During a matchmaking session with a music teacher, she asked me a question: “What was your youth like?” I have to say, there aren’t many questions in this world that can completely leave me speechless, but this one definitely counts.

I’ve been using the FiiO X7 for a while now, and there are a few problems: When playing songs, it stalls once at intervals ranging from 30 seconds to 1 minute; the stall lasts about 20 seconds before playback resumes. Battery life feels like it should be around the official 9 hours, but standby is a real weak point. It ought to have auto-shutdown. Any artist name in English gets displayed in all caps. Firmware updates can only be done by copying to an SD card—it’s supposedly a smart device but doesn’t support Wi-Fi updates. The breathing light stays on constantly, which is light pollution at night. The machine formats cards as exfat, which doesn’t support long file names. So I was grumbling about all this when I saw FiiO had released firmware 1.3. The update method is the same as for older devices, but 1.3 did fix quite a few things. First, the breathing light is now configurable. Second, there’s now a mode that auto-shuts down after a set number of minutes in standby, so long standby periods won’t drain much battery. Overall it should now beat the ZX1. But the most infuriating problem—playback stopping—still isn’t fixed. I emailed FiiO, and they suggested I try a different card.

Let’s talk about Lump of Sugar for a second. Back when I didn’t know any Japanese (still don’t, for the record), I figured this studio was hot shit. Mostly because the name sounded nice and because everyone and their dog kept holding forth about it. And whenever someone says “Lump of Sugar,” I picture an elegant girl sitting on a street corner in the afternoon, watching the crowd drift past under the awning, dropping a sugar cube into her coffee with pale fingers. Very atmospheric, very mood. But mood is mood, and in reality Lump of Sugar is just a company that makes porn games. Yeah — the kind that otaku love to gab about, big tits bracketed by mosaic, flesh-colored straws spraying white gunk. The feeling is like that elegant girl I just described taking a sip of her coffee, then suddenly shuddering, cheeks flushing, all because the black uncle running the shop next door has a remote-controlled vibrator stuffed inside her. The whole thing changes in an instant…

When I first started out as a web editor, I thought it was a sacred job. After all, so many people are reading what you write. What you write has to be responsible to others—no garbage content, no stupid opinions, no vague phrasing. I don’t remember what the article was about, probably browsers, let’s say Chrome. That day there was a foreign news report saying that some version of Chrome had a lower security rating than IE9. So I compiled a news piece: “Chrome Version XX Less Secure Than IE9.” The news went up and was quickly taken down by the editor-in-chief, followed by a private talk. “The news is fine, but it has zero impact. Your headline is too bland.”

As a FiiO X5K user, I can’t say the FiiO X7’s hardware upgrades excite me much. I never bothered reading closely about which chips it upgraded or what tech it uses, because sound-wise the X5K already satisfies me — at least it has way more driving power than the ZX1, and the basics are good enough. Tuning is all smoke and mirrors anyway; you can fix it with earbuds. But one thing about the X5K always grated on me: the UI. FiiO already has the best UI among Chinese DAPs, but the X5K’s godawful dot-matrix font and lack of touch support drove me crazy after getting used to Sony’s stuff. Browsing for songs was a nightmare. And the kicker: even though the X5K handles album art and other metadata well enough, song names in the file list still show up as filenames. I was stuck navigating piles of 1.XXXX-XXX.flac, and since a lot of them start with album numbers, sorting to find anything was hopeless. I gave up on that idea. You can probably guess what I’m getting at. The biggest win of the X7 for me is the brand-new touch-controlled UI. When I first heard FiiO was making an Android player, I was worried about a Chinese Android playback UI — figured the best case was it barely escaping the shanzhai smell. But after the product came out and I watched some overseas review videos, it surprised me quite a bit. No need to beat around the bush: honestly, this UI is already pretty great.

Recently I picked up two things: a USB fast-charging adapter for the Nexus 6P that I plan to use at work, and a Bluetooth module for my desktop. The Bluetooth module is straightforward. Usually you plug in a USB one and the system just recognizes it, especially since my desktop runs Linux — even more likely to work out of the box. But that was too easy. I could’ve just bought any random one, but I always want something fancier, so I got a Dell Bluetooth dongle that supposedly supports entering the BIOS. Of course, that BIOS trick only works with a Dell Bluetooth keyboard. The Dell Bluetooth keyboard works fine with this dongle, but plug the thing into a desktop and it isn’t recognized… and that’s not all — it doesn’t work under Windows 10 either.

Before this I was using a plain car mount. Nothing wrong with it, except it blocks the air vent. In summer that’s tolerable — the cold air blows on the device and cools it down. In winter it’s a problem: the phone is already warm, and blowing more hot air on it makes it completely useless. So I started looking for a replacement, and one day on eBay I found this…

After getting the Nexus 6 last year, some things satisfied me and some didn’t, so when the Nexus 6P launched this year I kept hesitating about whether to upgrade. The things I wasn’t happy with: The screen was too yellow. It’s an AMOLED panel, and supposedly not even a good Samsung one, which is why it took me forever to adjust after switching from a Sony Xperia Z1. Battery life was a bit of a mess. With the Moto 360 sipping power over Bluetooth, I barely got through a day, and sometimes had to top up around noon. No LED notification light. The Nexus 6 actually has one, but Android disables it by default, and even if you turn it on you apparently need a paid app to make it work. Ridiculous. The biggest thing making me hesitate was this: the Nexus 6P does fix those complaints, but not in a way that leaves you feeling reassured.

Play enough visual novels and you start to notice patterns. For instance, most visual novel plots follow the same trajectory when it comes to love: the girl has feelings for the guy, keeps them bottled up, and every time she’s about to say something, the protagonist plays dumb, she stays reserved, he keeps wandering around blind, until some specific event happens, he realizes he’s actually in love with her, confesses, they date, they fuck, End. Honestly, that formula is pretty standard, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But even if salted tofu pudding is delicious, even if five-kernel mooncakes are tasty, you eat them year after year, month after month, day after day, and you’ll eventually get sick of them. So some visual novel companies started throwing in all sorts of weird shit: the girl isn’t human but a god, the girl gets tortured to death, the setting is in the future, the setting is in the past, time travel here, changing the future there~ And so on and so forth. Over time, the original meaning of “Galgame” as a shorthand for “Girl and Love Game” has become a bit of a misnomer. No wonder foreigners always call these things “visual novels.” Some stories have literally become novels, but even then, they still slap an 18+ sticker on the label, just to attract more people, forcibly stuffing in so-called “romance elements” that don’t fit, and while they’re at it, throwing in some sex scenes, hoping to lure in more players—at least those who don’t care about the story and just want to see fucking—to contribute a few more sales.

As a handheld, the Surface Pro 3 kept me company for a long while. But eventually the newer Surface Pro 4 came out. Not a huge upgrade, but considering I spend more time with this thing than with my desktop, I figured I should treat myself. So I upgraded. On the whole the two machines aren’t that different. Most of it is a spec bump.