The CDs arrived a bit late this time, so this post is late too.

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AMUSE CRAFT seems like a pretty based company — at least they’ve got several pretty goated game brands under their belt, and a few pretty goated artists willing to work with them, plus they can pull in a lot of famous industry names, Shinjima Yū included.

Oh right, this company also loves to open new brand aliases for no reason. Weren’t both of Shinjima Yū’s works released under new aliases that got thrown away after one use?

So this time they’ve opened another new alias called CRYSTALiA, and very pretentiously announced that the codename for this new game is: Katana, which means “sword” in Japanese.

So the full name of this game codenamed “Katana” is this painfully cringe “Kizuna Kirameku Koi Iroha.” I don’t even know how to translate it into Chinese properly — something like “shining bonds sprouting love,” I guess.

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I’ve bought a fair amount of iQunix stuff, and this time I picked up their cheapest product: a laptop stand.

It can double as a cooling cradle for a laptop, but my only use for it is to put the laptop on it, next to the Dock. That’s it.

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The ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5th couldn’t use its TrackPoint under Linux at all. Plenty of people were discussing the problem, but nobody had actually fixed it.

Then a while back, with the X280 and X1 Carbon 6th entering internal testing, the issue finally got some attention, and it got solved.

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A while back I was mulling something over:

Which visual novel actually delivers a romance experience closest to the real thing?

If I’m forced to answer, the first thing that pops into my head is a game from a company called SMEE.

Yeah, SMEE and HOOKSOFT are basically the same outfit. They bill themselves as focusing on “romance by stages” — the whole hero-meets-heroine, gets to know her, falls for her, and then, uh, conspires with her… wait, no, marries her kind of flow. That’s what they say on the tin, but the games themselves don’t always look that way.

How to put it — a lot of SMEE games feel like gag routines strung together through everyday life. Early on, Fureraba Friend to Lover wasn’t that blatant about it. But later stuff like Pure×Connect and Step Kanojo started leaning harder into comedy, using exaggerated presentation to sell the heroines’ quirks and the protagonist’s snark. Sometimes the protagonist himself turns into a total creep just so you have something to roast.

SMEE’s comedy path keeps veering further off course, though. Last game, that “country love” one, was basically a joke collection — the heroines had no personality, the art was unsettling, and I had a genuinely painful time playing it. Listening to Honda-san’s country ojou-sama rattle off scatological jokes one after another, plus bits about a bunch of people observing sperm… I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The confession at the end was cookie-cutter and half-hearted, and it wrapped up out of nowhere.

Personally, I prefer the style of early SMEE like Fureraba. There the conversations center on “getting to know the girl,” most choices are about communicating with her, and many of the women feel close to real romance — especially Mochizuki Rina and the vegetable-selling senpai Sawatari Misaki. That’s why I say SMEE’s games are closer to real love.

And now SMEE is back with a new title: Making＊Lovers. Still about the player searching for a partner, still that witty, chatty style. They even put out a super simple preview version first — a few minutes of dialogue per heroine, nothing you could really judge. A trial version came later, but I couldn’t be bothered since the game was about to launch.

After finishing the retail version, I have to say this is probably SMEE’s second-best game in recent years, after Fureraba.

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「博物杂志」 is a magazine in the National Geographic family, but what’s more famous is its Sina Weibo account — that thing knows literally everything.

So when they dropped the 「Panda Gun Gun」 gachapon series for Double 11, I grabbed some.

How’d it turn out? See for yourself:

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The Pilot Iroshizuku line has a certain flex to it, I think. Especially good for writing things that need to look like they have some flex.

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When I bought my Surface Pro 4, it already had a pretty bad screen-lifting problem. The build quality on everything back then seemed shaky, so I figured I’d just wait until the warranty was almost up and send it in.

And wow, time flies. Two years gone, just like that.

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I’ve written before that for the OnePlus 5, the official protector is what I recommend. And for the Sony XZP, Banana’s soft film.

Problem with soft film is it deforms easily and gets dirty fast — you’re basically replacing it every month.

Which is when you start missing glass film. Shame that glass film on this thing always leaves a white edge. Sure, there’s white-edge oil, but it doesn’t last — two weeks tops and it’s gone, time to re-oil. And the stuff in those bottles really does seem to be just plain oil. Completely unreliable. Then I saw someone on XDA post a video of a fully transparent, fully laminated glass protector for the Sony XZP.

And that’s when I noticed: the lamination process uses “optical adhesive” as the filler. It’s liquid going on, and sets into a semi-solid — way more trustworthy than oil.

So I went looking for someone on eBay selling it, and what do you know, I found a seller offering liquid optical gel for white-edge repair.

Tried it right away. Works well. Thicker than your average white-edge oil, but it still seeps into the edge just fine — a little pressure with your finger is enough.

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Qie Ting Qin Yu (且听琴语), also known as Pure Hearts in the Catfight Music Scene (juan), tells the story of an artsy but uncultured vagrant of unclear sexuality who successfully infiltrates a music school in a seaside city — a city that has Chinese chengguan and American gay bars, yet everyone speaks Japanese, so who the hell knows which country it’s in; probably some no-name island in the middle of the East China Sea. There he proceeds to chase girls and act unhinged.

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