago.

    The story starts off like many other fantasy stories with a character basically showing off how powerful they are. In this case, the character is showing off their power against some demon king enemy which is also pretty standard in fantasy stories. We then find out that this is just some kind of game and see the main character create a new character in the game with some supposedly strong traits with very negative traits too.

    This is actually one of the first webcomics to come up with this method for balancing an OPMC which made it an especially good read when I first started reading it a few years ago. Unlike in Solo Leveling where the constant power scaling and increasingly powerful characters caused a slippery slope of exponentially increasing power, the limits of the main character in Drug-Eating Genius Mage where very easy to define because the main character literally had to take drugs to stay alive. This meant there was an inherent weakness built into the character which the writer could use to create conflict more naturally.

    However, just making an interesting mechanic to limit the power of your main character really isn’t enough to say it’s one of the best. The way the limiter plays into the worldbuilding helps reinforce the main character’s place in the story. We can see this example with another webcomic that I regularly follow which is Terminally-Ill Genius Dark Knight which is also translated by Asura. In this webcomic, the main character has to kill monsters to extend his lifespan. This sounds like a very good way to limit the main character’s power and initially seems like a way to generate conflict and for the most part it does do all of these however it doesn’t generate conflict as naturally.

    So what do I mean by generate conflict naturally? In Drug-Eating Genius Mage, the main character has to strategically decide when to use what drugs in different situations. They main character also has to manage the source of his drugs to ensure he is able to sustain himself while also trying to improve his own ability. In Terminally-Ill Genius Dark Knight, the main character basically just needs to find an excuse to kill a bunch of monsters. The first few situations where this limitation is used at the beginning of the story show a great execution of this limitation but as the chapters have progressed the limitation can now be seen as more of a nuisance rather than a limitation as the main character has grown strong enough that the limitation feels annoying.

    Both of these limitations feel the same as they interact directly with the ability for the main character to function in the story however the limitation in Drug-Eating Genius Mage makes the threat of the limitation feel linked to the world and less a mechanic that stands on its own.

  • Necesse Is Pretty Cool

    I found this game about a week ago when it went on sale for it’s 1.0 release and started playing it. It feels kind of like a more organized and user friendly terraria with other neat mechanics from other games. To be honest, I went into the game not really expecting much since I haven’t really played many games from this genre in a few years. The sandbox like feeling of Minecraft and Terraria with the exploration and such quickly sucked me into the world and I found myself 10 hours deep on my way to kill the third boss.

    I honestly have found it surprising how these small indie games are giving me so much more fun per dollar spent than the big names such as battlefield 6. I spent so much money on battlefield and still have played it less than Escape From Duckov which was released after the battlefield 6 launch. I also think that these indie games are much easier to play than these big AAA games.

    Almost all the indie games I pick up now days are games where I can pick it up and put it down at any point in time and save my progress to that point. And if it isn’t made in a way that I can put it down at any time, I can at least figure a way to put down the game within two to three minutes if the need arises. This has come to be an increasingly difficult situation to find myself in when playing competitive online games which is almost seems like every major game studio is trying to force players into.

    I don’t want another competitive game. I want a game that I can come back to my dorm room at 10pm after dying on homework and studying to drown all my pain away in a nice relaxing video game. Crazy how all these studios expect us players to turn their game into our lifestyle. I aint doin that.

  • Follow Expectations

    I often read many webcomics that attempt to make a scene more “memorable” or hook more readers in by doing this “subversion of expectations” tactic where they twist something in the story to catch readers off-guard. However, I really don’t get how this strategy is supposed to work because it often is not executed like a twist where the twist is somewhat foreshadowed to give the reader at least an inkling of what is happening.

    One of the most common kind of subversions of expectations is for when two characters are talking about some kind of agreement and suddenly the main character goes and does something totally unthinkable in that situation. It often just makes me scratch my head and ask myself, “What the hell am I reading?

