Potato is yum

Potato is yum.

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Fun stuff (Coming soon)

  • Current Dumb Projects

    So. I somehow came up with a really dumb video project that I’m gonna start working on. I suddenly realized that I’m working on a lot of dumb and not so dumb projects. So I figured it might be interesting to people if I listed out all the projects I’m working on and maybe I’ll make something about them later on if I actually end up completing any of these.

    • Bad Apple but every beat is a different video
    • 5th Titanfall Edit
    • CS Edit
    • Finish My Book
    • Composter
    • 3D print stand for phone
    • Figure out better cooling for laptop
    • Fix memory issue on desktop

    I’ll probably talk about a lot of these more. The composter is an extension of my gardening project that I started last summer. It didn’t really go so well. The soil I have has a high clay content so a lot of my veggies kind of just died. Buying soil is expensive as hell so I’m trying to save a bit and make my own.

  • My Minesweeper Addiction

    It’s become a bit of a problem. I started playing minesweeper about a year ago. It was kind of like 2048. Some small little game I could play while sitting on the train without anyone giving me some weird looks. It was also pretty fun since I had to use my brain to play it. Overall, it was great since sometimes I didn’t want to use all my braincells playing chess or turn off my brain and play a clicker game or 2048. It was a great middle ground. And then I found minesweeperonline and found that there was a whole thing around minesweeper.

    I kind of expected this to be honest. After all, if you look hard enough you can find basically any group on the internet. A group for minesweeper? Obviously something like that exists. I made an account and started playing and quickly found myself getting really into it. Here’s my profile if you’re interested.

    https://minesweeper.online/player/35384401

    So yeah. I kind of started playing minesweeper basically 1-2 hours a day and it’s become a bit of a problem. In fact, I’ve started playing minesweeper more than I play counterstrike or any other game for that matter. However, I feel like this gaming is much healthier than my past gaming habits. Minesweeper is pretty easy to put down at any moment unlike my other games and my progress in minesweeper is very luck based as breaking 50/50s is literally a coinflip.

    I’ve gotten pretty decent after wasting nearly 300 hours in minesweeper. So um. Yeah. Maybe I should start doing better things with my time.

  • What Is Confidence

    So I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m probably delusional about my work and probably have more confidence than I should about my work. But I think a distinction between confidence and good is necessary. It is very possible to be confident in something fully knowing it isn’t good. In fact, when we were young we probably made shitty drawings but were proud of them. We were proud of all the crappy stuff we did because we didn’t know about anything better than it. The widespread use of the internet and such has made it much easier for people to cherry pick the best of different forms of art without seeing any of the work done that led up to the great art.

    I think one of the biggest reasons for the cherry picking of art is two problems. I’ll try to break them down here and show how to stop caring about them by reframing the problem into something you can act upon and actually do right now.

    The first problem is the massive quantity of high quality art that is out there on the internet. At almost every moment in time you could go onto basically any social media platform and find some incredible art for basically any niche you want. This volume of art makes it difficult for newer creators to break into the scene because it feels like an impenetrable wall without realizing many of these successful artists have been working at it for decades before getting to where they are. Also success in art has become more of a contest of marketing rather than ability which is something people often overlook or focus too much on. You need both. I saw the amount of competition that I had and instead of thinking about how great these books were I started thinking about how I could make it better. I came up with a book I wanted to see in the world and saw nobody else had made the combination of ideas I wanted. The only way to read the story I wanted to read would be to make it myself. So that’s what I’m doing. I reframed my goal for creating to be from making a successful book to making something I want to see that doesn’t exist. By taking control over the goal it’s easier to actually complete it because it doesn’t depend on others.

    The second problem is the surface level understanding of a large amount of art. There’s a lot to be gained from a lot of books beyond just the surface level plot elements and the story. It seems as if much of the world has begun to consume art for entertainment rather than for thinking. I find this kind of sad. This can be seen happening in real time when you take a glance at the gaming industry where the best stories released in the past decades are almost all done by smaller studios. The biggest studios ended up making COD7. It’s ridiculous. And even stories that don’t have a story have a kind of design philosophy that is meant to make players feel something however it feels as if the development of gaming has become incredibly stagnant. This comes down to actually understanding the art you consume and use as fuel to make your own stuff. After all, how are you supposed to make anything if you don’t understand what you’re consuming. Understanding why you like certain works helps a ton with actually making something.

