What is a nukige? Put simply, nuki = fap. A nukige exists entirely for you to jerk off to. Sure, story-driven 18+ visual novels at least have that thin fig leaf of “I’m here for the plot,” but a nukige is there to stimulate your junk directly, no pretense, no bullshit. Sei ○ Onna ○○ Ikusei Gakuen is exactly that. As the title suggests, the goal is to drag the girls at this school down into a bunch of living sex toys.

Mashiroiro Symphony’s tagline goes: what color are boys? What color are girls? And when a boy and a girl fall in love, what color is love itself? Koi ga Saku Koro Sakura Doki’s tagline goes: a girl who can’t fall in love, and a boy with no interest in it — if the two of them fall in love, what happens to the world? Alright — Palette and 和泉つばす teaming up again. The title still has that high-class, faintly bittersweet ring to it, that pure longing-for-love vibe. That’s what I figured at first too: Koi ga Saku Koro Sakura Doki (恋がさくころ桜どき) is nothing more than a plain… school… boy-slowly-works-his-way-through-the-heroines story. A little sweeter at most, something along the lines of Sena Airi’s and Uryuu Sakuno’s routes. What’s the worst it could do? Drag things out like Kanna Sana’s route? Except that’s not true at all!

The famous deal-hunting site SMZDM has a few headphone holy grails: Creative IE3, Creative Air, Creative Live2, AKG Q450, and whatever else I can’t remember. Basically, every time there’s a JD.com audio coupon, these earphones get trotted out and recommended, until almost everyone has a pair—it’s practically a recurring segment. As for the sound quality of these headphones, not many people actually talk about it seriously. Based on my own experience, I can only say some of them aren’t really for the masses. The typical one is the Creative IE3: its sound is too treble-heavy, the bass is just sad, and plenty of people who bought it hoping for thumping bass are probably disappointed. Another Creative product, the Creative Air, has been tagged as a “female vocal poison.” Oh great, female vocal poison again. After the last Phiaton, I thought I was done with female vocal poison, but people keep making the same mistakes. This time I got a 100-off-400 coupon, and my hand slipped and I bought the Creative Air, because the IE3 had already been taken by someone else. I have to give JD.com credit here: they deliver even during Spring Festival, and efficiently too, though the courier guy told me after delivering this that any order placed today would have to wait until after the holiday.

After picking up a ThinkPad X250 I paired it with a dock. The dock was an engineering sample. Cheap, but with its share of problems. Most of them I can live with — no triple-monitor output, for instance, which I don’t need anyway. The real killer is that when the machine isn’t plugged into power, external audio picks up a loud hum. People reported this on the official site and on Youtube. It turned out to be a hardware fault on Lenovo’s end, and only got fixed after Lenovo recalled the thing. Like I said, though, mine is a cheap engineering sample, so no recall for me. That doesn’t mean there’s no fix. Just get an external sound card…

I use my own laptop for work. It’s not that the desktop machines at the office are bad, they’re just a hassle to use. Over a year ago I bought a ThinkPad X230, and using it since then I’ve really come to appreciate how good ThinkPads are. If something goes wrong you can just find the parts yourself and fix it. Honestly, even if you smashed it, I could buy some bits on eBay and put it back together for you… Over the past year or so I’ve replaced the screen, messed with the cooling, and the machine runs fine. But there were still a couple of things that bugged me. One, the screen was the cursed 1366 x 768. Two, the battery life was bad. Even with a 9-cell I could only push power draw down to 11W at best, and it would randomly spike to 20W… So when I heard the ThinkPad X250 was announced and that it brought back the original trackpad, I just bought it. Why not a Mac? Because I don’t use OSX, and I think putting Ubuntu on an RMBP is too much hassle.

If I had to name the first time music truly got to me, it’d be my senior year of college. Back then my daily IEMs were the Audio-Technica CKM55, and I was listening to an Alan song. The rhythmic drumbeat paired with her sweet, slightly melancholy voice hit me with a wave of sadness. I remember thinking: how is this singer’s voice so clear, so sweet — it’s like the sound itself carries emotion, and I got infected by it. Later, the CKM55 that had been with me for so long had its cable snap, and then I found out the thing was discontinued. I’ve gone through plenty of earphones since, and it’s rare to find a pair that separates bass from vocals while keeping the highs clear. More importantly, that feeling of passion was gone. Even with booming bass, sweet mids, and crystal highs, there’s always something missing — that one bit of passion. I’m no good at the mystical side of this hobby. That “passion” is probably expressible in a frequency response curve, but how exactly you tune for it, I couldn’t tell you. Luckily, the Grado SR225 headphones gave me what I wanted.