    I would list examples but there are so many that I think it would be more worthwhile to list my reasons for why I think this tactic is just not as effective as following the reader’s expectations. One of my favorite webcomics that follows expectations is Another Typical Fantasy Romance Novel which is the perfect example of a story that does exactly what you expect and executes it in such a way that you get more satisfaction out of reading it than these supposed subversion of expectations stories.

    The way the story manages to be not completely predictable is by leaving little holes and gaps for how the end goal of each issue is resolved leaving room for readers to guess the plot but maintaining a level of predictability that ensures the reader never leaves because the story didn’t go the way they expected. Because of this, I have continued following this webcomic for over a year already even though I am not really a big fan of romance novels.

    It does also help that the characterization of the major players in the story are especially distinct and the author manages to develop characters that are predictable yet deep allowing the author to have holes in the solution but still have the end goal clearly defined throughout the whole story. It also helps that the story never “backpedals” which is a big issue I have with other romance novels.

    By keeping the progress of the romance at a steady but slow progress and making the end results predictable, the author of the webcomic is able to add small variations within each arc to prevent the story from becoming stale while also providing the readers with a satisfying conclusion to each arc.

  • Stormgate :(

    I really like starcraft and I’ve always loved RTS games. When I first heard that the developers of starcraft were making a new RTS game that was supposed to be an improved version of starcraft, I was very excited. Unfortunately, my hope was shattered during the alpha tests where pretty horrendous performance issues and many other questionable design decisions made me rethink my choice.

    Now that the full release of Stormgate is out, I’ve decided to look through all my opinions again. When I started writing this post I actually thought my thoughts would change but unfortunately not much has changed. My somewhat old computer still struggles to play the game at a reasonable level of performance and the characters aren’t synced up with what they say. It really feels like they rushed out the project and it’s kind of disappointing. I’m keeping an eye out for other upcoming RTS games because I’ve been keeping track of three or four indie titles that seem much more promising than this.

    Kind of a bummer but at least it’s free.

  • What Even Are Ranks?

    One of the biggest aspects of Lit-RPG is the assignment of numbers or letters to various levels of power. One of the biggest aspects of cultivation stories are the cultivation levels that the characters reach throughout the story. Much of these stories depend on ranks and levels to set clear limits for how power is measured just like how class is measured in real life. In fact, these ranks are often a direct mirror to political and economic power in the world the author tries to paint. This often brings up a very difficult issue that many stories have to solve in some way.

    Often, the main character or their party are under leveled and in theory by the world’s logic should not win a certain fight. The main character, expectedly, wins anyway through the help of some BS ability or through some rule that “transcends the barriers of level”. These solutions to power scaling issues honestly feel very disappointing to read. I thought the whole point of these levels were to give a framework for the functions of the world and making a hole for the main character to get past these issues without any reasonable conflict really makes the story feel like the main character obtained an undeserved victory.

    I see this pattern a lot with Murim and other cultivation stories where the main character learns some neat technique that supposedly “transcends the barriers of stage” or some BS without really explaining how exactly this power is quantified. In fact, in many of these stories the reader really gets no idea how powerful any of these levels are because in the end the levels don’t actually matter that much only the fact that the main character is supposed to be weaker than the enemies they are going against. However, when the purpose of level is just meant to be a means to say “The main character is weaker trust me” it kind of makes levels lose all meaning. This can clearly be seen in many popular stories such as World After The Fall where the author has basically given up on trying to power scale and just has characters fight to judge the power difference.

    Somehow, by not introducing some kind of power scale, the conflicts feel more real as it doesn’t makes sense for someone to be able to precisely judge the difficulty of their opponent without a large amount of prior observation.

    In the end, I think many stories fall into this trap of trying to make their main character feel weaker compared to their opponent instead of showing through the actions and reactions of the two characters than the main character is actually weaker until they use their special ability or cool new technique to get them to win. The power scale should not do the heavy lifting of upping the tension.

  • SFM Fixed Itself… Kinda

    SFM Fixed Itself… Kinda

    So a week ago I made a post (https://potatoisyum.com/2025/10/29/source-film-maker-sucks/) complaining about how SFM was doing a bunch of stupid crap. So now I’ve figured out a solution to the lighting bug but found out a few new issues! YAY! I LOVE THIS! Either way, I’ve finally managed to make it work properly so my CS2 edit is finally progressing.

