Recently I got to mess around with one of these laptops, and got a taste of the latest and greatest DELL power.
The Dell XPS 13 2020, apparently the top-spec model too. No AMD YES, obviously, but it does have Intel’s latest integrated graphics.
It’s not my laptop — I just set up the system and installed some software on it — but I figure I got enough hands-on time to give some basic impressions.
Sonora is a brand from the infamous cash-grab factory CUFFS. I’ve said before that CUFFS games, despite the pile of aliases, are all basically the same style—but this Sonora alias actually does something a little different.
They built a shared universe across the games under the Sonora label.
What that means: the three games released under Sonora all take place in the same world, so you get characters from different games making cameos, which gives everything a familiar feel.
Gotta admit, the trick works. Sometimes you play an earlier game, then in a later one you get to see the previous heroine show up and get involved, and there’s this weird sense of closeness—like “oh, the developer actually cares about the players.” Of course, the more important part is that the background art doesn’t need to be redrawn. Reuse, baby. Save that money!
So this time we’re talking about Sonora’s new game: Hirono-san Chi wa Eroge-ya-san! (The Hirono Family Runs an Eroge Shop!)
A while back my main eroge machine, the Chuwi Minibook, broke — the power light wouldn’t come on anymore. Since the warranty on that thing was almost up, I contacted the support lady to see if I could get it repaired. But nobody bothered to answer me for about two months, right up until I’d given up.
Then the email came!
She said it could be repaired, and explained the part I’d been worried about. I’d heard Chuwi’s after-sales was garbage — basically they just reinstall the OS and ship it back — but it seems crowdfunded products aren’t treated that way.
Of course, I also found out why there’d been no reply for two months: the lady who’d been answering had quit, and they hadn’t hired anyone in those two months…
Fine. In the end the machine got sent off, and I had no Windows machine on hand.
That’s when I spotted what looked like a Lenovo Windows tablet in my wife’s inventory. The model was Lenovo MIIX 2 10, and it even came with a keyboard. So I asked if I could borrow it.
“Sure, whatever. That’s your mother-in-law’s computer, seems like it’s been abandoned for ages.”
So I picked up this Lenovo MIIX 2 10 and kept playing Gal.
Asa Project’s title from last year was probably their best game in recent years, and the main reason is that they gave up on their usual “dumbass romance setup” and turned the content straight into close-quarters, hand-to-hand catfighting. You can actually see the rare scenario where the protagonist picks one heroine, and another heroine who’s clearly already lost keeps showing up to try and steal him away. In a normal visual novel, once the protagonist enters a route, all the other heroines instantly vanish…
That rare brand of infighting actually gave last year’s Asa Project a bit of a “pure love” feel. The love-hate drama between the girls and the protagonist, all that Mary Sue-flavored content, let a lot of otaku find that long-lost “romantic comedy” feel, so plenty of praise naturally followed.
So Asa Project probably figured out a new formula that suits them—at least it’s way more solid than the dumbass nonsense they used to pull, like “indirect romance,” “swapped romance,” “long-distance romance,” “love triangles,” and whatever else. And with that, the ugly nature of Japanese capitalists revealed itself: Asa Project announced this year’s new game, Renai X Royale (恋愛Ｘロウイアル). What’s it mean? It’s just Love X Royale. Personally I’m convinced the “Royale” here is totally short for “Battle Royale,” so I’d translate it straight as Love Battle Royale.
Battle royale—you know how it goes. Played PUBG? Everyone fights to the death, only one winner. This is blatantly a game where the heroines tear each other apart to the bitter end.
Everyone knows MacBook touchpads are the best in the business. Plenty of Apple fans will tell you that once you’ve used one, “you’ll never want to touch a mouse again.”
I’ve used a MacBook touchpad, though it was a while back. Not gonna lie, when I was in college, besides a Windows gaming laptop, my main work machine was an Apple iBook G4. I was a full-on Apple fanboy back then, and at one point I figured I’d stay one for life, keep buying iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, the works. Fate had other plans, thankfully, and I didn’t turn into that guy.
Anyway, this isn’t a trip down memory lane. On to the actual topic.
The reason I picked these up is pretty simple: I wanted a pair of TWS earbuds I could use at work.
I’d been using over-ear headphones before, but they felt way too conspicuous. I didn’t like being noticed all the time, so I figured I’d get something a bit more low-key. Requirements:
I happened to see QCY was taking pre-orders for a new model, the T10, with a bunch of random new features. It basically fit the bill, so I got on board. Price was 120 yuan with free shipping, so I hopped on.
So earlier I found out Fcitx doesn’t work under WPS on Linux.
And there’s an issue about it on Jionglian’s tracker too: https://github.com/fcitx/fcitx5/issues/83
The solution everyone on the internet gives is to set:
env QT4_IM_MODULE="fcitx5"
and then launch WPS, after which the IME works. That did jack shit for me. And from what Jionglian has said in various places (GitHub, IRC, SNS), setting it to fcitx5 isn’t actually fixing anything — it fails to find a real “fcitx5” and falls back to xim, which is why it works.
So why the hell are we setting “fcitx5” at all? Just set “xim” directly!
I had my eye on Sakura no Kumo * Scarlet no Koi (さくらの雲＊スカアレットの恋) well before release, mostly because that “Cabbage” game from before was so unbelievably stupid.
The scenario is by Fuyu Akane (冬茜トム), who’s done story-driven work for several SugarPot and Cabbage titles, and this wasn’t his first time teaming up with Korie Riko either.
The premise when it was first announced kind of baffled me: our protagonist gets sent back 100 years into Japan’s past and has to find a way home.
That’s literally the level of a Chinese web novel. One of the bad ones.
Trusting the writer, I still opened it up and it took me a good while to finish. Partly because things were busy at home, partly because the early-to-mid game is just so damn boring. The good news is the final chapter is genuinely fun, and it’s tightly paced — it blows through all that long-winded buildup and explains what was actually going on.
In Japan they call this “paying off the foreshadowing.”
Sure, if you say so. Anyway, let’s get into the game.
The great Weng-face finally shipped the stable release of Fcitx 5. He didn’t bother writing a proper release announcement — just sent a message to his own mailing list, so I’d guess most people have no idea this happened.
Doesn’t matter!
Fcitx 5 stable is out, and in the time it takes to jerk off once, it’s already at 5.0.2!
I used to run junk routers from overseas as APs at home. Nothing really wrong with that, but recently I noticed the AP at one of my places started losing signal—my guess is one of the antennas died.
So with that, and the Double 11 sales landing at the same time, I decided to swap them out. My main router is a software router, so these were bought to be pure APs anyway; all they needed was good wireless specs. That’s how I ended up looking at two new Redmi models.
So I bought both, one AX5 and one AX6, to replace the two junk ones.
