After years away, I paid the Sony tax again: I bought an Xperia XZ Premium. I’ve said the reason plenty of times. I need a phone with a system that leans native, looks good and squared-off, and doesn’t have any weak or outdated spots in the specs… So the Xperia XZ Premium walked into my sights. Native-ish system First Snapdragon 835 in the world with a 4K resolution Squared-off design and a full mirror screen Checked the price and it was even a bit cheaper than a certain Pixel… so I preordered. Before preordering I figured it definitely wouldn’t drop in price, and I thought it probably wouldn’t either, but it seems it still dropped a few hundred bucks. Fuck.

Someone once left a comment on one of my blog posts expressing contempt for PULLTOP. Honestly, my own feelings about PULLTOP are fine — they’ve put out some games I like, what with the plane-making one, the country romance, and the stargazing one. But PULLTOP has definitely also released some mediocre and even mind-numbingly sleep-inducing games. Most of those were the work of their sub-brand, though. PULLTOP LATTE was literally built as a nukige label, so if it’s boring, whatever — at least the main brand is fine, right? Like the guy in the comments said, he thinks PULLTOP itself is stupid, and sometimes I agree. Take the plane-making game — it was probably one of the first Japanese eroge to make the jump to STEAM. The publisher was a company called MoeNovel. I looked into MoeNovel, and the registered asset info lists it as a sub-brand of willplus. And willplus is the parent company of the PULLTOP brand. willplus is actually pretty big, with a bunch of labels under it — plenty of nukige, some normal stuff too. The old Propeller, PULLTOP, ensemble, all of them were willplus labels. I know guilty too — they do NTR. A company that big should be doing well, right? Yet I keep watching them make one dumb move after another. Some of their decisions are just braindead. How braindead, specifically? Back to the earlier topic. Since PULLTOP = MoeNovel, that means PULLTOP chose to publish its own games overseas itself — no licensing agent involved. Should be fine, right? The plane-making game had a great reputation, plenty of Western otaku wanted to play it, a fan translation was already finished, and lots of people said they’d buy it the moment it hit STEAM. Heaven and earth and man were all aligned. PULLTOP probably didn’t even need to translate anything — just grab the English translation license and lie back collecting STEAM money…

Marriage is happening later and later in Japan, and more and more people can’t find a partner at all. So the country keeps cranking out “get married already” content — dramas, music, anime, manga… games — all trying to sell you on the romance-and-matrimony package and get you dreaming about wedded bliss. Kekkon Shugi Kokka (結婚主義国家) is one of those games. Originally it looks like it was a small doujin title; by the time I played it, it had been polished up and turned into… a mobile game. It’s also been split into several volumes. Volumes one and two are free, the rest cost money — about 250 yen a pop. I only tracked it down out of curiosity, and I couldn’t even finish volume one. Once I heard the later volumes are just parallel-world stories, I shelved it. So this is a view through a keyhole — volume one only.

I bought a cheap second-hand colorimeter before. It worked, sort of—it was a second-hand piece of junk, after all. Then during the 618 sales I stumbled on a deal for the Green Spider 5 and picked one up to play with. A lot of people will tell you to get the Red Spider 5 instead, but the truth is the Red Spider 5 and Green Spider 5 have identical hardware; the difference is the software. And you can solve the software problem with the third-party DisplayCAL, so the discounted Green Spider is the better buy. The only downside is that if you use that 1000-yuan software, calibration is a lot faster.