    Overall, the issue of confidence is more of a framing issue where many have lost sight of a an actual goal and are chasing social validation over creating valuable art. Unfortunately, I can’t really comment much on this as I’ve been producing art at a loss for over a decade. I’ve kind of accepted I’ll never make a living off my hobbies. And I’m kind of okay with that.

    So I planned a different post for this week but it took much longer for me to write up so we’re putting that off for a week. Instead everyone’s gonna need to be okay with this for now. Oh, here’s the post plan:

    • My Minesweeper Addiction
    • Andor Is Good
    • Media Review
    • MY BOOK IS BEING RELEASED!!! (This coming Sunday. Chapters will also be available on this website!)

  • My Book Launches This Week

    Um. Yeah. It’s time. Well crap. I’m really not ready for this thing but it’s kind of like a bandage where it’ll just get more painful if I take it off slowly. So like…. I’m gonna just let it rip. No looking back. I’ve got the whole thing setup and have started setting up the patreon. I wonder if anyone is actually gonna read this thing. That would be incredible.

    I guess I should do my little elevator pitch for why you should care about this random dude’s book.

    So the book is basically my story going through boarding school with a scifi twist from my favorite games and stories such as titanfall, halo, starwars, warhammer 40k, and many others.

    Aight, that’s it basically. Launch is on January 4th. Please check it out if it sounds interesting.

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

  • How to have fun playing Counterstrike

    So you want to have fun playing the single greatest game of first person chess? Well. That’s great because this guide is made just for you. To start with you need two important things. You first need to find the worst webcam microphone possible. Next, you need to learn an optimal way to play the game.

    The most difficult part of this guide is defining what fun even means. Winning? Maybe. Getting kills? Sure. Cursing out teammates? Hell yeah. Throwing the game? Up to you. Well, there’s one strategy that can do all of these things at once. It’s called the mid rush. No matter if you’re T or CT run it down mid every round. How is it fun? Well running it down mid is actually a winning strategy in most cases. Does it get you kills? Hell yeah it does. Curse out teammates? You can curse out that idiot who is sitting in window and didn’t trade you when you died top mid. And if they get mad tell them I said you could do it. They shouldn’t have missed that awp shot. Throwing the game? Rushing too far up mid is throwing so just keep running forward through mid if you don’t see anyone peeking mid. Simple way to throw.

    How do you flame your teammates? The best way is to learn some russian or chinese. Actually, chinese is getting more common so I would recommend that. Ragebaiting and cursing is a very difficult art form and takes thousands of hours to manifest in a usable manner. The best way to get better is to start earlier. In fact, this is exactly what valve’s goal is with cases. Start them young they say. I too think you can get a knife next case. 99% of gamblers quit before they win big.

    Are you tired of premier? Well so am I. Instead join me on competitive office. Competitive office is a work of art that is worth studying. I too sometimes lodge a vending machine in a door using a machinegun to push it over. What? You’ve never seen a bulletproof vending machine? Pfft. You’re missing out. Office is the perfect map for me to let out all my frustrations from working every day. Just by trashing my workplace I can already feel the large quantities of dopamine flooding into my brain. It’s great.

    So the real question is why do you want to have fun playing counterstrike? The fact you’re playing this game means you’re suffering. It’s okay. You’re not the only one. I’m also trapped in the addiction.

  • Solo Farming In The Tower

    I have loved this series for a while and am honestly surprised that Asura decided to pick up translating this one. Apparently the previous translator has made a large amount of money and decided to do other things with their life. Good on them I guess. The old translator did an incredible job so I hope Asura continues the great work as many of the jokes and much of the humor was a nice change of pace compared to other action webcomics where the jokes were about questionably funny things like appearance and such. I’ve already covered some other questionable jokes in webcomics such as the Charlie Kirk assassination joke and I’m thinking of making the long post this Tuesday on jokes and humor in art. Anyway, let’s get back to the review. As usual, between the separator sandwich is spoiler stuff. I try to avoid spoiling much but I do this because I have a visceral hatred for people that don’t give warnings for any level of spoiler in my reviews.

