Back in elementary school, my family bought a VCD player. I can’t remember the name of that player anymore. What I do remember is that it came bundled with a stack of pirated VCDs. My dad bought it thinking “once we have this thing we can watch blockbusters at home,” and the discs they threw in were all big prestige movies, stuff like Mission Impossible. So we immediately fired up this fancy machine and watched Mission Impossible for a good long while. Halfway through, neither my dad nor I could stand the movie. It wasn’t that the content was bad, it was just… boring to watch. So for a long stretch after that, the VCD player just sat there gathering dust, because there was nothing worth watching.

Back when I’d just started university, I bought my first pair of in-ear earphones — an Edifier model, I think. Once I pushed them in, I discovered a whole new world. Over time, “earphones” came to mean “in-ears” as an unwritten rule. After all, if a thing can’t even isolate sound, it just sounds bad, and the lows and highs are hard to get right too. But people are fickle. Lately I’ve been fascinated by flat-head earbuds, because I dug out an old Creative Air, and its surprisingly wide soundstage caught me off guard. That’s when I realized flat-heads can do things in-ears can’t. There aren’t many high-end flat-heads, and even if there are, they’re hard to track down. Luckily, Beyerdynamic Earbuds happened to put out an entry-level model, so I gave it a try — and it felt like discovering a new world again. How to put it… that slightly wider soundstage, bass that isn’t too cramped, paired with full mids, really gives you a different feeling when you listen in the dead of night. Of course, I said the dead of night, because the weak spot of flat-heads is that the isolation is terrible.

The first time I heard of Rene Liu wasn’t because of her songs. That was probably middle school. Star Chinese Channel was airing April Rhapsody, and Rene Liu played the rather tragic lead — but it was that role that stuck with me. I don’t know if I liked the frail woman she played or liked Rene Liu herself, but I think it was the former. At least later, when Pink Ladies came on, I took one look and ignored it. Luckily I later heard her songs. Most of them have the shadow of cover versions, but her distinctive voice still left that first impression: a frail woman, quietly singing those slightly sad stories.

The Surface Pro 3 is Microsoft’s own hardware, and also the handheld gaming platform Microsoft was pushing, so upgrading it to Windows 10 really shouldn’t be a problem. I bought the regular version of the Surface Pro 3, then picked up a key on eBay to upgrade it to Windows 8.1 Pro, so the Windows 10 upgrade I got was naturally Pro too. The upgrade itself went smoothly. Just like everyone else: reserved the Windows 10 upgrade, downloaded it ahead of time, upgraded directly. The process was fast, and then I ran into a few problems:

I know a very gay straight guy. He’s obsessed with otome stuff, even BL. Watches it, raves about it, and constantly tries to convert me, hoping to turn me gay. But you know how it is. If there’s only one straight guy left in the world, it’s me. So I turned down all his invitations and dodged every trap in the videos he sent me. Still, back when I was being an idiot two years ago chasing a fujoshi, I figured this little gay dude was pretty reliable. As a fudanshi, he’d have deep insight into fujoshi.

Everyone loves to flex, but almost nobody enjoys watching someone else flex in their face. There’s a very telling phrase for this: “flexing with actual skill.” Sure, it’s mostly used as a joke, but it gets at something real—when it comes to flexing, if you’ve got enough genuine chops to back it up, there’s not much anyone can do about it. Speaking of “skill,” I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with a friend about cooking. Back then I was being a total idiot, convinced that “a great chef has to make all these flashy, fancy dishes to be legit.” My friend just shook his head.

One thing that annoyed me about the PHA-2: you can’t use it while charging. Most of the time I’m using it as a laptop DAC, and the thing constantly running out of juice got on my nerves. So whether the PHA-2 can be powered over USB became a big question for me. Some people say it can, but mine can’t, so I had to email and ask… Fine then, time to buy a spare.

First off, let me confirm that Twinkle Crusaders (ティンクル☆くるせいだ) is indeed a galgame. (dead serious) Visual novels have always been treated as digital novels, and some studios have tried to do something with the systems to make us feel like it’s a game, but most of them failed… Twinkle Crusaders is the first game that changed my mind about that…

In my whole life I’ve read exactly two power-fantasy web novels. The first one I finished: Rice Wu’s I’m a Hooligan, which I followed all the way to its finale, I’m a Hooligan: Dragon War Starfield. The other one, also fairly famous, is How the Bad Guy Was Forged—and I didn’t finish that one. To put it in terms the ACG crowd will get: the former is SAO, the latter is Log Horizon. I’m a guy who likes things punchy, so I finished I’m a Hooligan and dropped the other.

I heard about noise-cancelling headphones a long time ago… on a Sony Walkman… Back then Sony’s Walkman came with noise cancelling as standard. According to my classmate, the tech works by using a mic to pick up the sound waves around you, then firing the inverse waves to cancel them out. Anyway, the effect was passable, though I clearly remember it wasn’t actually that great. Years later, I’ve found myself wanting noise-cancelling earphones again. No real mystery why: the office AC is too damn loud, my place faces the road and that’s loud too, and I seem to have developed a touch of nervous exhaustion. When it comes to noise-cancelling headphones, the only choice is naturally Bose, and I didn’t want big over-ears, so the QC20 was the only option.