Alright, so it’s been at least ten years since I last played a game with a “crossdressing infiltration” premise.

What? You mean that “Monkeys?” thing? No, that one doesn’t count. That game is unhinged.

The company that’s been cranking out “crossdressing infiltration” titles year after year is probably ensemble, the one everyone knows. Their games give me a feeling I can’t quite put into words. The company keeps putting out visual novels at Intel-like tick-tock cadence, churning out titles that mix the “crossdressing infiltration” and “rich young lady” elements, but after all these years, they’ve left barely any impression. A lot of the time people just skip right over the brand.

The reason is simple: it’s way too samey.

The so-called “young lady” games are gorgeous art paired with a plot straight out of a gender-swapped Tiny Times—players drop their pants, fap to the story, and move on.

The “crossdressing infiltration” ones are also gorgeous art paired with a yuri Tiny Times plot—players drop their pants, fap to the story, and move on.

Over time, people just assume this brand’s games have no story. The main draw is the beautiful girls, some scenes are fappable, and you grab it for the eye candy as material. OP and ED are always Duca, the titles always have “otome” or “hanasaku” in them. And that’s how ensemble keeps surviving—lukewarm, neither dead nor alive.

But lately, they seem to have decided to change something. They’ve started improving the story and narrative, and their last release was a ninja-themed game. This time, with their “crossdressing infiltration” title, they’ve gone full transformation—and it hit me weirdly… hard.

Hoshi no Otome to Rikka no Shimai (星の乙女と六華の姉妹)

The title is cliché, the setup is cliché, but anyone who’s been following ensemble will spot the difference immediately.

“The art quality in this game has visibly dropped.”

That drop in visual quality brought about a change in the whole game. After playing it out of curiosity, I have to say this is genuinely ensemble’s most daring “crossdressing infiltration”… no, actually their boldest and strangest work in the entire lineup.

The plot is simple to describe, but not that simple.

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Around early March 2021, I was broke enough to start thinking about making a little side cash — passive income, ideally. Mining was booming at the time, but I only had a 1070ti and wasn’t about to whore it out, so I never jumped into that pit.

Then something called “Xunlei Zhuanqianbao” caught my eye. By then it had already been renamed “Wangxin Cloud,” and the pitch was that you just run a little router-like box at home and make 100+ RMB a month. You could run several, some people supposedly pulled in over 1000 a month. Pretty tempting, I have to admit.

So I followed the project through 2021, used some idle hardware I had lying around, put in about 120 RMB, and ended up making over 1600. Honestly that’s way less than I expected, but at least it covered my internet “freedom” — all my broadband and phone bills, with a bit left over.

There’s a lot of talk online about Wangxin Cloud. Some say it’s a scam, some say it’s a goldmine, some say it’s mining, some say it’s a pyramid scheme. So let me go through my own experience and take on it.

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So here’s the thing: I didn’t even want to play this game. I’ve given up on Hook. The way they develop their scenarios like some high-cohesion, low-coupling assembly line pisses me off just looking at it, and paired with that eternal 720p max resolution, my blood pressure went straight through the roof…

But I heard there was a “landmine,” so I dove in. You know how it is. I really love playing “landmines.” No idea if that counts as a symptom of being a total M. And here’s the awkward part: I’d barely finished the game when I got a commission request.

So yeah, I already busted my ass writing a not-exactly-short commercial piece on this game, and now being asked to talk about it again is exhausting. Plus there’s honestly not that much to discuss story-wise. If I had to say something, let’s talk about the game’s “concept” and where it crashes and burns.

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I remember once saying, angrily, that Android tablet productivity is all shit.

And then I went to a Xiaomi store and tried one out, which only confirmed it. Even on the “Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro,” productivity is still a pile of shit. My biggest complaint is that the IME on Android still can’t do proper cursor-following; in a lot of cases you still get the idiotic “type up here, pick characters down there” setup. Not to mention the browser being unusable…

In the end I decided to try the Chromebook Duet. I picked one up on eBay, plus a USI stylus. Bought before the price went up — the seller listed it at 50, realized the next day he’d undersold, and jacked the price up in a hurry. But I’d already bought mine.

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There was a time when I was really into an artist named 白もち桜. Chinese fans render her name as “白餅桜” — I followed her Twitter account almost as soon as she opened it, and the funny thing is, she followed me back.

That makes her the second artist to follow me, after 茉宮祈芹.

I still think fondly of her characters. The one I liked most was probably ナツイロココロロッグ — the heroine genuinely moved me — and the character she handled in 魔女こいにっき felt like a step up in how the cast was written.