    So this story is kind of like an action webcomic masquerading as a slice of life webcomic. It follows pretty much every indicator of slice of life with cozy farming and everything and then hits you with like 5 chapters straight of combat action with just 2-3 chapters of farming rest stuff. These numbers are more similar to an action webcomic than anything meaning the pacing is actually quite fast for your typical tower comic in general because it swaps between this combat and farming thing meaning most combat is brushed over relatively quickly to move right into the next segment.

    The way the system is done is pretty refreshing as the progress of the character is done fairly well and the introduction of new characters is spread out to not overwhelm the reader. Overall it’s a fairly cozy action webcomic and is a great read to check out with 100 chapters in it’s first season.

    I would give it an 8/10 for the story and a 6/10 for art.

  • Practice Fight Scene Writing

    I decided to do some practice for my book by spending exactly an hour every day writing one scene. Basically, every day I think up something random and figure out a way to include all the major aspects of a fight. Stakes, payoff, all of it.

    Because I’m trying to do all of it in an hour, there is extremely limited wordcount to fit the whole scene into it. The average wordcount is between 500 to 1k so I have to hit every story beat in a pretty short span of time. It turns out that this challenge is really good for getting good at writing stories.

    I decided to put these up on RR to help make myself actually follow through with this daily challenge. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to read it because it is just unedited practice but we’ll see if I can continue this.

  • Asura’s Quality Improving?

    So I’ve noticed a noticeable improvement in Asura’s translations as of late. This is quite a welcome change as they used to have probably the highest standard out of all action korean translators with some of the most dedicated translators. As of late, Asura has been picking up two to three new IPs every month. The hitrate of these have been surprisingly good with the most recent wave of new additions being incredibly well done.

    Many of the longer running series have also seen a return to the previous high quality translations Asura was known for with series like Nano Machine getting fixes on a few chapters that had english translation on top of the characters that hadn’t been erased. This looks pretty promising and I’ll likely make a few posts on the new additions to the site as most of these additions are quite good.

  • Prosperous Universe Commodity Sim

    So I always loved the idea of legalized gambling. I mean, the stock market. Well. I’m a broke guy so I wasn’t able to play with money until very very recently. So instead over the past few years I’ve been playing with a bunch of virtual money on a game that accurately simulates a space economy and has won multiple awards for how realistic it is.

    This is the trading panel I have designed for myself to profit off SF fuel. From this program I was able to risk free practice gambling for when I got real money to waste on the actual game after I actually had money to waste. I think this is actually quite fun and educational. I went from around 5k to 1 million from flipping the margin of fuel which is a high volume commodity.

    I think this game was a very good first step into investing and really helped me understand what hedging is and how to do a cost benefit analysis of setting up a supply chain. The logistics networks in the game also helped me better understand the complexity of trade in a much more simplified and risk free manner. Losing a bet in the game doesn’t cost me anything but maybe a week of relatively safe margin flips.

    From this program I branched off into EVE trading and developed my gambling ability but I really feel like this program is the program for people to get into investing and finance.

  • The Delusions Of A “Magnum Opus”

    I make stuff because I really like other things. This is pretty common actually. I am confident in saying that the most common reason people get into some kind of art is because they are inspired by some other art in some form. And yes, I consider politics a form of art since it’s basically just professional rage baiting with structure and big money behind it. Ahem. Back to the point. Everyone starts making stuff because they have this idea of some kind of initial dream in their mind.

    For me, I’ve gotten into many different creative outlets. Let’s just go through the list and put in the “dreams” while analyzing just how delusion I am. To be clear, it’s not bad to be delusional. Like, you need to be some degree of crazy to waste this much time of your life get into creating.

