I used to be a Sony PHA-1 headphone amp guy. For the longest time I ran it with my laptop as an external sound card, which kept the laptop’s own noisy audio chip out of the picture. Honestly it worked fine.

Then a few days ago some bottom-tier dude from the opposite faction back in my World of Warcraft days — a guy I’d killed more times than I can count — strong-armed me into selling him the PHA-1. So a new purchase was unavoidable. I looked at the Creative E5 first, but word is that thing is garbage. Also considered the PHA-3, until I found out it needs its own power supply, and my laptop doesn’t have that many USB ports. Ended up buying the PHA-2 as the replacement.

Once it arrived, sure enough, I had to shout it out loud: in Sony we trust.

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Bought this ChromeCast on Black Friday, mainly to test out the EMS official overseas forwarding service. Turns out that forwarder is seriously unreliable — a $19 doodad from Amazon US took a full month to reach me, and it went missing in transit several times along the way.

Anyway, it arrived. A lot of people probably want to know what this thing is good for, and how it can still be used in China in 2015, so let me run through it briefly.

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What is a landmine game?

It’s the kind of trap that gives you a massive落差—looks great on the surface, but once you’re in, you realize it’s nothing like you imagined, and you get hurt bad without even a courtesy rub.

Like you bust your ass chasing a goddess, get ready to bang her, and find out she’s actually a dude who forces you to bottom, fucks your ass till it bleeds, then dumps you and sells you as a cum dump to a gay bar.

The feeling a landmine game gives you is different from being deceived. With deception, you’re just being teased and played with. With a landmine game, you’re not only teased and played with, but tied up and force-fed a mouthful of shit.

The earliest I heard about Haruka Kanata (はるかかなた) was that its reviews weren’t great, people called it a landmine. But I thought, how bad can it really be? A plot that gasps for air? Unexplained developments? Shit art? A pile of dead characters? What else? I’ve seen the worst plots. I don’t believe it can be that garbage. Curiosity got the better of me—I wanted to see just how explosive this landmine was…

But I was wrong. Haruka Kanata is a certified landmine. It redefined landmines for me. It made me understand what a landmine truly is.

This game fucked me in the ass and then just smiled and walked away.

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The world is dark. That’s not enough of a reason to deny that light exists.

I know a guy. Met him online, same as usual. From day one I figured he was mid. Like — you can talk to him, but nothing about him stands out. No rebellious streak, never picks a fight, always smiling, doesn’t seem to have strong opinions, but he’s not clueless either. He knows a lot of things, just isn’t great at any of them.

Sometimes I figured his life had zero passion in it. But he always seemed happy.

I asked him once if there was anything he wanted to do. He said he wanted to be a programmer someday. “Like writing some insane software?” No, he said. “That’d be ideal, but just writing stuff that solves people’s problems is fine too.” He paused. “I like writing code. Same way most kids like building with blocks.”

So I stopped keeping in touch. Mostly because talking to him was boring — he’d listen to anything you said, then go right back to living his ordinary life, never once thinking about stirring things up. I used to figure that anyone worth a damn was obsessive, fanatical, one-track-minded. And a guy like him was just another face you’d lose in a crowd.

Then years went by and I watched all these big shots online pivot and scramble, watched plenty of talented people’s lives take crooked turns, running around after one thing or another, gaining some, losing some. And that’s when it hit me: the guy with no passion had somehow ended up the happiest person I know.

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SINCLIENT is a visual novel developed by BOOST5. Well, actually, calling it a visual novel is a stretch—it’s more of an 18+ kinetic novel, because there isn’t a single choice or branch. You just hold the button from start to finish.

The game isn’t long, but it’s definitely not short either. It’s split into two chapters: a prologue and a main chapter called Babylon. After finishing it, I had one thought…

That thought was: the prologue and the Babylon chapter are completely disconnected. Two different games… two different plots… and even two different levels of rigor.

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First off, the Vim that ships with Ubuntu 14.04 doesn’t support Python 3. Run:

vim --version | grep python

and you get:

-python3

Two ways around it: compile it yourself with the right flags, or just use a ready-made PPA:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:pi-rho/dev
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vim

After installing, don’t forget to run that command again and check whether python3 has turned into a plus sign.

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Grabbed a box, cut a few holes in it, slapped some A4 paper over them, spent 10 yuan at the local market on a roll of photography backdrop paper, and boom — a softbox. So I just messed around taking phone pics…

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The first time I worked up the nerve to spend over 1000 on earphones, I went with the UE TF10. My reasoning was that I’d already bought an F807 and committed to listening to FLAC, so I ought to pair it with something decent.

That TF10 stayed with me for a long, long time. I got so familiar with its sound that I couldn’t be more familiar with it. Strong instrument presentation, powerful resolution, punchy bass, and… vocals buried under the bass and instruments, plus a fit that was a nightmare to shove in no matter how you tried.

Two years later, one side of my TF10 finally gave out, so I had to let it go. It was a US-market unit, and there were no new TF10s on the market anymore… I could only go listen to the ER4P, though sometimes I’d still catch myself missing that aggressive TF10 sound. It wasn’t nearly as transparent as the ER4P, but it was genuinely great for rock. Later I picked up a cheap TF10 unit on eBay; putting it on, I just shook my head — that cheap, it had to be junk from overseas. The resolution was there, but the sound was way too muffled…

So how does the TF10’s successor, the UE900, perform?

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I first heard about Midori no Umi (翠の海) two years ago. I saw a CG of the heroine standing in the moonlight and she looked so goddamn beautiful that I went digging for more. And while I was digging, the CGs started getting weird — same pose, except now she’s holding a bloody knife. Oh. Okay. I know what this is. Yandere heroines are everywhere. I looked it up and it seemed like a fan translation group was working on it, so I figured I’d wait for the Chinese release. So I waited. And waited. I waited until even a scrub like me had started reading raw Japanese, and the translation still hadn’t shown a peep. So I just went and grabbed the game itself.

I didn’t know much about it going in. I skimmed a bit beforehand — mostly positive reviews, but nobody talked about the plot, just that picking the wrong choice gets you killed.

“The protagonist dying is no big deal.”

So the game began again.

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Magic exists in this world, and so do magic books. A magic book is an object with magical power—the story inside might be sad, or joyful, or left hanging, or neatly resolved… none of that is particularly unusual. But since it’s called a magic book, there’s naturally something “magical” about it.

“Open a magic book, and the story inside will play out for real around you. The magic only fades once the story reaches its ending.”

Amazing as that is, magic books don’t always bring happiness—more often they cause trouble in reality. So Yurouji闇子’s mission is to collect the books and keep them in the magic library.

闇子 is a woman who married into the Yurouji family. For various reasons she was ostracized by the family. The Yurouji have ties to magic books, but they also fear something: a witch called the Paper Witch, identifiable by her white hair and red eyes. During her days of ostracization, Yurouji闇子 and her husband welcomed the birth of their daughter—but in that moment, everything changed.

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