I’m not from the Northeast, but I know plenty of Northeasterners.

Back when World of Warcraft was huge, Zones 2 and 6 were the China Unicom servers, and they were basically northerners’ territory. And among northerners, Northeasterners made up a wildly high proportion of the player base.

It was pretty much: join any random raid, hop on voice chat, and there’s a good chance the raid leader is speaking with a Northeastern accent. Combined with the old sitcom Northeast Family (东北一家人) being a hit, I’ve picked up the dialect by osmosis.

The Northeastern dialect is a branch of Northern Mandarin, with a lot of Beijing influence in the pronunciation. Anyone who understands Standard Mandarin can follow it without much trouble, and it carries this weird mix of “comic” and “gangster” energy. A lot of people assume Northeastern guys are all hard cases, but honestly the Northeastern girls are worse. Fun fact: the only domestic violence shelter in all of China that protects men is in Shenyang, Northeast China. Meaning out there, the girls will chase the big Northeastern lads around and beat the crap out of them.

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I started building websites back in middle school.

I remember it clearly — the summer of eighth grade. I applied for a free forum and domain and threw together an extremely crude “class website.” I figured it was just for fun, but it somehow took off across the whole class, then the whole grade.

It wasn’t just my own class. Kids from the neighboring classes signed up and started posting too, and all kinds of conversations got going. That chatter later moved to the school’s official forum, and after that to the class Discord group. I think I was the one who created and ran that Discord group, for the simple reason that I was one of the few users who had permission to create Discord groups at the time. So I made the group for the class, and I’m still listed as admin to this day, even though nobody’s said a word in it for years.

Later I went to college and started making all kinds of websites and forums again, but honestly nothing ever took off the way it did, and I could never recapture that middle-school glory. In one of the forums I’d rebuilt God knows how many times, I once wrote this line:

“Some dreams you only dream at eighteen, and some dreams you only understand once you’ve grown up…”

There were a few more lines after that, I don’t remember them now — something with that whole “forcing yourself to feel sad for the sake of a poem” vibe. I didn’t really know what I was trying to say. I just thought it sounded cool, so I went with it.

Sure enough, a classmate came along and criticized it right away, saying I’d taken the wrong medicine and that it was so pretentious it gave him goosebumps.

I thought he had a point, so I made that line my Discord signature so he’d have to see it every day.

Years later I thought of that line again, and I have to say, I now think it actually makes sense. Because there really are things you only do when you’re young, and dreams you only understand when you’re young at heart.

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Last year, while I was replacing the battery in my Switch, my hand slipped and the screwdriver flew off and hit the screen, leaving a nice little pit right in the middle.

That’s when I remembered that almost a year ago, I still had insurance on the screen — you can read the details here.

So I thought, isn’t this the perfect time to get the screen replaced?

While I was still hesitating, the next day the machine obligingly developed a new problem: the TrackPoint’s right-click button popped out, and it wouldn’t go back in.

Looks like I had no choice but to go to the service center.

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A while back I wanted to get my dad a computer so he could chat on Discord and check stocks. I originally planned to pick up a ThinkPad and upgrade it myself, but then I spotted something unexpected on Xianyu:

DELL Latitude 7370

• Intel Core M5-6Y57
• 8G RAM
• 256G SSD

The seller said it was in 9/10 condition and wanted 900 yuan, shipping included.

By any reasonable measure, 900 yuan is a bit much for this. But I looked closely at the screen and asked the seller what the resolution was. Turns out the seller didn’t even know how to check…

So I tried a different angle: is the screen a touchscreen? The seller said yes, it’s touch.

That’s when things got interesting. On the DELL Latitude 7370, a touchscreen version can only mean one thing: the same 3K wide-gamut touch panel as the top-spec XPS 13. If it really was that screen… then 900 yuan is a fair price, because the screen alone is worth more than 500.

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When I got sent to the quarantine facility, I brought my Switch, and that’s where I wrecked the sticks on the thing…

The clips that hold the left and right sticks in place also went bad — the sticks wouldn’t stay put, one push and they’d pop up.

So I figured I’d just replace them, and in for a penny, in for a pound: the left and right stick clips, the console’s own battery, and the sticks themselves all got swapped.

You can buy all of this on Taobao:

• Rail clips — there are metal versions now, and I strongly recommend the metal ones, they’re just sturdier
• Sticks — there are second-gen ones, plus the newly released GuliKit Hall effect ones. If you’ve got the money I’d go Hall, but remember: the point of a Hall stick is that it massively cuts the odds of drift, not that it feels good
• Battery — I couldn’t tell which was the real “official” one, so I just bought the highest-selling listing
• The screwdrivers for teardown usually come free

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A while back, I got this sudden itch to buy a tablet, but my requirements were a bit unusual:

• Cheap enough
• Has a Type-C port
• Screen preferably 4:3 — I don’t game, just reading and videos
• Speakers have to sound good
• As few ads as possible, ideally none or stock Android
• 8 inches

It’s not like tablets meeting these specs don’t exist. The Xiaomi Pad 2 and 3 series are all over Xianyu, for instance — but those are e-waste that’s been hacked to hell and back…

Then I stumbled on something magical: the JD Tab, the tablet JD.com put out back in the day:

• 4:3 high-quality screen
• Flyme OS, no ads
• 8-inch size
• Harman Kardon speakers
• Type-C charging
• Going for just over 200 yuan on Xianyu, brand new

Holy crap, brand new? That’s gotta beat all that e-waste, right? So I got carried away and bought one. Little did I know that was the start of a whole series of adventures.