Disclaimer: I haven’t taken money from any of the links below. If a shop wants to pay me, feel free to do it here. Whether you buy or not is your call—these are just my personal recommendations. Don’t come at me if you buy something and it sucks. And most importantly: if you’ve got the cash, I really don’t recommend using a screen protector at all. The Sony Xperia XZ Premium feels best naked—except it chips easily. Honestly, I’ve always thought curved screen designs are useless except for decorative light effects. That’s why I think Samsung’s various curved-screen phones are ugly as hell—like a piece of crystal-clear soap. I don’t know if anyone else likes square, boxy designs like I do. That’s why I’m willing to pay for Sony phones. I was also willing to pay for the Smartisan Pro—too bad Luo Yonghao wouldn’t give his own system stock Android. But sadly, even though the Sony Xperia series stuck with the square design for a long time, it eventually fell too and started doing curved screens. Based on my experience with the Xperia XZ Premium, this curved screen is completely useless. Maybe the corners feel better to hold, but the flat bottom still digs into your hand a bit. Sure, they added a bevel at the bottom to reduce the digging, which just proves you don’t need curved sides either—a bevel is enough. Anyway, you can’t make the whole thing curved like a crystal soap bar; doing it halfway is worse than not doing it at all. But regardless, the Sony Xperia XZ Premium already has a curved screen, which creates a big problem: screen protectors are a pain.

Years ago, The Fruit of Grisaia blew up as Frontwing’s anniversary title, and it’s not hard to see why. The game itself is rock solid, and it nails the mix of “daily-life comedy” and “plot-driven drama” — the 30-hour common route is all slice-of-life gags, while the other 30 hours of heroine routes lean hard into wild plot twists. A game that goes “grab both handles and grip them both tight” like that was never going to escape glowing reviews. The Fruit of Grisaia: possibly a masterpiece After that, Frontwing struck while the iron was hot and put out sequels in the series, including The Labyrinth of Grisaia and The Eden of Grisaia, plus several DLCs for the game. By the time the last DLC, The Melody of Grisaia, came out, the whole Grisaia series was complete, and the game series even got an anime adaptation. Looks like Frontwing put a period at the end of the Grisaia saga and moved on to making new anti-American propaganda spectacles…

Confucius, Jesus, Guang Liang and Shinjou Yuu all said it: “first love is infinitely beautiful.” Especially in Japan, a country with an especially deep complex about “初めて” (the first time), “first love” means a sweeter, more awkward, even slightly painful memory you can’t stop chewing on. “First love” is the first time someone’s heart stirs, the first time they taste what romance is, the first time they start to mature emotionally and learn the playbook. After going through it, a person might turn into a smooth operator or a cynical old hand who no longer gets moved by the simple stuff. Seen that way, first love really is precious.

Ranked matches in 王者荣耀 hadn’t been going well lately. Someone suggested I buy a “touchscreen” controller to improve the feel of the controls and boost my win rate, so I did. Taobao has way too many kinds of these things, so I bought every single type. Right now these products fall into three categories…

Back in high school I read web novels every day. A lot of them were… okay, I guess. Some were way too terminally online, but at least they told a coherent story with a distinct flavor. If it was entertaining I didn’t nitpick the literary quality, and if it was actually serious I wouldn’t treat it like a power fantasy. Man, though, seriously written web novels are rare. Most are drowning in internet slang and come with their own snark. A little self-aware snark in a literary work isn’t necessarily bad—it can add flavor—but overdo it and it gets ugly. I remember two web novels I read: one called Sanguo Houhei Zhuan and another called How I Picked Up the Campus Belle. The latter is actually decent—I’d recommend it, it’s solid for a school romance. The former just made me shake my head… I bring them up because they share a trait: both love their own snark.

Back in high school I used to frequent a site called “Huanhuan Wenyuan”—basically the text-only version of a porn site, with dirty stories updated on the regular. That site kept going until I graduated college, then it vanished. Never came back. There were some genuinely good pieces on there, well-written enough to get your imagination going. The one I remember most was about a female teacher who promised her class that if the slackers all ranked near the top of the grade, she’d let them have their way with her. The writing was actually pretty interesting—the teacher goes through all these psychological hurdles, and when faced with the principal’s coercion she ends up choosing to give herself to the students instead. The ending was a bit unexpected, almost had a Happy Ending vibe. Anyway, I’m getting off track. But some formulas really do deliver results you wouldn’t expect—like this game, PacoMane: Watashi, Kyou kara Meimon Yakyuubu no Seishori Gakari ni Narimasu… (パコマネ わたし、今日から名門野球部の性処理係になります…).