I know who Matsuyama Takeshi is, because I read his novel Kimi Shinitamou Ryuuseigun. I’m still not sure whether that series is actually finished—it stopped at volume five, and I got stuck on volume three. The official line is that it’s complete. The plot of that novel is pretty simple: the protagonist’s childhood friend dies, and he spends the entire book getting over it. One idea from that novel stood out to me as genuinely novel: the heroine isn’t actually a “Earthling” in the usual sense—she’s a “space-born,” born in space to a mother who gave birth to her up there. That’s the bit that stuck with me the most. Honestly, I think that novel should have ended after volume one. The whole first volume is already overflowing with inspirational chicken soup, and the protagonist does manage to move past the heroine’s death. But then—surprise—the story pulls a sudden twist and reveals there might be a way to save her. And that’s where I checked out. If I had to guess, the rest of the story involves the protagonist using some supernatural ability (time travel, space hopping, whatever) to bring the heroine back… Lame. So lame.

When Sonora first launched, I remember they were trying to do something closer to mainstream young-people vibes—the first game’s gacha whale theme, the second’s anime idol theme, that sort of thing. Those are the topics young people love and that are trendy right now. As a visual novel company, creating a new brand to pull in new users with that kind of move is completely normal. Then the third game came along and the direction was already off—suddenly we’re talking about running an eroge shop, which is a super hardcore topic. And by this fourth game, they’ve completely let loose, heading straight into a field that eroge players know all too well but young people couldn’t care less about: eroge development. Uchi wa Mou, Enki Dekinai (We Can’t Delay Any Longer) The title itself reflects part of the current state of eroge development companies—thanks to COVID, staffing shortages, funding shortages, the declining industry taking another hit, development content getting delayed over and over, constant pushbacks. It’s basically the norm. I could already imagine the game’s theme before it came out. Going by Sonora’s previous eroge shop game, it’d be all jokes about the daily work of an eroge production company, with cameos from the previous game’s shop and maybe some idol characters. There might be some tense work descriptions, but problems get resolved quickly, and it all ends in a happy ending… And so this game… is pretty much exactly what I imagined.

Back at the start of 2021, while I was playing visual novels, I couldn’t help but sigh: “Everything coming out early this year is so mid. Guess only the big second-half releases can save this year’s reputation.” So I waited for the second half, and at last the legendary “big release” showed up: Sakuhin Kanojo no Ren’ai Koushiki (創作彼女の恋愛公式) When this one was announced it was stacked with buffs: the artist behind “G-Senjou,” Nii Shuu’s go-to producer, a Campus scenario writer who supposedly understands love better than anyone and who’d kept Light alive for a whole year off a pile of small titles, plus the best support resources Akabesoft2 had to offer. Everything about it made this game the closer that had to finish the year off. Then the trial version dropped. Honestly, the trial had its affected and janky bits, but overall I thought it had real merit. The big one: the secondary heroine, Kiriha, genuinely stood out. Earlier in the year I’d been snarking that she was a painter who’d also done debug work on the game, and then in the second half she turns around and becomes a heroine who spends the whole route PUA-ing the protagonist, and she’s the one who brings the story’s highlight moments. So I was looking forward to release. End of the year came, the full version arrived. When I saw the walkthrough mention a story lock, something felt off. Add the OP title they revealed later, “Kiseki nante, iranai” (“I don’t need miracles”), and I had a bad feeling. “Don’t tell me this game is about to pull some shit again.” Unfortunately, my hunch was right. Again.

Another exam came up in the first half of the year, so I’ve been in study mode again lately. I’ve been wanting to try the “all-digital” paperless study thing — reading PDFs, books, and magazines on a tablet. I’d been using a Lenovo Chromebook Duet, but the stylus on that thing is godawful, and the screen aspect ratio isn’t 4:3 either, which feels like a waste. Then I remembered the very chicken-rib Surface Pro 4 I had lying around. It’s got a 3:2 screen and a 12-inch size — just right for reading books and magazines. Let’s look at the basic specs first: CPU: Skylake i5-6300u RAM: 4GB Storage: 128GB NVMe SSD As you can see, here in 2022 a Windows machine with 4GB of RAM is basically unusable. The CPU feels salvageable — ancient, sure, but it’s battle-tested 14nm at this point. The drive is too small and probably needs fixing too. And this thing has been used for who knows how many years, so the battery’s down to about 60% capacity and needs replacing.

Zhou Ge (Maxzhou) is one of those figures in the “open-source handheld” scene who gets both love and hate. The love is because he keeps cranking out new products, and the new products generally look pretty good. The hate is because they’re all expensive, the performance gains are minimal, and people roast him for “harvesting the leeks.” Honestly, though, while there’s profit in Zhou Ge’s machines, calling it leek-harvesting is a stretch. His machines just take open-source designs and pile on a lot of his own tweaks and optimizations—higher-quality metal shells, better-feeling conductive rubber pads and metal dome switches, and so on. You can argue this kind of handheld isn’t worth that much, but if you bought one and modded it yourself, the cost wouldn’t be much lower than buying straight from Zhou Ge. Think of it as buying a fully modded open-source handheld out of the box, saving you the hassle later. From that angle, it’s really not that expensive.