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Right after I sold my FiiO Q3S, I happened to see the announcement for the FiiO Q7, and there was a launch discount, so I got carried away and bought it.

Then I barely listened to the thing before hastily selling it off. Maybe I just didn’t like it. Or maybe I didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

I remember the Q7 arriving around October 14, 2022. As FiiO’s new-generation flagship DAC, the Q7’s packaging can only be described as “lavish,” and its spec sheet as “extravagant.”

• 3.5/4.4/2.5 balanced outputs
• Dual DAC chips
• Independent amp stage
• Large battery
• Supports bypassing the battery to run on wall power
• Works as a desktop unit or as a portable DAC/amp combo
• A display in the middle showing the current status

It also came with a pile of accessories: a genuine leather case, a screen protector already applied, and even a cooling stand so you can use it as a desktop unit.

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Finally got around to writing up everything I played last year. Turns out I went through 31 games, same as 2021. That said, I can already feel 2023’s number dropping off a cliff — not because I don’t have time, but because the industry is just cooked. Look at May: barely a handful of titles worth mentioning. By year’s end I’ll be lucky to count ten on my fingers.

Looks like my dream of “watching the visual novel sunset industry finally die” is about to come true.

Last year’s quality was honestly nothing to write home about. If you asked me to list my “personal best,” I doubt I could even fill ten slots. So let’s do it differently this year — alongside the usual recommendations, I’ll throw in some roast-flavored awards. “Worst,” “dumbest,” that sort of thing… just for fun. Helps people dodge landmines.

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Taiwanese rapper MC HOTDOG shows up in a lot of movies too, but he’s a bit different — he only does “low-budget,” “rough around the edges,” the kind of thing you look at and think, yeah, this is gonna be a mess. He’s worked with the likes of Xiao Shenyang, Da Peng, Yue Yunpeng. Sometimes he even pops up in Taiwanese horror films by directors nobody’s heard of. The results are about what you’d expect: most of these movies got panned. Basically everything he’s been in is a stinker.

A lot of people, me included, were puzzled. The guy is arguably the face of Chinese-language rap. Eminem made 8 Mile. Hotdog should at least have the ability and the resources to make something decent — even a vanity project shouldn’t turn out to be a “bad movie.” But in a later interview he brought this up himself, and his answer stuck with me.

Hotdog explained that he doesn’t like so-called “big productions.” He prefers that “cheap” B-movie feel. And he laid out all the upsides of B-movies: because they’re niche, the subject matter can be sloppy but also way more unhinged; because they’re niche, the content can be bolder, more willing to shitpost, even touching sensitive territory that “big” films won’t go near; because they’re niche, the style gets more exaggerated — horror gets scarier, gore gets bloodier, comedy gets to cut loose.

And because it’s a B-movie, niche audience, niche marketing, nobody’s really watching, so it’s just more free. There’s a decent-sized crowd of B-movie lovers out there going nuts over films that “don’t belong in polite society.”

That idea hit me, and it reminded me of when I first got into visual novels. For a market that’s been called a sunset industry for years, the B-movie approach works just as well — in both subject matter and plot development, visual novels are freer, and a lot of the “masterpieces” were born inside that freedom. No wonder so many people find “healing” in themes of darkness, death, torture, even training.

So finally some developer remembered the common ground between visual novels and B-movies. Like CUBE’s Same to Ikiru Nanokakan (サメと生きる七日間), “Seven Days Living with Sharks.”

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When I first saw the announcement for this new Lump of Sugar title, Arcana Alchemia (アルカナ・アルケミア), I genuinely couldn’t hold back a laugh.

What year is it, and they’re still making traditional “alchemy” stories?

The moment you say “alchemy” it’s always “human transmutation” this and that — at least bring up how alchemy was a precursor to modern medicine, philosophy, and chemistry, would you? Then I read the premise. Oh boy, of course it’s “transmuting a living beast-eared girl.” No idea if that was on purpose or an accident.

When the game came out at the end of December, I couldn’t shake the association — seeing “shark” reminds me of that Osaka black-veil otaku, which then reminds me of jerking off, and that’s just uncomfortable. So I got around to this one first. And it turned out to be surprisingly decent. Honestly I’d even say Arcana Alchemia is the best thing Lump of Sugar has put out recently, good enough to squeeze into my year-end ranking.

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