One thing has been holding me back from buying Bluetooth headphones: my Linux laptop doesn’t support Bluetooth APTX. Later Sony open-sourced LDAC, but those open-source devs are still too busy arguing about whether the code is “orthodox” to actually ship anything.

Progress on APTX and LDAC support under Linux has been ongoing — some of it reverse-engineered, some of it code integrations — but none of it got merged upstream, because they’re still bickering.

And at this point APTX has already been reverse-engineered, the LDAC source has been released, and it’s even been merged into ALSA, while PulseAudio still hasn’t moved. That makes no sense.

So finally someone from China took action. Respect.

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I’ve played a lot of games with interesting premises, and the one that left the biggest impression on me is definitely the one where a heroine turns into an alpaca.

That game was actually pretty touching. The moe girl you love most turns into an alpaca—that’s the moment that tests whether your love is real. It’s worth recommending, too.

Besides heroines transforming, there’s also the protagonist-transforms genre. The famous recent one is that game where the protagonist becomes a black cat. It even got an anime, so I won’t go on about it.

This kind of game always produces a lot of comedy. It’s a comedy-grade absurd premise to begin with—the protagonist suddenly turns into another species, so of course there’ll be plenty of laughs.

So this genre has a new member. More, the well-known rhythm game developer, has a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary whose brand got renamed—and that renamed brand, KATE, released its latest work: Koi wa Mofumofu! Love Me Teddy (恋はもふもふ!ラブ・ミー・テディ). Literally, “Love is Fluffy, Love Me Teddy!”

Don’t bitch about why it isn’t “Love my teddy” yet—I looked it up, and “love me teddy” seems to be a reference to something. The premise is easy enough to explain: the protagonist turns into a teddy bear, gets taken home by several girls, and gets rubbed all over.

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Growing up, every one of us ends up watching some… physiological, health-oriented, body-art, stimulating, videotapes.

And among those… physiological, health-oriented, body-art, stimulating, videotapes, the most famous ones besides the female teacher, the flight attendant, and the OL are probably the prosecutor series.

Most prosecutor-series films are about a female cop who, to fight the evil forces of darkness, infiltrates the enemy’s ranks, gets caught, gets tortured and humiliated… oh, sorry, disgraced, and then our unyielding heroine defeats the evil forces and completes her mission or whatever…

Of course, this kind of educational plot isn’t only something you can see performed by Matsushita Saeko on videotape. We’ve also got the so-called “2D version” in the visual novel sphere.

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Some guy with a screw loose once laid out the whole “old school” vs. “new school” thing.

Of course, a guy with a screw loose doesn’t talk like a human being, so what he meant was Old School and New School. Put bluntly: “new type” and “retro type.” You see this pattern in other games, you see it in music genres, so naturally you also see it in the eroge space.

Remember what the earliest eroge were like?

You’d have a male lead meet a pretty girl, and after about two lines they’d start fucking, and then it was over. Same as what Carmack the Great said about FPS games: “The game is the porn, the story is superfluous.” The subtext: games exist to make you feel good, so why the hell bother with plot and authorship? If it doesn’t get you off, why the hell are you playing it?

Normal games are already pigeonholed that clearly, so what about eroge?

What’s an eroge for? So you can watch it like porn!

So why the hell go through all that asinine setup and payoff? Just drop the pants and get to it!

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This time I didn’t buy a wife for Zijin — these are more like Zijin’s husbands.

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Apparently every woman on earth owns one of these things. It’s called the Luna Mini 2. And naturally, I got told to buy one too.

Supposedly it’s for washing your face. But after staring at it for a while, all I see is a vibrating motor shaped like a massager, wrapped in rubber nubs that look like a shoe brush. You smear soap or cleanser on your face, rub this thing around while it buzzes, then rinse. Done.

So it’s a shrunken-down vibrator for your face. And you’re telling me this thing costs 900+ yuan?

Highway robbery?

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Honestly this dish isn’t that hard, but after making it myself once, I gotta say it turned out way better than what I’ve had at other people’s places.

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Personally, I really like ClockUp’s games, because I always feel they’re very “real.”

Yes, real — the kind of game that’s genuinely 18+ for adults, not one of those “it’s 18+ only because they bolted on some sex scenes” games.

Honestly, if you stripped the optional HCGs out of a lot of 18+ games, the age rating would suit thirteen-year-olds better. ClockUp’s games are the opposite: even if you deleted every HCG, they still wouldn’t be okay for anyone under eighteen. It comes down to the content and the emotions the game expresses — stuff that’s hard for minors to stomach. Most of it delivers shocking gore and violence, and through those shocking images, thoughts about life and human nature.

I always praise ClockUp’s games as insane, but not every ClockUp game is like that — it mostly depends on the scenario writer. Some bring in Light’s lead writer, like Nemurenu Hitsuji to Kodoku na Ookami and Maggot baits. Others are the series of small, deep works by Asa Ei, like Natsu no Kusari and euphoria. And this time Asa Ei took the pen again, teaming up with ClockUP on a new title: Erewhon.

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Yep, another kernel update just landed in the Ubuntu repos.

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Google Pixel Buds are Bluetooth earbuds from Google. Unlike the other Bluetooth earbuds that came out around the same time, these supposedly support all sorts of real-time translation, plus Google Assistant of course.

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