Seeing this title, I have to bring up this pair of mysterious, exquisite little pieces of junk I paid a premium for from Japan.
What is this thing? I wonder if you can guess.
This is something I bought on a whim from Japan last year for 2,000 yen. The way you use it is so abstract that it’s been sitting in my drawer gathering dust for a long time.
Preface:
I wrote a Fedora 40 installation guide a while back, with notes on my own install and initial setup plus some thoughts on how to keep Fedora from being a pain. Those tips still hold up—arguably even more so now.
Short version: if you’re using Fedora (GNOME), try to adapt to GNOME’s logic and design philosophy. Otherwise, just use KDE.
This time it’s about Fedora 42. I’ve updated some parts, carried others over directly from the previous version, and dropped steps that are no longer necessary. My GNOME rants and key points stay in the Fedora 40 post. Maybe I’ll pull them out into their own piece someday—perhaps in the next Fedora guide.
For installing Fedora and doing basic setup, I recommend having a way to get around network restrictions—ideally a router-level global solution. Otherwise it’s either slow or some things just won’t connect.
Preface:
Retro handhelds (open-source handhelds) have been kind of popular these past few years. I’ve bought and sold a few myself. Honestly, before this I was just following the crowd — I barely played any games on them, it was more about messing with the hardware. Lately I’ve been thinking about settling down and actually playing something seriously, so I started wondering whether I should put together a “handheld” that genuinely fits my needs.
So after a whole bunch of tinkering, I ended up with a result I’m reasonably happy with. I figured I’d write it up and share it with anyone who’s had the same idea, in the hope it helps or gives some inspiration.
I once had an idea I thought was the shit: a visual novel with one of those fiery “feminist warrior” types as the heroine. Talk about a gimmick, and the conflict writes itself.
I’m not against women’s equality. But feminism and what gets called “femcunt-ism” are not the same thing. The former is a demand for equal rights; the latter is extremists wrecking it for everyone. And in an internet that gets more torn apart by the day, the latter’s rise and volume have long since overtaken the former.
Put plainly, the former are normal people and the latter are morons. Putting a moron in a visual novel—ideally a nukige—and giving her a good hard fucking isn’t an unreasonable thought, is it?
Anyway, last year that wish got granted. A game called Otome Sekai no Arukikata (オトメ世界の歩き方) sold itself on exactly that premise. The setting: the future, where women have taken total power and passed a special “Gender Segregation Act.” Women are top-tier humans, men are beasts of burden, and the two sexes are physically separated. So the “New Tokyo City” that symbolizes high society is almost entirely women, while the men are out on the frontier as soldiers and disposable material, fighting off an invading hostile power.
The story opens with the protagonist as a corporate drone, ground down every day by life and his boss, starting to think about ending it all. At the subway station entrance — the Japanese favorite for this sort of thing — he stares at an oncoming train and considers jumping.
One little hop and it’s all over.
Of course, he doesn’t have the guts, so he keeps scraping by. Right when he’s at his lowest, he meets a girl who asks him to help her get into a mixed-bath bathhouse. Her reason is simple: she’s never been in one and wants to see what it’s like.
The girl calls herself Nagisa. She seems cheerful enough, and not only does she drag him into a mixed bath, she hauls him all over the place — eating good food, trying new things, sightseeing by the sea, vacationing on a little island. Maybe it’s some kind of magic spell, but he just lets her pull him along. Total strangers, yet the two of them do couple-ish things together like a string of dates, and eventually they do the thing couples do, too.
Then, right after they’ve finished and he drifts off, he wakes to find she’s quietly gotten up and walked out onto the balcony. She thanks him, says she’s an unforgivable murderer, and that her last wish has been fulfilled. Then she jumps. She hits the ground hard and lies there in a pool of blood.
This all happened a while ago, but I kept going back and forth on whether to write it up. Same deal as that time two years ago when I got hauled off to a quarantine camp for ten-odd days — I really wanted to write about it, and it would’ve been genuinely worthwhile, but it’s the kind of thing that gets you burned.
Last year I was dying to write a rant about it, but time passed and I forgot. Today it popped back into my head, so I figured I’d write it down. The whole process was surreal and kind of ironic, and it says something about the state of the industry in general. Plus it ties back to some stuff I went through years ago.
This article is about the OrangePi Neo. I’m not going to over-analyze the company’s development or management strategy — I’ll just lay out the facts as plainly as I can and let you judge for yourselves. Maybe a few brief thoughts at the end.
Of course, this was all just a long dream I had last year. Every detail comes from the dream, none of it is real. Please don’t try to match it to real-world events, and don’t start any weird speculation.
When this game was first announced I was hyped as hell. Madsoft at the helm, so you know the production values are solid. Yuzuna on art, easy on the eyes. And the premise—a “comeback story”—was exactly my shit. The writer had previously done all sorts of training-and-humiliation eroge, which made it even more promising. Pair that with the absolutely fire OP from the initial promo, and my expectations were through the roof.
Then the game dropped. I dove in full of hope, and pretty quickly something started feeling off. The “play dumb, crush the elite” / “poor dude climbs to the top” power fantasy I was promised? Nowhere to be found. Instead the whole game turned into the usual Otome-soft style routine—the protagonist becomes the school’s incubus, every woman goes crazy for him, and he even gets a direct invite to join the student council.
The story then headed in the direction I was most familiar with but had zero desire for. The protagonist says he wants to climb the ladder, but his method for crossing class lines is to bang some upper-class young lady—works out great whether you’re talking bloodline or marrying in. He even starts fantasizing—oh, he’s fantasizing again—about becoming the school’s stud horse, every woman becoming his wife, and he’s already picked out how many kids they’re gonna have…
What kind of Shandong peasant logic is this…
Last time I mentioned I bought an RK3588 laptop. It used a no-name OEM chassis, but the overall experience still beat my expectations.
I also mentioned that the laptop had a few shortcomings, and fixing them would be a huge improvement:
So is there an RK3588 laptop that solves all those pain points?
Yes, there is, my friend, there absolutely is.
Around May last year I was thinking about replacing the laptop I’d been using for over three years. Unfortunately, the only new stuff out at the time was either a Ryzen 7840HS with mediocre Linux support, or the new Intel Meteor Lake ThinkPads.
Even though going from an 11th-gen chip to Meteor Lake would have been a big jump, Meteor Lake barely improved over the previous generation — it even regressed in places — so I decided to wait it out.
While waiting, I stumbled onto this “Chinese-made laptop,” the Cool-Pi CM5 Laptop. ARM architecture, RK3588, native Linux support, 32GB of RAM, hard drive expansion, and interest-free installments on the Tmall store. I thought about it and figured I’d play with it for a bit. Ended up buying one.
The story starts with our protagonist, Kakehashi Yashiro (宵宮梯子), a truant who’s already stopped going to school. On the road after running away from home, he wanders into an abandoned ruin somewhere in the city and meets an angel with only one wing. The angel grants him a mysterious power through her feathers and asks for his help recovering them, handing him a feather that bestows a special ability. The price: once the feathers are returned, he’ll forget everything.
