When the Nintendo Switch first came out, people were already asking dBrand whether they’d make a skin for it.

dBrand’s answer: “Can’t do it.”

The reason was that the adhesive would damage the soft-touch coating on the Switch, so they didn’t recommend skinning it.

Then, more than half a year later, dBrand suddenly announced they’d developed a new adhesive — and now they could offer a skin for the Switch.

I bought one on launch day and tested it out. Not bad at all.

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When I get nostalgic, elementary school inevitably comes to mind.

Because back then I felt like an ACG protagonist.

People like to reminisce about when they were hot shit, not when they were a dumbass—totally understandable. But my so-called “protagonist” days weren’t about going to Beijing for some “X-Fusion” to brag about “this is so fucking insane,” or riding a bike to get Heytea and chafing my ass, or constantly tearing down laptops and fiddling with Raspberry Pi while saying “how how how amazing I am” in a Shonan accent, or juggling a female teacher, a pigeon girl, and a student I met in Japanese class. It was just that in elementary school my grades were okay, my looks were okay, my conversation was okay—enough that some girls would voluntarily get close to me.

But what does an elementary school “protagonist” actually get? You don’t know shit in elementary school, and I didn’t either.

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It’s been raining every single day lately, so I figured I can’t keep running if the weather’s like this — I need some other way to work out…

So I bought this:

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Around this time last year… a game came out… called 9-nine- Kokonotsu Kokonoka Kokonoiro. I didn’t rate it highly back then, because honestly there wasn’t much to rate. The story barely moved at all, it just laid out the setting.

That game was really just the start of a series. 9nine is a project sold in volumes, and my initial guess is there are three heroines, one volume each, so at least three volumes total.

I already talked about the first volume here: the protagonist gets dragged into a battle between espers. There are villainous espers, and righteous ones like the protagonist and heroine. Some people kill, and someone else stops them, that kind of thing…

Except in the first volume the esper murderer was never unmasked at all. It just ended unresolved, so a year later the second volume shows up again.

The main romanceable character in volume two is the protagonist’s little sister: Niimi Sora (新海天), so the title changed to something built around her name, Sorairo Sorauta Soranooto.

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A lot of games love pulling the “tube-out-the-back-of-the-head” twist. What’s that, you ask? It’s when the story feeds you one narrative up front, then at the very end tells you it was all a lie, that it was only a tiny fragment of some much bigger story behind the scenes, that you were just a pawn on the board, and the real story starts now.

Like you’re in the middle of Speed, and just as you’re about to die you wake up in another world and get told the whole “Speed” thing was virtual reality or a dream…

The twist itself is genuinely cool and it’s got real con-artist energy. Done right, it goes off like a bomb. Even done half-right it’s at least not bad — see that one World of Gurgle and Birthdays. But note what I said: “done right.” What if it’s done wrong?

Remember that game called Danganronpa 3? Remember that feeling of eating shit?

So I played another one of these “tube-out-the-back-of-the-head” games that didn’t quite land: Kieta Sekai to Tsuki to Shoujo (消えた世界と月と少女).

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My Pixel C’s screen shattered. I figured I’d find someone to repair it—maybe Google US could do a mail-in fix. So I contacted Google US support directly, went back and forth for ages, and they said it’s out of warranty, told me to find a technician in China Mainland myself. I said I don’t have the screen component, and they said “neither do we.”

Fuck. What now? Guess I’ll buy a new one…

Except there are basically no Android flagship tablets anymore!

So in the end I bought this…

Lenovo P8

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The Xiaomi Hybrid Pro earphones are a solid pick.

I mean, they’re genuinely great — as long as you don’t use them for music.

Mine mostly get used for WeChat voice calls, gaming on the tablet, listening to crosstalk routines, that sort of thing. But lately I’ve noticed a bad connection, and the mic keeps dying on me…

Normally I’d just buy another pair, but I’m flat broke this time. Not like Zhu, who’s loaded. So what do I do? Then I remembered these things come with a one-year warranty. Why not try the after-sales route?

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Snowflake nougat is a dessert—a trendy internet snack, apparently. Lots of people have been into it lately.

So I looked it up and the process isn’t that much trouble, and decided to make some myself.

But I couldn’t be bothered to hunt down the ingredients. What to do? Just use bootleg substitutes.

Snowflake nougat needs marshmallows, digestive biscuits, milk powder, butter, and cranberries. Roughly: butter into the pan first, then add marshmallows and stir, then dump in everything else and stir, take it out and press it flat, freeze it, then cut into pieces.

Pretty simple, right? But I told you I didn’t have the ingredients. So what did I do?

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Around 2010, in my last semester of college. I’d already landed a job, but graduation was closing in and I still had to finish my thesis defense.

I’ve actually forgotten the whole process of writing my thesis by now. I just remember that while I was working on it, it got so boring that I started looking for anime to watch online.

I was looking for anime and saw some shitpost compilation blowing up on AcFun, so I went and tracked down the source material, and that’s how I found this thing called Toaru Majutsu no Index (A Certain Magical Index). Looking back now it’s got plenty to poke fun at, but for me at the time I thought it was a pretty interesting watch.

The interesting part is its setting: battles between scientific ESPers and magicians, with the male lead caught right in the middle as a third-party existence.

Even more absurd is that this so-called “third party” male protagonist is actually the strongest one of all, and the story unfolds in the most formulaic way possible: some Boss suddenly pops out saying he’s gonna take out the protagonist, the protagonist fires off a bunch of trash talk, kills the Boss in one punch, keeps the guys around as bros, and adds the girls to his harem……

Of course, after finishing A Certain Magical Index, I went ahead and checked out its spin-off too — the famously well-known Toaru Kagaku no Railgun (A Certain Scientific Railgun).

Frankly, the story in Railgun is way better than in Index. Most of it has nothing to do with magic — it’s all about espers. The heroine is a fairly strong esper, and she’s constantly running around with her friends solving all sorts of incidents, from espers losing control of their powers to crimes happening in the shadows.

Honestly, the reason A Certain Scientific Railgun is the better watch comes down more to its story and character setups just being way cooler.

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