Originally I wanted to write something poking fun at the straight-guy Twitter guy, Awen, but then I figured he’s already pitiful enough and I shouldn’t pile on, so I deleted that and went back to the original format. That said, this game is incredibly practical. I don’t mean that kind of practical. I mean the “teaches you how to fall in love” kind. HOOKSOFT and SMEE have always been solid at this, but unfortunately most otaku just use their games as joke-dispensers for rom-com sketches. Genuinely a shame. In recent years HOOKSOFT and SMEE seem to have pulled off a weird identity swap: the former started doing SMEE’s “love simulation” thing, while the latter leaned into fantasy settings. Most people don’t care, since both brands come from the same daddy and their art styles are converging at a frankly alarming rate anyway. Nobody cares about brand purity — honestly they could merge into one label someday. This time HOOKSOFT’s offering is Houkago Cinderella (放課後シンデレラ) — literally “After School Cinderella” — built on the premise of “romance through chance encounters depending on which route you pick on the way home after school.”

This laptop isn’t mine — I bought it for someone else. Their budget wasn’t high, and the requirements were just these: A bigger screen, since they deal with Excel spreadsheets all day Decent performance — besides spreadsheets, the occasional game, roughly LOL and Overwatch level Looks nice, nothing too flashy Reliable after-sales service Honestly though, I think these days every laptop looks fine except those weirdly shaped gaming machines.

My workplace moved recently, and my old keyboard had developed double-press issues across half its keys. I soldered that one myself, so I figured it was time to buy a new one. But I’m too broke for a real budget, so I bought the cheapest thing I could find: this Dareu EK861 Bluetooth keyboard. 61 keys, Bluetooth 5.0, a big battery, PBT keycaps, under 300 yuan. What more could you ask for? I’ve been using it on and off for almost a month now, and I’ve got some pros and cons. Let me keep it short:

Years ago, back when I was still hanging around online, I met this so-called “big shot” who completely overturned a lot of my views on the world. It was the first time I’d ever met someone that impressive on the internet. At least, he claimed he was impressive. The “big shot” said he was living in Canada, young and successful, just taking classes now and then, occasionally doing some work for Microsoft, with access to the latest Windows Vista beta builds. He also had the money to mess around with all kinds of new “UMPCs.” At the time I thought this guy was absolutely amazing—being in the same group chat as him felt like a real honor. But then I started to find it a bit odd. If he was really such a “big name,” why did his Discord name still have all that “Martian language” and scene-kid vocabulary? And if he was such a huge deal, why was he online basically 24/7? So one night, while we were private messaging, the “big shot” said he wanted to show me something “nice.” He sent a video. I clicked on it and saw a huge white guy violating two very small people. Looking closer, those “small people” seemed to be kids—a little girl and a little boy. That video made me extremely uncomfortable, but the “big shot” was still asking me if I “Want Some More.”

So-called “stress relief toys” are basically the kind of thing that… serves no real purpose in your hand, but always gives you something to do. The big stress relief toy before this was the fidget spinner. Its influence spread worldwide: foreigners hated it, China banned sales, teachers loathed it. Still, I thought it was pretty satisfying. Recently I bought another stress relief toy, this Flipo Flip.

Girls Book Maker announced a series of cash-grab DLCs half a year after the base game shipped. Cash-grab, sure, but honestly this is standard practice by now. We’ve seen too much of this over the years. This DLC is called ガールズ・ブック・メイカー ～グリムと三人のお姫さま～, which translates to Girls Book Maker: Grimm and the Three Princesses, so naturally it’s about the world-famous Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Since Grimm’s Fairy Tales is itself an anthology, you can’t really sum it up with one character, so they just carved out the princesses and split them into three volumes sold separately. Sound familiar? Yeah, classic milking scheme. The three princesses are Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella.

The game this time is called God Sisters.

A female teacher I know once said something: “In a romance it looks like the man is chasing the woman, but the initiative is always on the woman’s side. All she has to do is pick from a menu of things the man does.” I think her version is incomplete, though. There’s a precondition: the woman has to be good-looking. If you look like Shonan’s walking dick, no man is coming over to hand you a menu. You can also read that line the other way. In a normal man-chases-woman romance, it looks like the guy grinds it out with persistence and wins his goddess, but really the woman was just giving him chances, one after another. Think about it. If she genuinely has zero interest in you, she won’t give you a single chance to make contact, and she won’t listen to a word you say. You think you’re conquering her. Really you’re just being allowed to conquer her.

So here’s the thing — playing this game was a complete mistake. I don’t even know when I downloaded it. I didn’t know what the premise was, who voiced the heroine, basically nothing about it. I just found it sitting on my hard drive while I was cleaning things up. My guess is the developer name, Prekano, threw me off, since there’s a million games out there called “XX Kano” these days. But through sheer coincidence, I ended up playing it anyway.

A long, long time ago, a game caught my eye: Suite Life, put out by MME before they went under. My English is trash. Back in high school I used to pronounce “Suite” as “Suit,” and it took me forever to realize I’d been saying it wrong the whole time. That’s part of why the title stuck with me. Suite Life, literally “packaged life.” There’s an American TV show with the same name, but this game seems to have nothing to do with it. Honestly, I played Suite Life not long after it came out, and then… I dropped it. Dropping it wasn’t my intention, I was genuinely interested. The main reason was that the game was just too boring. And years later I went back and finished it. The main reason was pretty much the same as why I dropped it: I was too bored.