Recently I ran into a problem with my OnePlus 5: I plug it in, turn on USB debugging, run adb devices, and the list is empty!

Tried everything, but the phone just would not show up in adb devices.

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Almost three years ago (damn, has it been that long?) I bought an ASUS Xonar U7 sound card to get audio output while my laptop was hooked up to a dock.

And now, three years later, that sound card has started acting up.

Roughly, the problem is it often doesn’t get enough power and won’t come up—plug it in and it isn’t recognized. After unplugging and replugging it a bunch of times it occasionally has a chance of working. Eventually I couldn’t stand spending ages plugging and unplugging every day when I brought the computer home, so I decided to replace it.

I had three requirements:

1. USB powered, I don’t want to plug in a power supply
2. Has audio input
3. The DAC chip can’t be too crappy
4. Has a headphone output jack

I looked through a whole pile of Chinese-made DACs and couldn’t find one I was happy with. The biggest pain is that they don’t have audio input, and they can’t be USB powered either—they all make you drag along a big power supply…

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I’ve had this feeling for a while now: Alcot is done for.

Looking back, Alcot’s peak was probably around the time of Clover Days. Their sub-label Alcot Honeycomb was doing well too, and Clover Days itself had the art advantage from the start. On top of that, other stuff like Spring Limited and the “ignore the future” sister-complex games carved out their own style. From any angle, it looked like they were about to take off.

But that didn’t happen. I don’t know the exact reason — I just heard Clover Days sold poorly and counted as a loss. After that, Alcot honeycomb’s later titles seemed to lose their soul, at one point they even brought in a landmine specialist to write the story, and their main artist left too. They put out LoveRec — honestly I think it’s okay, but it still got middling reviews.

And then it just kept getting worse. That mom-goddess whatever game Alcot put out last year — I couldn’t even be bothered to look at it. I couldn’t even find any reviews. It got completely treated like air…

Alcot’s own Twitter account posts stuff every day, and it all gives off this “company is going bankrupt, everything must go” vibe — it’s all Clover Days merch and other ancient junk. That feeling, man, it keeps making me think they’re about to fold any minute.

And so Alcot has a new title out this year, with the tagline “the proper sequel in the Alcot lineup.” I took one look and thought, yep, they’re really about to go under.

Because the last company that pulled this “true sequel” move was Lass, and they ended up putting out a “long-delayed true sequel” too, and then they croaked.

What actually bugs me more is — since when the hell does Alcot even have a “proper sequel” to anything? So your LoveRec was just a throwaway? Your Clover Days was fudged together too? Then I looked a bit closer and it clicked: they probably mean a proper sequel within that old “parody isekai half-sci-fi” series style of theirs. 《幼なじみは大統領》, Onigokko!, and 中の人などいない! are all roughly that style, and their later stuff seems to have drifted away from that direction. So this so-called “proper sequel” is basically just them going back to that original direction.

And so we got the title of the new game: Shogun-sama wa Otoshigoro (将軍様はお年頃).

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I personally recommend Kage no Umi no Apeiria because it’s full of surprises and genuinely novel. Unfortunately, despite all my hype, it seems the game didn’t sell well last year — apparently it couldn’t even beat some other game’s FD.

Still, Kage no Umi no Apeiria announced a sequel. Except it’s really just an FD, as you can tell from the title and cover art:

Kage no Umi no Apeiria Casablanca no Kishi — the suffix is “Casablanca no Kishi” (The Knight of Casablanca).

Normally, a fan disc gives you after-stories for the original cast plus new routes for characters who didn’t have one. That’s what I assumed Casablanca no Kishi would be, especially since the cover features those two side characters.

Calling them side characters isn’t entirely fair — they did interact a lot with the protagonist in the main game, and one of them is the nurse connected to another main heroine, Mashiro. But in the virtual world, they’re two female knights.

After playing it, though, I’d say this is less a fan disc and more an append disc.

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Last October in Beijing, when Fengniu Jushi Zhu Niubi treated me to guanchang at the Dongsi Minfang restaurant, he asked me a question:

“Your blog’s pretty badass these days, huh?” “Badass my ass. There’s exactly one badass thing about my blog.” “Where?” “Open Google, search for the keyword ‘妹ぱらだいす2’, and see who’s first.” “Search for what? Ichimoto… what?” “It’s Japanese!”

So I guided Zhu Niubi through searching “妹ぱらだいす2”, and after seeing the first result, even Zhu Niubi couldn’t help but marvel:

“Badass, badass, badass. Truly badass.” “Right? That’s the one badass thing about my blog, though I don’t know how to explain it.”

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Clockup is a company that often puts out “very serious” games, even though most of the time that’s not the impression it gives.

