When we’re little, we all read fairy tales.

Funny thing is, in fairy tales the protagonist is almost always a little girl. And the story is usually about a frail girl and the prince who protects her.

Boys read them and want to become the prince, guarding their princess.

Girls read them and want to become the princess, searching for a prince to protect them.

I tried to remember the fairy tales I knew as a kid, and was surprised to find they don’t really have a clear gender bias. In other words, boys and girls read the same stories—explorations of strange worlds, the prince-and-princess tales passed down through generations.

But time moves on, boys and girls grow up, and maybe they’ve quietly accepted that the fairy tales they heard were lies. Most boys no longer believe there’s a princess worth protecting, and most girls don’t really dream of a prince coming to save them.

Looking back on those old tales brings a wry smile—can’t tell if it’s nostalgia, or just thinking how ridiculous I was to believe that stuff.

Still, fairy tales never stop. They keep telling the story of princes and princesses, for anyone willing to listen.

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The Fiio EM3 is Fiio’s new pair of earbuds, and honestly my goodwill toward Fiio keeps growing.

The accessories are sparse: just the buds themselves and a few foam covers. That’s it.

Since it’s positioned under 100 yuan, the pros and cons are equally obvious.

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My Moto 360 2nd came with a leather strap, but now I need to switch to rubber.

Why? Because I’ve been working out a lot lately, and the leather strap went completely black from all the sweat.

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I’d already made up my mind to play ワールド・エレクション (World Election) long before, and I remember it was the winter of 2015. Surrounded by one landmine visual novel after another, I couldn’t find more than a couple of decent CVs in a sea of games featuring Akino Hana — which, for a seiyuu nerd, is pure agony. Like a plant deprived of sunlight. Like an earthworm deprived of soil. Like a shut-in deprived of instant ramen. Like Four Leaf Clover deprived of TFboys. Then Whirlpool announced their new title, World Election, with heroine No. 1 Kururu voiced by Sawasawa Sawa — a beacon in the darkness that lit up this ugly bastard and left me so hyped I couldn’t even find my bearings.

There’s no such thing as story supremacy anymore, no such thing as art supremacy anymore, no such thing as industry blockbuster supremacy anymore. As long as it’s Kiritani Hana, and she’s the main heroine, that’s the absolute best.

But by the time this game actually came out, several months had passed, and honestly I’d lost most of my interest. You can pretty much guess where the plot’s headed just from the setup: a destroyer god drops out of the sky, a fictional world where multiple races coexist, an election between those races, and the ugly-ass protagonist is of course gonna bang all the non-humans too, plus you know he’s gotta drag the destroyer god herself into bed and teach her who’s boss. Still, I remembered this game had given me hope back last winter when I was in despair, finally letting me escape that sea of suffering where shitheads and Akino Hana were fucking everywhere, and I’m such a loyal, faithful guy, so considering Whirlpool keeps putting out games with decent premises that fall way short in the end, I picked it up in the educational spirit of improving my Japanese reading comprehension.

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A while back some foreigner said that starting with the ThinkPad X250 and ThinkPad T450 era, the hardware whitelist was dropped.

T450 and X250 no longer have Whitelists

I also found confirmation from an official rep on Lenovo’s overseas blog. Shame is, the rep only said the Wi-Fi whitelist restriction was gone.

Saying it is one thing, but nobody had actually gone and tested it, so I had an itch to scratch and decided to be the guinea pig. On Taobao I ignored the seller’s warning and bought an 8260ac without an FRU:

So does it work or not?

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Bought a Nexus 5X to use as car navigation. Plugged it into the USB port on the car charger, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a problem.

I’m not asking for “charging rapidly,” but you went and gave me “charging slowly”…

Thinking it over, it’s pretty simple. The car charger I was using was a gift from someone, so I figured I’d just buy a proper one. The thing is, the fast charging supported by the Nexus 6P / Nexus 5X / Pixel C is the 5V / 3A standard, not Qualcomm’s, so there’s currently no car charger that fully hits it. I settled for an Anker 5V / 2.4A one instead.

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Bought this for my parents. My mom had been using the Sony Xperia Z1 I handed down, and my dad was on a first-gen Meizu M Note.

Three things sold me on the Redmi Note 3:

1. The new Full-Netcom processor, supposedly a beast.
2. The massive 4000 mAh battery, supposedly a beast.
3. MIUI, which for people my parents’ age is a system that’s user-friendly to the point of exploding.

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Last year I played the fortissimo series, and my personal feelings about it were complicated.

Content-wise, the fortissimo series has some seriously melodramatic plot. Basically the world gets destroyed, and the one destroying it might even be your dad. Your dad destroys the world because he’s given up on it, so you, as the protagonist, go off to fuck up your dad. After a bunch of cheat-code showdowns you successfully fuck up dad and establish a new world. No real twists—just cheat vs. cheat, shouting louder, forced hot-bloodedness, justice always wins. Another big feature of this game is that fight mode and non-fight mode are two different worlds. During slice-of-life scenes everyone’s goofing around like a normal game, but the moment a fight starts it’s kill or be killed. Completely inconsistent…

But despite all that, experience-wise the fortissimo series is a blast. There’s so much combat, and the atmosphere during fights is genuinely great. Especially that feeling of “shouting each other’s names at the top of your lungs and then busting out a cheat-code ultimate”—it’s genuinely hot-blooded, it’s hype, it’s satisfying. So for the previous fortissimo games, I’d say they’re ultimately not bad at all. I mean…

When the hype kicks in, who cares about details.

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A while back JD had a sale, and the Edifier S1000 was going for a good price. I’d been meaning to replace my old Edifier R1600TIII anyway, so I just bought it.

At the same time, to make headphone swapping easier, I picked up the Aune X1S, a DAC/amp combo unit.

So just getting these two things set up cost me a ridiculous amount of effort.

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Before this I was using a Lamy Al Star. It was fine, I guess — mostly it just took a beating and felt decent in the hand.

Then I lost it.

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