I used to be a Sony PHA-1 owner. For the longest time I ran it with my laptop as an external sound card, which nicely dodged all the noise coming out of the laptop’s built-in audio. Honestly, it worked fine. Then a few days ago some little bottom I used to gank over and over back in my World of Warcraft days — opposite faction, same server — forced me to sell him my PHA-1. So I had to buy a new one. I considered the Creative E5 first, but word is it’s crap. I also considered the PHA-3, until I found out it needs its own power supply, and my laptop doesn’t have that many USB ports. So the PHA-2 it was. It arrived, and sure enough: praise be to Sony.

Bought the ChromeCast on Black Friday. The point was to test EMS’s official overseas forwarding service. Turns out that forwarder is deeply unreliable — this $19 thing from Amazon US took a month to reach me, and it went missing a couple of times along the way. Anyway, it arrived. A lot of people probably want to know what this thing is good for, and how it can still be used in China in 2015. So let me run through it briefly.

What is a landmine game? It’s the kind that gives you a huge落差—looks great on the surface, but once you’re in, you realize it’s nothing like you imagined. And on top of that, it hurts you bad and doesn’t even give you a rub afterward. A total scam. It’s like you spend ages chasing after a goddess, get ready to fuck her, and then find out she’s actually a man—and he forcefully makes you the bottom, fucks your ass raw till you bleed, then dumps you and sells you to a gay bar as a cum dumpster. A landmine game feels different from being deceived. With deception, you’re just being played with. With a landmine game, you’re not only played with but also tied up and force-fed shit. The first time I heard about Haruka Kanata (はるかかなた), the reviews weren’t great—they called it a landmine. But I thought, how bad can it really be? A plot that drags? Unexplained developments? Shit art? A pile of dead characters? I’ve seen the worst plots. I didn’t believe it could be that bad. My curiosity kicked in, and I wanted to see just how explosive this landmine was… But I was wrong. Haruka Kanata is a proper landmine—it redefines the term, made me relearn what a landmine means. This game fucked me deep and just walked away smiling.

The world is dark. But that’s not enough of a reason to deny that light exists. I know this one guy. Met him online, same as usual. From the moment I met him I thought he was mediocre. Mediocre in the sense that, sure, you can chat with him, but nothing about him stands out. No rebellious streak, never picks a fight, always smiling, doesn’t seem to have much of an opinion of his own. Not that he’s clueless — he knows plenty — but nothing he knows counts as expertise. Sometimes I figured this guy’s life had zero passion in it. But he always seemed happy. I asked him once if there was anything he wanted to do. He said he wanted to be a programmer someday. “Like, writing insane software?” He shook his head. “That’d be great if it happens, but just writing stuff that solves people’s problems is fine too.” He paused. “I like writing code. Same way most kids like building with blocks.” So I stopped keeping in touch. Mostly because talking to him was boring — he’d listen to anything you said, then go right back to living his ordinary life, never once wanting to shake things up. Sometimes I think the big shots, the experts, they’re all obsessive, fanatical, one-track-minded. And guys like him? Throw them into a crowd and you’ll never find them again. Then the years went by. Through the internet I watched countless big names pivot and maneuver, watched plenty of experts trace their winding life curves. They ran around chasing all sorts of things, gained some, lost some. And that’s when I realized: the guy with no passion had somehow become the happiest person of all.

SINCLIENT is a visual novel by BOOST5 — ah, actually it’s not really a galgame, more like an 18+ visual novel, since there isn’t a single choice or branch in it. You just plow straight through from start to finish. It’s not a long game, but it’s definitely not short either. It’s split into two parts: a prologue, and a main chapter called Babylon. After finishing it, I came away with one feeling… And that’s that the prologue and the Babylon chapter don’t connect at all. Two different games… two different stories… and even two different levels of rigor.

The first time I worked up the nerve to spend over 1000 on earphones, I bought the UE TF10. I figured I’d already picked up an F807 and decided to listen to FLAC, so I ought to pair it with something decent. That TF10 stayed with me for a long, long time. I got to know its sound so well I couldn’t know it any better: strong instrument rendition, powerful resolution, rhythmic bass, and… vocals buried under the bass and instruments, plus a fit that was a struggle to jam in no matter what. Two years later, one side of my TF10 finally developed a problem, so I had to let it go. It was a US-market unit, and there were no new TF10s on the market anymore… I could only switch to the ER4P, though sometimes I couldn’t help missing that aggressive TF10 sound. Compared to the ER4P it wasn’t transparent at all, but it was genuinely great for rock. Later I picked up a cheap TF10 unit on eBay, put it on, and just shook my head. That cheap, it was probably foreign e-waste. The resolution was there, but the sound was far too muffled… So how does the TF10’s successor, the UE900, perform?

I first heard about Midori no Umi (翠の海) two years ago. I saw a CG of the heroine standing in the moonlight and she looked so goddamn pretty that I went digging for more, and while I was digging I noticed something off about the CGs — same pose, except in this one she’s holding a bloody knife. Oh. Okay. I know what this is. Yandere heroine setup, dime a dozen. A fan translation seemed to be in the works, so I figured I’d wait for the Chinese release. And I waited. And waited. I waited until even a scrub like me had started reading raw Japanese, and the translation still hadn’t shown up. So I just went and got the game itself. I didn’t know much about it going in. I skimmed some impressions beforehand — mostly positive, but nobody talked about the plot. All they said was that picking the wrong choice gets you killed. “The protagonist dying is no big deal.” So the game began again.

There is magic in this world, and there are magic books. A magic book is a thing with actual power inside it. The story it holds might be sad, or happy, or left hanging, or wrapped up clean. Nothing special on the surface, maybe. But call something a magic book, and it’s bound to have a “magic” part. “Open a magic book, and the story inside plays out around you for real. The magic only fades once the story reaches its ending.” Amazing, sure. But magic books don’t always bring happiness. More often they’re a pain in the ass for reality. So Yūkōji Anko’s job is to collect them and keep them safe in the magic library. Anko married into the Yūkōji family. For various reasons, the family pushed her out. The Yūkōjis have ties to magic books, but there’s one thing they’re afraid of too: a witch called the Paper Magician. White hair, red eyes, that’s her. During those push-everyone-away days, Yūkōji Anko and her husband had a daughter. The moment she was born, everything changed.