On September 30, 2020, Google announced this year’s new phone, the Pixel 5. But a month before that event, I picked up Google’s previous-year flagship, a Pixel 4 XL 128GB. There was a reason for that: the Pixel 5 is just that bad. Hole-punch screen, downgraded processor, squeeze sensor gone, IR gone, radar gone — by any measure it’s a piece of junk at the level of a thousand-yuan phone, the kind that competes with Xiaomi’s Redmi over here. Google’s explanation is that this time they used a bigger battery and a 5G-capable chip, so the overall experience hasn’t been downgraded. Oh my god, don’t you know Redmi has supported 5G for ages? Big battery, you say? Hell, which domestic thousand-yuan phone has a smaller battery than yours? Google proudly announced a price of $699. Bear in mind that buying a domestic phone (one that can be bootloader-unlocked) only costs me around 2000 RMB. Only an idiot would buy your Pixel 5. It’s not a flagship at all.

Why did I even buy this thing… probably because I had such a good time with my last-gen Pixel Buds. I was actually pretty happy with the Pixel Buds, except the fit was beyond words. That dangling cord was just stupid. I mostly wore them running, and that damn cord kept swinging around, teaching me what “occlusion effect” really means. Now the Google Pixel Buds 2 finally exist, and the stupid cord is gone. But this thing Google built to pair with Pixel phones and fight Apple’s AirPods is still as unreliable as ever: No AptX support Only white at launch Various problems and complaints shortly after release But Google products are American-made after all, and plenty of American tech media started hyping it from day one, the same way they hype the Pixel line. If it’s Google, it can’t be too bad. And after the hype, they go home and keep using their iPhones…

Back when I first became an otaku, I had this weird sense of superiority. I don’t know where it came from, but I just felt one step above everyone else. It was like 2D culture was the ultimate goal of life, and all those people around me who didn’t get it were just aimless walking corpses. In a world of black and white, only 2D culture made me colorful. So I boldly changed my profile picture to a moe girl, set my desktop wallpaper to a big-breasted girl, and wore the strange looks from others like a badge. The whispered gossip behind my back actually made me prouder. “Anyone who loves 2D culture is a friend.” At the time I thought I was insanely cool, like the one sober person in a room full of drunks.

The “caged bird” that got delayed for over a year Cabbit, a brand under Skyfish, is a company I find genuinely interesting. They’ve put out a whole series of “mystery-flavored” games — starting with Midori no Umi, then Sora no Hana, then Hakoniwa Logic, and so on. The premises are always fun, dripping with suspense from the very first scene, and they usually land on a decent ending. But Cabbit’s real signature isn’t the “mystery” — it’s the way they serve up the fear lurking behind it with zero restraint. Their earlier games had bloody scenes, heroines getting broken in every sense, and combined with the fog-of-war plotting, it always hit hard. My guess is that the man behind Cabbit is Mikuri Mikuri (御厨みくり). He’s not officially attached to the brand, but he’s been involved in every single one of their games, often as “planner.” I don’t really know his style — he’s worked with bigger companies too, and nothing about those credits stands out — but compared to what Cabbit was doing before, you can at least infer the guy has some chops. So after nearly two years of silence, Cabbit announced a new title last year: Kagi wo Kakushita Kago no Tori (鍵を隠したカゴのトリ), set for release on August 30, 2019. And then, surprise — this damn game got delayed for a whole year. Various reasons along the way. At first it was probably just not finished, then at the end of the year COVID hit, and there were rumors the producer was hospitalized. Anyway: push after push, delay after delay… Aug 30, 2019 ⇒ Oct 25 ⇒ Dec 20 ⇒ Feb 28, 2020 ⇒ Apr 24 ⇒ Jun 26 ⇒ Aug 28 Finally, a year later on September 25, 2020, the game actually came out!

Pulltop probably got paid off by some local government somewhere, because they’ve started pumping out a whole series of “tourism promo” games. The story is light, sweet, and most importantly, all-ages… Last year they had Sora to Umi ga, Fureau Kanata, and this year they went and made a sequel called Ano Hi no Tabibito, Fureau Mirai. As expected, it shares the same world, the same staff, and even the same characters. Before release, this game had zero presence. I just remember Pulltop putting out a statement one day saying something like “Due to the pandemic, Ano Hi no Tabibito, Fureau Mirai has been delayed.” Everyone was dumbfounded when they saw that. Not because of the delay itself, but because of something else: Since when was Pulltop releasing this game? We didn’t even know it existed! And when they announced the delay, the game didn’t even have a proper website yet. Later on, the scenario writer plugged it while doing promo for ATRI, otherwise literally nobody would’ve cared. Anyway, the game did come out. The previous title’s “Ogasawara Islands diving” story was actually pretty good, so how does this new one hold up?

