Ryuuyoku no Melodia (竜翼のメロディア) is an old Uzumaki-sha game, built around singing and dragons — same half-fantasy flavor as usual for them.

How do I put this… it’s very… long-winded?

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I never knew my Kaitian keyboard was an 84-key layout. I always assumed it was an 87.

Then again, maybe I was just being lazy. The original keycaps were filthy beyond recognition, so I figured I’d swap in something cheap — ordered a set on Taobao that was listed as fitting the NOPPOO choc 84 mini.

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Nvidia pushed a driver update today, and right after that Steam on Linux blew up.

Dota 2 wouldn’t run.

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There’s a fairly distinctive phenomenon in Eastern cultures: the “reincarnation” setup. Of course, it isn’t culture that decided this — it’s religion. Reincarnation gets preached a lot in Buddhism, and plenty of Eastern countries are big on Buddhism, so naturally the idea caught on with more people.

What is “reincarnation”? Pretty much what it sounds like: a person dies and their soul is reborn in someone else’s body, sometimes with memories of the past life, sometimes without. There’s a bit of a “law of conservation of souls” vibe to it.

In most literature, reincarnation tends to get tied to romance. Lovers from a past life fall in love again in the next cycle, cycle for thousands of years, meet hundreds of times, either end up together or never truly do, tossing and turning through infinite loops — and we, the audience, are left sighing.

Why sigh? Because fate plays games with people, and you can’t help feeling that this is just how it is.

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I’ve been using the Google Pixel C for a good while now, but there are a few problems I need to mention…

1. The touchscreen is really unresponsive. Western users have been complaining hard about this, and plenty of them got replacements over it, which didn’t help.
2. The keyboard keeps double-clicking or multi-clicking. Some Western users ran into it; I didn’t.
3. Bad Wi-Fi signal. Also didn’t happen to me.

But an unresponsive touchscreen on its own is pretty fatal. Not only does it get in the way of using the thing, I couldn’t even use the Jot Dash stylus I bought for it..

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Firefox just updated to 44.0, and for Linux users that means a new problem.

Fonts look like garbage. Like this:

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Lately the games I’ve been playing have been a bit unusual — either hand-chopping, big meat grubs, or hookup stuff. After wandering down the non-traditional path for so long, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic for the old moe-charage, so when January rolled around and I was picking games, I found myself wanting something light and fun to play.

So among the January releases, while I was downloading Toukyou NECRO, I spotted this game called Hanikami Clover.

Compared to whatever Toukyou NECRO was doing, Hanikami Clover was clearly on the traditional cute-bishoujo game route. I got hyped, saw it was by Green Tea Soft, figured Green Tea Soft wouldn’t screw anything up — Minamijuujisei Renka seemed to have decent reviews, so this one probably wouldn’t be too bad either. Then I checked the official site for the CVs. The first heroine sounded like Gotou Mai right away, and the others — Akino Hana, Sendai Eri — were all solid voice actresses. But the absolute most explosive thing was when I later checked out the game’s OP.

Deredere student council president, a sweet-loving senpai, an erotic girlfriend, a little sister who’s a useless-brother-manufacturing machine — paired with that seductive, intensely rhythmic footage.

The game’s tagline was “a love story with a slightly H her.” Honestly, while the OP looked a bit like a moe-nukige, it still had to be better than hand-chopping meat grubs or hookup games, right? Based on my years of experience, this had to be a fun-filled moe-selling work — even if it was a nukige, it’d be a comedic one, a light entertainment nukige with no fancy effects. Playing it would definitely be fun.

My feelings at the time were:

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A while back — though looking at it now, maybe not that long ago — I was having dinner with some friends, and they asked me why I still didn’t have a girlfriend. I’d already lost the weight, so was I still hung up on that fujoshi who screwed me over, or was I just not into women?

At first I refused to answer. But refusing only makes things worse — getting pegged as some loser who’s still simping for a batshit girl, or as a guy who turned gay because he got dumped, both look pretty bad.

So after thinking it over, I gave a careful answer.

“Because, uh, I don’t really know how to act around women. They’re hard to figure out, it’s stressful, and kind of a hassle.”

My friend blinked, then burst out laughing.

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LOVEREC. -Mini Theaters- is the fan disc for LoveRec.

Actually LoveRec is a pretty good game, but this fan disc is just… cheap. Like, painfully cheap.

The story picks up right where the original ended: the protagonist is about to graduate, and the white-haired little sister plans to sell the film she shot at the new C90, so the whole crew has to pitch in. That’s the setup.

Except that’s only the prologue. The movie-making thing never actually happens.

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Maggot baits was made by Clockup. If you know them—or if you made the mistake of looking them up—you’ll know they’ve put out a few fucked-up games.

So for Maggot baits, the title alone tells you what you’re in for.

Maggot: maggot baits: bait

Put together, it’s bait for maggots.

And that fits the story perfectly. The game’s got tentacles, giant bugs, and humans—witches, hunters, whatever—getting swallowed and chewed up by them.

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