Everybody has some contradictions in them… Some people love spicy food, but hate the fiery ring of death the next morning. Some people are scared of yokai, but can’t stop themselves from reading ghost stories anyway. Some people love games, yet spend every day watching someone else play on video and shouting “insane” along with the crowd. Some people love eroge, yet never actually play them—they just hang around 5ch and forums while other people argue about the plot, nodding along to things they don’t understand. Like me: I love mystery and exploration stories, but I absolutely hate detective novels…

Starting with the ThinkPad X240, the TrackPoint got thinner, and the feel got worse too. It lost that “point where you want, go where you point” convenience of the original ThinkPad X230. Honestly there’s not much to be done about it — laptops have to get thin, and this is hard to balance. By the time the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5th came along, the TrackPoint’s size got even more awkward. Still, the TrackPoint’s advantages are irreplaceable, so I just put up with it. Naturally, a Japanese guy named さおと (saoto) wasn’t having it, and decided to solve the problem with 3D printing. I found out about saoto from a Taiwanese friend’s blog. He made his own little TrackPoint cap to replace the stock one, and it’s said to greatly improve the feel, so I decided to give it a try. saoto has released the 3D-print files for his cap design, but you can also buy one from him, and the price isn’t especially steep. What arrives is a plain envelope from Japan. When you open the envelope, be careful not to just tear it apart — there’s an instruction sheet inside… The sheet explains the design concept behind the cap in detail, plus the various versions included, covering both the old-style and new-style TrackPoints.

Otaku with no girl, playing with his dick, Glasses-wearing handsome otaku, good with married women. Porn in the left hand, girls in the right, Zijing acts tough and gets struck by lightning. There’s this guy online who calls himself a fat otaku, name of Zijing. Dude’s handsome as hell, goes around banging cute girls every day, yet spends all day posting porn online and saying “women are all trash,” then goes back to rolling around in bed. This kind of flexing is just unbearable. Worst part, he swaps waifus daily. A while back he claimed he’d found his one true love, and soon after he set his claws on his “true love’s” little sister—in other words, his sister-in-law. As someone who drills Zijing’s sister-in-law every day, drilled all the way up to a district-level silver medal Player, I ended up buying Zijing’s sister-in-law anyway… In plain terms: “I bought the Xiao Qiao figure from Honor of Kings, and threw in her husband Zhou Yu’s while I was at it.” That normie Zijing keeps saying Da Qiao is his wife, so Xiao Qiao is his sister-in-law.

Butterfly Seeker (バタフライシーカー) came out back in March, and I only just finished it recently. The main reason I didn’t want to touch it at first was the scenario writer: Nozomu Kaihara (海原望). Kaihara is, I believe, a Liar-soft person. I’ve played a few things he worked on. I wouldn’t call them bad — it’s just that they always leave me with this strong sense of discomfort. Not from the art or the setting, more from the way the script and dialogue are written. So when I saw his name on Butterfly Seeker, I immediately didn’t want anything to do with it. But I had literally nothing to play. I don’t like moege, I don’t like the stuff everyone else hypes to the heavens, and what I actually want is traditional mystery / puzzle-solving / story. Looking around, the only thing left from the first half of the year was Butterfly Seeker. So I played it. And since there was nothing else I wanted to play, I played it pretty seriously. After clearing everything, my impression was: actually pretty good. This might be the first Kaihara game I’ve been able to get through? Some people say Kaihara is a pen name of Meteo Hoshizora… but I’m not familiar with Meteo Hoshizora so whatever, lol.

Hi everyone, I dropped my phone again. And the protector I’d put on it shattered too, so my obsessive self is back to applying a new one. Both phones I have use curved screens, which makes protectors a pain to apply — not impossible, though. You need white edge liquid.

Picked up a Xiaomi Pad 4 recently. Feels like it’s the most worthwhile Android tablet you can buy right now.

I bought this purely to save a buck… Think about it — 199 yuan. Even just a hard drive enclosure costs about that much, so it’s a win.

I bought a Raspberry Pi before, left it powered on for half a year, and then it just up and died for no reason… Once it died I had no idea how to fix it, and I don’t think it was covered by any warranty, so it just sat there collecting dust. Recently, for certain reasons, I needed a small computer to use as a server. Originally I was thinking of buying one of those recycled thin clients, but with electronics you always buy new rather than old. The server didn’t need high performance anyway, so I just went with the newer Raspberry Pi. The latest Raspberry Pi: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ . Compared with the previous version, the CPU is improved and the network card performance is expanded—it’s now a gigabit NIC! Sure, it’s still routed through the USB bus, but that’s better than not having it, right? The price was fairly low when I got it, and Taobao has all sorts of cheap bundles—basically a simple case and a simple heatsink, but that’s about enough. Actually, when I bought the Raspberry Pi 3, I somehow ended up contacting the Chinese general distributor. This time the distributor just ignored me, saying they don’t accept retail and telling me to find their sub-sellers on Taobao, so I had no choice but to buy on Taobao. It even came with a case that looked like a big gift pack.

A while back I picked up a piece of junk off Taobao, from the seller I always buy from. It’s an ASUS Z10 tablet. Junk, probably, but in surprisingly good condition.

Japanese works love to bring up “four-leaf clovers” all the time. Most of the time it’s the hero and heroine finding one in the grass—the kind that supposedly symbolizes “luck.” One use of that trope would’ve been plenty, but unfortunately it’s everywhere now, played out to death. It goes back to games like Clover Hearts in 2003, and from then until now the four-leaf clover legend just keeps multiplying. Sometimes I honestly wonder if Japan is covered in the damn things. Four-leaf clovers are supposed to mean luck because they’re rare, so why can the protagonist and heroine always, without fail, stumble onto one? I wrote a post complaining about this a long time ago too: if four-leaf clovers stand for luck, then what does the ordinary three-leaf clover stand for? Does that mean three-leaf clovers are unlucky compared to four-leaf ones? Of course, a three-leaf clover isn’t unlucky. But if you actually use three-leaf and four-leaf clovers as a metaphor for people, the happiness a four-leaf clover gets really isn’t something everyone has. For me, I read it as “the three-leaf clover stands for the ordinary and the mediocre.” Last year More launched a sub-brand, DOLCE, and put out its first game, “カサブランカの蕾” — that is, “The Buds of Casablanca.” I rated that one pretty highly, because it gave me a lot to chew on: its take on desire and true love is “realist,” and the ending, paired with an old song redone as something new, really shines. DOLCE put out a new one again this year. Given how More has a habit of spinning up brands for no real reason, this label’s whole deal seems to be cranking out the same type of game over and over. The new one’s called Shamrock no Hanakotoba — “the language of flowers, shamrock edition,” basically. My guess is it follows the same route as Casablanca no Tsubomi before it: grounded, leaning dark. At least that’s what I figured when I stumbled onto one of the promo CGs — a big ol’ 3P shot staring me in the face… Before I got into this game, I didn’t even know there was a word “Shamrock” that specifically means “clover” — I’d always thought it was just Clover. Naturally I also looked up the language of flowers for clover, and after reading up on it, I get why everyone says the four-leaf one stands for luck. The language of the shamrock: one leaf stands for prayer, one leaf stands for hope, one leaf stands for love, and the last leaf stands for happiness. If you can find a four-leaf clover, you will find happiness. And of course, if you didn’t find that fourth leaf… you have everything, except happiness. Yes, this game is the story of four girls who had everything except happiness.