Microsoft’s new “Designer” line of Bluetooth mice is pitched at “designers,” but honestly, designers probably wouldn’t touch this thing — same way a lot of Apple fans who swear the Magic Mouse is great wouldn’t actually put up with that feel.

The full name is Microsoft Designer Bluetooth Mouse. It’s flat and portable, and it takes the unusual AAA battery, which means my pile of Eneloops are useless here. The upside of that battery choice is a big drop in weight, so the trade-off does make some sense.

There’s not much to it: left and right buttons, a scroll wheel, and a middle click on the wheel.

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Not long after I got my driver’s license, people kept asking me:

“When are you buying a car?”

Honestly, I hadn’t even thought about it. For one, I know jack shit about cars. For two, every car that looks decent to me has a price tag that makes me kneel.

Then my parents started asking too, and eventually they just said, “Tell us how much you’re short and we’ll cover it, just go buy a car already.” That’s when I figured I should probably buy one—and I really didn’t want to take their money for it.

So the goal became: “Buy a car I’m comfortable driving, within my own budget.”

Which raises the question: what the hell do I buy?

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Dekinai Watashi ga, Kurikaesu. left a pretty deep impression on me, and not because of the art or anything like that. Mostly it was the crowd saying “this one’ll make you cry” and “it’s peak.” Generally, if a game gets that kind of broad approval, it can’t be too bad, so I played it during June when there wasn’t much else out.

The title is weird. Going by my Japanese level (roughly that of a one-year-old), it’s basically saying: even if I keep going back, I can’t change a damn thing. Early on, the protagonist gets a pocket watch from a big-sister type named Ren, who tells him it can travel through time and return to the past.

“But there’s no point in going back, because the future can’t be changed.”

Time travel that can’t change the future is basically useless. Ren drills this into him when she hands over the watch:

未来は変えられない (The future cannot be changed)

So the story begins five years after Ren’s death, when the protagonist—pocket watch in hand—meets a girl named Shino.

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A few days ago the ThinkPad Bluetooth mouse was on sale on JD’s mobile app. 100 yuan was a pretty interesting price, and since my old one kicked the bucket after getting water in it — I swapped to a Microsoft one, but that’s mostly been doing duty on the Win 8 laptop — I just went ahead and grabbed a new one.

After it arrived I compared it with the old model, and sure enough it’s REV.V06.

I figured there’d be nothing different, but it turns out it’s a bit better than before: the middle button is a little firmer, the left and right buttons aren’t as loose, and the shell seems slightly crooked, though you can’t tell unless you look closely.

The most important thing is that the Bluetooth pairing on this thing seems different from before.

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I haven’t played many Alcot games, but most of them run the same playbook: lowbrow (no offense) snark and slice-of-life, cute moe character designs, and solid music. Honestly, Clover Heart wasn’t quite like this, but by the time Clover Days rolled around it had already become the house style. So my feelings on Clover Days carry over: no matter how you slice it, it’s not exactly “high art,” but there’s nothing really wrong with it either. The plot beats are a bit cliché, but it won’t feed you shit.

When LoveRec. was announced I took one look at the character designs…

“Oh fuck, that’s just Anzu.”

Yeah, the heroine named Hitomi looks almost identical to Takakura Anzu from Clover Days—just a different hair color and eye color. You could chalk it up to Nitamura Yūji’s art style, but the whole “we literally recycled an old character and are selling her again” vibe is a weird feeling. The other two heroines aren’t Nitamura’s designs, but they’re also kinda off. Overall, not as cute as Clover Days.

Given Alcot’s usual style, I figured this would be a pure moe-selling game—and the designs and basic premise certainly suggested that. But after finishing it, I came away with a very different impression.

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The Acer Chromebook C720 is a Chromebook, and as the name suggests, it runs Chrome OS.

Chrome OS isn’t actually bad, but for one thing I’m a Firefox user, and for another, Chrome OS needs to be online to activate on first boot.

Activation works like ChromeCast: you need some circumvention. I tried a VPN and it promptly locked my Google account, claiming an abnormal login IP. Fine, whatever — I couldn’t be bothered to deal with it, so I just wiped the thing and installed Linux.