Audiophile mysticism is mysticism because so much of it can only be felt, not explained, and often can’t even be put into words. The vocabulary grows with the years. Back when I was in high school, most of it was “bass extends moderately, highs are transparent, mids are sweet, good resolution.” Now it’s “wide soundstage, bass loose vs. tight, mids forward vs. too far back.” I don’t know about the rest, but “extends” is a word I haven’t seen in ages. Another trait of the mysticism is that it can’t be expressed precisely and has no unified standard. Plenty of gurus like to measure frequency response curves with pro gear, but nobody tells you what curve counts as “female-vocal poison,” what curve counts as a “wide soundstage,” what curve counts as “pop tuning.” And the funniest part: even if you produce the curve, someone will tell you music isn’t for looking at, it’s for listening to, and how it sounds is what matters… I don’t get it. I really don’t. There are also plenty of weird terms in this mysticism that can’t be explained, or you can’t even say what they mean. Recently I heard two of them: “musicality” and “monitor style.” Someone said the Sony D100 recorder isn’t suited for listening to music, and gave a reason. “Sure, this thing crushes the ZX1 in every way, but the sound is too cold, too dry, too monitor-flat, too compressed, no musicality. It’s not as smooth as the ZX1 and PHA-2.” I didn’t know sound could be heard as “smooth,” or that sound has a taste… and that it fails on taste even while crushing everything else on every count… So what exactly is musicality? What is monitor style? And how is the D100 as a music player, for a device that’s a voice recorder? After reading a pile of guru talk I got nothing usable out of it, so I had to listen for myself.

I don’t have much of a high opinion of most of what’s on the Japanese light novel market. Forget plot—just the basic flow of the prose is a huge problem. The ones that are actually tolerable to read are few and far between; most sit at a middle-schooler’s level of storytelling: blunt, simple developments, boring-as-hell girls throwing themselves at the protagonist, and a bunch of vague posturing about “allies of justice.” Honestly, not many of them feel fresh. In that respect I prefer Chinese works. Of course, that’s understandable. Light novels as a product rose up hand in hand with their illustrations, so there’s a saying for the ones with bad writing and good art: “You’re buying the illustrations, and the toilet paper comes free.” The most disgusting thing isn’t someone ugly—it’s someone ugly who thinks they’re good-looking. The most idiotic thing isn’t someone who looks like an idiot—it’s an idiot who keeps strutting around like a big shot. That’s more or less how I see most light novels too, but there are exceptions. The “Hentai” Prince and the Stony Cat is one.

Every adult who’s never been in a relationship has, more or less, gone through a phase of wallowing in “2D delusions.” Don’t rush to deny it. Either you’ve dated someone, or you won’t admit it. Otherwise… why would a life winner like you be reading my blog? I had that phase too. Back then I thought way too highly of myself, carrying a bit of detachment and aloofness, full of imagination about the world. Seeing other people in relationships always made my chest tighten: why can even that kind of person get a partner? Why do those couples always look kind of dopey? There are so many girls in this world—how come none of them notice me? Maybe my “her” just hasn’t shown up yet? I once firmly believed: I should have a childhood friend who’s been by my side since we were kids and messages me first every day; in school, I’d always run into one or two girls in my club who blush when they talk; or maybe, by some chance, I’d learn a mysterious girl’s unspeakable secret and we’d forge a bond that belongs only to us… Just like girls get hooked on Qiong Yao novels and teen romance, the harem works guys consume build us a dreamlike ideal world too. “Why doesn’t this stuff ever happen to me? Why aren’t there girls like that around me?” As they say, people grow by gradually coming to understand themselves. When one day you look in the mirror and think, “Who even is this, who’d want to get close to you,” you probably get why the so-called “protagonist halo” never once favored you. Growing up teaches you that without enough resources and charm, no miracle’s going to drop out of the sky. Those old dreams, looking back, feel more like the real world’s little contrast-and-mockery routine aimed at you. Fiction is fiction; no matter how pretty something unrealistic is, it can’t stand in reality. The more you sink into it, the bigger the gap and the more exhausted you get. I eventually climbed out. But there are always people still soaking in the rose-colored dream, unwilling to wake up. Real-life frustration needs some fantasy to cushion it—and the brief thrill those dreams give might just be the start of another kind of addiction. So today’s subject is exactly this kind of fantasy-projection work—

My take on whether ghosts exist has gone through several phases… In elementary school, when I heard there might be ghosts in the world, I was terrified. I couldn’t even sleep after watching those cheap Hong Kong and Taiwan horror flicks, and local ghost stories were enough to make me afraid of the dark. Then I saw some behind-the-scenes footage of those Hong Kong/Taiwan horror movies, and I started spreading ghost stories myself, and after that I was never scared again. Humans only fear the unknown and things they can’t control. That’s how I understand it. As for ghosts, humans can’t catch them, but they can’t deny them either. Some even go so far as to say ghosts have magic, supernatural powers, that they can control people and command wind and rain, which makes everyone even more anxious. Later I developed a new understanding of whether ghosts exist or not: if people become ghosts after death and can run rampant in this world… then wouldn’t the world be full of ghosts by now! Humans would’ve been wiped out by ghosts ages ago, right? So after Hatsuyuki Sakura, I played another game about ghosts: Kimi e Okuru, Sora no Hana is Cabbit’s second work — yeah, yeah, the same one as Midori no Umi last time. This time they dropped the artist whose art gave off a strong nukige vibe and had Yukie, the character designer for Chisa, who claims to be female, handle the art solo. From the outside it looks like a thoroughly heartwarming work. So is the story actually heartwarming? Trust me — if it’s not, you can come and fuck me up!