Potato is yum

My Opinion On Asura’s New Additions

10/31/2025

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.
Is This Titanfall 3?

10/30/2025

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.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dieselknights/diesel-knights

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.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2785740/Diesel_Knights/
Asura Has Fallen Off

10/30/2025

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.
Source Film Maker Sucks

10/29/2025

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.
First Post

10/29/2025

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.