2020 was a rough year for the whole world. COVID hit a lot of industries hard, and that includes the Japanese visual novel business. I say “even” because visual novels theoretically shouldn’t be affected by the pandemic. Selling software, collaborating online, selling through online stores, and the customer base is all otaku who can’t be bothered to go outside—by all rights, the industry should’ve been totally fine. Unfortunately, the actual visual novel market doesn’t work that way. Because visual novels live and die by first-week sales, and first-week sales don’t depend on game quality at all—they depend entirely on the bonus merch driving purchases. And bonuses are tied to specific retail stores, which means, surprise, you’re back to physical storefronts. It’s 2020 and software sales still rely on brick-and-mortar. Only in Japan, I swear. Saga Planets, though, doesn’t seem worried about money. Their previous title Kinkoi was a huge success and clearly raked in a mountain of cash. Rumor has it Saga Planets split from Visual Arts (Key’s parent company) and went independent. They’re really flying high now. My guess is they’ve gone back to the “money is no object” phase. Remember what happened last time Saga Planets had money to burn? Yeah, you know where this is going. Last time it was Karumaruka. This time, probably because Kinkoi did so well, they made Kakenuke★Seishun Sparking!

The office got renovated and moved into new digs, so I got a new desk. My old busted monitor became unbearable to look at, so I decided to replace it. But this is still a workplace, after all. I didn’t want to buy anything too nice and look like a show-off. I wanted something cheap, with a resolution I could live with, and a screen big enough to get work done. After some thought, I set three targets for the monitor I needed: Under 1000 yuan, and the cheaper the better 27 inches is the floor, nothing smaller 4K would be ideal, 2K is acceptable I was initially worried that 2K on a 27-inch monitor would break scaling on my Linux setup, but after a rural schoolteacher on Twitter told me that 2K at 27 inches works perfectly fine at 100% scaling, I stopped worrying.

A lot of people want to buy “sleep plugs” — by which I mean earbuds that are comfortable when you lie on your side. Most people using them want to fall asleep to something: maybe a symphony, maybe rock, maybe Guo Degang, maybe a ghost story. In any case, it’s definitely not going to be ASMR. Of course, the two big requirements for sleep plugs are probably just these: The sound quality has to be passable, no noise Comfortable to wear — no matter how you lie on your side, it shouldn’t feel bad So recently a batch of “sleep plugs” showed up on Taobao, pretty cheap, with a full set of connectors — they support the usual 3.5 as well as Type-C. Really thoughtful. So, being the bored idiot I am, I bought a pair to check them out.

Preface: My workplace just moved to a new office, and during the move my old computer stopped turning on. It was an ancient AMD machine anyway, slower than today’s low-voltage Celerons, and I’d wanted to replace it for a while — so this was a good excuse to put together something new. But at work my desk space is limited, and there’s no room under the desk for a tower either, so the “new computer” had some requirements: It has to take up very little space Within that footprint, as much performance as possible It has to run Win10 without issues As cheap as possible — under 1000 ideally After looking around, the Lenovo M73 that was popular a while back turned out to be a pretty good choice. After a bunch of research I decided to jump in.

As everyone knows, one of the ThinkPad’s biggest draws is the TrackPoint, and newer ThinkPads have been caring less and less about it — not only has the height been cut way down, but it keeps getting shorter and harder to use, again and again. Maybe the TrackPoint just doesn’t fit with the mainstream Windows laptop push toward touchpads these days, but it’s still the last stubborn holdout for ThinkPad fans. The obvious fix is to swap the stock cap for a third-party one. I swapped mine out before — a 3D-printed piece by Mr. Saoto in Japan. My impression back then was that it felt great: it fit the finger nicely and was easy to use. The only downsides were that the color was a bit ugly and the material seemed pretty ordinary — not very durable. A while back I saw on Etsy that Mr. Saoto had released a new version of the 3D-printed TrackPoint, made with a composite material and with better colors, so I decided to grab one. Getting it, though, was a real ordeal.