So I realized today I never made anything about my post schedule plan which may or may not be useful for people to know.
Monday
1 Post on media
Tuesday
Usually a post about the website or my life
Wednsday
1 Post on media
1 Post on Video Making
Thursday
1 Post on media
1 Post on upcoming video games
Friday
1 Post on media
1 Post on video games I play
Saturday
1 Post on media
Sunday
1 Random post
This is probably the general plan. I’ll probably stick to this for at least a few months. Anyway, I’m taking a little break today since I was busy getting new meds. Hopefully in the future I’ll have a post prewritten for Tuesdays.
So I read and watch a crap ton of stories in the form of anime, webcomics, books, and much more. I actually have an entire ranking for all of the media I consume based on my opinions which I am currently trying to make more readable for a future post. Anyway, I noticed a bunch of interesting patterns with my preferences while going through the thousands of pieces of media I enjoy. For the next week I’ll go through the five biggest annoyances I have with many stories.
Today will be the use of “That Person” to create some kind of fabricated mystery around an unintroduced character. I often see in many mid level webcomics that I rate from 0-7 that the phrase, “I’ll need to find that person.” is a commonly seen phrase in many contexts. The most common context being that of the typical regressor that wants to find “that person” to exploit something and hit that regressor itch that a non regressor story can’t hit. On paper, this makes total sense and story wise it makes sense however the mystery is completely fabricated when using obscure language to obfuscate the meaning of a phrase.
Almost every time in a regression or time hopping story I’ve almost never seen a good usage of this phrase. This phrase could just be replaced by something that describes what they are actually trying to figure out or could be replaced with some actual suspense instead of this fake suspense. I think a lot of these mid level stories are being severely kneecapped by this need to create suspense at every possible moment. When I read an action story I care about much more than this kind of fabricated suspense. In fact, suspense created by stakes, danger, or internal conflict resonate much deeper with a reader than using some kind of shortcut to make people question who this random ass character we’ve never seen before is.
The reason why it doesn’t make sense is because we often have no prior knowledge of this supposed person and really have no guess to base it on. This surprise actually becomes effective and becomes a device that can create suspense or surprise when the author uses the phrase “that person” to perfectly describe something and then either show it’s someone else or, even better, show it is exactly what the reader is expecting.
I was recently reading My Passive Skills Are Invincible translated by Qiscans and found a fairly effective use of the phrase “That Person” where the person was perfectly described before the introduction of the character with clear stakes and importance of the character described by the main character. Once the character is introduced, their appearance in the webcomic and their demeanor almost nearly perfectly matches what is described by the main character and the missing pieces are what adds to the suspense to make me as the reader want to read the next chapter for the character introduction. I know enough to invest interest in the character but not enough to know who they are.
This usage of “That Person” is probably just a relic of lazy character introduction. However, proper character introductions are extremely important to a story even if the character is a ally or enemy to the protagonist.
I loved Solo Leveling and I really do think it was a very important development in webcomics. It’s pretty hard to find a webcomic that hasn’t been influenced by it in some way. However, since Solo Leveling, we’ve basically seen an absurd number of what has been dubed a “Solo Leveling Clone.” I’ve met so many people that tell me, “Ohhhh, solo leveling is so overrrated.” which is actually such a BS take. People have to understand that before Solo Leveling there really weren’t that many OPMC webcomics with pretty much the only one being One Punch Man which was more of a comedy more than anything.
A lot of people look at Solo Leveling and focus on the supposed aura farming or the iconic “Arise” but miss what really made Solo Leveling a great story which was it’s uniqueness. When reading Solo Leveling in 2018, you could not say it was like any other story. You could open a random chapter of the webcomic and say, “Yup. That’s Solo Leveling.” Obviously this isn’t the case after the story became so popular because success is copied until it ceases to succeed. This is how we ended up with low quality clones of Solo Leveling that miss all great things and only focus on a weak ass idiot with a sister and a necromancer ability that does a funny particle effect when he says the word “Arise.”
Like seriously, why would I want to read a story just because I wanted to hear one character say a random ass word with a bunch of funny colors splashed on? I continued reading Solo Leveling because the world was cool. It was unique and brought something I had never seen before into a story. The story wasn’t exactly perfect and I hate the ending but it was much better than whatever aura farming slop we are getting right now.
I feel like a lot of new authors are just trying to pick out the best aspects of successful stories without realized that in the end what their writing is supposed to be their own story. It does make sense to pick out what made another story successful but only if it makes sense in the context of the story you want to write. Suddenly trying to introduce dungeon portal mechanics into your scifi cultivation story is probably not a good idea. It’s not a good idea to just make your main character a necromancer because, “People want to read a necromancer story,” because that’s probably not what people actually are reading that story for. If anything, readers are really bad at know why they actually like reading something but are really good at know why they don’t like reading something. Chances are, they liked reading that necromancer story because it had a novel take on the genre that made the reader rethink the way they read the story.
I really think the Solo Leveling anime really doesn’t help. The anime adaptation basically changed nothing about the story and retained much of the original feel of the webcomic. On one hand, this is great because it is faithful to the source material but it also misses out on the opportunity to innovate on the OPMC genre just like it’s source material did. I’m a little disappointed by this missed opportunity and I feel like the hype of Solo Leveling didn’t hit the same for newer consumers of the story like it did for us long time readers of the webcomic. I still greatly enjoyed the anime as I remembered how incredible the innovation on the genre was and realized just how impactful Solo Leveling has been on webcomics in the past few years.
It’s been a few weeks since Qi scans released chapter 234 of Top Tier Providence. This story is probably among my top 10 favorites and is pretty hilarious. One of the things the author commonly does is reference real life events or other stories and satirize them to send some kind of message or just for laughs. Much of the story mocks typical story tropes and pokes fun at some global politics and other matters.
In chapter 234, the author decided to reference Charlie Kirk’s assassination which kind of felt a bit ugh. I don’t really think the whole thing is as bad as many others in the community want to make it seem but it does leave a bad taste in an otherwise incredible story. It isn’t totally unexpected that something like this happens. If anything, Top Tier Providence has been rather tame in it’s political satire in comparison to western equivalents.
It’s kind of obvious that not every joke will land and I think it’s great that such a work is able to be this successful. I do think that the thought process behind this chapter wasn’t really that well calculated as it really seems like the author came up with some idea and forgot to really think about it. I have noticed that many of these Chinese authors are much more willing to write satire and especially political satire in comparison to Korean and Japanese authors. This could also just be a product of my samples in which almost all of the comics I read that have comedy are by Chinese authors and artists.
I find it kind of surprising how big of a reaction the general community gave to this chapter as it really didn’t seem like the author was trying to mock Charlie Kirk but rather the situation around which the assassination happened. When attempting to read between the lines, the author actually seems to be attempting to satirize the irony of the motive of someone who supports guns being killed by a gun at a time when they are talking about guns. Of course this gets taken the wrong way because it is incredibly difficult for people simply skimming the story to actually pick up on the irony.
Maybe people just aren’t paying attention to what the author is trying to say and think that all humor is just a means to laugh at the subject. I could also be reading into this too much but I love the story too much to just point a finger at the author and call him a shitty person even though that could be the case.
If you haven’t read Top Tier Providence I would highly recommend giving it a read. It is an incredibly unique system cultivation story with a very unique premise of someone who wants to avoid trouble and attention.
I’ve been addicted to this game called Escape From Duckov. You might have heard about it before. Here’s the steam store page link if you’re interested.
This game has been massively successful and it’s pretty easy to see why it’s successful.
It has over 50+ hours of content for a very low price
Modding support
Ducks are cute
Just the right amount of challenge
Deep game loops
I bought the game right in the first hour that it was available on steam and feel like it was one of the best game purchases I’ve made since Factorio in terms of content for money paid. I feel like many of the AAA studios really can’t compete with the price efficiency of indie games and Escape From Duckov really shows this. It takes a typical player around 30-60 hours to finish the game and the difficulty is based on whatever the player wants with the difficulty being changeable at any time (except for hell mode).
I’ve been trying to figure out how the modding works to try and make myself a custom map. It’ll probably take a while and I might post updates about it here. Currently there are only mods for quality of life additions but I’m expecting things like additional maps and structures to soon be something we see modders make.
Look at that cute creature.
So my dumbass decided to play the game on the highest difficulty of extreme difficulty. That means every thing does 50% more damage and I lose everything whenever I die. So it took me 20 hours to get to the second map and that sniper idiot keeps 2 tapping me. I might make a little montage of me dying over and over again.
I’m now onto hour 50 and am close to entering the 4th map. I might switch off extreme…
So yesterday I talked about how Asura’s new addition Initializing the Sect System was a bad addition to the site. To make sure I wasn’t talking crap about something I didn’t know I decided to actually read all thirteen chapters that were part of the initial release to see what my actual thoughts where. So let’s go through it.
