Potato is yum

Potato is yum.

recent posts

Fun stuff (Coming soon)

  • CS Season 4

    Soooooooo when is it happening? I saw that the season ended but I can’t play the matchmaking anymore until season 4 starts. :/ This has gotta be some pretty bad design. Unless their overhauling the servers. That would be crazy.

    I don’t like faceit either. It feels like a whole lot of work just to play games for people to care less. In premier it feels like people still care about the game and still want to have fun even if they can’t win. In faceit people seem to just shut off their brains depending on the first three rounds.

    Unfortunately, I came to college without all my clips and stuff so the CS edit is on pause for now. Same with the titanfall project. hopefully when I visit home I’ll be able to pick up those recordings to continue the projects.

  • Writing Satire Is Hard

    I love satire. I am probably one of the biggest fans of satire on this planet. I find the stuff hilarious. I find the stuff effective. Nothing quite hits as well as showing the absurdity of something stupid. And it’s funny how some people wouldn’t get that it is satire and would actually believe something like eating babies. Like seriously. What kind of person reads A Modest Proposal and goes “HELL YEAH! LET’S EAT BABIES AND SPICE EM REAL GOOD!” Apparently some readers did since letters complimenting the great proposal exist.

    The thing is, satire requires some kind of prior information on the topic to recognize that something is indeed satire. This is difficult because it’s hard to guarantee that everyone knows a fact when many people are simple uninformed about the world these days. Sites like The Onion are able to bypass this because they have a reputation of being satirical with every article being satire. However, other papers like the New York Times, The Wallstreet Journal, and The Washington Post often produce satirical articles. Most of these do hit correctly because they are written by professional writers. However, there are many examples of satire not hitting. Like many satirical food reviews or movie reviews end poorly. The reason? People take it seriously.

    The hardest part of satire is signaling to the reader that what their reading is satire. The way satire used to do this was to show something utterly ridiculous or something completely unacceptable. However, it’s beginning to be hard to tell the difference between someone with radical views and someone who is trying to be satirical. A great example of this is the current US president Donald Trump. It’s often very difficult to tell when Trump says something in a satirical manner and when he actually means to make some kind of statement. It sure doesn’t help that he has a high position of authority adding significant weight behind his words.

    This is often why satire must be done from down low to punch up. Not because satire punching sideways doesn’t work but because satire punching sideways is not called satire, it’s called shit talking. And satire that punches down? That’s called shitting on someone. Both aren’t really a good look. But so what? Well, it’s hard for satire to go anywhere unless it’s from someone big. And if someone is big, they can’t exactly punch up without risking what they have built up. Especially with the way defamation works these days.

    I feel like satire is dying. In some way, every piece of media I read now is somewhat satirical. Every dystopia depicts a dumb world that nobody would want. I still think this is unfortunate. Masterpieces like A Modest Proposal are harder to find now days. And yes, I know that most satire now days is a different kind of satire and that there are many many different kinds of satire but I’m really just ranting because I’m sad the kind of short form satire I enjoy seems to be disappearing. I liked those satirical comics in the newspaper snippets. That was what kept me laughing through my school years.

    I’ve tried writing satire before. I can’t. I’m just not good enough to signal the ridiculousness. So I end up with a crazy story with a strange message. But like it’s alright I guess. Dystopias are fun.

    Aight. Post plan:

    • Media Review
    • Book Ad
    • Wings Of Liberty Is A Masterpiece pt2 (delayed)

  • Lunar Tombstone RRCM Submission

    So. I spent the entirety of today working on my RRCM submission. I wanted to show off the little cover I threw together a few hours ago. I’m pretty proud of it.

    So yeah I spent the past like half an hour throwing this simple thing together. It ended up being quite a nice cover. It’s actually kind of cute even though my artistic ability is kind of horrible.

    So I’m currently looking for people to help read through the submission before the due date on the first of February. So far the story is looking pretty good. I still don’t think I have much of a chance but at least I’m having fun with it.

  • My Book Is Done Launching

    It’s been 2 weeks. Shifting to a weekly post schedule now. No more daily. Link if you want to check it out but this post is just gonna go through the logistics and the results.

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

    So most of the logistics for this was to find people to do shouts with. Fortunately, this wasn’t that difficult as I had made a bunch of friends in a writing discord server over the past year. I asked around in DMs and found quite a few people who were very willing to swap shouts with me. Unfortunately, almost none of them are my genre making the shouts not as effective as they could be. But I’m an unproven author with nothing to back me up so there isn’t much to be done about this. I’m kinda just screwed.

    Royal road was pretty easy to schedule chapters for. I just put them in and wrote up short notes on days that I remembered. I tracked all the shouts in a little spreadsheet that I made and had people fill out the spreadsheet for the chapter they wanted their shout on. After that it was fairly smooth sailing and the only hard work was to frantically edit chapters before releasing them. But the way I write stuff requires minimal editing as I do most of the work as I write so there really wasn’t much work to be done there.

