I used to have a desktop: E3 1230V2 + 16G DDR3 + GTX 1070. I forget when I put it together. Once I started using a laptop as my main machine I pretty much stopped upgrading it, and honestly the performance was enough for me — I could play through Ori 2, Doom Eternal, even Genshin without issues. Genshin 2.0 even ran at 4K with settings cranked, so I never bothered upgrading.

In the first half of last year someone gave me a bunch of spare parts they’d retired, and I pieced together an i7 12700 + 16G DDR5 + 512G NVMe setup. Then I grabbed a cheap motherboard off JD, swapped the whole thing into the case, and installed Fedora 43 as my main system.

Read More

Getting my hands on this machine was a bit of a fluke. I’d been messing around with running LLMs on Intel hardware, using the Xe Linux graphics driver, and every time I filed a bug with Intel I got the same sneering response: “The Xe driver is for LNL and BMG. We don’t care about your ARL integrated graphics.”

Truth is, plenty of Xe driver bugs have nothing to do with LNL or BMG—they’re just bugs. And cards from the Arc 140T / A770 era benefit hugely from the Xe driver too; the performance gains are real, and using them makes far more sense than clinging to TGL-era stuff. Getting unceremoniously dumped by Intel pissed me off, so I vented:

“Should I buy a Lunar Lake laptop just so I can complain about Intel?”

And then this Lunar Lake device showed up for testing. Special thanks to Cat Dad—here’s his blog, packed with good stuff, go check it out.

Read More

I already had two x86 handhelds on hand, but there was still a reason to buy a third. At first I just wanted something to play PS2 on. My old device was a Retroid Pocket 4, an Android handheld with a MediaTek Dimensity 1100 — just barely enough for PS2, but some games still drop frames. What’s worse is that PS2 emulator on Android: it hasn’t been updated in ages and looks like it’s on its way to being completely dead. So I started looking for a replacement.

Then I came across all those high-end Android retro handhelds — Aya Neo, Ayn Odin, Retroid Pocket 5/6. The budget for these things has climbed to around 2,500 RMB. Honestly, I really don’t like Android handhelds. For one, the OS itself is bloated for a gaming device. For another, Android has input latency when playing emulated games. A lot of people probably can’t feel it, but if you compare side by side it’s obvious.

So isn’t there some slightly smaller handheld that runs Linux and can handle PS2 emulation?

That’s when I spotted a batch of brand-new AYN Loki Max units on Xianyu. After thinking it over, I went for it.

Read More

As a longtime ThinkPad user, I’d always stuck with the X1 Carbon series, and I’d always felt the Carbon deserved its flagship status. But as time went on and the nature of my work changed, my demands for performance kept climbing.

The thing is, the X1 Carbon is fundamentally a thin-and-light, so its performance ceiling is very limited — and, absurdly, the battery capacity isn’t great either. That eternal 57Wh (I hear they bumped it to 58Wh in 2026) means that aside from being light and thin, both battery life and performance are pretty mediocre. It just wasn’t meeting my needs anymore.

So after watching and waiting for nearly a year, I finally saw off the absurd MTL architecture and welcomed the TSMC-powered ARL-H. I picked up the ThinkPad T14p Gen 3 with integrated graphics — the so-called “China-exclusive pocket rocket” — in the U285H + 6400 high-frequency DDR5 64G memory configuration. I ran the numbers and buying the RAM myself would actually cost more than paying the upgrade premium, so I just went all the way.

I’ve been using the machine for nearly a year now. Feels like if I don’t say something soon, Panther Lake will be out. So let me just jot down some impressions here.

Read More

If there’s one English line that stuck with me more than any other, it’s the Oracle’s from Matrix: “Everything that has a beginning has an end.”

I love that line. It states a truism in the coolest possible way—and honestly, a lot of philosophy is just truisms. The difference is that most real-world truisms go unnoticed until someone with a special aura says them in a mystifying tone, and then suddenly everyone treats them as gospel.