Her characters are mostly faces paired with fangs and gorgeous outfits, and they really do feel girlish. The weakness is obvious too, though: same-face syndrome. Whatever she draws, it’s always the same face.

She went on to work on some newer titles and drew plenty of illustrations, but honestly, I don’t see any real progress. Her characters always end up in the same handful of poses, always flashing their panties, always wearing that same smile…

Gradually I stopped reacting to her characters. 茉宮祈芹, by comparison, spends most of her time drawing high-exposure lewds too, but she can still deliver genuinely appealing characters in actual games — TamaYura Mirai or whatever it was called.

And more importantly, 白もち桜 hasn’t done original art for a visual novel in ages. She even streamed once, playing Super Mario — and watching that was enough to spike my blood pressure.

Then recently, out of nowhere, she came back. Partnered with Whirlpool, no less, on a little throwaway title whose name I literally cannot remember. It was something like…

けもの道☆ガーリッシュスクエア

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I needed a keyboard, backed by various bullshit excuses. Requirements:

• Portable, small
• Bluetooth, multi-device support
• At least 84 keys; I’ve had enough of life without an F-row and arrow keys
• Good build quality

In the end I settled on the Keychron K3 — which is also the 京造 K3 version. This keyboard stirs up a lot of controversy online: opinions are extremely polarized. Most KOLs give it the usual praise, and looking at it I couldn’t find any obvious problems; the specs are fine too. Sure, it’s low-profile, but I don’t see what’s wrong with low-profile switches. The funny thing is most negative reviews online just call it “garbage” without explaining where the garbage is. The positive reviews, on the other hand, are very detailed. That struck me as bizarre. Is the marketing just too strong, drowning out genuine impressions? Or is this thing really that good?

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Been busy lately, haven’t had much time to cook, so this one is good for half-assing breakfast.

Just simple egg pancakes.

The method is dead simple: one bowl of flour, one bowl of water, 2-3 eggs, half a spoon of salt, chopped scallions. Dump it all in, stir until smooth, then grab a flat pan and you’re ready.

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About two years ago I bought a China-market Fossil Gen 5 smartwatch. I already covered why I bought it and how it felt to use in an earlier post, so I won’t repeat that here. Today I’m just going to talk about my after-sales experience with this watch.

First off, less than a year in, I accidentally scraped the bezel on one side, exposing the bare metal underneath the black finish. That bugged me for a while. I even tried some nail polish type stuff to cover it up, but it was no use—just a little mental scab I couldn’t pick off.

Also, after a year or so of use, the battery life was nowhere near what it used to be. I remember in the beginning I could leave Always Display on and still get a day and a half. Later, even with Always Display off, it barely lasted a day. Pretty clear the battery health had declined.

Then the watch started acting weird. The speaker would intermittently produce distorted sound. Whenever you got a message, the watch would make a sound, but it was this harsh, crackly noise—super annoying. The thing is, it wasn’t easy to reproduce. Sometimes it happened, sometimes not. I couldn’t figure out if it was a software issue or a hardware issue.

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Why did I buy the Redmi Watch 2? Mainly because my Fossil watch went in for repair, and they said it’d be at least a month before it came back from the factory.

For a month I’d have nothing on my wrist to check the time, so I had a fresh excuse to buy this thing. I got in on the first batch, paid around 299 yuan—retail was supposed to be 399.

The packaging is nothing fancy. Open it up and there it is. Gotta say, even though it’s basically an oversized fitness band, the build quality is genuinely nice. From a distance it really looks like an Apple Watch. Up close it still looks like one. As long as you don’t swipe, you can pretend it’s an Apple Watch.

I’ve used it for about two weeks now, and I’ve got some thoughts, so I figured I’d write them down.

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Honestly, at first I figured HARUKAZE was dead as a studio, that they’d gone full-time into all-ages TokyoToon stuff. Didn’t expect them to come back from the dead with a brand-new title.

The game’s called “Monkeys!¡,” and that double inverted exclamation mark at the end is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Combined with the premise, it gave me the feeling they were about to do a crossdressing bit.

I haven’t touched many crossdressing VNs. Most of them follow the same playbook, and the ones that actually do something interesting with it are rare. The one that stuck with me was Maria†Holic from back in the day, and even that didn’t have much to do with crossdressing, really.

I’ve always appreciated HARUKAZE’s talent for shitposting, so I was looking forward to this one bringing something new.

After playing it, though, all I can say is this game brought plenty of “surprises”—and even more disappointment.

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