My previous phone was a Sony Xperia Z Premium. I used it for over a year, close to two years, and Sony recently said it would push out Google’s Android Pie OTA update to that phone too—every version except the Hong Kong one got it. But in the end I decided to replace it, with Google’s flagship phone released this year, the Google Pixel 3 XL. Plenty of people aren’t optimistic about Google’s new flagship—its specs are behind, it looks ugly, and it isn’t exactly cheap either. After using it for a while since it arrived, it really does have quite a few problems, but I’m still fairly satisfied, so I’ll briefly go over my first impressions.

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This ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 of mine has been in service for over a year now, and honestly I’m pretty happy with it. No plans to replace it — maybe next year, if the X1 Carbon still doesn’t have a 4K screen or any big leap forward, there’ll be no reason to upgrade.

But it’s been a year, and lately some weird shit has started happening. Just watching YouTube makes it heat up… like, really hot.

Weird, right? Shouldn’t be doing that. Then again, the thing is a year old, so my guess is the thermal paste is dead… no wait, dried out.

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Yesterday I was digging into a Shutter problem, and today someone told me Shutter somehow still gets updates…

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Recently, whenever I took a screenshot with Shutter, it would crash the moment it captured anything…

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Haven’t done an impulse buy in a while. This time it’s because I saw this thing was cheap enough:

A 99-yuan Bluetooth earphone with aptX support and killer battery life.

So I bought one to check it out — my laptop supports aptX now too, after all.

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This time I made fragrant roasted chicken legs — the kind that can hold their own against what you buy on the street.

Not much work to it. The main thing is the marinade: scallion sections and ginger, light and dark soy sauce, a little salt and chili powder, two chicken legs, and let them sit.

Overnight is what I’d recommend.

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The chef I admire most, Kiritani Hana, once said:

“Good food is improved through constant practice.”

So every time I cook, I try to make it a little better than last time, and add a bit of my own recipe while I’m at it.

Soy sauce fried rice is already pretty good, I think. But recently I got my hands on a bottle of “salted duck egg yolk mayo” — hardcore stuff — and I figured I’d throw it into the fried rice. Tried it today and it went great. Here’s the rundown.

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I have a Logitech T650 touchpad, but I bought it 4 years ago.

Recently I dug it out on a whim. It still works fine, honestly — but that’s exactly when you get cocky and drop the thing…

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I wanted a phone to play games on.

Originally I wanted a tablet, but it turns out tablets aren’t really an option anymore — Google went and released the Pixel Slate, so a big-screen phone was the only choice left.

What I wanted from a gaming phone:

• Enough performance
• Strong battery life
• A large screen
• Decent feel in the hand
• No touch dropouts or connection drops
• As cheap as possible

Xiaomi phones all seem to have that tradition of the touchscreen failing when it gets hot, Meizu phones all have connection drop issues, the Smartisan Pro 2’s build quality is a joke and the screen even lets water in, and there are plenty of MediaTek phones, but their performance is absolute garbage.

Then I saw 360 phones were on special on JD. Took a look — the 360 N7, originally discounted by one yuan to 999 yuan, and paying with Baitiao knocked another yuan off, two yuan off total, so I got it for 998 yuan.

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Whether or not you’re like me and couldn’t care less about the various works under Type Moon’s banner, you have to admit the same thing I do:

The Fate series under Type Moon is the most successful visual novel ever made.

What counts as success? It’s when a product’s fan effect is so strong that all they have to do is keep reheating leftovers to keep raking in money—where even some slapped-together spinoff with no real connection to anything is a cash-printing machine. If that’s not success, I don’t know what is.

From 2004 to 2018, the Fate series has gone through two anime adaptations, a prequel novel adaptation, countless movie adaptations, and all sorts of spinoff games, spinoff manga, spinoff anime, and so on—all the way up to the current mobile game Fate/Grand Order, which still gets hordes of otaku throwing money at it by the fistful. Sure, the Fate brand has now spread into every corner imaginable, but I wonder how many people still remember that the Fate series started as a game—a visual novel, and an 18+ one at that. I know the thing was originally a novel by scenario writer Kinoko Nasu, and it got turned into a visual novel out of necessity to get it to market, but its debut was, in fact, in visual novel form.

A whole world expanded out of a single visual novel, reaching the point it has now—if that’s not massive success, what is?

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