The place was getting too dusty — the bed and the sofa both had a layer of it — so my wife said we should buy a “mite remover”. I looked into it and, well, a “mite remover” is just a vacuum cleaner with a UV lamp bolted on… So we might as well buy an actual vacuum. A vacuum isn’t only good for handheld work; you can swap the head and use it on the floor too. That’s how I ended up with a Xiaomi vacuum. It happened to be on sale — 12 interest-free installments, a 50-yuan coupon, and a free Xiaomi desk lamp thrown in. So I bought it.

The 9-nine- series, delayed for God knows how long, has finally reached its fourth volume, bringing us the last routeable heroine, Yuuki Noa, and finally prying open the various secrets buried in the game’s setting. The title is Yukiiro Yukihana Yukinoato.

I vaguely recall that the last time I played a game with Kantoku art was years ago, and I ragged on it pretty hard. Honestly, looking back now… Still deserves a good ragging. Why? Because Kantoku always works with CUBE, and the heroines in CUBE games inexplicably turn into Easy Girls—like, they confess to the protagonist and before you know it they’re spreading their legs. Yeah yeah, I know it’s an eroge, but even for an eroge you can’t keep doing it so bluntly. Nobody watches porn for the plot anymore? Well, a little story goes a long way—it makes it tastier. So after all these years, a new game with Kantoku art drops, and the title alone is high-tier: Kamisama no You na Kimi e I honestly don’t know how to translate it. I feel like in Japanese this kind of sentence could mean “to you, who is like a god,” but a direct translation would be “to you like a god.” The English subtitle is To you like goddess, so I guess it’s the first meaning. But none of that matters. What matters is the scenario lineup—they brought in three guys who specialize in writing toilet paper… oh wait, I mean light novels. Looks like they decided to go all-in on the story. But how did it actually turn out?

This isn’t my first 8BitDo controller, actually, but the one I bought before somehow went missing, so all I’ve got left is one with a bad feel. This time, in order to play some “poorly optimized garbage Unity game,” I had to buy a new 8BitDo controller. Times have changed, though—this thing has evolved. It’s got built-in rumble now, and supposedly a gyroscope too. I’ve used it for about two weeks, so let me share my impressions.

So I upgraded to a 2K HDR screen a while back, used it for a bit, and honestly the colors are a little too vivid, and even with 500 nits I never use the brightness. But the biggest thing: 2560 x 1440 is just stuck in an awkward middle ground. I’m a Linux user, and Linux has always been terrible at fractional scaling. People say Wayland supports it now, but one, my discrete GPU has no Wayland driver, and two, Wayland performance is a joke — the mouse stuttering in particular is absolutely maddening. Word is Wayland mouse handling goes through libinput, which shares a single thread with gnome-shell, so high system load equals stutter. Fucking stupid. In the end I couldn’t stand 2K’s nonsense scaling anymore and chose to “throw money at the problem” — went 4K.

Hato, the writer who got famous off the Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart series, went quiet for a while and then came back — this time on Steam. A game called Marco & the Galaxy Dragon (マルコと銀河竜) showed up, and it had that “we’re not hurting for cash” look about it, plus the standard day-one Simplified Chinese, so it read like a cash grab from every angle. By that point my opinion of Hato had already soured pretty badly, because with Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart 2 he’d started going way too sappy and way too self-indulgent. You couldn’t even tell what the main plot was about anymore, and the jokes were getting harder and harder to follow. My personal take is that he’d gone full “mentally ill genius” like certain other famous scenario writers — call it “too artsy to understand” if you’re being polite, “can’t write a straight sentence” if you’re not. I still wasn’t happy with the game, but Mayuge flat-out refused to gift it to me, so I had to go get it and play it myself. Pretty simple reason: “How am I supposed to dunk on it if I don’t play it?” Anyway, after playing this “scam game,” I feel like I underestimated Hato. Sure, I think he’s a bit unhinged now, but I forgot that he’s got a real gift for doing big things on a shoestring — something he’d already made obvious with the ultra-low-budget galge-to-anime adaptation he spearheaded. Put simply, Marco & the Galaxy Dragon is exactly that kind of “big things on a shoestring” game.

