A package from overseas showed up a few days ago.
I was confused — what did I even buy? I haven’t ordered anything from outside Japan recently.
Opened it up and it clicked. It was the Dbrand Grip I backed on crowdfunding half a year ago, finally here.
A few nights ago, out of nowhere, I got a message on Line from the female teacher:
“Help… I… I’m starving to death…”
A bright and snowy Saturday morning, buki went out on the town to cause trouble…
Woke up Saturday morning and saw my Pixel C lying under the bed. It’d fallen plenty of times before, so I didn’t think much of it this time either. Picked it up and took a look…
Holy shit…
A while back I bought my parents a Redmi Note 3. Nearly two years later, turns out the Snapdragon 650 is still putting up a fight in the budget bracket… some new phones actually perform worse than the 650.
So I have no idea what to upgrade them to. Go too expensive and my parents will just abuse it — they toss their phones around, and when something breaks, the old folks feel bad about it.
And abuse it they did: my dad’s phone ended up bent out of shape.
“Bent” really just means the back cover got knocked crooked. Everything else was fine. So what to do? I looked it up and fixing this isn’t a hassle at all, so I fired up Taobao and got to work.
First I bought an iPhone 8, since Suning had a special deal a while back. You had to pay a deposit, but overall it was much cheaper than the Apple official site…
After ordering you wait two days to pay, but once paid it arrives the same day — seems to be picked up from Suning’s local Zhengzhou warehouse.
Got it in hand and it just feels small. Really small…
Hitotsu Tobashi Renai is an old game, one of Asa Project’s earlier works.
Actually, calling it “early” is a stretch—more like early-ish. Hitotsu Tobashi Renai is built around “love one person removed,” and the Chinese patch apparently translated the title as “indirect love,” which honestly fits pretty well. That’s exactly what the game is about.
My opinion of Hitotsu Tobashi Renai wasn’t exactly high at first, because I overplayed it. It’s chaotic the whole way through—the “skipped-over characters” are either insufferably nasty or unbearably saintly, and the art style itself doesn’t look remotely serious. Compared to Renai 0 Kilometer, it feels like it goes too far. If you say it’s going the comedy route, then it insists on throwing in some “romance” on the individual routes. If you say it’s going the pure-love route, those enormous exaggerated facial expressions alone make it look like anything but pure love…
Awkward, isn’t it…
A while back Slickdeals pushed a deal — Sony’s noise canceling earbuds on eBay for just $69.9…
Couldn’t resist. Bought one, and picked up two more for a coworker and Jipiss.
In the end it arrived with no customs fee, but it was overweight, so shipping cost 10 extra yuan — which I magnanimously passed on to Jipiss and made him pay.
So Google went and renamed their shit again. Everyone knows it.
Android Wear is now Wear OS, and the reason they gave is that “Android watches shouldn’t be Android-only, Apple users can use them too.”
Except Apple users all just use an Apple Watch, you assholes. What the hell.
I don’t know what crawled up the executives’ asses over at Google. They go crazy every other day.
And of course, with the rename comes an update that’s mostly about the rename.
Lately I’ve been kinda unsatisfied, you know? Getting older, and plain plots just don’t do it for me anymore.
Probably I’ve played too many games and seen every story beat there is, so when something completely ordinary happens I just go “meh.” Recently I’ve been hunting for stuff with more “punch,” more “intensity.”
Don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not about to awaken some weird fetish. I just mean I want that “protagonist starts weak, beats one strong enemy after another, and finally takes down the boss in a blazing finale” kind of story.
Ah, whatever, I just want to read 王道 — the tried-and-true hot-blooded route.
Honestly, 王道 stories are everywhere in shonen manga; all those long-running mainstream series are built on that formula. But in the visual novel world this kind of content keeps shrinking. Either it’s half-assed, or they force some bullshit and end up making a mess. Some don’t even try. The last game about piloting fighter jets really disappointed me. I don’t think I’m asking for much — I just want something like Aokana. Is that really so rare?
In the end I had to go digging through old games. Then I remembered: way, way back I’d picked up Walkure Romanze and never finished it…