Because Clockup’s breakout work was euphoria, and I think you can figure out what kind of thing that game is if you look it up yourself. Ever since then, most of the games Clockup has released give off an impression of being “unvarnished.”

By “unvarnished” I don’t just mean the “directness” and “brutality” of the game content, but more the way they embody the characteristics of “18+” games. What is “18+” anyway? It’s adult content, right? And what is adult content? It’s not just pornography, it’s also violence. So these two elements get splashed around to the fullest in a lot of Clockup’s games.

Clockup has made a lot of nukige that express a lot of “erotic” intent, and at the same time it’s also made a lot of “story-driven” games that tell some very interesting stories. Of course, these stories don’t just have “eroticism”—they also have explicit “violence.” Even more absurdly, Clockup has also put out some baffling comedy nukige with a style completely different from its usual dark style. But all these wildly different games come from the same company brand, rather than doing what other companies do and spinning off a sub-brand to keep things categorized. It always feels so haphazard, which is exactly why I said at the start that Clockup always leaves you with some weird impression.

That said, you can’t deny that Clockup still puts out a good game with real depth every now and then. Not just the early Natsu no Kusari, which had a bit of an art-film vibe—Maggot baits from a few years ago was also memorable. It depicts a story of hope being born once again in an utterly hopeless world, yet the game is still packed with very hardcore erotic and violent elements. Those elements aren’t gratuitous; they highlight the game’s themes very well. The game never seems to compromise for the sake of avoiding “extreme” elements—whatever CG is needed, it shows. No beautification at all. Sometimes I feel there’s even a touch of “aesthetics of violence” in there.

Another game that reminds me of this style is DOOM. A lot of people have opposed violence. They’re all dead.

So the original team behind Maggot Baits got back together at Clockup and brought us Nenurenu Hitsuji to Kodoku na Ookami, still with a slightly dark style, which naturally made me look forward to it.

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Compared to the Sony DK60 charging stand, the iQunix Hima USB-C dock is a bit more reliable.

The biggest part of that reliability: it works even with a case on your phone.

That’s something Sony’s original stand just can’t do.

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A Singaporean company released a full-lamination, full-coverage tempered glass protector for the Sony XZ Premium.

Applying it is kind of a hassle, though—basically you have to fill the gap yourself with optical adhesive.

So I got to try it out, and the result is pretty damn good.

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If you ever need to talk yourself out of buying a new phone, you absolutely have to follow 「魔法师蛋小丁」 on X (Twitter). He’ll make you feel like every new phone out there is trash.

If you accidentally bought a Sony phone and don’t want to be looked down on, then you absolutely have to follow 「Zackbuks」 on X (Twitter). He’s the most steadfast of the remaining Sony fans—because a lot of them are acting real confusing these days, some even turning into Samsung fans or Miboys.

So to live up to the title of Sony fan, Zackbuks took matters into his own hands and made a case for the Sony XZP. To break the Banana back shell monopoly, and it’s cheap too, so I bought one.

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Every SAGA PLANETS game follows the same formula: individual routes scatter the pieces of the main story, then a GRAND END ties all the threads together and walks you to the true ending.

They’ve done this in several of their titles, from Hatsuyuki Sakura to Kisaragi GOLD STAR to Hanasaki Work Spring! and Floral Flowlove. Roughly: the character routes screw around, maybe drop a hint about the main plot at the very end, and only after you’ve cleared every route does the game unlock the entrance to the real story, the TRUE END.

Honestly the structure isn’t bad. It’s kind of interesting, it builds suspense. But it doesn’t fit every kind of story, and SAGA PLANETS has tripped over this formula more than once, or at least failed to deliver the payoff it deserves. Those games tend to be slice-of-life stuff with a weak main plot, where it feels like “we made a main plot because we need a main plot.” In other words, the route lock is completely unnecessary. It’s a moe game. You don’t need to force-hide a main story and a so-called “truth” behind it. When you finally see it you don’t go “oh, mind blown” — you go “that’s it?” Reverse effect.

In recent years SAGA PLANETS’ choice of premises has gotten less and less interesting. Last year’s Floral Flowlove was themed around “ojousama,” young ladies, which made it look like ENSEMBLE had possessed the company (and of course, in the end the story had nothing to do with ojousama). And when this year’s game was announced I felt the same way: it’s called Kin’iro Loveriche, and the theme is “blonde hair.” Every heroine is blonde. At first glance it looks like it exists to satisfy some specific fetish. I personally don’t like blondes, and I haven’t noticed many people who do (silver hair, I’ve seen people into that). Blond-haired men are never any good either. The whole thing felt kind of nonsensical to me — but based on my prior experience with SAGA PLANETS, this “blonde” had to be a decoy, and there’d be a GRAND END at the end, 99% unrelated to gold hair.

After finishing the game, I figure I was half right and half wrong.

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