I wonder if anyone else out there likes fairy tales as much as I do. Fairy tales are, of course, stories meant for children. I’m not a kid anymore, but I still find myself drawn to that childish style of story… Ancient legends, gods in the sky, princes and princesses, forests and sunlight, and cute flat-chested skinny twintail girls you just want to scoop up into your arms… So yeah, I like fairy-tale-style stories, and visual novels too. This has nothing to do with being a lolicon, of course. Nothing at all. Really, nothing.

In high school I heard a thing: in the class next to ours, there was a girl who would have sex with people for money. “See, that’s her.” My deskmate pointed at the back of a girl from the next class and told me she was the subject of the “school secret” he’d described to me before. Honestly, I saw her face later. Not pretty, thick lips, but skinny, pale, a ponytail, always smiling. My biggest takeaway was: I can’t believe she’d do something like that.

I didn’t really want to play Koi × Shin’ai Kanojo (恋×シンアイ彼女) at first. Two reasons: Didn’t like the setup. That kind of school romance plot looks like a sleeping pill just from the description. I’m not a fan of Niijima Yuu, the writer everyone keeps hyping. Sure, I think Hatsuyuki Sakura (はつゆきさくら) is a decent game, but this guy’s scenario-writing ability really doesn’t deserve the praise. His work on Kisaragi Kinboshi pretty much confirmed my judgment.

So here’s how I found this game. I saw some foreigner streaming it on YouTube, in English of course. I didn’t even watch the game itself, just the part where the OP played. Honestly the OP is pretty good, pretty damn sick. And from the OP you can pretty much tell it’s a horror game. More importantly, the Japanese lyrics in the OP told me this was probably a Japanese Galgame that got an English localization. I got curious and looked around for info on it, but there’s basically nothing out there—just some stream videos and not much else. That got me hooked. I wanted to play it, searched everywhere and couldn’t find it, except on Steam. So I bought it on the game’s Steam page. It’s not big, a little over 700 MB, supports English and Japanese, just no voice acting. The surprise is it supports Windows / Linux / Mac, so after downloading, the journey began. I just want to say, this game’s journey really felt like a close call…

I’ve known about NFC for ages — my Sony Xperia Z1 had it way back — but I never really used the feature. Okay, not entirely never. I tapped my China Construction Bank card with it once and saw some card info through Alipay, and that was it… I’d seen NFC tags around too, Sony made some I think, but at the time it felt like a solution in search of a problem. Still, one of these pointless things eventually landed in front of me as a filler item on a JD order. Might as well try it.

Why play this game? Because I’m a seiyuu nerd. There’s no way I could see that cast list and not react. Uiii is in it. Uehara Aoi is in it. Kotori Yuka is in it. Tohno Soyogi is in it. Miyoshida Ina is in it… okay, that’s Shimizu Ai. For me there’s no lineup more stacked than this, except that it’s missing Kiritani Hana. As for the game itself, who the hell cares… though after finishing it I was still stunned.

Yeah, it’s cliché, and I know I shouldn’t write it this way, but before I get into the game I need to talk about something from the past. You only really feel the game’s content deeply when you connect it to your own life, after all. Let’s start with a look. A gaze. The gaze of a certain girl from my elementary school days is one I’ve never been able to forget. Back then I was a top student. The especially top kind. Honestly, I don’t know why I was a top student. I just figured that the stuff they taught in class was something you were supposed to learn, that long-distance running in PE was something you were supposed to be fast at, that speaking and giving presentations was just something you did that way. I couldn’t understand — couldn’t even begin to grasp — how hard it was for everyone else to do the things that came so “naturally” to me. I never saw anyone as an enemy, but there are always people who want to see you as a challenge. After one final exam, a girl jumped out and said to me with a resolute look in her eyes: “Just you wait. Next exam, I’m taking first place. I’ll beat you.” And with that, she turned and ran off. Sure enough, at the next final exam, she took first place, and I took second because I got one math problem wrong. I didn’t really care, though, because soon after, I took first again, and that girl was still looking at me with that same resolute — almost resentful — gaze. “Why does she look at me like I’m her enemy?” I couldn’t understand it. By the time I did understand, years had passed, and that empathy has only grown deeper and more obvious with age…

For years I ran TP-Link routers, until I got sick of having to reboot them all the time. In 2011 I bought a Linksys E4200 and, paired with an RE1000, covered the whole house wirelessly. Then came four-plus years of peace. Honestly, apart from power outages I basically never touched those two routers, and they almost never crashed—only now and then a loose WAN port needed re-plugging. A few days ago, though, I found this router was finally done. First the ports wouldn’t come up, then config changes wouldn’t save, and it stayed that way after a reset; flashing firmware threw an error. That’s when I realized the thing was probably dead. Dead means replace. Linksys hasn’t been Cisco’s for years, but I still have a good impression of them, so I picked up a Linksys WRT1900AC plus RE4000w to replace the E4200 and RE1000.

Last year I bought the first-gen Moto 360, swapped the band later, and it turned out great. I wore it for a full year and honestly it changed my life a little. Now the upgrade, Moto 360 2nd, is here — redesigned lugs, better battery life, more customization options, and an official China release. I wasn’t really unhappy with the first gen. Battery was enough for me, and the second gen’s “a bit over a day” feels awkward anyway — you still have to charge it at night… The main reason I bought the Moto 360 2nd is… looks. I hated the black first-gen Moto 360. Plenty of people saw it and said it looked like plastic. So while I was kicking myself for not buying silver, I kept refreshing the Google Store until the silver version came back in stock, ordered it and shipped it through a forwarding service. Arrived without a hitch.

My memory is bad in certain ways, and lately I’ve been trying to work on my foreign languages—English and Japanese—so I wanted something I could carry around and jot down new words in as I run into them. Before this I used an ordinary leather-bound notebook. I wrote quite a lot in it, and then a while back I lost it… When I was getting ready to replace it, I happened to see on YouTube that Sharp makes this “electronic notebook” (電子ノート) thing, and that it’s already on its umpteenth generation. The newest WG-30 was about to go on sale in mid-October, so I kept an eye on it, ordered from Amazon Japan on launch day, shipped it through Tenso, and had it in hand for about 1000 RMB all in.