I bring it up because I still remember 2013, when I laid my cards on the table with a fujoshi I’d been pursuing and she shot me down for good. What I felt wasn’t so much heartbreak as relief. Looking back, she probably knew I was into her the whole time and just never gave me a clear no—kept me on the hook, had me tag along, paid for her meals. Not exactly malicious, but there was definitely some calculation in there. After that day I decided I needed something to do. I’d just bought a Windows tablet—a Dell V8p—and figured, well, I’ve never had a successful romance, so maybe I’ll find solace in games. I fired up Hatsuyuki Sakura (初雪桜), a newly translated release that had just dropped, and that kicked off my visual novel bulldozer mode. Windows, PSP, PSV, even iPad, and later Switch—my assault on visual novels has never stopped, and it hasn’t stopped now.

Read More

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this on the blog more than once—the story of the very first eroge I ever played.

I was in sixth grade. I found it on a disc I’d bought called Recoil. It wasn’t even a compilation disc, just a single-game bootleg with a cover that didn’t list anything extra, yet somehow there were other games stored on it too.

I can’t remember the title. All I remembered were the characters for “complete bloodsucking.” You’d open it and first there’d be two women doing yuri stuff, then the heroine meets the protagonist, and she suddenly starts going down on his pixelated crotch… and then it cuts to “that kind” of scene.

Bear in mind I was in sixth grade. The most explicit thing I’d seen up to that point was probably some TV shopping channel ad for a bra. This was way too much for me. Right when I was completely losing control and about to keep watching, I heard footsteps approaching from somewhere in the house. I panicked and hard-rebooted the PC. When my mother came in and saw the blue disk-check screen, she thought it was weird, and I just awkwardly told her the computer had frozen.

Read More

I’d been keeping an eye on this one for a while but never bought it, and the reason was that whole abstract Chinese crowdfunding mess from before. You open Modian’s front page and more than half of it is various “heart-stopping Chinese visual novel masterpieces” in vigorous development — who knows if you can actually finish yours, maybe you’ve already run off with the money?

Then I saw the game had launched, and it even went on discount for the winter sale, so I figured I’d buy it and give it a spin. It’s way longer than I expected, and after finishing it I have to sigh — as expected of a team that went to Japan to study, it’s better than traditional Chinese visual novels in basically every respect, and in a lot of places it’s genuinely excellent. At the very least it does things “right.” I’ll break this down into a few points, and since spoiling this game would kill half the fun, I’ll try to keep things spoiler-free:

Read More

Honestly, I’m not sure why I bought this thing. Maybe because I saw it on sale during Double 12. I did the math, and building an eGPU dock myself would have cost more than this. I’d also been wanting to play games again, and I wanted something that worked with my Linux laptop and my Windows handheld, with some room to spare. After looking around, this seemed to fit, so I bought it.

Anyway, I bought it. I mainly want to talk about my experience using it, because I think a lot of people are curious and there’s very little online about how this thing works under Linux. So I’ll share my impressions and give Linux users thinking about an eGPU dock some reference.

Read More

Ever since Key got acquired by Tencent, their direction changed completely—they shifted to a weird… but also very modern approach.

On one hand they ride the heat of old IPs to squeeze out the remaining value; on the other they push a series of small, quick, cheap titles, using fast iteration to boost overall sales. Take the new “Kinetic Novel” line, for example: no-choice visual novels focused on story and presentation for a more three-dimensional experience.

Honestly, you can see the logic. Games—visual novels especially—are a one-time development cost with essentially zero cost to copy afterward. As long as you have enough titles and keep throwing sales, you’ll move some units, and you can even count on passive income later. For a traditional visual novel company, that’s not a bad thing. So from last year to now we’ve seen Key pump out new title after new title, and this one is Rainbow City.

Read More

I have to trot out the old line again, the one I’ve said who knows how many times: I have no idea when I bought this game. Probably some sale. Anyway, I recently noticed it was already sitting in my library, so I figured I’d give it a spin.

Saying this every time makes me feel like I’m cosplaying QZXX, but it really is the truth. I probably just saw an interesting title and screenshots that looked decent enough, and bought it.

That game is Otaku’s Adventure (otaku的人间冒险).

Read More