Let’s first start by looking at the title and blurb for this story. In the first sentence we get our supposed hook to get us interested in the story which tells us about some probably strong main character who wants to make a sect. So far it’s actually pretty good but there isn’t anything special in here that makes me think, “Huh, this is gonna be interesting!” Following this we basically just get what seems to be a summary of the whole story with the expected “Oh my someone’s not gonna like another group.” And to that my only reaction is, “Well no shit. It’s set in the Murim.” The blurb really doesn’t help the story since it really doesn’t highlight anything unique about it nor does it really attract my attention. It’s not a bad blurb but it sure doesn’t help.
Now once we start looking into the actual story the situation actually looks much better. Starting from this point there will be some spoilers so you have been warned. If you just want to read my final verdict you can scroll down to the next separator.
Right in the first chapter we are introduced to the main character reacting to his supposed mothers unjust death. This is pretty stock standard for Murim stories and I honestly think out of most executions of this trope Initializing The Sect System actually does a pretty good job by not spending a lot of time on it. However, we eventually find out that these events really don’t matter all to the overall story and this whole sequence is just an empathy grab. The main character literally never cares about this for the rest of the thirteen chapters and this event is just a means to create problems for the main character. This isn’t uncommon in typical Murim stories so it isn’t really a bad thing.
After this initial part of the story we get introduced to the real main character which is some OP guy who has decided that making a sect is his dream. I’m a big fan of OP main characters with Solo Leveling being one of my favorite webcomics. However, something about this guy just feels off. I get he got really angry for twelve years and decided to power level but it makes no sense for him to get so strong that he could kind of just walk over everyone. But then again, this is a Murim story so this actually is pretty common. There really isn’t anything special about this and I’ve read at least 3-4 other stories that follow this exact same plot.
I could continue on with the recruitment of the first and second disciples and then the start of the school training thing but really don’t think I need to do that in order to say this whole webcomic is mid.
There’s really nothing special about the story and the art style is good but slowly decreases in quality as we get to chapter thirteen meaning it was probably rushed. I really think this story isn’t bad but there’s nothing good about it. It’s not garbage like I was implying in my post yesterday but it is still a little disappointing to see average stuff like this be placed next to bangers like Nano Machine. Although, for the first time in a while, we have had a release on Asura without major proofing errors. This is a great step in the right direction and I hope Asura continues with this trend.
I’ve actually not been playing a lot of Titanfall the past few months as my gaming laptop has been having some pretty stupid cooling issues (no surprise). My desktop PC is very old and can’t run most videogames at playable speeds so I’ve mostly been sticking to my counterstrike and other various indie games that I might make posts for in the near future. This pretty much all started when I found this video in my YouTube home page a week ago.
I was quite surprised to see this and thought it might be another one of those clickbait Titanfall 3 videos. I’ve been burned by false promises before and wasn’t exactly expecting anything. The instant I saw the Stalwart mech and the countless Titanfall references my brain instantly realized this crap was real. As of a day ago this project launched on kickstarter and has already exceeded it’s goal by five times.
Anyway, why should us Titanfall fans care about this other than the fact that it’s another Titanfall 3 attempt? Am I crazy enough to think that this will be Titanfall 3? Well. Yes. I’m crazy enough to believe every ray of hope so far and will continue to be crazy enough to believe it until I get my Titanfall 3.
So why do I think this game is the one? Why this one?
One of the biggest issues with previous Titanfall 3 attempts was the lack of programming and technical expertise that comes with producing a game in general. Many people made it their dream to create the next Titanfall but end up falling short because they literally can’t. It’s also difficult to find games that mix infantry and vehicular combat in general with battlefield being the defining example of mixed warfare in modern video games. The difficulty in developing these systems are pretty apparent once you realize how few battlefield like games there are.
The current developer, Xavier B. Johnson is clearly a very experienced animator and it shows in the showcases and videos seen in all of the promotional content. They also clearly have been in game development for longer than many of the other Titanfall 3 attempts I have seen.
Another aspect of the Diesel Knight project that makes me very hopeful is the clear goal of going beyond Titanfall and bringing something new to the table. I feel like many of these AAA studios seem to forget that what their making is a singular game that players are going to play. We’ve seen from games like FIFA where the yearly games are basically identical and the only reason a new game is released is to continue the IP rather than make a game. Diesel Knight is trying to develop an IP in a game rather than create a game inside an IP.
I am very hopeful for the success of Diesel Knight and put a few dollars into the Kickstarter along with wishlisting it on steam.
Asura is a website that I have used for over five years to read english translations of many webcomics. In the past, their selection of comics has been quite good with their translation team doing an excellent job on pretty much every comic. It seems in the past it was a fun hobby a group of people did rather than a cash grab. Now days, it almost feels like the site is only taking in new stories to make more cash.
I think I can prove this downfall without much effort by looking at the most recent addition to the catalogue with a story that has the English translation of Initializing the Sect System. Hilariously, the boosted ratings just 1 day after release has dragged the story down to 7.6/10 on the Asuracomic website. This story has pretty quickly been labeled as disappointing by the general community. From looking at recent releases, we can see that the length of time Asura continues to translate these new stories has decreased significantly from the start of the translation group many years ago.
On the other hand, this pattern kind of makes sense. Asura in the past had to play it safe by choosing stories that were already fairly well known and established they would be able to build up a reader base to grow upon. Now that the group is big enough, they can afford to fail on new stories and gamble on new ideas. This can clearly be seen from when they picked up Eternally Regressing Knight which was initially met with confusion until the novelty of the story brought in many new readers. However, many of these new stories don’t offer anything as novel as Eternally Regressing Knight and are almost all standard Murim or systems with a weak ass protagonist that abuses some kind of special ability to get through fabricated difficulties.
The story choices that Asura has isn’t something they can do much about since there is only a finite number of webcomics and a finite number of people interested in each genre. However, the quality of translations in even long standing stories has been going down with users reporting missing panels, typography errors, and many mistakes that previously never appeared in well loved series such as Dungeon Odyssey and Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint. We’ve also started to see some English errors in other long standing series that are the literal life blood of the website. It’s a little disappointing as a long time reader to see series like Nano Machine and The Greatest Estate Developer have chapters be release to premium with errors.
I recently canceled my premium payments to Asura because I couldn’t justify paying for a defunct translation group when other groups like qi, drake, and flame exist and give free translations that have been proofread and edited properly. It almost seems as if Asura is trying to push out new series at the cost of long time readers and it’s sad.
Still, I think Asura is better than a majority of the other scanlation groups by going adless due to the widespread use of NSFW ads and popup ads which infest many lesser known sites. This made Asura a great example and unique for many years until other sites learned methods to stay afloat without NSFW ads. Now many sites such as qi and drake don’t run intrusive ads and provide a similar user experience to Asura. There’s not much that makes Asura unique anymore other than it’s catalogue of high quality translations from multiple years of past work. But most long time readers wouldn’t be going back to read it all again.
It really seems like Asura has decided to care less about their long time readers and unless they return back to the quality I really don’t see myself saying they are the best translation group anymore.
So some of you might know that I’ve been trying to put together this counter strike 2 edit for about a month now. Last night I loaded up the source 2 version of SFM and tried to get at least 1 more scene completed. For some reason, some of the objects that show up have turned black and are missing either textures or lighting. I couldn’t figure it out because once I reloaded the scene the textures fixed themselves. However I had already left it overnight to cook up the video so I basically wasted four hours. Here’s a photo of the crappy A site of Nuke.
For some reason the entirety of the bomb site and many of the metal textures are just black. I’ve been having this issue quite a bit on many maps and can’t really figure out what is going on. The fix I had for this was just to rerecord the whole demo file and set up the camera shot again.
The other big issue with SFM is that every freaking ragdoll becomes a T pose for some reason. I legit had to redo all the bones to match my recording clips because in game the ragdolls don’t T pose like this holy crap. Not to mention the weird lighting bugs that crop up.
For some reason smokes also don’t show up in my capture of demos. And I actually have no idea how to recreate the volumetric smokes of CS2 so I’ve just been doing a bunch of editing BS to make it happen. It’s a whole nightmare.
Why the hell is motion blur built into posters when I’m trying to make a still image. Can’t SFM see when I’m exporting that I want to export it as a poster NOT as a 1 frame movie? Like last time I checked most posters don’t include motion blur on the subject.
I also recently found out that my computer sucks because one of my memory sticks has gone bad and is crashing everything so this project is probably going to take a long time. I might post an update on it but probably not because this crap is seriously pissing me off. And if anyone has a solution for these problems please tell me. I need to know.
I have wanted to make a website for a few years at this point but only really got around to figuring out how to do it now. I guess I should put a little greeting to whoever ends up randomly stumbling upon this page.
I’m potato is yum or strangemudkip. I’m someone who consumes an absurd amount of anime, manga, webcomics, and video games. I’m probably going to make many pages on this website for my anime recommendations and such and word dump my opinions on random crap that happens. I honestly don’t know why anyone would read this but whatever. Might be interesting for me to look back at this after I graduate college. Might be interesting or incredibly depressing. That would be hilarious.
Potato is yum 