The first NAS I used was an HP N40L, so I’ve got a soft spot for that little chassis. Then the motherboard died… So I built my own case, stuffed some drives in it and called it a NAS. Installed OMV, set up a garbage storage stack — a RAID 1 made of junk, then a RAID 0 on top of that, then another RAID 0. It ran fine for over a year, but that pathetic 3TB capacity ran out fast, so I started looking at a new NAS. I like small cases like the HP N40L, and I saw that a German site had the HP MicroServer Gen 8 on sale again, so I figured I’d do a German import. After ordering I assumed it’d arrive around the end of November, but it showed up surprisingly fast — 12 days to my door, and no customs fee.

We already had a NAS at home, but it was useless to the older folks in the family. Fine for me, too much hassle for my parents. For them a NAS is actually necessary — they need somewhere to keep the photos they take, whether on phones or cameras. Importing photos from a phone to a PC is way too much trouble for them, and I didn’t want to install some domestic Chinese management app and get burned. Dumping everything onto one computer also seemed unsafe — one dead hard drive and it’s all gone. So we decided to go with a Synology. Given data safety concerns, I picked the two-bay DS216se.

The moon is bright and the stars are few; the autumn night has already begun to carry a chill. An old man in a short-sleeve shirt and jeans, idly messing with his phone. “Grandpa.” A little girl’s voice rang out. She looked like she’d been staring at the old man for a while, and had finally worked up the nerve to speak to him. “It’s so chilly tonight—aren’t you cold out here?” “Cold my ass.” Old as he was, his tone carried an unmistakable flippancy—until he looked up, saw the girl in front of him, and realized that kind of talk didn’t suit his image. So he straightened his expression and put on a smile that wasn’t exactly handsome, saying to her, “I’m not cold~ thank you~.” The little girl didn’t seem to care about how the old man talked. She just went on slowly, “Grandpa, grandpa, what are you looking at?” As she spoke, she started peeking at the phone in the old man’s hand. The old man looked a little embarrassed and hurriedly put his phone away. He didn’t want the little girl to see what was on the screen, because in his eyes—no, in most people’s eyes—what was on that phone screen really wasn’t something you’d want others to see. **“Hey there, kiddo~” The old man forced himself to stay calm. “How about I tell you a story?” “A story, huh? What kind of story?” The little girl didn’t turn it down at all—if anything, she looked like she’d heard them all. “What kind of thing do you want to hear?” **“There are handsome guys, pretty girls, and people falling in love…” “Tch.” The old man clicked his tongue, then immediately put his grin back on. “Ever heard the story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl?” "……you…… pervert…… uncle?" The little girl looked completely confused. Do kids these days not even know the story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl? The old man couldn’t help but sigh. “Want to hear it?” “Yeah!” The little girl was thrilled. **“Come on, come on, sit here.” The old man patted the clean spot beside him. “The story has to start from the beginning…” ……………………

Recently I keep hearing this word, “light luxury.” No idea who cooked it up first, but it caught on for a while anyway. “Luxury” I get, but what the hell is “light luxury”? “Luxury” mostly means: something you could handle for 50 yuan, you insist on handling in a 5000-yuan way, chasing that low cost-performance ratio. No doubt, luxury belongs to the rich, and “light luxury” looks more like a different kind of luxury for the broke-ass crowd. Funny, right? Being broke and still wanting luxury, pretending to have money when you don’t — isn’t that just showing off? Though fair enough, “light luxury” does carry a bit of that showing-off flavor to begin with.

Imouto Paradise! 2 (妹ぱらだいす2) is the sequel to Imouto Paradise! — at least it’s not a spiritual successor. Why do I say that? I think a comparison shot is in order. Here’s the main cast of Imouto Paradise! 1: And here’s the main cast of Imouto Paradise! 2: And I should point out that the characters in the two games are not meant to be the same people… What the hell!!!

Imouto Paradise! (妹ぱらだいす) is a pure-love game with genuinely nice art. The story centers on family and kinship — the parents are away on a business trip, so the eldest brother looks after his five younger sisters. Most visual novels these days are trending toward “novelization,” but they always end up feeling half-assed. I say that because real novels don’t have this much dialogue and slice-of-life padding — VNs do. It’s voiced media; no dialogue means no reason for the CVs to exist. The result is that even well-received VNs feel bloated in their daily-life sections, and it’s only after the routine ends that the foreshadowing actually pays off and the plot kicks in. I’m optimistic about the future of VNs experimenting with tighter storytelling, but until that surprise arrives, I’d rather they just stick to classical pure-love stuff. Imouto Paradise! does exactly that, and does it well.

The world is a colorful place. Sure, there’s plenty of darkness and things that don’t go your way, but none of it stops us from singing the praises of human goodness. Ricky Hsiao has a song called “You Are My Eyes.” It’s about a blind man who, with his lover’s support, sees the whole world through her eyes. He can’t see a thing himself, but as long as she’s beside him, the dazzling world still finds its way into his gaze. You are my eyes, leading me through the changing seasons. You are my eyes, leading me through the crowded throngs. You are my eyes, leading me to read the vast sea of books. Because you are my eyes, I see the world right here before me. The lyrics hit you right in the gut, they really do… Stories like this happen all the time. Today’s is another one that warms the heart.

Tokeijikake no Ley Line is one confident game. How so? Because it dares to split a single game into multiple parts and sell them separately.

I’ve been driving a lot these past few days — almost as many miles as the two months since I bought the car. But a few days ago I noticed the car felt bumpy even on flat ground… I don’t drive much, but it really was a bit bumpy on flat ground. Later, during the late-September maintenance, the 4S shop staff told me it was a tire pressure issue. They checked the tires themselves and found nothing wrong — just that the pressures were off by a fair margin. After adjusting, the bumpiness disappeared. The staffer said it was lucky I found it early, otherwise it would have caused a whole chain of damage to the tires. During the maintenance I asked the staff a bunch of questions, including about tires. They explained the consequences of uneven tire pressure and blowouts, and also told me… “Tires aren’t covered by warranty. If you blow one out, you’ll be paying out of pocket at the 4S shop just like at a street tire shop.” Fuck…

There’s a line literary types like to throw around: “Life should include a trip you take on a whim—pack your bag, hit the road, get away from the city noise, and find inner peace.” Honestly, that’s not wrong. Most of the time even when we do travel, we lose the fun to planning and second-guessing, so one carefree trip really can be a decent way to blow off steam. Unfortunately, I hate traveling… Or rather, I hate traveling in China.