The reason for buying this is simple: to replace the old Surface Pro 4. That Surface Pro 4 would overheat badly the moment I opened DingTalk to teach a class, and on top of that the screen would start shaking. Turns out that screen shake is a known defect — “Zhang-chan” actually had to swap machines because of it, while I probably never hit it since I’d never thrown anything “heavy” at the tablet. Anyway, the Surface Pro 4 just couldn’t keep up anymore, so I bought a Surface Pro 8. Spec is i5 + 256GB + 16GB RAM, with the standard keyboard/pen/cover bundle. Double 12 sale, 9998 RMB for the lot. Not a bad price, eh.

Alright, so it’s been at least ten years since I last played a game with a “crossdressing infiltration” premise. What? You mean that “Monkeys?” thing? No, that one doesn’t count. That game is unhinged. The company that’s been cranking out “crossdressing infiltration” titles year after year is probably ensemble, the one everyone knows. Their games give me a feeling I can’t quite put into words. The company keeps putting out visual novels at Intel-like tick-tock cadence, churning out titles that mix the “crossdressing infiltration” and “rich young lady” elements, but after all these years, they’ve left barely any impression. A lot of the time people just skip right over the brand. The reason is simple: it’s way too samey. The so-called “young lady” games are gorgeous art paired with a plot straight out of a gender-swapped Tiny Times—players drop their pants, fap to the story, and move on. The “crossdressing infiltration” ones are also gorgeous art paired with a yuri Tiny Times plot—players drop their pants, fap to the story, and move on. Over time, people just assume this brand’s games have no story. The main draw is the beautiful girls, some scenes are fappable, and you grab it for the eye candy as material. OP and ED are always Duca, the titles always have “otome” or “hanasaku” in them. And that’s how ensemble keeps surviving—lukewarm, neither dead nor alive. But lately, they seem to have decided to change something. They’ve started improving the story and narrative, and their last release was a ninja-themed game. This time, with their “crossdressing infiltration” title, they’ve gone full transformation—and it hit me weirdly… hard. Hoshi no Otome to Rikka no Shimai (星の乙女と六華の姉妹) The title is cliché, the setup is cliché, but anyone who’s been following ensemble will spot the difference immediately. “The art quality in this game has visibly dropped.” That drop in visual quality brought about a change in the whole game. After playing it out of curiosity, I have to say this is genuinely ensemble’s most daring “crossdressing infiltration”… no, actually their boldest and strangest work in the entire lineup. The plot is simple to describe, but not that simple.

Around early March 2021, I was broke enough to start thinking about making a little side cash — passive income, ideally. Mining was booming at the time, but I only had a 1070ti and wasn’t about to whore it out, so I never jumped into that pit. Then something called “Xunlei Zhuanqianbao” caught my eye. By then it had already been renamed “Wangxin Cloud,” and the pitch was that you just run a little router-like box at home and make 100+ RMB a month. You could run several, some people supposedly pulled in over 1000 a month. Pretty tempting, I have to admit. So I followed the project through 2021, used some idle hardware I had lying around, put in about 120 RMB, and ended up making over 1600. Honestly that’s way less than I expected, but at least it covered my internet “freedom” — all my broadband and phone bills, with a bit left over. There’s a lot of talk online about Wangxin Cloud. Some say it’s a scam, some say it’s a goldmine, some say it’s mining, some say it’s a pyramid scheme. So let me go through my own experience and take on it.

So here’s the thing: I didn’t even want to play this game. I’ve given up on Hook. The way they develop their scenarios like some high-cohesion, low-coupling assembly line pisses me off just looking at it, and paired with that eternal 720p max resolution, my blood pressure went straight through the roof… But I heard there was a “landmine,” so I dove in. You know how it is. I really love playing “landmines.” No idea if that counts as a symptom of being a total M. And here’s the awkward part: I’d barely finished the game when I got a commission request. So yeah, I already busted my ass writing a not-exactly-short commercial piece on this game, and now being asked to talk about it again is exhausting. Plus there’s honestly not that much to discuss story-wise. If I had to say something, let’s talk about the game’s “concept” and where it crashes and burns.

I remember once saying, angrily, that Android tablet productivity is all shit. And then I went to a Xiaomi store and tried one out, which only confirmed it. Even on the “Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro,” productivity is still a pile of shit. My biggest complaint is that the IME on Android still can’t do proper cursor-following; in a lot of cases you still get the idiotic “type up here, pick characters down there” setup. Not to mention the browser being unusable… In the end I decided to try the Chromebook Duet. I picked one up on eBay, plus a USI stylus. Bought before the price went up — the seller listed it at 50, realized the next day he’d undersold, and jacked the price up in a hurry. But I’d already bought mine.