Buying these earphones was an impulse purchase. I was ordering the Mi Band pulse edition for my mom and figured I’d toss in some Xiaomi batteries, except my finger slipped and I bought a pack of AAA size instead. I only noticed when the package showed up.

Mind you, I’m not saying AAAs are useless to me. Thanks to that mistaken order, the beat-up TV in my room no longer requires me to get up and hunt for buttons on the thing itself, because its remote has been dead for ages and takes AAAs.

So I went to order Xiaomi’s rainbow batteries again, the AA kind this time. Batteries are cheap, which means no free shipping — shipping alone costs more than a battery, so that’s just a bad deal. I figured I’d add something to the cart to hit the free-shipping threshold, and there it was: the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid earphones.

I hadn’t really looked into what the market thought of the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid. Only caught bits and pieces, and naturally none of it was kind.

“Take that money and go eat something nice.” “It’s literal garbage.” “I pulled them out after 30 seconds.” “Barely any sound quality to speak of.” “Boomy, can’t hear the vocals at all.”

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of earphones says this about them. Honestly, I was willing to believe they were trash too, because at this price point unless you’re buying from a specialty manufacturer, everything sounds the same: boosted bass and nothing else.

But these are hybrids, and I’d never heard a hybrid before. Also… I needed a filler item, and the power banks were out of stock!

So somehow I ended up buying the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrids. Or, if you prefer, I bought batteries and threw in a 99 yuan hybrid as a filler.

So the question is, how do they actually sound? I hate suspense, and like the title says, “they’re not as bad as you’d think.”

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If you use Firefox in fullscreen as much as I do, you’ve probably hit the same problem I have.

What happens is this: while I’m browsing fullscreen in Firefox, I click some other popup window and it opens underneath Firefox instead of coming to the front. WiFi status, uploading images to Weibo, all sorts of stuff.

And it only happens under Unity. Annoying as hell.

Well, there’s a fix now.

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I’m pretty open-minded. If a game’s supposed to have an interesting story, I’ll give it a shot—moe, otome, BL, mystery, guro, whatever.

Tokage no Shippo Kiri is a guro game. Actually, everything this developer puts out is guro. And there’s this weird pattern: most guro and hardcore games get surprisingly high praise. They should make you uncomfortable, but a lot of people sing their praises anyway. Plenty of them even say “Yeah it’s guro, but the story is so healing.”

I don’t get that. Guro is just a device. The story underneath is what matters. A kid helps an old lady cross the street, the same kid gets hit by a car and still helps her cross on crutches, the same kid with a vibrator up his ass still helps her cross—it’s all saying the same thing. Sometimes obsessing over the details is pointless. It’s seasoning. The main dish is the same.

So how’s the story in Tokage no Shippo Kiri? How’s the seasoning? How’s the main dish?

Short version: it’s pretty bad.

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Honestly, I left this one sitting unfinished for almost a year.

I’ve got this bad habit: whenever everyone else is playing something, I look at their impressions, their screenshots, and my brain just fills in the plot on its own. Which gives me a rough idea of the game. And having that idea means… unless there’s literally nothing else to do, or some other factor kicks in, I won’t prioritize it. Most of the time I’d rather spend the hours breaking new ground somewhere else. That’s just how it goes.

So it wasn’t until the anime was about to air that I remembered, oh right, I still haven’t finished this. I started pushing through it then, and because the game itself was too damn engaging, I ended up taking it slow — slow enough that the anime had already aired two episodes by the time I actually finished.

Hm? What did I just say? The game itself was too engaging?

Yes. This is a good game packed with positive energy, bright life-affirming values, and genuine psychological healing capability. (adjusts glasses)

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Thank god, the Xiaomi Mi Band Optical Heart Rate Edition finally doesn’t require a flash sale scramble anymore!

So I bought one without hesitation and gave it to my mom.

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I don’t want to spend too much ink on how these two things are, because it’s honestly hard to say much in detail.

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Yeah, so I broke my sleep earphones again.

My sleep earphones usually serve two purposes: one is hooking them up to the Surface Pro, and the other is listening to voice works on other tablets. At first I used an Earpod, then I got seduced by the princess and bought an Audio-Technica CX550. Later I lost that and did some searching, which led me to the strongest sleep earphone, the K314p. A year after getting it I found out the thing had actually gone up in price, so I quickly enshrined it. To have a replacement I bought the Diving Expert line, but the quality was honestly bad, so I had to get the new DP100 from Beyerdynamic, which broke soon after too. Then I bought M&G’s K314P reissue, and as you can imagine the cable snapped quick.

So at my wit’s end, I bought this Edifier H293P killer earphone for 99 yuan. You can probably understand my helplessness by now.

My requirements for a sleep earphone are simple:

• No heavy low end. I use them for visual novels and voice works, and I don’t like the boom-boom club sound.
• Comfortable to wear. That should be the basic requirement for a sleep earphone.
• Durable as hell. This is way too important, since I’ve wrecked every earphone before it.

So how does the Edifier H293P killer earphone perform?

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Shovel Knight is a pixel side-scrolling action game — my favorite genre, pixel art excluded. The Chinese name for it is “铲子骑士” (Shovel Knight), which says it all: the hero fights with a shovel. Your attacks include the standard swing, a jump-and-down-thrust with the shovel, and a bunch of other fun moves.

So why play this instead of the so-called big titles? Because they’re not fun — to me, anyway. These days, what they call AAA games keep chasing “immersion” and “cinematic experiences,” and what that actually delivers is a whole lot of boring, monotonous combat hidden behind some story. There are always people who mock me: “You keep playing those Gal games where you can’t even hit anyone, just endless yapping — how is that even a game?” But honestly, strip away the graphics, the story, and the cutscenes from most AAA titles on the market, and the combat and gameplay itself isn’t fun at all. I’d say it’s worse than games from 10 years ago — at least those didn’t have all the yapping and cutscenes, or those god-awful “tutorial guides,” or the endless grind like walking a dog. Oh, sure, some hardcore gamer will tell you that XXX big title shows you such and such a great story and scenery, with grand exploration and blah blah blah.

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After a recent kernel upgrade on Ubuntu Linux, my power consumption went up.

I looked around and found a method that brings it down—and it seems to use even less power than before. Writing it down here.

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The Philips SHP 9500 has been blowing up lately — 什么值得买 (SMZDM) has pushed it so hard the recommendation is basically worn out. It’s cheap, and the word of mouth is good.

I didn’t think much of it at first. The price point is what it is, and sure, people hype it as “this used to cost X back in the day,” but in the end it’s still budget gear, right? Then one day — I forget which bastard egged me on over on G+ — I somehow spaced out and placed an order. Newegg overseas, no less. After ordering I completely forgot about the thing, and only remembered a month later. Turns out the Newegg account I’d registered ages ago still had my old phone number on it, so the delivery address got flagged as undeliverable and the package was marked problematic. After a whole runaround I found out Newegg doesn’t have its own logistics and had handed it off to Tiantian Express, then another round of calls, and finally I got the thing in my hands…

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