As a ThinkPad X1C 5th user, there’s actually one problem that’s been bugging me. The laptop is so thin that the screen hits the keyboard when the lid is closed, leaving keyboard marks. That’s also why I recommend a screen protector. But a screen protector isn’t a real fix, and putting one on a laptop is honestly pretty dumb. So I thought of another solution.

The first time I heard that SMEE — the “matchmaking game maker” — was doing a harem game, I was shocked. SMEE has always emphasized “pure love,” and not just that, but a kind of “realistic romance.” I’ve praised them for doing that well more than once. And then, before they’d even done it well a few times, they got cocky. What’s weirder is that they basically swapped identities with their parent company HOOKSOFT. In other words, HOOKSOFT, which usually pulls settings out of its ass, started doing pure love. And SMEE, which usually does pure love, started doing settings. Sure, both SMEE and HOOKSOFT have done settings plenty of times, with all sorts of gimmicky elements — “gradual conquest,” “a friend of a friend,” “corporate drone matchmaking,” “conquering and being conquered” — but none of that shit ever mattered. What sticks with you is always the bickering between the protagonist and the heroines. So I think the core competitive strength of SMEE, and of the now-SMEE-fied HOOKSOFT, has become “couple bickering skits.” Nobody cares what story you’re telling, nobody expects any wild developments, nobody even thinks you’ll throw in a “memory flashback.” The core is always that “lovers’ quarrel,” and that’s exactly what everyone wants to see. Actually, don’t underestimate “lovers’ quarrels” — not many people can do them well, which is one of the reasons I keep praising SMEE. If I were the president of SMEE, I’d lock in the protagonist and heroine names. Copy-pasting the same template of “unpopular protagonist suddenly hits his popular phase” every time is exhausting. Just use one name, like Wu Laoji or whatever, and put the protagonist’s name in every game title: Wu Laoji’s Country Adventure, Wu Laoji’s Matchmaking Odyssey, Wu Laoji and Miss Wang’s Space Adventure, Wu Laoji and the King of Another World… Keep that up and forget sales — SMEE could become famous overnight, get a theatrical film, and build a national IP. But that pattern feels familiar… Oh right, speaking of “another world,” this time SMEE actually did go with an “isekai” setting. The title is pretty blunt too: Harem Kingdom. The protagonist suddenly gets transported to another world, becomes its king, and gets a harem. To this day I still want to complain that this setting is just so not-SMEE!

I’m a Wear OS watch user, the stock Wear OS kind. The watch I’ve been using is still the LG Watch Sports, and I’ve had it for over two years now — I even replaced the battery. Its battery life is honestly fine, but I’m still not happy with it, for three reasons: You can’t swap the strap. I’ve been stuck with the default rubber one, which feels pretty dumb. Once it cracks there’s no fixing it — you can only go buy knockoff parts. Nobody’s in charge of system updates. Google says LG handles it, LG says Google handles it, and the two of them just kick it back and forth. By 2020 that legendary Wear OS H still hadn’t shown up. It’s way too bulky, and the SoC isn’t new either, so it stutters sometimes. So I couldn’t take it anymore and wanted to switch. Right around then Xiaomi announced its watch — big battery, decent RAM, plenty of features — and I got tempted.

A week ago, that well-known Linux kernel developer Mawei-kun gifted me this game. Oshi no Love yori Koi no Love (推しのラブより恋のラブ). Honestly I wanted Tryment, that reheated cash-grab, but Mawei-kun sent me this instead and hoped I’d walk through the gates of yuri. The game isn’t long, and after finishing it I fell into deep thought. Because this game made me think back on a lot of things… A lot of memories I’d almost forgotten…