    Onto the results, the numbers aren’t that great at week 2. But that doesn’t really mean anything. Out of the shouts I got, only two of them have been out. So most of my marketing hasn’t kicked in yet. And my advertisements haven’t started up yet so I’m not really hitting any kind of growth yet.

    To be honest, the story is doing much better than I expected especially with how offmeta it is. I suspect it will take at least a month or two to get any kind of sizable attention. Until then, I’ll be satisfied with 8 followers. At least I can go on any device and read my own book now. That’s enough of a win for me.

  • My Fridge Froze Fruits

    I’m pretty mad today. I recently moved to university and setup my fridge. But for some reason it was set at the lowest temperature.. I put some oranges in the fridge 3 days ago. I pulled three out today and found them frozen on the inside. FROZEN. FROZEN ORANGES.

    AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

    Okay but like… the frozen oranges were actually kind of good? The crunch of the inside mixed with the citrus and bursting sensation on the outside somehow mixed very well giving a pretty unique fruit experience. I suspect the apples I threw in there are also frozen. Still considering if I should try eating them or just toss em. It’s kind of unfortunate but whatever.

  • Rust Documentary

    I play a lot of games. One of the games I play a lot of is Rust. It’s an odd game to play a lot of. On one hand, it is horrible for your life, on the other hand, it’s really really fun.

    So if everyone says Rust is a horrible game to play, why is it still one of the most active games on steam right now? Well, that’s actually a project I’ve been working on for nearly 3 years. Can you believe it. 3 whole years.

    I’ve been working on a documentary for the rise of Rust. I think some parts of the video will be complete soon so I’m throwing this little note out there. Originally I was gonna just take a break for today but I figured something a bit more interesting would be nice.

  • Review Of A Cool Murim Webcomic

    I really love webcomics. You probably know that by now. One of the webcomics I’ve been following a lot of recently is Reincarnation of the Fist King on Asura. I find the story to be a breath of fresh air as far as OPMC reincarnation stories go. I feel like the writer of this story actually thought through a plausible and interesting backstory for our main character and wrote a bunch of supporting characters that feel like actual human beings instead of puppets to prop up the main character.

    Like most Murim stories, there is a big shadowy group that wants to kill everyone. This is honestly not so surprising since that’s basically every murim story now days. A lot of the common tropes with OPMC and reincarnation are reused in this story making it pretty ununique in plot. What does make it unique is the characterization of the MC and the people around him. They all have very distinct personalities and the personality of the MC is very likable in comparison to other reincarnation stories.

    This reincarnator has more of a “ah whatever I’ll just do what I want” kind of vibe and it honestly is just very entertaining to read. The supporting characters do well to prop up the personality of the MC by bringing out the reactions in a more obvious manner.

    I feel like this webcomic is a 7/10 and an 8/10 for art. It is currently translated to 35 chapters and has some banger one liners.

  • Wind + Snow

    This morning sucked. It was snowing with 30+ mile per hour winds. I walked through it for twenty minutes. I even had to walk into the snow meaning it slapped my face and stung. It sucked. However, it made me think. As a writer, I like to write a lot of stuff I have experienced. So that could be from minor injuries to personal anecdotes to annoying grievances with daily life such as this. I write a story with a male lead and a close best friend because that’s what I’m used to. I know that feeling so that’s what I’d be best at writing? Right?

    From the wind and snow this morning I realized this was a pretty narrow view. Me experiencing the wind and snow this morning only really was concerned about the interaction between me and my suffering and the environment. A third person observer of me walking to class this morning would have noticed a struggling student barely standing upright slipping his way across treacherous roads to get to class.

    Now you may say “there’s no difference!” And you would be kind of right. Both describe my trip to class this morning. What’s different is the framing. I know a lot of people will now groan at this but framing matters a lot. In fact, debate has an entire topic just about winning framing because without a frame you can’t have a picture. When I frame my morning walk from the point of view of me in first person, the main focus is to push through the snow. The perseverance. The human aspect of the journey. However, this is just one way of framing the trip to class.

    If I frame my morning walk from a third person perspective, I see all the giant blocks of metal sliding across the road and barely stopping in time at the stop lights for me to pass. The giant patches of ice that I barely miss as I walk across the street. The other students next to me who also struggle through the snow with me. It goes from an individual feat of perseverance and human endurance to a scene that makes me seem small. Seem lucky. Seem extraordinarily vulnerable. Just one student in a sea.

    After thinking about it, I think I’m gonna need to start trying to write things from this higher perspective. It would be quite helpful. As a first attempt at this, I’m going to try and write my royal road contest submission with this in mind. Let’s see if it works out.

    Oh, and the snow really sucked. Sometimes I hate this city.

  • How I Deal With Ideas

    So I get a lot of ideas. In fact, I come up with probably 5 story ideas every day at least. I’ve made a post previously about why I throw out most of these because they are bad but never really outlined my philosophy for why I believe this is a good approach to ideas for writing and ideas of creative projects in general.

    When starting a project, you need to have some kind of emotional tie to it to keep yourself motivated no matter what happens in the project. You cannot get bored of the project. If you get bored of the project, is it really worth doing it? Of course, I’m talking about projects done as hobbies. If you do this stuff as a job you probably will have to utilize a different philosophy as mine revolves entirely around my enjoyment of creating as a means of having fun.

