Frail girls trigger the protective instinct, which is why so many stories give their heroines a serious illness — or a setup where they’re liable to catch one. Lying in a hospital bed, gazing out the window at the scenery, looking up at the sky, imagining what ordinary life would be like if she were ever cured. Then the kind-hearted protagonist shows up, spends every day at her bedside watching the half-moon with her, all while internally accepting that this sickly girl doesn’t have many days left.

Ah, so tear-jerking! So heartwarming! So moving!

So when you read the official site’s description of Niji no Kanata ni, you’d naturally assume it’s that kind of healing story. Well… in a certain sense it really is quite healing.

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UPDATE: the compiz patch PPA has been updated to the latest version, so pinning the compiz version is no longer necessary.

I wrote up a method for fixing this bug between Compiz and Nvidia’s proprietary driver. The conclusion was: use the PPA. Then recently Compiz went and updated with a vengeance, the PPA build got overwritten, and lo and behold, the bug wasn’t fixed — the screen started flickering again, the hell.

First thing I thought of was rolling back to the PPA version with Synaptic, but compiz has too many dependencies, it pulls in unity directly, and the rollback dialog won’t let you multi-select. So I just went to the patched PPA, downloaded the debs, and downgraded everything in one go with sudo dpkg -i *.deb.

Opened Synaptic again and pinned all the compiz versions.

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I’ve got a Sony PHA-1 portable amp, and the thing doubles as an external sound card. Most of the time it’s hooked up to my laptop so I don’t have to put up with the nasty electrical noise coming out of the laptop’s own output. It does that job well, and in DAC mode Linux picks it up as a separate sound card without any fuss, so I never bothered looking into it. Today I was bored and flipped through the manual, and found an explanation of how the PHA-1 is used under Mac OSX.

It’s in Japanese but I could follow it — turns out after it’s recognized you still need to set the frequency to 96Hz. I knew where that option was back when I was using the PHA-1 with a Surface Pro 3, so… does Linux have one?

Checked the manual, and sure enough it does. I haven’t touched ALSA much lately; these days it’s mostly PulseAudio.

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There’s very little written about the HAVI B3 Pro 1, at least here in China. All I could find were a handful of impressions on the overseas Head-Fi, and they don’t exactly agree with each other — one guy even reported a quality issue. Domestically there’s even less; what I did find reads like sponsored fluff. HAVI itself doesn’t seem to care much and looks more interested in expanding overseas. Anyway, I bought one, and after listening I was pleasantly surprised. Quick write-up:

There’s only one seller for the HAVI B3 Pro 1 on eBay, and it’s the official one. The owner was very friendly and even shipped it express. The packaging is nice and the build quality is solid — the back has a glass facet. Sure, it’s a bit of a knockoff of the Sennheiser IE80, but at least it doesn’t look ugly. According to the official site it’s a dual-dynamic design. I’ve heard plenty about multi-BA setups, but this is my first time with dual dynamic drivers.

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Originally I just wanted a Nexus 6. I’d been using a Sony for over a year and figured that with Android, you’re better off with something close to stock. But then the Nexus 9 and Nexus 6 dropped at the same time, so I got impulsive and bought both. The Nexus 6 is still on a plane somewhere; the Nexus 9 arrived a week ago. Quick rundown of how it went.

I bought straight from the Google Play store. A lot of people say that if your credit card billing address doesn’t match the forwarding company’s receiving address when you register Google Wallet, the order gets cancelled, and that Google cancels orders like crazy. From what I can tell, most of those people had never had a Google Wallet account, or even a Google account, and rushed to sign up through some temporary proxy just to buy a Nexus and then immediately placed an order. No wonder Google flagged them as scalpers or sketchy accounts.

So put simply: if you’ve bought stuff with Google Wallet before, or you’ve had your Google account for a long time, Google will let the billing address thing slide. Mine went through without a hitch.

Google Play doesn’t ship directly. You can buy the Nexus 9 from Amazon with direct shipping, but there’s $70 in tax, so a forwarding service is cheaper. I used Benniao Haitao (笨鸟海淘). Partly because I couldn’t even register with Zhuan Yun Zhongguo, and the other forwarders were either backed up or banned electronics, so Benniao was the only option. Honestly it was serviceable, though I wouldn’t call it fast — 25 days from shipping to delivery. Four of those days were bad luck: it hit the weekend, everyone was off, and nothing moved until Monday when shipping and customs could resume.

I got the 32 GB black model. Forwarding fee was 70 yuan, and customs hit me for 200 yuan on the electronics. Work out the total yourself if you care.

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A while back on a forum I saw someone loudly declare that every visual novel’s core has to be porn — softcore, hardcore, hidden, whatever flavor of titillation — and that if a game loses the core of making the player jack off, the whole medium is doomed.

Rare for me, I couldn’t really take a side. Honestly, what I play visual novels for isn’t the format itself; it’s the Japanese flavor of story that leans a little into fantasy and thrill. Anime doesn’t have the runtime to tell a story properly, and manga and light novels mostly get strangled by endless serialization that drags things out. Only a visual novel, with one route and one ending, can more or less scratch that itch — because when a route reaches its end, the story actually ends, instead of dragging on like a bottomless pit the way serialized manga and light novels do.

As for porn, I’ve always figured it doesn’t conflict with plot. When the H-scene comes up you can sell as much meat as you want; when it doesn’t, you can still just tell your story straight. If the H and the plot are inseparable, then at best it’s a nukige, made for a specific audience with specific needs. So in visual novels you get a few different ways of structuring the plot: some play the borderline game hard, some straight-faced hand you a softcore setup, and some rare ones honestly keep H and story separate. Which brings us to… 《アストラエアの白き永遠》 might be one of those.

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《终わる世界とバースデイ》 is a visual novel put out by Wataame-sha, and good luck finding anything about it — even in Chinese-language circles the info is scarce, and basically nobody seems to have reviewed it. I played it partly because Kiritani Hana is in it, and partly out of curiosity about the story setup. Played it raw, too — so thanks are due to VNR, a Casio Japanese-Chinese dictionary, and the surprisingly useful Baidu Translate.

How should I even rate this game? Hmm, let’s just say it’s one of the few recent works I’ve come across that genuinely takes its storytelling seriously.

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Most of the culture that’s popular in Japan right now, as I see it, is stuff China was already playing with centuries ago.

Crossdressing boys go way back in Chinese opera — crowds of opera fans clapping and cheering for the cute boys on stage, striking poses no different from a bunch of otaku today wanking it to a girl with a dick on screen. Opera has scripts, staging, singing, acting. A pack of opera enthusiasts obsessed with one particular performer, addicted to his voice — isn’t that just the early ancestor of the CV fanatic? You pass an old man on the street holding a radio listening to opera — you gonna tell me he’s not listening to an audio drama?

At the bottom of it all, the otaku type has always existed. It just keeps changing shape as history rolls on.

I’m saying all this to make one point: China has its own style and culture, and in most respects there’s really no need to deliberately imitate someone else. Clumsy imitation only earns you a sigh and a “what the hell is this.”

Which is exactly what I’m talking about with a visual novel called Akane印 (赤印)…

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I’ve got this bad habit: if a work is too famous — famous to the point where everyone talks about it, everyone says it’s a masterpiece or everyone says it’s trash — I lose all interest in touching it. After all, you pick things up by osmosis, and by then you’ve been spoiled on most of it anyway. So ef - a fairy tale of the two, eden*, all that — I can’t be bothered to play them, because I’ve already been spoiled on most of it.

Still, minori as a studio left a decent impression on me. The art and character designs looked nice, the various settings felt kinda fresh and clean. I’d never really followed their stuff, but when I heard their new game Natsuzora no Perseus (夏空的英仙座) got a translation, I figured I’d kill some time and give it a go.

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It’s been almost a month since I got the Moto 360. That’s long enough, I figure, to justify writing down how this thing actually feels to use.

The internet is already saturated with pictures of how this thing looks, so I’ll only talk about the parts I think people overlook.

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