I didn’t actually plan on buying this, but you can’t fight the fact that more and more shitty devices don’t leave you a headphone jack anymore — so now any device that still has one gets called “extremely advanced.” And what’s even stupider: phones losing it is one thing, but tablets too? That I genuinely don’t get…

Anyway, I still bought an adapter. If I’m gonna adapt, I might as well get one with some standards for sound quality, so this time I set my sights on Meizu, which supposedly has a great reputation.

I don’t even know the exact model of this thing, but I got it on Xianyu for 70 yuan, and the listing wasn’t clear either on whether it was Meizu or Meizu Blue Charm.

Read More

I forget when Xiaomi put out these earphones. Launch price was 999, then all of a sudden I noticed they’d been cut in half to 499, and before long you could pick them up on eBay for 299…

From 999 down to 299. These things lose value fast. And this is supposedly a kickass “dual dynamic” + “dual balanced armature” setup.

Mine came from eBay, listed as brand new. What showed up was a plain box with the earphones, some spare silicone tips, and even a mysterious “Bluetooth adapter” of unknown provenance (turns out that was in the original package too, for phones without a headphone jack).

The stock silicone tips are genuinely badly sized — way too big. They leak sound, which is why I kept thinking something was wrong with the sound at first. Switched to one size smaller and the problem went away.

Read More

I’ve been out of the audiophile game for years, but I talked to some young folks recently and they told me domestic Chinese “mysticism” products are nothing like they used to be.

By “nothing like they used to be” they mean flagship prices have shot through the roof — I have zero interest in that — and the low end has gotten “even stronger.”

“Moondrop” is the brand the kids keep bringing up. I’d heard of it, but other than noticing they’re pretty deep in the anime thing, I had no real impression. So by chance I got my hands on a Moondrop “Quarks,” supposedly their honest-to-goodness entry-level model.

Say what you will, the packaging is actually decent, and it even comes with a card I have no idea what to do with. Some kind of coupon, I think.

The earpieces are genuinely tiny. Tiny and nicely made — the material is plastic, but it doesn’t feel obviously cheap. What confuses me is I can’t tell which of the red and black ones is left and which is right. Conventionally red should be the right, right?

Read More

God knows why I played this game. Curiosity, probably.

Koumuin Yamete, Ana o Horu Koto ni Shimashita (公務員辞めて、穴を掘ることにしました)

The title sounds like a joke, and that’s exactly what it is: a 4399-tier doujin minigame. I don’t know if the old “Chengguang” platform is even still alive, but this is the kind of thing that would only exist on a site like that.

The game is short. Our thoroughly goofy-looking protagonist ditches his shut-in wife at home to dig a hole by the front door, and ends up in another world. There are multiple endings—one where you dig down, come back up, and find your wife has run off with someone else; one where you tunnel through time and space. But the whole thing is just snark and shitposting, so you’re not expecting anything actually interesting out of it.

And the “jokes” in this game are genuinely hard for me to parse. Maybe it’s because I’m not a young Japanese person, but my face the entire time was the old-man-staring-at-his-phone meme:

“What the fuck is this? What’s supposed to be funny here?”

Read More

I don’t know when the “YuanDao” meme blew up, but by the time I noticed, it was everywhere.

What is “YuanDao”? A flathead earbud that ships for 9.9 with free shipping (sometimes even less). I was already familiar with this kind of product, because back in the day it wasn’t called “YuanDao” but something like “Diving Expert,” so at first I figured it was just a “budget Diving Expert.” Later, as the YuanDao meme took off, my curiosity about it grew a bit:

Is this thing really that amazing?

Plenty of people, I’m sure, ended up trying YuanDao the same way I did — by accident.

I got my hands on YuanDao a month ago. The price was great — 9.9 with free shipping, I think, and they knocked 4 yuan off, so it cost me less than 6.

I’ve been listening to these earbuds on and off for about a month. Not that many times, honestly, but not few either. Quick impressions:

Read More

Sure, Akane Ikegami-sensei once reported my Twitter account and got it suspended, claiming I “spoiled” things and “leaked the protagonist’s dick length.” But considering how utterly moronic the visual novel industry has been lately, with each new release dumber than the last, by that horizontal comparison, Ikegami-sensei’s game here is still worth a look.

Ore no Koi Tenshi ga Ponkotsu Sugite Kowai (俺の恋天使がポンコツすぎてコワ～い。)

The こわ〜い here only really works if you drag out the vowel. The title follows the same pattern as that “yabai” series from before, just swapped to “kowai” this time. The meaning is dead simple:

My love angel Cupid is way too much of a klutz and it scares me.

Honestly, I knew exactly how this game was going to play out just from the title, and the opening had me spitting out my drink:

男主在路边捡到了一个“Love Note”，并且认识了一个自称是“丘比特”的天使，天使说只要在“Love Note”上写下你喜欢的人的名字，很快你就会和这个人产生邂逅。

Ah, wonder if the protagonist still has to hold onto this “Love Note” and become the god of the new world.

Read More

The saying that “premium ingredients often need the simplest cooking method” hits harder with this dish than with anything else I cook.

It’s really not much work at all, but there are exactly two things to get right:

• You need 「yellow lantern chili sauce」— this is the core of the flavor. If you don’t have it, a 「sour soup beef seasoning packet」 works just as well; it’s basically the same sauce inside
• Good-quality sliced fatty beef. The quality of the beef directly decides how this dish eats

Read More

I still have a lot of affection for Niijima Yuu, because the game he wrote, Hatsuyuki Sakura, was the first one that made me go “whoa, a visual novel can actually do this?” Up until then, every visual novel I’d played was the same old clichéd school romance: talk to a girl every day, confess when the time comes, then fuck and roll credits. The fact that Niijima Yuu went and pulled off something genuinely unusual left me with a really good impression of him.

After that, Niijima Yuu put out a whole string of new works — Majo Renai Nikki (魔女恋爱日记) and whatever that Shinai Kanojo thing was. A lot of the reception has been pretty hostile toward him, but I still think the guy’s got real talent; the visual novel audience just doesn’t get him. Sometimes I think he should be writing novels instead of stooping to make visual novels.

Then I heard Niijima Yuu went off to hang out with that hack Maeda Jun, and the two of them started jerking each other off in public, which somehow spat out Summer Pockets. After that, Niijima Yuu got tangled up with the Makura guys again, heading off to work on Sakura no Koro…

Right when I was about to forget all about Niijima Yuu, I noticed this month’s releases include something called アインシュタインより愛を込めて APOLLOCRISIS…

Read More

As everyone knows, the Japanese visual novel industry is on its deathbed lately — August didn’t even have a single big release worth playing — so out of boredom I had to go find something else to play.

That’s when I happened to see someone on a blog hyping up a visual novel called Hallucination (幻觉). The funny part: the studio behind it, Ash Heaven (灰烬天国), had a previous game called Old Watch (旧手表) that was pulling in a lot of positive reviews on Steam.

Most Chinese-made visual novels on Steam have high ratings anyway, except the ones that shitpost themselves to death. Considering Old Watch was especially praised for its story, and considering I literally had nothing better to do, I bought the Old Watch + Hallucination bundle and started playing. Old Watch first, naturally.

The playthrough wasn’t especially long, wasn’t especially short. Honestly, Old Watch far exceeded my expectations. Compared to the games I ran into years ago where the “anime-nerd concentration was high enough to make me vomit,” Old Watch actually has a shadow of what a real “Chinese-made visual novel” could be, and its strengths and weaknesses are both very obvious. So I figured I’d write something about this game and its sequel, plus my own views on the endless stream of “Chinese-made visual novels” coming out these days. No plot summary this time, and no savage roasting either (I heard bashing Chinese visual novels gets you flamed?). Just an essay, writing wherever my thoughts go.

Read More

There are plenty of people on Xianyu selling modded webcams that support Microsoft’s Windows Hello face unlock. Basically they take cameras out of laptops, hack them into USB devices, and you plug one in as an IR face-unlock camera. The cost isn’t high, but most of the shells are 3D-printed or metal shims and look a bit janky. Not a big deal unless you look closely — the main draw is that they’re cheap.

I ended up buying one for 69 yuan with free shipping, since the other sellers were asking 79 to 99 and up, sometimes without free shipping too.

Once it arrived it turned out to be pretty simple: a 3D-printed shell with a laptop pull camera inside. No cable included by default, but I found a USB cable and plugged it into the computer. Mainly meant for the PC at work, which is running the currently trendy Windows 11.

The shell comes with double-sided tape, so you can easily stick it to the top of the monitor, like this:

Read More