    So as you can see I finally fixed the weird ass lighting bug and now everything renders properly inside the movie export.

    And finally the ragdoll isn’t just a Tpose meaning I didn’t have to rerig anything but… wait a minute. DO YOU SEE THAT FLOATING MAGAZINE? WHAT THE HELL?

    Yeah that’s a floating magazine alright. IDK what to do about it because no matter what I do the floating magazine persists. And the previous rendering didn’t have this problem because for some reason it just never generated a magazine from the reload in the first place? What a mess.

    In the next shot I hadn’t noticed the floating magazine and ended up leaving it there. Looking back at the export I now noticed the magazine was there before the reload animation even happened? What?

    Yeah, something’s not right here. For the next shot I ended up just deleting the magazine from the entire thing and hopefully nobody watching the edit notices the random floating magazine. It’s not that noticeable but still pretty annoying.

    If anyone knows why this happens and also my memory crashes, please let me know any fixes and such. I kind of need all the help I can get.

  • How To Make Schemes Feel Good

    There’s many stories that try to use schemes and other word trickery inside their character interactions make the stories seem more intellectual or make people think that the story is very deep. However, when this complicated wording or schemes is used too much, it makes the story feel like a mockery of English rather than a story in a high class setting.

    In many webcomics I read now days with nobility and such, authors decide to use hidden meanings in multiple character reactions and end up needing to use internal dialogue to explain what both sides are meaning to say. I feel like this trajectory for nobility communication is a really bad one as nobility didn’t use such language for much of their social interactions and often spoke with fairly normal language for the great majority of their life.

    We can see many of these stories using this kind of language just to make the character feel more high class without many of the other aspects that indicate the social status of specific people. We can see from classic literature like Pride and Prejudice or the works of Shakespeare how higher class language and actions mix together to compliment each other in such a way that saying one thing could also mean another thing. However, this collection of works all used this kind of language to punch up at the upper class in a work of satire with Shakespeare making multiple cleverly disguised dick jokes that gives me a chuckle even when reviewing their works.

    We can see with many webcomics that many Korean or Chinese authors seem to have a somewhat poor understanding of Western culture which kind of makes sense. Much of the nobility in many of these stories use fancy language without any of the actual substance of nobility that set the higher class apart from the lower or middle class in Western culture. Anyway, my complains about the lack of cultural knowledge is just a small point to help reinforce how many of the webcomics I read don’t actually know how to make someone scheme properly or at least the presentation of the scheme is not really done in a sensible manner.

    One of my favorite webcomics is I Am The Fated Villain translated by Asura. I like it because the main character uses many schemes and trickery to steal the fortune of various protagonists for his own gains. Initially the story feels great until you notice the pattern.

    • Character realizes there is a special person with fortune to steal
    • Some random event in the world is suddenly going to happen
    • The character lures the special person to participate
    • Character tricks the random nobodies to go against the special person
    • Yippeee everyone somehow believed our villain

    I think that this kind of works since the author puts a twist at the end or middle of every arc to make it distinct from all the previous arcs and has enough character grown and overall story development to distract away from just the scheme but how the scheme plays a role in the overall story. Too often, I see mid level slop that just has the scheme happen for the main character to obtain some item or opportunity and then the story just moves on like everyone forgot about what happened. The stakes for the scheme failing aren’t ever really established other than “Main character won’t get super OP item that they probably don’t need anyway because they are the main character.”

    One of the biggest motivators for a reader to continue reading an arc is the building tension and stakes as the conflict develops to the climax. Many of the schemes I’ve been reading recently really don’t feel like the stakes are real and the ones that do establish some kind of stakes really feel like they are fabricated stakes.

    I probably could write a whole entire book about character building but to sum up everything, I wish some of the webcomics I read to spend more time tying things together instead of just trying to achieve last chapter’s promises and make another cliff for the next chapter. After all, I’m pretty sure the story is supposed to be the whole webcomic not individual chapters.