A lot of fiction likes to play with the “end of the world” theme. I can’t really say why. Maybe it’s that “even after the world ends, I still love you” feeling that comes off as romantic? Or maybe everyone’s got a little bit of wasteland fever in them.

An endless wilderness, nothing left but the male lead and the heroine, wandering the ruins looking for some reason for humanity to keep going. That does sound pretty coool.

Use it too many times, though, and it stops being coool.

Read More

I often regret some of my past articles.

The main reason isn’t anything else—it’s that when I was younger I went on huge rants, trashing a lot of games I thought were terrible at the time. First and foremost among them: Lump of Sugar.

I still remember that Unmei Senjou de Suika wo Kiru—I called its plot retarded. And Rensou Kankei—I said its system was dumb as shit.

And yet, faced with Lump of Sugar’s new game Nekotsuku, Sakura. (ねこツク、さくら。)…

I couldn’t help but shed tears. I deeply realized I was wrong.

Read More

A dish I picked up recently. It’s basically stir-fried noodles, except it’s done the Dingding stir-fry way — stir-fried noodles with no Dingding in them.

Read More

Girls Book Maker (ガールズ・ブック・メイカー) is an eroge developed by Yumemiru, a new label from some big Japanese company. But compared to your average eroge, this one’s pretty unusual—it’s got a bizarre “setting” and “worldview,” with a dash of “cultural depth” thrown in.

The plot: the protagonist is a bookworm who gets summoned by chance to a “library in another world,” where he works as the librarian and helps the head librarian exterminate the “bookworms” hiding inside books. Thanks to this setup, our hero can easily hop between “stories” with different worldviews, interact with “the heroines within those stories,” and go on all sorts of wild adventures.

The books referenced are almost all classics: The Little Match Girl, Alice in the Mental Hospital, The Sino-Japanese Co-Production Journey to the West, The Phantom Thief Weak-Ass Gentleman Lupin, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter Goes to the Moon, Gay Faust, and so on. These stories are not only familiar but should be no strangers to most eroge players—Alice, Kaguya-hime, Faust, Lupin have all been done to death in Japanese ACG works.

Read More

Lately I’ve been feeling like my Ubuntu 20.04 laptop is kind of slow, but every time I complain about it on X, some people crawl out of the woodwork to tell me to switch to Arch + KDE.

And this is exactly why Arch users are so annoying. It’s like the moment you mention the word Linux, Arch people show up like they’ve been triggered into PTSD, frantically recommending Arch, and bundling KDE into the pitch while they’re at it, like cult members who never once consider whether the other person can even stand them.

Read More

For the longest time, on both Ubuntu and Fedora, I kept running into incomplete clipboard behavior.

Basically: I’d cut or copy two files in Nautilus, paste them somewhere, and only one would show up. Sometimes copy-paste even required a “double-click” like on a garbage Mac OS just to make sure the file was actually “copied.”

I always assumed it was a Gnome bug, but later found out that wasn’t the case, because I searched the Gnome bug list and nobody else seemed to have this problem…

I tried copying two files in Nautilus and pasting into Gedit, no problem at all — it really was the contents of both files. But pasting in Nautilus would lose one.

What the hell!

Eventually I narrowed it down to the Gpaste extension, since I use it on both Fedora and Ubuntu, and it’s directly related to the clipboard.

Read More

Lately I noticed I couldn’t lock the screen on Ubuntu 20.04.

Specifically:

• Two 1080p monitors connected through a Thunderbolt 3 dock
• Hit Super+L after booting up
• The lock fails, GNOME Shell crashes and restarts, and then nothing happens

Read More

I got tired of pan-frying chicken cutlets every morning, so I decided to try baking them in the oven.

The tricky part with oven-baked chicken cutlets is keeping them from turning dry and stringy. We want them juicy. After a few attempts, it turned out pretty well.

Read More

Preface:

I ran into a sound card crackling issue a while back and wrote a post about it:

Fixing crackling from an external USB sound card on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon via Thunderbolt Dock

Tried that method, and it turned out to be pretty much useless. Basically, every time I plug in the Thunderbolt 3 dock, TLP just doesn’t apply the “power-saving exclusion” setting to the corresponding device.

Read More

Back when I installed Ubuntu, picking UEFI would automatically add a matching entry to the laptop’s UEFI menu. Lately, though, it just won’t go in anymore.

The cause is weird. I dug through everything and in the end it somehow fixed itself, so I’m not even sure which of the things I tried actually did anything.

First, to be clear: every time Ubuntu boots it automatically tries to add an Ubuntu entry to UEFI via efibootmgr. You don’t need to add it by hand, which is one less thing to worry about.

Read More