Potato is yum

Potato is yum.

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Fun stuff (Coming soon)

  • Writing Words Is Hard

    One of the biggest issues I have when writing my book is well… writing the damn thing. I find myself drawing up character sheets and tweaking things that ultimately don’t matter. I sometimes need to remind myself that nobody will care about a world if there isn’t an engaging story set in it. Often, I find that I make some world building decision just to realize a year later that the choice make it difficult to write the story. So, let’s go over a few examples from my story Fool In Space that I ended up needing to throw away. A lot of these examples are actually published on Royal Road under my first book Wyrm In The Brain.

    One of my biggest ideas was the idea that my main character would die 7 times and be revived with his life following one of the 7 deadly sins each time until the last life where all of his personalities would mix together to create one super being. It sounds so cool right? But that ideas was so big that it would only fit in the story by making some of the other ideas and the theme take up a much smaller portion of the story pie. I really didn’t like that. I wanted to write the story to talk about my life and not because I wanted to write a story about philosophy or religion so I ended up throwing away the idea.

    After throwing out this idea I realized that each story has a kind of budget of “stuff” you can fit into it and each part of the story takes up some amount of space inside the story. Depending on the worldbuilding, theme, and other parts the story could end up bloated and slow or lean and fast. I know that my writing style is on the leaner side meaning I have to be very deliberate with the content I put into my story. From figuring this out I went through and cut a crap ton of stuff out of the story. It’s still possible to read my first attempt at writing a story but I believe I bloated the world building making there be less story and more scene painting.

    By realizing I only had a finite amount of “stuff” I could fit into a story, I learned how to quickly judge if an idea would fit in my story.

    You know, sometimes I wake up, stare at the ceiling and think, “Damn. Why do I get up to do the same thing every day?” and then realize I really got nothing better to do with my life. Not like I’m complaining. I rather like things being simple. It’s just sometimes I want something a little more exciting than sitting at a desk grinding away at a degree that won’t yield results for years. Maybe that’s what going outside is for. If only it wasn’t snowing and brutally cold everywhere except my room. I guess I’m stuck in this building for a couple more months. Eh. Why do I think these things? Oh yeah, post plan for this week:

    • Media Review
    • Making Ads For My Book
    • Raw Broccoli
    • Titanfall 2 Edit
    • 3D Software Shenanigans

    Aight that’s it for me today.

  • A Spreadsheet Of Webcomics

    I’ve been working on this for a while… Like a while… Here’s the link.

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1THuylzz86f-G9puNVvzPcRV36HhyeyZr/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=102652862306890961519&rtpof=true&sd=true

  • Battle Bit is Back?

    So. Yesterday was the battlebit playtest and ohhhhhhh man was it an experience. Let’s get the first big stuff out of the way. Yes, it sucked. Yes, there was a memory leak. Yes, the devs knew about it. Yes I crashed 7 times while playing the game. Well, alright. That sucks. Anyway, let’s get into what I liked about this playtest.

    I opened up the selection menu and noticed that the names of each of the guns have been changed to not reflect real life. I think this indicates that the developers are starting to realize that realism and fun are different and you cannot use realistic statistics to balance guns in a video game because a videogame is inherently different to real life. In real life a single bullet can remove a combatant while in a video game you have a so called health bar and can respawn once you die. Very different. The playtest seemed to try to make the battlebit experience much more realistic while keeping the arcade like mechanics that made the game feel great to play. This visual and audio upgrade increases the playability by a ton because the enemies are now much more visible and the audio is much clearer and distinct even in the middle of combat.

    The servers though… they still need some work.

    I’m very excited for the next playtest and hopefully the memory leak will be solved. Oh and also a lot of the projectiles are just… broken. And helicopters don’t work. :p

  • I was busy today so here is a potato

  • Hilarious Production Issues In The Major

    So I remember when we all used to joke abut the audio guy when we got really fried audio in PGL. On the first day of the major we got a total of 2 hours and 40ish minutes of technical freeze time with multiple HUD bugs and audio issues. It’s kind of hilarious that the biggest event in counter strike has this many production issues.

    One of the funny ones is the music playing while the in game audio got doubled up causing some seriously pain inducing audio. I would put a link to the clip of the moment but I wouldn’t wish that upon sound upon anyone.

