As a ThinkPad X1C 5th user, there’s actually one problem that’s been bugging me.
The laptop is so thin that the screen hits the keyboard when the lid is closed, leaving keyboard marks. That’s also why I recommend a screen protector.
But a screen protector isn’t a real fix, and putting one on a laptop is honestly pretty dumb. So I thought of another solution.
The first time I heard that SMEE — the “matchmaking game maker” — was doing a harem game, I was shocked. SMEE has always emphasized “pure love,” and not just that, but a kind of “realistic romance.” I’ve praised them for doing that well more than once. And then, before they’d even done it well a few times, they got cocky.
What’s weirder is that they basically swapped identities with their parent company HOOKSOFT.
In other words, HOOKSOFT, which usually pulls settings out of its ass, started doing pure love. And SMEE, which usually does pure love, started doing settings.
Sure, both SMEE and HOOKSOFT have done settings plenty of times, with all sorts of gimmicky elements — “gradual conquest,” “a friend of a friend,” “corporate drone matchmaking,” “conquering and being conquered” — but none of that shit ever mattered. What sticks with you is always the bickering between the protagonist and the heroines.
So I think the core competitive strength of SMEE, and of the now-SMEE-fied HOOKSOFT, has become “couple bickering skits.” Nobody cares what story you’re telling, nobody expects any wild developments, nobody even thinks you’ll throw in a “memory flashback.” The core is always that “lovers’ quarrel,” and that’s exactly what everyone wants to see. Actually, don’t underestimate “lovers’ quarrels” — not many people can do them well, which is one of the reasons I keep praising SMEE.
If I were the president of SMEE, I’d lock in the protagonist and heroine names. Copy-pasting the same template of “unpopular protagonist suddenly hits his popular phase” every time is exhausting. Just use one name, like Wu Laoji or whatever, and put the protagonist’s name in every game title: Wu Laoji’s Country Adventure, Wu Laoji’s Matchmaking Odyssey, Wu Laoji and Miss Wang’s Space Adventure, Wu Laoji and the King of Another World… Keep that up and forget sales — SMEE could become famous overnight, get a theatrical film, and build a national IP.
But that pattern feels familiar… Oh right, speaking of “another world,” this time SMEE actually did go with an “isekai” setting. The title is pretty blunt too: Harem Kingdom. The protagonist suddenly gets transported to another world, becomes its king, and gets a harem.
To this day I still want to complain that this setting is just so not-SMEE!
I’m a Wear OS watch user, the stock Wear OS kind. The watch I’ve been using is still the LG Watch Sports, and I’ve had it for over two years now — I even replaced the battery. Its battery life is honestly fine, but I’m still not happy with it, for three reasons:
So I couldn’t take it anymore and wanted to switch. Right around then Xiaomi announced its watch — big battery, decent RAM, plenty of features — and I got tempted.
A week ago, that well-known Linux kernel developer Mawei-kun gifted me this game.
Oshi no Love yori Koi no Love (推しのラブより恋のラブ).
Honestly I wanted Tryment, that reheated cash-grab, but Mawei-kun sent me this instead and hoped I’d walk through the gates of yuri.
The game isn’t long, and after finishing it I fell into deep thought.
Because this game made me think back on a lot of things…
A lot of memories I’d almost forgotten…
I’ve been using the Chuwi Minibook for a while now, and two problems have been bugging me the whole time.
The first is charging. As I mentioned before, the battery indicator is always off — it sits at 100% for ages after a full charge, then suddenly shuts down around 50%. The fix is to delete the battery driver, open the thing up, and reseat the battery, but the problem creeps back every so often, which is annoying as hell.
The other one is sleep. The method I was using before was enabling Hybrid Sleep and disabling hibernate. It sort of worked, but it’d still wake up on its own now and then. So I wrote to Chuwi’s after-sales support describing the problem.
Lately, to make a living, I’ve been slacking off at work and playing eroge.
But there’s one annoying problem: a lot of old work PCs don’t have a sound card, and a lot of eroge refuse to launch if they don’t detect one.
I’m calling out Lump Of Sugar and SMEE by name. This policy is dumb as hell. Don’t you know most of your players are sneaking in playtime at the office? When they get home and actually have free time, everyone’s off playing Honor of Kings like Shiziku, not your eroge!
To fix this, I bought this:
Once again, my hands got itchy. This one was for use at the office, so obviously I couldn’t buy anything too nice, and the budget couldn’t be too high either.
So I found this on Taobao. It claims to be an RHA CL750, some kind of “factory surplus stock,” but the price is obviously suspicious — only 150 yuan.
In the 1980s, Japan entered the exceptionally prosperous “bubble economy” period.
How prosperous was Japan back then? Roughly this: everyone was trading forex, casually waiting for the yen to appreciate, and the money in their hands would gain value every so often. As long as you weren’t an idiot, as long as you dared to put money in, you could do some random bit of financial business and easily end up rolling in cash.
By then, Japanese people had already become synonymous with “the rich.” No longer satisfied with spending at home, they went on the offensive in America, kicking off a lavish overseas spending spree. Their “binge buying” in the US left white Americans stunned—seeing something they liked, they’d snap it up without hesitation, even buying up famous Van Gogh paintings and acquiring ownership of the various billboards in New York’s Times Square. Beyond the overseas frenzy, people back home in Japan threw one last wild party: consumerism and hedonism ran rampant, teenagers sported the latest pagers and brick-sized cell phones, capitalists and the yakuza madly speculated on foreign exchange and real estate, nobody gave a damn about the real economy, and massive amounts of money poured into the property market. Tokyo housing prices soared all the way up—the money to buy one house in Tokyo could even buy several teams in the American baseball league…
In such a frenzied atmosphere across Japan, huge numbers of poor people also poured into the neon-soaked city of Tokyo, chasing their own get-rich dreams.
Some of these people come from the Japanese countryside, some from overseas, and some even from China.
And Bubble De Jing (泡沫冬景) is a game that tells exactly this kind of story.
After buying FiiO’s Bluetooth over-ear headphones last time and liking them, I’ve finally started buying FiiO earphones too.
The reason I bought this was purely my hands acting on their own. By the time I came to my senses, the order was already placed.
Of course, the main factor in that impulse was the discount being too big to resist. The first-batch preorder was 30 yuan cheaper, with six interest-free installments, plus a free cable if you posted a review. Basically 100 yuan off.
The earphones arrived pretty fast, and unboxing them was full of that typical FiiO “pile on the extras” vibe. It came with a bunch of accessories — a case, a pouch, everything you’d expect.
But what we care about is the earphones themselves. As a certified fat otaku, purple was the obvious choice.
