I’ve been using the Misfit Ray for almost two years now. Nothing special about it, honestly, but it’s been steady. At least the company’s still alive after all this time, and the thing still works fine. Then a while back I noticed the band had snapped.
What to do? Well, almighty Taobao had my back. I searched around and, surprise, the original band is gone—only “forgiveness green” third-party ones left.
A while back I bought a discounted Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 tablet on eBay to replace my Mi Pad 4 and 360 N7. Its job is watching videos and gaming, plus whatever else comes up.
The reasons were simple, just three:
Don’t ask why I didn’t get an iPad. I don’t use Apple, so Samsung was the only option — it’s the highest-performance Android tablet out there right now.
Eventually I searched Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 on eBay and found a US V version with a 4G module, model T837V. Got it for just over 3000 yuan. I’ve used it for almost a month now, so I can share my impressions.
I really don’t get what Palette is doing. Why did they have to chop the 9-nine series into pieces like this? And not just chop it up—release the pieces so damn slowly.
Two years ago we got 9-nine- Kokonotsu Kokonoka Kokonoiro, last year Sorairo Sorauta Soranooto, and this year Haruiro Harukoi Harunokaze. The Chinese title translates to something like “Spring Colors, Spring Love, Spring Wind.”
After a long stretch of research and practice, I finally landed on the perfect way to cook a pan-seared chicken cutlet. Works for breast or thigh, no exceptions.
And it’s dead simple. Ten minutes and you’re done. Even if you’re a fat otaku with a girlfriend who’d rather lick black tights, you don’t have to drool over someone else’s food — you can make this yourself.
Last year there was one insanely good game I recommended hard: Haruoto Alice＊Gram.
This year it got a sequel, Hakuai Sakura＊Gram. After finishing it I looked up at the stars and felt a whole lot of ripples in my chest. People always call Japan the “Warring States period of eroge” — every company dives into the fray, blood and guts everywhere, trying every trick in the book to survive and sell copies, and still taking heavy casualties.
While every other studio was racking its brains over how to make otaku open their wallets, the great Nanawind did not let me down. Hakuai Sakura＊Gram is a satisfying answer sheet.
An eroge has to sell to survive, and Hakuai Sakura＊Gram is a runaway commercial success. Hell, it’s a textbook success.
Lately I’ve been expanding my breakfast roster… mostly because I realized breakfast is the only meal I can be bothered to eat properly. The rest of the day I can’t even be assed to feed myself.
A while back I saw a heroine in some eroge who loves mashed potatoes, and watching her eat got me hungry as hell, so I went and made some myself.
Lately a lot of eroge makers give off the vibe that they’re about to go under… Alcot, for instance.
Aside from peddling expired pillows and illustrations on Twitter every day, you barely see them do anything. I remember last year they put out what they called a proper game, 将軍様はお年頃, and then basically nothing for almost a year. Just when we figured they were about to croak…
Alcot announced a new release!
And then I look closer and holy shit, the new release is a fandisc.
Honestly I’m so sick of fandiscs filling my screen I could puke, but it seems like a lot of studios can’t manage new titles anymore and just repackage old stuff to scrape by. Whatever. If Alcot’s done for, might as well see them off.
Alcot’s new release is called 将軍様はお年頃 ふぁんでぃすく -御三家だヨ！ 全員集合. Long as hell and contains zero information… the name itself looks cheap, like a little flyer ad.
Fine, fine. Don’t speak ill of the dying. Let’s just look at the game.
Maybe everyone gets this illusion — that when you meet someone, or hit some particular moment, your brain flashes “wait, have I seen this scene／this person in a dream before?”
Plenty of people have researched and argued this phenomenon, and most land on a few possibilities: memory misplacement, an illusion of similarity between scenes, or some blurry subconscious memory of a scene. One of the Steins;Gate games even explains it as “déjà vu across worldlines.” And then there’s the one factor that’s never certain but can’t be ruled out: dreams.
Which is to say, it’s entirely possible that the familiar thing you just ran into really was something you saw in a dream.
Dreams are funny like that. Humans can never control their dreams, yet the dream is something the person themselves created. So when we go adventuring in a dream, the dream is something we wrote ourselves. There’s a bit of “playing with yourself” to it.
Some say a normal person creates one to three dreams every night, and over the course of growing up, all those assorted dreams pile up to a terrifying number. Among them, one or two scenes are bound to resemble something you run into in reality, and that produces the so-called “déjà vu.” This is probably the most reliable explanation for the “I keep seeing it in dreams” feeling — but compared to that cold reality, we’d rather accept the romantic explanation:
“You and I are connected by something heaven ordained, so we met in a dream long ago, and that dream scene guided us to meet in reality…”
Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? uh?
Xinjiang’s been all over the place lately, and now I’m craving pilaf too. I still remember the Dingding stir-fried noodles—wait, no, the lamb pilaf and baked samsa I had in Beijing way back. Can’t get any of that now, so I have to make it myself.
Ingredients:
