Potato is yum

Potato is yum.

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  • 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.

  • Post Schedule For Now

    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.

  • “That Person”

    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.

  • The “Solo Leveling Clone” Epidemic

    The “Solo Leveling Clone” Epidemic

    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.

  • When Satire Is Ugh

    When Satire Is Ugh

    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 Hate Lorden

    I Hate Lorden

    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.

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/3167020/Escape_From_Duckov/

    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…