I’d already made up my mind to play ワールド・エレクション (World Election) long before. It was the winter of 2015, as I recall — I was staring down a whole pile of landmine galge, and in game after game stuffed with Akino Hana, I couldn’t find a single CV worth a damn. For a seiyuu junkie like me that’s pure agony: like a plant deprived of sunlight, like an earthworm deprived of soil, like a shut-in deprived of instant ramen, like Four Leaf Clover deprived of TFboys. Then, out of nowhere, Whirlpool announced their new title, World Election. The main heroine, Kururu, was voiced by Sawasawa Sawa — a beacon in the pitch-black night, shining on this ugly bastard until I was so excited I couldn’t even find my bearings. No more “story is king,” no more “art style is king,” no more “the industry’s big releases are king.” As long as Kiritani Hana is in it, and she’s the main heroine, that’s the best. Period. But by the time this game actually came out, several months had passed. Honestly, I’d mostly lost interest by then. Just from the setup you can basically guess where it’s going: a destruction god drops out of nowhere, a fictional world where multiple races coexist, an election looming between those races, and of course our ugly-as-sin protagonist is definitely going to bang all the non-humans too, not to mention pinning the destruction god herself to the bed and teaching her some manners. Still, I remembered that this game had given me hope back last winter when I was desperate, finally letting me escape a world that was nothing but 秋野花, 秋野花 everywhere, and I’m a man of loyalty, you know. Considering that Whirlpool keeps putting out games with neat setups that then fumble the landing hard, I went into this one with the noble spirit of improving my Japanese reading comprehension.

Bought a Nexus 5X to use as a car navigation unit. Plugged it into the car charger’s USB port and… there’s the problem. I’m not even asking for “charging rapidly,” but you’ve decided to be “charging slowly”… Thinking it over, it’s simple enough. The car charger I had was a gift. Figured I’d buy a proper one. Since the fast charging supported by the Nexus 6P / Nexus 5X / Pixel C is the 5V / 3A standard and not Qualcomm’s, there’s currently no car charger head that fully hits that spec, so I settled for an Anker 5V / 2.4A one.

I bought this for my parents. Before this, my mother was using a Sony Xperia Z1 I’d handed down to her, and my father was on a first-gen Meizu M1 Note. I bought the Redmi Note 3 mainly for three reasons: New 全网通 processor, supposedly very solid. Massive 4000 mAh battery, supposedly very solid. For people my parents’ age, MIUI is an explosively user-friendly system.

Last year I played the fortissimo series, and my personal feelings about it were complicated. Content-wise, the fortissimo series has a super melodramatic plot. Basically the world gets destroyed, the guy destroying it might be your dad, your dad destroys the world because he’s despairing, so you as the protagonist go fuck up your dad, and after a bunch of cheat-code clashes you successfully fuck up dad and build a new world. No big twists—just cheat vs cheat, yelling matches, forced hot-bloodedness, justice always wins. And one big feature of this game is that fight mode and non-fight mode are two different worlds. In daily life a bunch of people joke around like a normal game, but once a fight starts it’s kill or be killed. Totally inconsistent… Still, as an experience, the fortissimo series is a blast, because there are tons of battle scenes, and the atmosphere during fights is genuinely great. Especially that feeling of “shouting each other’s names then activating cheats and unleashing a finisher”—it’s really hot-blooded, really hype, really satisfying. So for the previous fortissimo games, I think they’re ultimately not bad. I mean, after all… once you’re hyped, you don’t sweat the details.

A while back there was a JD sale, and the Edifier S1000 had a pretty good price. I’d been wanting to replace my old Edifier R1600TIII anyway, so I just went ahead and bought it. At the same time, to make swapping in headphones easier, I picked up the Aune X1S, this DAC/amp combo unit. So just getting these two things set up took a hell of a lot of effort.

The NETGEAR R6300V2 is a good router. Plenty of people say the first thing you should do after buying one is 1. I have no idea what that Merlin thing even is. I’ve always used Linksys and never touched NETGEAR’s higher-end stuff, but I finally picked up an R6300V2 during a JD sale a while back. Not for home, though — it’s for work, where it serves as a plain AP. The network situation at work is a bit messy. First, the office has around 20-plus phones and tablets that need to connect wirelessly, plus 5–6 laptops. So the office Wi-Fi has some requirements. The office has three ISP connections coming in: one China Unicom (Netcom), one China Mobile, and one China Telecom. Telecom has the most bandwidth, Netcom the least, and Mobile sits in the middle. But for certain reasons you probably know, the best route for “scientific browsing” is Netcom, while Telecom is fastest for domestic sites. Mobile is the awkward one — not good enough for either. The gateway router has an address table that decides which exit to use based on the ISP address ranges in it. That setup doesn’t satisfy me. I need to specify the network exit more bluntly.

Honestly, I didn’t want to play this game at first. The trial version had been out for ages and I kept skipping it, and I had my reasons. First, the OP just doesn’t grab you. I’ve been burned by OPs before—more than once—so that’s probably a weak spot in how I pick games. Second, the premise is way too light-novel. A princess from the underworld comes to the surface to destroy the world or whatever—how many times have we seen that? A heroine drops out of another world and runs into the protagonist? A dime a dozen. Third, the art style. It’s just too… sultry. I really didn’t like the character designs. Every girl looks like a sexually frustrated female rapist. Maybe I’m better off as a simple moe pig—cute art appeals to me more. So for these pretty dumb reasons I kept ignoring the game. But the game kept making moves—announcing an anime, running ads, going on sale. I started to wonder what kind of backing this studio had. Eventually I couldn’t take the flood of Twitter bombardment anymore and thought, fine, I’ll check out the trial… And then I fell down the rabbit hole. How to put it—the game is way, way, way, way better than I expected. Honestly, it’s a solid gem.

I’ve got a fair number of digital devices on hand, and the biggest headache after buying them is buying accessories for them… screen protectors, cases, and all sorts of add-ons. I’ve wasted quite a bit of money on this front over time, so let me briefly go over what I’ve picked up recently and share a few lessons along the way.

Things have been tight lately for reasons, so I’ll keep this short and to the point about the Nexus 5X.

The FiiO X7 is a player I’ve grown to like more the longer I use it, but I still have to say it has one fatal flaw: the stock AM1 amp module is just crippled. On some tracks the X7 has a spiky, gritty treble, but when I run the X7’s LO output into my car stereo those treble spikes disappear. Think about it long enough and the only explanation is that crippled amp. Maybe FiiO did it on purpose, but at least they did release the official mid-tier AM2 amp, and swapping modules is easy — all you need is one hex screw.