    It’s actually kind of sad that starladder has managed to blow out the eardrums of a few thousand people. Not to mention they also gatekept the english broadcasting rights preventing many smaller people from costreaming the major which led to quite a bit of scrambling from many people over the past few days.

    Matches on day one lasted all the way till 1:30 AM because of the production issues.. Now that stage one is over we can only hope for all these issues to be fixed. However, it seems kind of unlikely to be perfectly smooth judging from how badly starladder have been managing this event. Never let starladder get another major.

    Oh yeah, if you have battle bit tomorrow is the playtest.

  • I’m Hitting The Gym

    So I’ve been a little lucky to always be underweight. Now this is usually considered a good thing in our society but it turns out health wise being underweight can actually be as much a problem as being overweight especially because I’m supposedly still growing. So, I’ve decided to start putting some meat on my bones.

    I’m gonna probably make a post every week on what I’m doing and hopefully these posts keep me on the grind since I’ve tried to get on the gym grind multiple times in the past. I think if I say it here and than say my results I’ll end up manifesting the motivation to keep it up so I’m going to at least give this idea a shot.

    I’m going to start pretty light for now with 8 pound dumbbells doing some basic upper body exercises. With a bit more research I might get some other equipment or I might go to the gym to do some stuff. Anyway, I should start eating properly… hmm…

    Maybe I need to finally eat more than just frozen chicken, noodles, and fruit and add something like beef or fish into my diet. I’ll probably talk to some buddies to figure it out. Anyway, it’s thanksgiving and I’m really lazy today because I ate like a tenth of a turkey. Haha. That’s the most I’ve eaten ever.

  • Royal Road Setup

    I spent a lot of time getting everything setup for my book and didn’t prepare a post for today so I’m gonna just throw this here since I wanna keep my streak heh. Do check it out if you are interested. The launch announcement contains my promises for the story and also a little message about my current situation which I kind of just realized I never mentioned here.

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

  • The Urge To Create

    I like making stuff. It feels good. It feels like I’m doing something with my life. I would be lying if I said I didn’t like the social validation of people appreciating my creations but that’s not why I like creating stuff. In the end what I really like about creating stuff is the ability to make another person see something the way I see it. If someone likes the way I see something it just means they are more likely to show others my vision helping my perspective reach more eyes. So in the end what I like is not the social validation but basically imposing my ideas upon others.

    That sounds kind of violent and brings up weird imagery but like… isn’t that what almost every form of media does? Isn’t the whole point of a theme an idea that the creator wishes their reader views and potentially adopts into their own perspective of the world? I know that in a few thousand years there’s probably nobody that will remember some random dude named potatoisyum or strangemudkip and likely nobody would hear the weird ass music I made in middle school or read whatever book I’m working on right now. But it’s not like I care about the stuff I make itself since what will remain for more than a few thousand years is the ideas and perspective I put into my works that diffuse into the consumers of my works. I might not hit it big or change the world but I’ll have at least changed one other human on this planet.

    When I make something, I see my creation as a vehicle to deliver a part of me to a consumer with the hope that people look at how I see the world and think about it. I know my views are different than most and I never expect to assimilate someone to my perspective but the value of my creativity isn’t to assimilate but to demonstrate. When I grab my violin and stand on the stage to play I want the audience to feel my emotions. I want them to feel the struggles I’ve had in life and to feel the victories I’ve experienced. I hear a lot of people talk about how age matters a lot with music and that someone who has lived through life can put more of their life into their music than a younger musician. I think this thought is BS.

    I might be young and still in college but I believe I have the same right to show the world my perspective as someone thirty years my senior. In fact, I believe it is more necessary than ever for people my age to start creating things not for clout and fame but for the love of creating. It is true that I am less experienced than an older musician but this makes the previously mentioned statement about skill of delivery rather than the message behind the creation.

    Someone who has spent decades refining the delivery of a speech will always produce a better speech than someone who just started speaking however both have the same right to share their perspective and neither is better for the images they wish to evoke.

    That got a bit philosophical but that’s it for my serious post of the week. Here’s the planned posts I’m probably going to make:

    • Media Review
    • Battle Bit is Back
    • The Major is Crunchy
    • My Steam Awards Choices
    • I’m Hitting The Gym

    I’m going to continue posting whatever I want and hopefully I can start tagging things properly for people that want to read specific things but next week will mostly be gaming related posts due to the counterstrike major happening and three game playtests that I somehow got into along with thanksgiving. Whew. I thought I could relax from school work but now I’m getting gaming work. Not that I’m complaining. Heh.