    So I said that whenever I get an idea I throw it out right away. This is actually not quite true. In my head is a bunch of ideas and projects I want to do at some point in my life. Let me just list out like the top 10 on my list right now.

    • Finish Fool In Space
    • Finish Royal Road contest submission
    • Titanfall 2 Edit
    • Counterstrike Edit
    • Youtube intro
    • Finish that compost bin in the backyard
    • Make a missile game using Conway’s game of life
    • Finish setting up the minecraft server for friends
    • Write a rougelike gun isekai litrpg

    So yeah. I go about my life with tons of ideas in my head at all times. You may ask, “How am I supposed to remember all my good ideas?” Well, that’s exactly why I don’t write down any of my ideas until I commit to doing them. If I think up an idea and instantly write it down, I’ve not let the idea pickle and mature in my subconsciousness. For all I know, the idea could be a stale specimen and be lost in the back of my head never to be remembered every again. Or the idea could be hidden gold with it’s true flavor being brought out by other specimens in the pot. The idea of not writing it down is to make myself need to remember my ideas.

    My memory is limited so there is a hard limit to the amount of ideas I can have at any given time. Human memory is also incredibly good at working on things while you are doing something else. I often am brushing my teeth and exclaim “Oh! That would be a great addition to that idea!” and then go into my brain’s memory and slightly alter the idea I had. A great example of this is my royal road contest submission. That idea pickled in my head for about four days before I committed on it. I usually would require an idea to sit in my head for 3-4 months before determining it’s readiness but the contest has a time limit so some concessions have to be made.

    The initial idea for the contest was “dragon rider dies and dragon mourns his death.” This could make an excellent story. I’m sure it could be great. But it felt to general. To grand. Too unrelatable. I didn’t have any personal attachment to the story. Why should I care? And if I don’t care about the story, why the hell should anyone else care? So then I thought about the idea. What was good about it? The dragon rider death part sounded great. The dragon mourning sounded great.

    From there I remembered my experience of mourning loss and realized that throughout life everyone loses some number of close friends and family. It’s inevitable. So wouldn’t that mean a dragon would lose many riders in their lifespan? Wait… that’s a new idea! So from there I decided “Dragon rider dies and dragon mourns their first rider’s death.”

    From there I kept looking at the idea and thinking “How could I inject more of myself, my feelings, my experience, my essence into this idea?” Unlike Fool In Space which is an author self insert story I didn’t want this story to be a self insert. Instead I wanted it to depict a typical human experience. An experience that is deeply human and relatable. I quickly realized that I was onto something and began to write that I will submit. I’m not gonna talk about it anymore because I gotta keep some surprises for the contest. Maybe follow the royal road of my contest submission as I’ll be putting up chapters near the end of the contest. It’s much heavier than anything I usually write. It’s… different. Whenever I write the story my eyes tear up while smiling so I hope that paints a picture for what it’s like. A happy tragedy.

    I find that my method of cooking up ideas prevents me from being sidetracked by random ideas as I only take a new idea off the stack when I’ve determined I have space to commit to another idea. My philosophy allows me to let good ideas cook more if all my time is allocated. My thinking is that even if an idea in my barrel is better than the idea in my hands I’d rather take that better idea out of the barrel when it is fully fermented rather than partially through the process. Leaving it in the barrel wouldn’t do anything bad to the idea because even if I forget the idea, the mere existence of the idea would have changed the water in the barrel and influenced every other specimen.

    This ideas fermenting in a barrel analogy is kind of a weird one but it has helped me maintain focus. Maybe it’ll be useful for someone else. Who knows. This is just what works for me.

    Aight. So here’s the post plan:

    • Media Review
    • Launch Week Over For My Book
    • Wings Of Liberty Is A Masterpiece pt2

  • Humble Pi

    So I just want to give a little bit of insight into what I usually read as like… a paper book. The one I’m currently reading through is Humble Pi By Matt Parker. The book is an incredible presentation of mathematics in a easily digestible format with jokes and fun remarks scattered about to keep your attention on the subject. I find that many of these mathematics books are really good at keeping a steady pacing and leading the reader to continue. It kind of makes sense that these books are good at that since many have the preconceived notion that math is boring.

    Is math boring? Or is it the way that math is presented that is boring? I choose to believe it’s the presentation that is boring. But I’m a math major. I’m probably biased. The intrigue and attention I give to mathematics is going to be greater than the average individual however I really like the way Matt Parker frames mathematics by showing just how much mathematics is intertwined with our daily lives. And they keep you reading by telling us exactly how bad it would be if suddenly the math went wrong. While these kinds of books aren’t really a great study for my fiction books, the structure of a story with hook, promise, payoff still apply and are very strictly followed to keep a reader on the mathematics. Unlike a cool fantasy world that you can picture in your head, it’s very difficult to picture a 64 byte computer system and it’s internal memory. The structure of a story is very apparent and I’ve found the book to be a nice case study for my own work.