I’d heard about noise-cancelling headphones ages ago… back on Sony Walkmans…

Way back, Sony Walkmans came with noise cancelling as standard. According to my classmate, the tech works by using a mic to pick up the sound waves around you, then firing out inverse waves to cancel them.

Anyway, it worked okay-ish, but I distinctly remember it not being all that great.

Years later, I’m in the market for noise-cancelling earphones again. No profound reason—the AC at work is too loud, and my place is right on the road, also loud, and I seem to have developed a touch of nervous exhaustion.

When it comes to noise-cancelling headphones, the only real choice is Bose, and since I don’t want big over-ears, the QC20 was the only option.

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Months ago I sold my iPod Classic to someone local in Zhengzhou.

The guy who came to buy it was also a headphone nut. We listened to each other’s earphones during the meetup and talked a lot. I really liked his old jazz, and he preferred my Phonak female-vocal poison.

While chatting, we got onto the topic of how people around us don’t understand why we buy earphones. I said most people who listen to my Audio-Technica im03 say it’s trash and the bass is completely weak, and he said a lot of people think good bass equals good sound quality, which is exactly why that garbage earphone on Hi-PDA got so many people saying it was great.

“Good listening habits are important. Bass isn’t everything.” I totally agreed with that guy.

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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.

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The reason mysticism gets called mysticism is that it has too much that’s uncertain and unprovable.

Headphone forums like to use all kinds of precision instruments to keep things objective, to determine whether an earphone is really Hi-Fi — after all, Hi-Fi was originally defined as high fidelity. High fidelity means absolutely reproducing the original recording the way it was meant to be heard…

So an audio device that boosts the bass, boosts the treble, boosts this and boosts that is, in theory, violating that original Hi-Fi vision. On this point, the various instrument measurements posted on headphone forums aren’t wrong in their direction.

But there’s a concept called “listening impression.” That’s where the mysticism starts.

An earbud might have monstrous playback quality on an audio oscilloscope, but that doesn’t beat a bunch of people listening and saying it “sounds bad.” One line of “sounds bad” can slam a high-end earphone into the ground.

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I’ve always liked girls drawn by soft girls, and Miyasaka Miyu[^1] is a soft girl, so I really like the girls she draws. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that logic.

Only a girl knows what expressions and poses a real girl would actually have. Only a girl-drawn girl can really capture a girl’s charm. I figure there’s not much to argue with in that.

So half a year ago, Izayoi no Fortuna (十六夜のフォルトゥーナ) already had me floored by Miyasaka Miyu’s art. Those soft, gentle girls hit my strike zone dead-on. You have to understand: petite girls are my absolute favorite. I just want to hold them and squish them…

So, about Areas ～空に映すキミとのセカイ～ — hand on heart, I played it purely for the art. I’d already seen the reviews on Chuuni Space saying “good start,” “ending makes no sense,” barely a passing grade, but who cares? What kind of shit haven’t I eaten by now? However bad your writing is, how bad can it get? Can you do full-cast insta-love? Can you do split personalities? Can you do forced harem? Can you do forced flexing? Can you do knockoff light novel? Can you do reincarnated saint? Can you do Tower Defense? Can you do imitation Guo Jingming? Can you do total meltdown? Or can you trick me into banging a boy?

No way! I thought I’d already tried every possible way of eating shit. There’s no reason left for me to find a brand-new way to eat shit!

Shennong sampled a hundred shits, and I no longer fear death.

Game Start!

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Futagoza no Paradox (双子座のパラドクス) is another Wata-nui* title. Why’d I play it? Mostly because its predecessor Owari Sekai to Birthday left such a good impression on me. So even if the character designs are shit as always, I’m still willing to give it a go — no other reason, I just wanted to see a story that could rival Owari Sekai to Birthday. That’s it.

But before I get into the game, I want to talk about something else: the science and pseudoscience in the story.

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The internet situation at my workplace is… special.

In theory — I mean, in theory, according to the management regulations — every internet user in every department should be rate-limited, with video and downloads throttled, and stock trading and remote connections banned. Even our department is supposedly no exception.

Except I’m the one who wrote most of those rules… so my own IP sits outside them. Sure, that violates the regulations, but I’m the type who doesn’t give a damn about the higher-ups, and plenty of the hospital leadership have their own IPs in the unrestricted group anyway. The thing is, the other guys and gals in the department are total bootlickers — the kind who look like they want to kneel the moment a boss walks by, then want to tear that same boss apart the second he leaves. Face to face one thing, behind the back another. They want to secretly watch videos and trade stocks at work, but when I offer to put their IPs in the unrestricted group, they shake their heads and say they don’t dare.

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Getting a car is just the beginning… beginning of what? The beginning of buy-buy-buy!

Since the Honda Vezel wasn’t easy to get and discounts were scarce, just being able to buy one with a small discount was good enough — can’t expect freebies thrown in, so things like seat cushions and whatnot I had to buy myself.

Good thing Taobao is pretty much omnipotent, so I got all that stuff together quickly. Of course, as an otaku who likes tinkering with computers, what I cared about more was other stuff.

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I bought a Cardboard a while back, but that was the first gen. And yeah, the first gen had plenty of rough edges — no big-phone support (even though my phone at the time was a Sony Z1), too few apps (aside from a few demos there was basically nothing to play). Then recently I stumbled onto the fact that YouTube now has a proper 360° VR video channel, and that’s when it hit me: the second version of that box from Google I/O was already dirt cheap on eBay.

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Only after learning Japanese did I realize how many Chinese words actually come from Japan. Setting aside stuff like 暴走 and 違和, 箱庭 (hakoniwa) is probably one of them.

I see the word 箱庭 all the time in anime lyrics—はこにわのせかい (the world of the miniature garden) and so on. It’s not a hard word to figure out: a garden in a box, or in a tray. Put it in Western terms and you get Sandbox—or, if you want something more Chinese, “bonsai” or “penjing.” The concept itself actually originated in the West; Japan just imported it and called it 箱庭. And honestly, I’m deeply grateful to whoever did that, because they didn’t write it as サンドボックス or some other godawful transliteration. I could cry tears of joy.

Of course, the term is most closely associated with 箱庭療法—sandplay therapy. It’s a form of psychological assessment where the patient builds a miniature world in a box, and the therapist reads their mental state from the elements they choose.

Basically a deluxe personality test.

So when I first saw 箱庭ロジック (Hakoniwa Logic) with its detective and mystery branding, I figured there had to be more going on under the hood.

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