That one Aonatsu Line everyone hyped to hell and back got a spiritual successor a little over a year later: Yukiiro Sign (ユキイロサイン).

Why “spiritual successor”? Same writer, same artist, different company — some outfit called wonder fool. I’m all for them ditching the shitshow that is GIGA, but wonder fool isn’t exactly a saint either. Look at the garbage they’ve put out. Feels like they’re just publishing leftovers nobody else wanted.

Anyway, I was still hyped, because Aonatsu Line was goated, so this had to be goated too. A bunch of otaku were dying to feel their youth again through this game (even though they never had one).

Then it came out and I played it, and I have to say, unfortunately: this game does not deliver what most people wanted.

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Rukuru’s first new game in two years, and honestly, from the moment 冥契のルペルカリア’s setting was announced, I felt very… uncomfortable.

First off, the title alone looks like people are going to die. Then the character designs straight-up contain elements from 紙の上の魔法使い, which had me suspecting the game was trying to coast on past glories. That said, neither the synopsis nor anything else explicitly states what 冥契のルペルカリア has to do with 紙の上の魔法使い — just a bunch of plausible-sounding edge-balling. Even the CVs don’t line up; I remember the witch being voiced by 小倉結衣, not メイ大姐. I took a look at the plot summary and it turned out to be stage-play focused, which killed my interest even more.

But the scenario writer’s skill is still there, and last year had basically nothing with a decent story, so I went ahead and played it on faith in Rukuru. The whole playthrough was a mess — at one point I lost my eroge machine, then it broke down again, and I finally stumbled my way to the end. Hmm… how should I put it. The quality was about what I expected, but there were some disappointing parts too. So let me just run through it briefly.

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Recently I was asked to download some online stream videos, and judging by their source code, most of them were m3u8 links.

As the name suggests, m3u8 is really just a playlist. Open it and you get a bunch of ts files, and the conventional approach means downloading them in bulk and then merging them.

But flip the thinking around: if you just have ffmpeg decode the stream and save it, things get a lot simpler.

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Kaiko no Okurimono (蚕の贈り物) is something I stumbled on by accident — a tiny indie game…

The premise is dead simple: in a fairy forest there’s a moth youkai. It’s a moth, so its lifespan is short, and before it dies it wants to do something to prove it once lived…

To stay faithful to the “moths don’t live long” thing, the game actually slaps a time limit on you. Of… one minute.

Yep. The game is one minute long.

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Preface:

I picked up a Pinebook Pro back around 2019. I vaguely remember the other machine I was fiddling with at the time was a Chuwi Minibook. Nearly a year and a half went by and the Pinebook Pro spent most of it collecting dust, until my ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 went missing a while back. I really had no computer to use, so I dug it out and used it as my “main machine” for a stretch.

And honestly, when the Pinebook Pro first launched, the ecosystem around it was pretty incomplete (though already a big step up from the old Pinebook). Now that I have a new temporary main laptop, I can set the Pinebook Pro aside for the time being. The days of using it were an interesting and painful memory, but it was also a chance to seriously try out this “open-source Arm Linux laptop” and see its strengths and weaknesses. So I figure I’ve earned the right to give it a subjective review here.

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That Lenovo M73 I messed with earlier only takes Mini PCIe cards and has an FRU whitelist on top of that, so I was stuck with an Intel 7260.

It’s not that the card doesn’t work. I just don’t think it works well. The Bluetooth in particular drops out all the time, which annoyed me enough that I wanted to swap it.

Around the end of 2020 a batch of Mini PCIe AX200/201 cards showed up on eBay. They’re basically an adapter board with the module bundled inside, but that’s fine by me. The first batch skimped on the antennas; the newer ones are much better, so I picked one up and got ready to install it.

Installing it in the M73 still runs into the whitelist, though, and you have to defeat that first.

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Buying this thing was a total accident — I saw it going for absurdly cheap on Xianyu.

I’ve got a decent impression of the Xiaomi Piston Pro. I still use it plugged into my tablet or PC for visual novels and videos. The sound isn’t anything high-end, but it’s not bad either — good enough for watching videos or playing games. It has a mic too, so it can pinch-hit for voice chat.

So when I saw how cheap this was, I bought the “Xiaomi Dual-Driver Earphones.”

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Heard Fedora 34 is going to replace PulseAudio wholesale with PipeWire. Plenty of people are popping champagne over it, and the vibe feels exactly like the Wayland cheerleading back in the day.

That’s not why we’d switch, though. The better reason is support for Bluetooth codecs like LDAC and APTX. Even the guy who wrote the PulseAudio patches said he doesn’t want to keep developing it, because PipeWire has more of a future.

So let’s just flip it over and see. Maybe it’s actually better?

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2020 was a rough year for everyone, eroge makers included, so there were way fewer games to play this year and way fewer that actually landed. And I played about as many as always… meaning not fewer. I went through 41 eroge in 2020, which somehow matches 2019 exactly. So I genuinely got worse this year. I’m supposed to be phasing this out gradually…

That said, there seemed to be more games worth recommending this year. Though I clearly felt one thing — visual novel music just doesn’t hit anymore. Honestly, I tried to put together a list of “OPs and EDs that sounded good this year” and came up nearly empty. The lesbian game’s OP was decent, but frankly I didn’t even want to collect OSTs this year, so I’m skipping music entirely. Let’s just talk about the games. Here’s what “I personally” thought was good in 2020.

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Last year, when I was writing “My Favorite Eroge of 2019”, I gave the number one spot to a work by Tōta-sensei.

I think Tōta-sensei sometimes writes preachy plots, and he has this weird obsession with random trivia that makes reading painful, but his storytelling is structurally sound, and most importantly, he always delivers something memorable. Whether it’s the moral encouragement in Floral Flowlove (フローラル・フローラブ), or the exploration of Japanese folklore, the hiyoku bird, and immortality in Tamayura Mirai (タマユラミライ), both are thought-provoking. To borrow the words of that Osaka Black Shark normie who’s always got a JK under his arm: “He can tell a good big-picture story.”

But soon enough, Tōta slapped me in the face. That’s what today’s topic is about: Garasu Hime to Kagami no Juusha — Glass Princess and the Mirror Servant.

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