Putting full-blown Linux on a Chromebook isn’t news. Some people use Chroot to switch between the whole system and Chrome OS, others like me just kill Chrome OS and start fresh. The former isn’t much different from the latter in practice; I’m just fussy about it.

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The Secret Game series is a visual novel from FLAT with a battle-royale-style plot. I played its predecessor’s enhanced version, Killer Queen, a long time ago, and it left a deep impression on me.

I say it hits deep not because it’s some masterpiece, just because… holy shit, it genuinely stings.

Because the protagonist is a giant bleeding-heart saint — the kind of guy who just takes whatever people throw at him, never fights back, and answers it all by spreading love and peace. In real life a doormat like that would’ve been picked clean and left with nothing, but nah, this is a game protagonist. He comes out of it without so much as breaking a sweat, and then he gets to bang the girl on top of it.

That was also the game that made me remember the name of its scenario writer, and once you see him attached, you can pretty much tell where the work is headed.

So that Secret Game did get a sequel. The first follow-up was just called Secret Game 2, then it got the name Secret Game: Code Revise, then it was ported to PSP with the story and visuals overhauled across the board and titled Secret Game: Code Revise 2nd Stage — and then that beefed-up PSP version had 18+ content bolted on and was ported back to PC, full title Secret Game: Code Revise 2nd Stage Boosted Edition.

Alright, whatever the hell this long-ass name is, I just want to say that even in the second game, the setup is still the same as the first.

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The first time I learned dating sims existed was in elementary school, when I found something called Tokimeki Memorial at a pirate vendor. Not a CD version, mind you—it was tucked in a folder on one of those “Cangjingge” compilation discs.

After installing it I found the name written as “純愛手札” (which I somehow read as 純愛手礼), and before I knew it, following the GameZ88 setup wizard, I’d put a shortcut for the thing on my Windows 98 desktop.

I played it for a while and felt thoroughly confused. Bear in mind I was an elementary schooler—I was itching to grab a gun and blast monsters, not sit quietly and hit on girls. The whole daily cycle of getting entangled with a bunch of women made no sense to me.

“Why isn’t he fighting?” “When does the fighting start?” Those were the biggest questions in my head.

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There’s a saying floating around the internet: “You can’t wake someone who’s pretending to sleep.”

It’s a line I’ve seen quoted by plenty of people I can’t stand, but the line itself isn’t wrong.

Sleep is just how a person rests. Strictly speaking, nobody knows the exact hour, minute, and second they nod off—it isn’t something you control. Wake someone out of that uncontrollable sleep and of course their eyes open. But someone pretending to sleep doesn’t actually want to sleep. They just want everyone else to think they’re asleep.

Why would a person who’s wide awake want people to believe they’re sleeping? Simple. To look the other way. To dodge whatever they’ll have to face once they’re awake.

Easy example: someone you hate comes looking for you. You don’t want to deal with them, don’t know how to deal with them, don’t want to turn them down, and really don’t want to talk to them…

So you flop onto your desk and fake a deep sleep. A friend tries to wake you, but you were awake the whole time, so naturally you keep yourself from looking awake.

That’s what “you can’t wake someone who’s pretending to sleep” means. The pretender chose to pretend because they never wanted to wake up in the first place. You can’t wake them.

Sumire (すみれ), NekoNeko Soft’s 15th anniversary title, takes exactly that “pretend sleep” as its theme. As its OP song “Sleeping Pretend” suggests, this is a story about three girls who each pretend to sleep to avoid the things in front of them.

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Kobo Aura HD is a pretty ahead-of-its-time E Ink reader.

“Ahead of its time” because its specs used to be cutting-edge, and now it doesn’t have much of an edge left. Still, if you like ePub or just like tinkering, this thing is more fun than a Kindle.

Back in the day, Kobo Aura HD firmware updates could be done over Wi-Fi. These days… not happening.

Why? Because it needs a VPN, you know how it is.

So thank goodness that when the world builds a wall around us, it doesn’t forget to give us some breathing room. Try the manual update method…

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