    The first creative outlet I attempted was violin. When I was probably four years old I saw one of my pre-K teachers playing that wooden thing and foolishly pointed at it and looked up at my mother while in her lap. That one choice has probably costed my family more money and more suffering than my entire education up to college. Anyway, I thought that wooden thing looked really cool and wanted to play whatever nice sounding thing the lady was playing. Once I got to somewhat know violin I set my sights on the little Paganini. If you play violin you know what I’m talking about. For those who don’t, Paganini wrote some of the most advanced violin pieces requiring combinations of techniques that are practically inhuman. The little Paganini is a heavily simplified version of his piece which is still considered extremely difficult. I had my goal set and I was pretty confident I could do it… until I started actually realizing just how violin was. You see, when you talk to the “best” about “good goals” they’ll tell you the goals for being in their level. My parents and I were talking to contest winners, professional soloists, big concert violinists. There is an uncountable number of people in the world who play violin but there is a very finite number that play in major orchestras. This dream I had was pretty unattainable for someone like me who wasn’t planning on devoting my life to that little wooden box. The source of this delusion was asking for goal advice from the wrong group of people. I found the best way to learn the art but the people who can teach you to make an art form probably don’t see it in the same way as you since they have to be that much better to be able to teach it. To this day I still haven’t gotten around to the little Paganini even though I should be capable of playing it. Over the fourteen or so years I gradually realized that fixating on a single piece kind of killed all the fun in improving my technique and such and decided to pick out my pieces based on where I’d end up playing things. As such most of the pieces I know now are either pop songs or old folk songs to be played with friends or for the older folks in my family gatherings. In the end, I gave up the dream. A pattern that you will soon see is quite common among the forms of art I pick up.

    The second creative outlet I attempted was drawing. I always wanted to draw one thing and that is eyes. Someone told me that the best way to improve as an artist is to develop some kind of fetish. I guess I developed an eye fetish. I started drawing eyes on literally everything but really just wanted to eventually draw this space marine. In reality, this whole drawing thing started from my first shot at animation but that fizzled out so quickly so we don’t talk about it. The drawing was pretty short lived and all it took was someone looking at my sketchbook full of eyes and going, “ew”. The dream of drawing a space marine kind of shattered right there at the slightest negative push. I think this happened because something in me felt that I was so far away from where I would need to be for my dream and it felt hopeless. So, setting the dream ended up killing the motivation.

    The third creative outlet was game development. I’ve had this dream game in my mind for so long. I even drew assets for the game and everything. I did a crap ton of research for unity vs godot and a whole lot more. Once I sat down to start making my dream game I quickly realized how hard it was to make a game. After completing tutorials and such I would go back to my planning files and say, “Hmm, doing that is hard, what if I tried this instead?” After going in a development hell circle for over two years I looked back at the original document and realized that basically the whole dream game had changed. Was it my dream anymore? Did I even want to make this game? After I found myself asking if I even wanted to make it I realized that my dream game wouldn’t be as much fun as I had thought it would be initially. After two years of learning game design and game development I took a good look at my idea and tossed it in the trash. The dream I had made was made by my fairly incompetent self and the dream game idea was not as glorious as I had thought.

    The last creative outlet was video creation. I was actually a fairly prominent figure in the rust building scene and at one point decided I was going to make a documentary on the history of rust building. I did nearly a hundred hours of research and started to learn a ton of video editing things to do the project. However, as I got further and further into it I realized that to make the best dream video I would need to have a whole lot more practice. I thought I could actually do the dream this time unlike my other creative projects and pushed out an announcement to my rust building community that I would delay the video to increase the quality of the video. From then I started getting my hands on video editing software and scripting along with studying professionally produced documentaries. I very quickly realized just how big this kind of project would be. There’s a reason most documentaries have pretty massive teams behind them. It’s hard. While this dream is still ongoing I really don’t know if my personal skill in video editing and 3D animation software will ever reach the point where I can make my supposed magnum opus. I think my wish for the quality to be professional is pretty delusional but that’s my wish so the project will probably be stuck in limbo for a few more years.

    As some of you know, I’m currently entering writing. This time, I have no project as my dream. Instead, I’ve set my dream to be completing at least one book. I no longer wish to fall into some massive project I can never finish nor do I want to expect great results from what will be my first creation. I expect it to suck. I might have a really big ego saying this but I love consuming every piece of art I make. I literally go back and eat up everything I’ve made like it’s fresh bread out of the oven. So, even if nobody else reads my book, at least I’ll still be able to read my first completed book and enjoy it whenever I want.

    Thanks for reading. This post has much more rambling but probably has more of the me voice in it than usual. I’m probably going to talk more about some of my other weird projects like gardening or woodworking since I do a crap ton of different things. People often ask me how I find time to do all this. I don’t. I have no time. I wish there could be 48 hours in a day. AHHH.

    Oh. I almost forgot. Post plan this week:

    • Media Review
    • 1 week until my book releases announcement
    • Prosperous Universe Commodity Market Sim
    • How to have fun playing Counterstrike (Satire)