A girl I know took a liking to the Boogie Board Jot I bought earlier, so I gave it to her. I’d been feeling the 8-inch was too small anyway — it can’t even hold a day’s worth of work notes — so I took the chance to size up to 10 inches.
The only 10-inch option is the Boogie Board 10.5, and it’s worth noting that the 10.5 is actually older than the Jot. Meaning some of its features are arguably behind the Jot’s. The big ones:
We already had a NAS at home, but it was completely useless for the elderly folks in the family. Fine for me, but too much of a hassle for my parents.
For them, a NAS is actually necessary—they need to save photos they take, whether on phone or camera. Importing photos from phone to PC is way too much trouble for them, and installing some domestic management app feels like a scam risk. Plus, dumping everything onto one computer seems unsafe—if the drive dies, that’s it. So I decided to go with Synology.
Given data safety concerns, I picked the two-bay DS216se.
Clear moon, sparse stars, and the autumn night already had a chill to it.
An old man in a short-sleeve shirt and jeans was messing around on his phone, bored out of his mind.
“Grandpa.” A little girl’s voice came out of nowhere. She’d clearly been staring at him for a while, and finally worked up the nerve to speak. “It’s so cold out tonight. Aren’t you freezing out here?”
“Freezing my ass.” He was an old man, but his tone was flat-out flippant—until he looked up, saw the little girl in front of him, and realized that wasn’t how someone his age should talk. So he straightened his expression into something that was technically a smile and said, “I’m not cold~ Thanks~.”
The girl didn’t seem to care how he talked. She just went on, slowly: “Grandpa, grandpa, what are you looking at?"—and started peeking at the phone in his hand.
A little awkward, the old man hurriedly pocketed the phone. He didn’t want the girl seeing what was on that screen, because in his view—no, in most people’s view—what was on that screen really wasn’t something you showed other people.
“Little kid~” The old man forced himself to look composed. “How about I tell you a story?”
“A story? What kind of story?” She wasn’t about to refuse. If anything, she looked like she’d heard plenty of stories in her time.
“What do you want to hear?”
“Handsome guys, pretty girls, people falling in love…”
“Tch.” The old man clicked his tongue, then immediately put the smile back on. “Ever heard the story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl?”
“Cow… herd… and the… weaver… what?” The girl looked completely lost.
Kids these days don’t even know the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl? The old man couldn’t help but sigh internally. “Want to hear it?”
“Yeah!” She was excited.
“Come on, sit here.” He patted a clean spot beside him. “The story has to start from the beginning…”
……………………
No way around it — the music library grew again, and I’ve stuck to the whole carry-a-DAC-and-my-library-everywhere thing, so the 1TB drive I’d put in the laptop finally ran out.
So I went bigger. The largest 9.5mm drive you can get right now is 2TB. Drive in hand, system is Ubuntu Linux, and my setup is SSD mounted at root with the HDD mounted separately at /HDD, with symlinks for the directories that need storage. That means the only thing to worry about is getting the mount options right, and the swap goes off without a hitch.
First, open it up — just pop the bottom panel, same as before.
Recently I keep hearing this word, “light luxury.” No idea who cooked it up first, but it’s been trending for a while.
“Luxury” I get. But what the hell is “light luxury”?
“Luxury” mostly means: something you could get done for 50 bucks, you insist on doing in a way that costs 5000 — chasing that low cost-performance ratio on purpose. No question, luxury belongs to rich people, and “light luxury” sounds more like a different kind of “luxury” for the broke crowd.
The broke also want luxury. Funny, right? No money, but still putting on the rich-person act — isn’t that just flexing?
That said, it’s not wrong either. “Light luxury” does carry a bit of a flexing vibe.
《妹ぱらだいす 2》 is the sequel to 《妹ぱらだいす》—at least it’s not a spiritual successor.
Why do I say that? I think we need a comparison shot.
Here’s the main cast from 妹ぱらだいす 1:
And here’s the main cast from 妹ぱらだいす 2:
And let me be clear—the characters in the two games are not the same people…
What the hell, man!!!
Imouto Paradise (妹ぱらだいす) is a pure-love game with genuinely nice art. The story is all about family and sibling bonds, following an older brother looking after his five little sisters while the parents are away on a business trip.
Most visual novels these days trend toward “novelization,” but they always end up feeling kind of half-assed about it. The reason is simple: real novels don’t have this much dialogue and slice-of-life, but visual novels do. They’ve got voice acting, and without dialogue the VAs would have nothing to do. So even the well-received ones end up feeling bloated in their daily-life sections to us, and it’s only after the daily-life stuff ends that the foreshadowing actually gets explained and the plot kicks in.
I’m optimistic about visual novels eventually getting better at plotting, but until that surprise arrives, plain old classical pure-love works are better. Imouto Paradise does pretty well on that front.
The world is full of color. Sure, there’s plenty of ugliness and disappointment out there, but none of it stops us from singing the praises of human goodness.
Ricky Hsiao has a song called “You Are My Eyes.” It’s about a blind man who, with his lover’s support, sees the whole world through her eyes. Even if he can’t see a thing, as long as she’s by his side, the dazzling world still finds its way into his gaze.
You are my eyes, leading me through the shifting seasons.
You are my eyes, leading me through the crowded throngs.
You are my eyes, leading me through the vast sea of books.
Because you are my eyes, I see the world right here before me.
The lyrics are heart-wrenching. Brings a tear to your eye…
Stories like that happen all the time. Today I want to talk about another warm, heartfelt one.
Tokeijikake no Ley Line is a very confident game. Why do I say that?
Because it dares to sell itself in pieces.
VMware 12 has been out for a while now. I didn’t upgrade the desktop at home, and the laptop got upgraded but I barely use it. Today I felt like running a VM, so I pulled it out and upgraded — turned out there were two errors during install.
The first was a theme error