    Oh. I’m editing this and forgot to mention. I’m currently looking for volunteers to read through a final draft of the first 10 chapters of my book for first impressions. If you’re interested please let me know and I’ll be very very very thankful for your time.

  • SFM Deleted My Smokes

    So I’ve not made a post about this for the past two weeks mostly because I’ve begun to debate between continuing with SFM or switching to blender or maybe even unreal. I think I’ve decided to continue with SFM until this project is finished since I can just change some of the shots I’m going for even though it kind of hampers with my ability to truly create the video I envision.

    One of the important aspects of the clips I’m trying to edit for my counterstrike two edit is a clutch where I throw a smoke and hide in it to win a 1v3. However, SFM kind of just eats my smoke and it looks like the enemy is staring at me for 20 seconds without shooting me. The only workaround I could figure out for this is to do a first person perspective recording from within the demo file but then I can’t get the proper camera angles. I don’t really know how to recreate the volumetric smokes in counterstrike but I found a texture that is similar to it on blender so it would be possible for me to manually fluff up an area with smoke and then figure out a camera track to make it work but it would take so much work because porting demos to blender breaks a crap ton of textures and sometimes makes the bones on the guns break.

    Speaking of bones breaking… I figured what made that magazine float! Turns out I accidentally selected the object and changed a value on it causing it to get stuck at the keyframe I had made. Oops. From that I’m starting to get the sense that while SFM is stupid it might also be a combination of me really not knowing what I’m even doing.

    Anyway, not much progress has been made because of the whole PC killing itself thing. Hopefully I’ll be able to make some progress soon.

  • I Cannot Write This Post

    This was supposed to be the day where I talk about One Punch Man S3. But I can’t write it. I don’t want to beat a corpse so I’ll just talk about my thoughts on how it’s become like this.

    My opinion is that One Punch Man has fallen into the trap of “Good Enough” just like many other adaptations. It’s pretty well established that a new story must have the best first impression possible to get a consumer base to consume it. In the case of One Punch Man, this first impression was one of the best examples of action animation with incredibly fluid animations, incredible voice acting, and a story that quickly pulled viewers into the world. After the hardest work of acquiring an audience what then?

    This has actually been a big problem for a lot of major Animes such as My Hero Academia, One Piece, and many others. They build up a large audience but have to continue moving somewhere to keep the money ball rolling. At the end of the day, views are needed to pay the bills and bills will forever haunt us creators. So I’ve given examples of One Piece and My Hero Academia both of which have maintained relevance despite running for so long. What’s the difference between these two examples and One Punch Man?

    I think the difference is the acceptance of “Good Enough” for aspects that are vital to the anime’s identity. For My Hero Academia, the writers choose to pivot the story to a slower pace causing them to lose some consumers. However, this choice of pivoting the story was made to maintain the quality of the story and animation for the action that is now closing the major arcs of the story. It’s true that retiring All Might made the series drop dramatically in views but knowing how to allocate their resources made it possible to cater to people following the story and to people following the spectacle.

    If you go on youtube you can probably find a bunch of videos of just clips from action anime where the main character powers up or some big letters talking about some amazing fight scene. I often go back to season 1 of One Punch Man to rewatch the fitness test or go back to My Hero Academia to watch Deku punch the crap out of that big ass robot. But when I go back to watch these clips it’s really not for the story but for the spectacle. When studying One Punch Man season 1, we can see how the mix of story and spectacle are refined in the starting episodes as each episode is basically a story on it’s own. The only real story behind One Punch Man is the story behind Saitama losing his humanity. While this story is incredibly interesting, it is definitely not the reason why I first watched the show. I watched it because I saw a clip of a bald naked guy squishing a mosquito.

    From looking back at season one, there is a clear emphasis on the animation of the spectacle while the other parts have some fairly obvious cut corners. However, the viewer doesn’t really care about those cut corners because in the overall story, those cut corners don’t matter. To cite an example, the underground laboratory they fight in pretty much repeats every few seconds but nobody would notice it because it’s not a detail that stands out. In season 3, much of the spectacle got reduced so much it would be almost impossible to call it animation. From looking at season 2, this is clearly because the publisher thought that this would be “Good Enough”. I think all creators can take something from this because we don’t have infinite time and resources.

    Try to figure out what matters and make sure it’s better than “Good Enough”.