March is spring.

Back in school, teachers would’ve made me write some essay about “the coming of spring.” I’m not in school anymore and nobody’s forcing me to write anything, which somehow makes me want to write on my own.

My impression of spring isn’t actually that vivid. Usually it’s only around April when it gets a tiny bit warm that I realize spring has crept in without me noticing. I’ve rarely written about my own life on this blog. Since spring’s here, might as well do a roundup of where things stand.

Read More

I haven’t played that many Yuzusoft games. Count them on one hand and it’s basically Tensei Ranman (天神乱漫) and Natsuzora Kanata (夏空彼方); the rest I mostly glanced at, went “oh, Yuzusoft, I remember that face,” and moved on. Still, I owe Yuzusoft some thanks: Tensei Ranman was the first 18+ game I ever touched. Sure, I played the PSP version, but before that everything I’d played was Ever17, MO2, MO4 — genuine all-ages stuff. Thinking back to the first time I imagined Chitose Sana’s H scene still gets me a little excited…

Ahem, getting off track. The truth is I have some affection for Yuzusoft games but rarely play them, mostly because I kept hearing people dunk on them — “Yuzusoft is moege slop, and it’s trending toward nukige.” Looking at the premises, that’s honestly true. The later vampire one, the teacher one in Amairo — the “practicality” got more and more blatant. Then at the end of 2014, a new title called Sabbat of the Witch (サノバウィッチ) popped up out of nowhere. I didn’t read a single line of the intro — I just saw the word “heat” and…

Then I looked at the plot summary… bruh… did they just toss all shame out the window? The heroine goes into heat on a schedule, the protagonist secretly witnesses it, and the story builds from there… What else could it be but fucking?

A win for the practical crowd, a sob fest for the story crowd. For me, one glance at the premise killed all interest.

I can stage a better “boning the girl” scenario in my head any time I want, each one more exciting than this. Why would I need to play the game for it?

But then I played the trial version and found it was nothing like that. The heat thing is just a gimmick; the actual story is pretty good… the trial version’s story, anyway. So after finishing the full game I figure I should sit down and properly talk about it.

Read More

Stumbled on a sale at a ThinkPad shop on eBay — the ThinkPad TrackPoint Bluetooth keyboard and a 6-cell battery for the X250 (72Wh) both had decent prices. I’d just returned and refunded some stuff I bought for Chinese New Year, so there was money sitting in my account, and I bought them.

Both shipped from Beijing, and fast…

First, the keyboard:

Read More

Back when I bought my first balanced-armature earphone, the UE TF10, I had this weird sense of superiority.

Because everywhere online people said BAs were the new tech, that they wiped the floor with dynamic drivers in every way — amazing resolution, badass multi-driver setups, vocals so toxic it hurt, and so on and so on.

Looking back now, BAs really aren’t all that. Not that their strengths are bad, I’m just saying that whenever I listened to music on a BA set, something felt missing. Sure, Phonak’s female vocals were poison, sure the ER4P’s highs were crystal-clear, sure the UE900 handled instruments well, but it always felt like it lacked a certain flavor.

A while back I had dinner with a friend, and the restaurant had a little stage where a live singer performed “Love Like a Tide.” After that song finished, I think I understood what BAs were missing.

What’s missing is that sense of atmosphere, that feeling of music reverberating through a small bar. BAs are too cold and clinical, and that’s where dynamic drivers need to step in.

The Sennheiser IE80 might be a pretty good dynamic driver.

Read More

Times change, kernels change. The old VMware build method for 3.13 stopped working after 3.16.

Today I upgraded my desktop’s kernel on impulse, just to try out 3.19’s new support for the Logitech T650 touchpad. So of course VMware’s module compilation failed.

When it fails, all you can do is fix it.

Read More

This is a stupid-ass problem that’s been bugging me for six months.

Read More

So, in the season of love, you should take your beloved home as your wife (fog)

Anyway, whether it’s real or not, or whether it’s a China version, this is the only one I could buy…

Kurimura Momiji’s chibi figure came bundled with the game’s release, but thankfully there’s still a boxed version.

Read More

A friend bought a gaming laptop and brought it over for me to install the OS, since he plays World of Warcraft on it. After the install was done, he fired up WoW and ran straight into a problem…

Once you hold right-click to move the camera, the speed is insane — so fast you can’t control it at all…

Changing the mouse speed doesn’t help. Changing the in-game mouse speed doesn’t help either. Some searching later, it turns out this is a bug Blizzard has actually confirmed, related to HiDPI support under Windows.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/10102720358?page=25

Specifically, if you have scaling enabled, you’ll hit this.

Read More

The last time I assembled a model kit was in elementary school—I remember it was a ship, and it looked hideous. The rest of the time I was messing with Mini 4WD cars, and those are so modular I don’t think they even count as models. You can put one together in a few minutes.

Guluo is something a small toy merchant makes themselves, and apparently there’s some intellectual property involved. I saw it was a limited run, so I preordered one. It arrived last November, and when I opened the box…

Holy shit, over 200 tiny parts, detailed down to every joint. Then I looked at the assembly instructions and my brain just short-circuited. So it sat there. Today I finally got sick of playing through Witch’s Dinner Party and feeling gross, so I figured I’d just build the model.

I saw someone on X (Twitter) bragging they finished assembly in 15 minutes. I’m calling bullshit. It took me almost 3 hours…

Read More

The source is the book Bishoujo Game Seiyuu no Oshigoto. My Japanese is half-baked so I can’t read it, obviously—this is a translation by 克雷多 on Douban.

I finally installed a Japanese input method recently so I can type Japanese without romaji. Over New Year I did some more Japanese study and discovered my Gal-reading speed has gotten slower. Before I could listen once and get the gist; now I have OCD and look up every single word…

I really need to set aside time for systematic study…

Both pieces are reposts. Only two actresses were translated: Aoyama Yukari and Hokuto Minami. Reading them taught me a lot about what goes on behind the scenes in Gal.

Normally I don’t repost other people’s stuff, but this seems rare online—I only found it on Douban. If it ever goes down and disappears, that’d be a shame… Treat it as an archive.

Read More