Some artsy type once said: “Life should include a trip you take on a whim—pack your bags, hit the road, escape the city noise, and find inner peace.” Honestly, that’s not wrong. Half the time we go traveling we kill all the fun with planning and second-guessing, so one carefree trip really can melt the stress away. Unfortunately, I hate traveling… Or rather, I hate traveling in China.

Let me tell you a true story first. It’s long.

I don’t watch porn anymore, but back in high school I watched it every day. Watch enough and you start thinking about it—even debating with fellow enthusiasts about what makes a good scene. The standard, of course, is whether it gets you off. Maybe I’m a bit extreme, but while everyone else chased beautiful actresses with big tits and good bodies, I was looking for specific scenarios: humiliation, getting gangbanged by black guys, being dumped in the middle of nowhere for all kinds of play, being raped on the street, etc. But over time I realized I was being an idiot. The stuff I liked was too unrealistic—either not enough struggling, or the acting was completely unconvincing. It looked worse than the rape scenes in domestic TV dramas. After a while it just got annoying. It’s still porn, after all; if it were realistic it’d be a crime. So I figured I’d rather watch those older-woman-takes-your-virgin plots—at least that’s not too fake, right… Speaking of getting me into porn, I have to bring up Wu Lao’er.

For the longest time—no, actually, just recently—I’ve been mulling over a question: So what exactly is it that keeps me from getting a girlfriend, and why do I keep striking out at matchmaking meetups? After thinking it over, there’s only one answer: I’m just not good at picking up girls. With the mindset of getting to the bottom of things, it’s worth digging further: why am I bad at picking up girls, and what exactly do I need to do to get good at it?

When I was in elementary school, my family bought a VCD player. I don’t even remember the brand anymore. It just came with a pile of pirated VCDs. My dad bought it thinking “once we have this thing, we can watch blockbusters at home,” so the discs that came with it were all fancy blockbusters, stuff like Mission Impossible. Naturally, we immediately used our fancy new toy to watch Mission Impossible for ages. Halfway through, neither my dad nor I could take it anymore. Not that the content was bad—it just felt… boring. So for a long stretch the player sat there collecting dust, because there was nothing worth watching.

I know a very straight guy who is extremely gay. He’s obsessed with otome and even BL stuff, and after finishing it he’ll happily preach about it to me, looking for any opening to turn me gay. But you know how it is. If there were only one straight guy left in the world, it’d be me. So I turned down all his invitations and dodged every trap in the videos he sent me. Still, back two years ago when I was being an idiot chasing after a fujoshi, I figured this little gay dude was actually pretty reliable. As a fudanshi, he had a deep understanding of fujoshi.

Everyone loves to flex, but almost nobody enjoys watching someone else flex right in their face. There’s a very fitting phrase for this: “the flex of real skill.” Sure, it’s said more as a joke than anything, but it gets the point across — when it comes to flexing, if you’ve got enough real capital behind you, nobody can really do anything about it. Speaking of “skill,” I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with a friend about cooking. Back then I was being a total idiot, convinced that “a great chef must only make fancy, flashy dishes to be impressive.” My friend didn’t buy it at all.

First, let me confirm: Twinkle Crusaders (ティンクル☆くるせいだ) is indeed a visual novel. (Serious face.) Visual novels have always been treated as electronic picture books, and a few companies have tried to do something with the systems to make us feel like it’s a ゲーム, but most of them failed… Twinkle Crusaders is the first game that changed my mind about that…

In my life I’ve read exactly two power-fantasy web novels. The first one I actually finished: Rice Wu’s I’m a Hooligan, all the way to its finale I’m a Hooligan: Dragon War Starfield. The other one is the also-pretty-famous How the Bad Guy Was Forged, and I did not finish that one. To put it in terms an ACG person would get: the first is SAO, the second is Log Horizon. And I’m the kind of guy who prefers things that are snappy, so I finished I’m a Hooligan and dropped the other one.

I used to be a fan of kichiku videos back in the day… Don’t get the wrong idea—I don’t mean the Japanese “kichiku” (brutal) stuff. I’m a normal person, not a freak. I mean the Chinese internet’s repurposed “kichiku”: basically those twitchy, remix videos. Around 2008, ACFUN was full of kichiku works, plenty of good ones too. I watched them happily. Then, with the rise of certain Japanese dubbing memes, more and more “snarky” comedy videos started popping up… At first I enjoyed them too, until… that kind of content flooded the entire internet. Sorry, I’m the type who easily gets tired of infinitely repeated content. I got sick of it. I even started finding it boring. I began to hate those chaotic, no-substance things—they felt pointless, like modern Chinese crosstalk: no backbone, just endless bickering.