Ranked matches in 王者荣耀 hadn’t been going well lately. Someone suggested I buy a “touchscreen” controller to improve the feel of the controls and boost my win rate, so I did. Taobao has way too many kinds of these things, so I bought every single type. Right now these products fall into three categories…

Probably thanks to the massive reaction to that little fidget cube thing, more and more toys that “look useless but keep your hands busy” are hitting the market. The most typical recent example is this thing: the fidget spinner. Fidget spinner, as the name suggests, is a top you spin between your fingers. Simple construction, clean look. Hold the center pad, find a way to get it going, and that’s it. It really does spin more easily than your average metal disc—feels super smooth. If you get the force right, you can keep it going for several minutes without stopping. Right now fidget spinners come in two main shapes: two-armed and three-armed. Shape doesn’t change the game, though…

I’ve had the Moto 360 v2 for almost two years now, and Android Wear 2.0 has been out for nearly a year too, yet the update only showed up today. It’s not that I hadn’t thought about switching watches—there just wasn’t anything suitable. So since the update rolled out today, I might as well use it for now.

Ever since I cooled off on audio gear, I switched to buying CDs. Buying CDs is actually pretty nice too—you focus on the music itself instead of using earbuds to listen to the same few crappy songs on repeat. I picked up a bunch of CDs recently, so here are some quick thoughts.

One regret of mine: the game Mahoutsukai no Yoru never got an OST release. Sure, you can extract the OGG files from the game, but those aren’t lossless—I actually ripped a set myself, just couldn’t be bothered to type in the names for the tags. I kept thinking an OST would come out eventually, and, well, you know how it goes. Years pass, the next game is about to launch, and the previous game’s OST is still nowhere. The composer is Meto. This isn’t the first time he’s worked with the writer Rukuru, if I remember right—Unmei Yohou wo Oshirase Shimasu had BGM by him too, so did Mahoutsukai no Yoru, and the composer for Suisou Ginka no Istoria, out next month, is him again. I don’t know if they’re doing it on purpose or what, but none of the games Rukuru and his crew work on ever get an OST release. Even Unmei Yohou wo Oshirase Shimasu was originally supposed to include an OST with the special edition, and then right before release they just… cut it. And Suisou Ginka no Istoria is only getting the theme song Azurite no Hitsugi as a bonus. So I poked around Meto’s personal site out of curiosity and found he’s been composing music on his own all along, and he sells CDs of his own work right there. So I picked up the package versions to show some support. (A few CDs in there are just gate-crashing, please ignore them.)

I’d been using the official Live Case from Google on my Nexus 6P the whole time, and honestly I was pretty happy with it — except it was sometimes slippery as a bar of soap. The Live Case has its shortcomings, though: the top and bottom aren’t protected. If you, like me, sometimes shove the phone into the car’s phone slot, you’ll find out where the problem is — the edges get dinged up easily. So I decided to swap cases, but I didn’t know what to get. Then I saw people on XDA recommending this thing… They call it a Bumper.

A crowdfunding product I stupidly backed last year. The JD crowdfunding page probably has a fairly detailed writeup. And as I said a while back, the company had no real intention of crowdfunding — they were just using it as a presale. Plenty of KOLs had already reviewed the thing before the campaign even finished. The box was actually pretty decent when it arrived.

I’ve bought plenty of cheap earphones — the Edifier H293P, the Amazon Fire Phone stock earbuds, the QianShui 39, the QianShui 25 — and they all broke. Yeah, all of them. Some cracked, some snapped, some got mysteriously eaten away by liquid. Not sturdy at all. My main use for them is leaving a pair by the bed plugged into my tablet. I don’t listen to music, I just game with them, so you could call them sleep earphones. But these things just don’t hold up. The only two that survived any abuse were Apple’s EarPods and the Xiaomi Hybrid. That said, the EarPods sound kind of muddy and don’t seal that well, so the ones I actually used most were the Xiaomi Hybrids. Right, the original Hybrid that sold for 99 yuan. My verdict back then was it’s not as bad as people say — it’s at least a proper hybrid driver, and the sound is passable for games. Then my dad asked me for a phone — he had a Redmi Note 4 — so I ended up giving him the Hybrids. But out with the old, in with the new. I happened to see Xiaomi had released a Pro version, so I just bought it. That was back in November last year.

I found this album completely by accident. A while back I followed a link recommended by the socialite Fubuki Hoshino on Google Plus, ended up wandering around SoundCloud, and discovered a whole new world. SoundCloud really does have a lot of musicians active on it — though of course there are even more music fans. Plenty of remixers and musicians choose to release their work on SoundCloud. Most of it, well… personally I think it’s pretty slapdash, but at the same time there are quite a few tracks with something going for them too. Most of the remixes and original tracks on SoundCloud are electronically produced music — not everyone can afford to put a band together, after all. That means the music there tends to have a strong beat and a thick electronic flavor. Once you accept that premise it’s actually pretty catchy. I personally found some interesting tracks, like this one by aiobahn — the latest, 永久の宴, is quite distinctive and leans into a flavor that suits Western tastes. Western listeners call that move where the chorus suddenly drops in a massive bassline to deepen the rhythmic drive Drop the beat. If you look closely you can see in the comments on 永久の宴 just how satisfied the Westerners are with that beat drop… Of course, SoundCloud isn’t only this boom-tish music. There’s some more Japanese-leaning stuff too, though most of it is still electronic. A few doujin circles attach SoundCloud preview links to their promo pages — that’s another route in. And that’s where I found this little album, ゆのみっくにお茶して…

A few days ago I saw this thing on sale on SMZDM. So I bought it, and I dragged along Ginio, who holds 99% of the global ass-selling market monopoly, to buy one too. Didn’t expect it to arrive so fast—it landed on the last day of 2016, and three mice plus a CD somehow dodged customs. Probably used up all my luck for 2016.