I forgot the root password of my NAS, which is running Debian.

After some Googling I found an easy way to reset it.

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A long time ago there was this game that blew up because the title was so ridiculous:

Onii-chan, You Are Forbidden from Using Your Right Hand (お兄ちゃん 右手の使用を禁止します)

It’s a pure siscon game. The protagonist has a name, but his presence is pathetically low. Several sisters orbit around him, and the OP is an absolute earworm.

The game sold because it had a gimmick. That’s it.

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The Pebble watch I bought stopped working on July 1.

That doesn’t mean it’s dead though — an outfit called Rebble has stepped up to take over.

All you have to do is go to Rebble’s site, migrate your account, and follow the tutorial.

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I’ve had the LG Watch Sport for about a year, and a while back it started acting up.

What kind of problem? See for yourself:

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《Miagete Goran, Yozora no Hoshi o (見上げてごらん、夜空の星を)》— I’ve already forgotten what year it originally came out. Still, that game left a pretty strong impression on me.

I remember it was winter, deep winter, around December. I was curled up under the covers and blasted through the game from the prologue to the OP in one sitting. Watching the protagonist finish building the telescope and do that first stargazing session together, with that hype OP playing — man, it hit me.

The thing I remember most is the soundtrack and the staging. Most scenes are at night, mostly quiet music, all kinds of shot compositions arranged like a film. The main story is excellent too — it’s nominally about “astronomical observation,” but what it actually is is a love triangle, and the real heroine is Amanokawa Saya with her heterochromia. The game intercuts memories and the present, and lays it all out on a detailed timeline. You can tell they cared.

But… when the main game of 《Miagete Goran, Yozora no Hoshi o》 was selling well, they put out a fandisc, and that one felt like it was missing something.

First the timeline was gone. Then the cinematic music and staging were gone… and finally the stargazing was pretty much gone too.

They call it a fandisc, but none of the strengths of the main game made it over. It’s just an ordinary vehicle for HCGs. Depressing.

Fine, whatever, it’s an FD, you can’t ask for too much. But I never expected… that after all this time, 《Miagete Goran, Yozora no Hoshi o》 would get another FD.

The full title is 《Miagete Goran, Yozora no Hoshi o Interstellar Focus》. The “Interstellar Focus” part sounds like it means “starlight focus,” but with a hint from Bob I finally saw it — the words are just there to spell out “IF.”

IF meaning this game depicts “another story, what if.”

And what’s the “if”…

When faced with the love triangle between Hikari and Saya, the protagonist says…

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My XZP has been in for repairs a lot lately, and every time it comes back the film is gone…

So I have to reapply one, and suddenly there are a lot more options for XZP films now — this “optical adhesive film” kind.

I wrote about it before; this time it’s a domestic one called “Xiaoxiaoyulei”, and both the film itself and the optical adhesive are better quality than the Singapore one from before.

Still, there are a few things to watch out for when applying it, to raise your success rate:

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“Gǔzǎo wèi” (old-school flavor) is a phrase you see more in Hong Kong and Taiwan — roughly means “ancestral recipe.”

In northern mainland China, “old-school flavor cake” would probably just be called “traditional sponge cake,” though honestly it’s almost indistinguishable from chiffon cake at this point.

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Ika Musume is one of those shows I got into pretty early on, back when I was still fairly new to anime. The OP is way too denpa, though… OP 2 is a lot better.

And honestly the manga is pretty good too, more fun than I expected. It just always ends up getting lumped in as moe garbage.

Anyway, that’s not what I’m here to talk about. What I wanted to say is that a few days ago I picked these up on Mercari — a whole set, 100 yuan.

At first I figured they were Chinese bootlegs, but after looking closer they’re prize figures, and the quality’s decent enough. I’ll take it.

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Back in college I visited some university in Pingdingshan, and a classmate treated me to this. All I remember is: really spicy, really fragrant, really satisfying.

Later I found out it’s actually pretty easy to make yourself, so I gave it a shot.

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Everyone knows game companies these days basically have no shame…

The most obvious sign of that shamelessness is they never “wait until the game is finished” before putting it on sale. They get it to roughly-done and immediately start selling. As for the rest—sell the base game first, deal with everything else later. When it’s done, they bolt it on and call it “Downloadable Content,” i.e. what we call DLC. Some of that DLC you have to pay extra for. So you pay for a half-finished game, then keep paying for the extra content bolted on afterward. Only after you’ve coughed up several times does the content count as fully there and the game count as complete…

Think about it and that’s pretty fucked, isn’t it. Fortunately this dumbass habit is mostly a Western publisher thing; Japanese companies still have some shame… probably.

Why “probably”? Because Japanese companies have learned bad habits too. Make half a game, then put out an expansion pack—it’s become the new normal. Once the engine and framework are in place, adding a few stages is just opening the map editor…

And that goes double for visual novels, sitting at the very bottom of the game food chain, which don’t even need a map editor!

SMEE, a sub-brand of the real estate company HOOKSOFT, is exactly this kind of shameless entity. They love putting out Minifandisks—the really short kind of fandisk, where the content length barely qualifies as DLC. Oh, and it’s not just SMEE being shameless. HOOKSOFT has no shame either; their games get Minifandisks too. If you want to say Asa Project, the other HOOKSOFT sub-brand, is relatively honorable and doesn’t do Minifandisks, you’d be dead wrong—they’ll add new characters and sell a PSV version, charge more, make more money… shame all over the floor.

Is the Japanese real estate business just not turning a profit anymore? Is that why HOOKSOFT is shamelessly grifting every which way?

Anyway, this time SMEE put out DLC for last year’s well-received Making＊Lovers—the so-called Mini Fandisk Volume 1.

The full title:

“Making＊Lovers Geki-Icha After Story Volume.01 Ako, Karen, Saki”

Holy shit that name is dumb as hell. They’re one step away from tacking on a Deluxe Package Complete Edition suffix once all the volumes are out.

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