Like I [said before][1]… I’m stuck using a laptop with a damn 1366x768 screen. I could give you ten thousand reasons why this shitty resolution needs to die, but regardless, I’m using it right now.

One big annoyance with this little thing is vertical screen real estate. Unity has done a fair bit of work on that front, but for someone who likes keeping the bookmarks toolbar visible, it’s still a bit tight… So I started looking into how to hide the Firefox bookmarks toolbar, tried a few add-ons, and only one actually worked. And even that one had problems: too twitchy, and every time the toolbar popped up the page would reflow. Super annoying, right?

I asked around on G+ and got an answer: manually edit Firefox’s CSS. I found a userChrome.css file meant for Firefox 4; we’re on Firefox 29 now, but I tweaked it a bit and it mostly works.

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Katawa Shoujo… I’m about to give up on this one.

These days everyone in Japan is naming their stuff with western names, while the gaijin are bending over backwards to sound Japanese. Fine, the names are all romanized, whatever — but then it’s -chan this, -chan that, -kun this, -kun that. If you’re so committed, why doesn’t your teacher get called sensai instead of teacher! Did they even finish translating this game into Japanese? Doesn’t it feel weird, jerking yourself off with the English version?

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I first heard about Hatsuyuki Sakura from a year-end ACG ranking on Niconico back in the day, where it was pushed to the top spot of the year. I didn’t bother checking whether that ranking was legit, authoritative, or botted—just took a quick look. Chinese info on the game was pitifully sparse at the time, since there was no translation yet. All I knew was that it probably involved ghosts and might be dark.

Later I saw people’s takes on it in a few places, including forums like Fuyu no Yuki and Reddit, and they all used the same phrase: “heartwarming.”

I know how that works. Just like Urobuchi’s “healing,” it means the game is 99% not a pure happy-go-lucky route.

After that I stopped looking into it. I just knew there was this game, ghost-related, dark-leaning, best of the year. That was it.

Then on December 23, 2013, I finally saw the Chinese translation. Thanks to the translation group. I’d also bought a Win8 tablet—right time, right place, right people—and with expectations of a dark route, I clicked the game open.

So recently I finally finished the game. Honestly it didn’t take me that long, but I have to say, it was completely different from what I expected… and I almost understand why people called it heartwarming. It really is heartwarming, in two senses.

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Another year’s over. Honestly, I’ve been meaning to write something for days now… but every time I actually grab the keyboard, my head feels stuffed with cotton… my thoughts grind to a halt… basically I just get hit by a wave of tiredness and can’t put sentences together. So I kept putting it off, and here we are at the end. At the very least, before 2014 rolls in, I should say something about this past year — it mattered a lot to me… so let me just ramble with my messy thoughts.

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Honestly, I was a dumbass in middle school. I kept messing around with CMSs and forum software, and because I was too shit at coding, I could read parts of the code and hack it to fit what I wanted, but I couldn’t write a feature from scratch. The “can modify, can’t build” tier.

I’ve half-assedly run a bunch of blogs too. Every time the hosting died, the blog died with it. This one might be the longest-running blog I’ve kept, over 2 years now — and I figure I should thank Linode’s stability for that.

When I decided to start a blog, I wanted something simple that would let me focus on writing instead of drowning in extensions. At first I found Sa-Blog, thanks to a recommendation from Hanxing at MyDrivers. It was nice to use, but then the author said he wasn’t planning to keep developing it. I thought about it and just didn’t have the guts to run something unmaintained. Then I saw a bunch of people hyping Typecho, set up a test environment, and found it was my kind of thing, so I stuck with it…

Who knew that was just another big hole.

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I’ve had three kinds of fresh-cream puffs. Here’s the rundown.

The first is the roughest-looking of the bunch — a yellowish blob — but the skin is thin and the cream is generous. Eating it feels like an explosion in your mouth; you can really feel the cream hit you.

The second is the deluxe version of the first. It doesn’t look rough anymore, some even have a pattern piped onto the crust, and sometimes the outside is still crispy. But that over-refined crust only cuts into the cream’s impact — that’s what it means to let the tail wag the dog. One bite in and you find you’re just chewing crust, or only got half the cream. You can’t pop the whole thing in your mouth, and honestly………

The third is even more upscale, improved on the second: more cream, more refined crust work, raisins or whatever thrown in. It tastes fine, sure, but I can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t a cream puff anymore… “little cake” fits better.

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Every day I see people deifying Apple. Sure, Apple is genuinely impressive right now. But when you elevate Apple to prophet status, when you claim every product it launches is guaranteed to be a hit — that’s where I can’t stay quiet. So let me talk about the skeletons in its closet that I know of, just rambling off the top of my head, read it however you like. The tone is venting, it’s not calm, feel free to treat it as nonsense. Don’t take it seriously. I can’t be bothered to chase down every detail and source — this is all from memory.

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Honestly installing this thing isn’t that much of a pain… but my memory is garbage, so I’ll just mark it down.

sudo apt-get install qt4-qmake libqt4-dev libqjson-dev libphonon-dev libqt4-dev git git clone https://github.com/CaledoniaProject/XLCloudClient.git && cd XLCloudClient/ qmake make sudo make install

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It’s Qixi again, so as a single virgin I get asked that annoying question a lot. The version I hear most goes something like this:

“Oh come on, why haven’t you found someone yet~ Don’t give me that ’nobody fits’ stuff. Love is a skill, you get good by practicing. Just pick someone at random for now… it’s not like you’re definitely marrying her in the end, right? Get some practice in first. No need to take it so seriously at the start.”

Right. This is a fast-food society, so fast that everyone wants to go from first pitch to home plate by tomorrow. Once we could read an article all the way through and then write down our thoughts; now we just scroll fast and mash the keyboard with “tl;dr.” Long blog posts that everyone wrote gave way to mindless reposts of 140-character updates. Original work used to contend from a hundred schools; now marketing bots are everywhere. All of it announces a new era: an era of fast food, an era of entertainment. People aren’t reserved anymore — they talk about sex acts and sex organs with barefaced relish, and nothing is off-limits for twisting and joking about. We gave it a philosophical-sounding name: tsukkomi (even though that’s not really what it means). And if anyone takes a joke seriously, they get one line, every time.

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Honestly, I never really needed a laptop that badly. Back in college I was like every other student — desperate for one, because it was portable, fashionable, and just plain badass. But the deeper I got into computers, the more I started to hate laptops, because the upgradeability is dogshit. Who doesn’t want to swap out a GPU, RAM, or CPU now and then? With a laptop, you basically top out at a RAM upgrade. That said, I’ve come around to needing one again, and the reason is kind of funny: I often want to find some empty room and just use a computer in peace. I already had a cheap Dell laptop, but the eye-searing screen, the garbage keyboard feel, the i3 Sandy Bridge-tier performance, and the tragic battery life even with a 9-cell — none of it cut it. Especially the screen. Anything else can be trash, but how do you live with a screen that makes your eyes bleed?

So my requirements basically settled: high performance + good screen + strong battery + good keyboard + portable.

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