What does it actually mean to love someone? Everyone’s got a different answer, but from start to finish the word “love” is tangled up with “sexual desire.” Straight or gay, if seeing someone doesn’t get you hard, you probably don’t love them enough. Unless something’s wrong with you. Plenty of philosophers have chewed over the question of emotion, and most of them either praised love or shit on it at length. Most took a loose, open attitude toward it, which is why we’ve inherited a pile of books that are more than a little debauched. None of that is the point, though. What I’m getting at is that “love” always needs “sex” to express itself. So what do you do when there’s a massive wall that makes that impossible? Say, the taboo of blood relations? Some people say, “If you love her, make her happy.” But for a real brother and sister with no possible future together, does loving her mean handing her off to someone else? To a normal person, that’s insanity. And Erohon o Sutete kara Ani no Yousu ga Okashii (エロ本を捨ててから兄の様子がおかしい) is exactly that kind of insane game.

I’d been wanting a hybrid IEM for ages, but I kept going back and forth: K3003, or the DUNU DN2000J? Some people said just get the K3003 and stop thinking about it. But the K3003 is way too fucking expensive. Others said the DN2000J matches the K3003 on technical ability — it just can’t command the K3003 price because it’s made in China. W at work, the train lover, has heard the K3003. He said it’s nothing special: the sound is too high, too floaty, too sharp, not a good buy — especially once he learned I listen to everything. “Honestly, for your taste, an Audio-Technica IM03 plus a Sennheiser IE80 is plenty. Don’t you already have the ER4P? Rotate those three and you’re covered.” But I still wanted a hybrid, just to experience one. At least something above the 100-yuan mark — below 100 yuan I’ve already got the Xiaomi hybrid. Thanks to a JD sale and 12 months of interest-free Baitiao, the dream came true.

“The world is big, but everyone is equal. Picking up girls isn’t the exclusive right of rich, handsome guys. Even a total loser with nothing can have the right to pick up girls.” “There are two ways to pick up girls. One is to win her favor, fight for the position of boyfriend, and finally round the bases.” “The other… is to become a girl-hunting hunter. Or, to put it simply, a girl hunter.”

My grandma says I’m a train nerd. I honestly had no idea. So she started digging through the old almanac of my life, saying that when I was little I’d cry at the drop of a hat over nothing, so she’d dump me in a little pushcart and wheel me down to the bank of some river in downtown Zhengzhou, where I’d just watch the railway bridge crossing the river in the distance and the trains rolling over it. That was the only place I’d shut up. I guess that tracks. But I don’t remember a single bit of it now.

I don’t remember where I read it, but at least one line stuck with me as pretty reasonable. “A lot of people gradually realize that their devices — everything except Apple — have almost all been replaced by Xiaomi.” I don’t use Apple, but looking back, there’s quite a bit of Xiaomi around me too. Mi Band, Redmi phone, Mi Power Bank, Mi batteries, Mi Piston earphones, Mi power strip, and… a Mi latex pillow.

Honestly, for the Surface Pro 4, being thin and light is the whole selling point. Slapping a case on it is kind of dumb. But in my case, there are still reasons it made sense.

Even though I use a laptop, and nobody really needs optical discs anymore these days — discs are old and stupid, after all. But back in the day, I thought optical discs were something utterly cool and aloof.

I remember when I bought the FiiO X7, I raised a suggestion on their forum. “Could you make the screen stay on and support phone or car Bluetooth control without sound output? I always run AUX out to the car stereo.” FiiO’s official reply said they understood my need and knew that controlling a car stereo through AUX input was a real problem, and they’d find a way to solve it. So direct car control really did turn out to be difficult. FiiO instead released this little thing, a Bluetooth remote…

When we were little, we all read fairy tales. The funny thing is, in fairy tales the protagonist is almost always a little girl. And the story is almost always about a frail girl and the prince who protects her. Boys read them and want to be the prince, protecting their princess. Girls read them and want to be the princess, finding a prince who’ll protect them. I tried to recall the fairy tales I knew as a kid, and was surprised to find they don’t really skew by gender. Boys and girls read the same tales — explorations of strange worlds, the same prince-and-princess stories passed down for generations. But time passes, boys and girls grow up, and maybe they’ve all quietly accepted that the fairy tales they heard were lies. Most boys no longer believe in a princess worth protecting, and most girls don’t really dream of a prince coming to save them anymore. Thinking back on those old tales brings a wry smile. I can’t tell if it’s nostalgia, or the feeling that the kid who believed this stuff was kind of ridiculous. Still, the fairy tales never stopped. They keep telling the story of prince and princess, for whoever’s willing to listen.

The FiiO EM3 is FiiO’s new pair of flat-head earbuds. Honestly, my goodwill toward FiiO has been climbing steadily lately. The accessories are minimal — just the buds themselves and a few foam covers. That’s it. Since it’s positioned under 100 yuan, this earbud’s strengths and weaknesses are equally obvious.