A few days ago I saw someone on Reddit (r/visualnovels) recommending this game. It’s a visual novel on Steam called Doki Doki Literature Club!. Of course, when it was recommended I noticed the tag: Psychological Horror. I could sort of guess what that meant. This game, made by non-Japanese gaijin imitating a Japanese-style visual novel, looks all harmonious and beautiful on the Steam page, but inside it’s probably a scam. There might be some “depressing” elements in there.

“Depressing” — how depressing can you get? The heroine suddenly dies, suddenly loses her head, suddenly goes yandere, suddenly chops you up. That’s about the limit. At most it’s blood splattering all over the screen. What haven’t I seen? So curiosity made me download this free game and click “Start.”

After a thrilling adventure, I repeatedly confirmed that the game had really, truly “End"ed, and only then did my heart settle back down. I let out a long sigh…

Let me shamelessly brag for a moment. As a forever-alone otaku who’s been single since 2013, who’s too old to find a partner and keeps failing at arranged dates, I’ve played nearly several hundred visual novels over these four years and written over a hundred impression posts. For a while I was playing visual novels almost indiscriminately. Among them were plenty with crazy plot twists and horror content, but I was immune to almost all of them. Even that Sakura no Mori † Dreamers with evil spirits all over the screen, Honoakari no Toki no Hate Yori with blood-spraying zombies everywhere, the sudden hanging in Midori no Umi, the dismembered limbs in Hakoniwa Logic — all small stuff. Games like Clockup’s are even more whatever. I just smirk, completely unfazed.

Out of all the games I’ve played, only two actually scared me. One was the sudden decapitated-head CG that pops up in 3days. The other… is this game. Doki Doki Literature Club!.

There’s only one reason it scared me: it was sudden, way too sudden, no preparation whatsoever.

Looking back after finishing it, I can say clearly: overall, Doki Doki Literature Club! is not a romance sim. It’s more like a horror game.

Yeah, don’t be fooled by all the promotional material or the people in the comments saying how interesting it is. This really is a horror game. At the start it repeatedly emphasizes: if you have a weak mental constitution, don’t play; if you’re a kid, don’t play; if you’re a scaredy-cat, don’t play. That sentence is serious, not a joke!

I know a lot of young folks can’t handle even a little “cruelty” in a visual novel. I’ve seen people get spooked by the music in Hatsuyuki Sakura, people devastated because the little sister dies in Kami no Ue no Mahoutsukai, people who can’t take how tragic the mermaid princess is in Suisou Ginka no Istoria, and people who want to mail razor blades to Niijima Yuu because the heroine in a story-within-a-story doesn’t get a happy ending in Majo Koi Nikki. For those people, stay the hell away from this game. It is not a romance game. It’s a horror game, a horror metagame in the same style as Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi.

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Visual novel anime adaptations have been in a rough spot lately — so rough that barely any new ones get made. We had Aokana a while back, then only Wagamama High Spec, and that one turned out to be a short-form affair. The long-rumored Island adaptation is still MIA. But eventually we did get a new one:

Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart (ノラと皇女と野良猫ハート)

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Honestly? I’m a fan of Nanaroba Hana. Yeah, she’s got some black marks in her history, but I’m still a fan. I’ve always felt that when a female artist draws girls, there’s a kind of charm that male artists just can’t replicate—a sort of “cuteness” that only a girl can understand. So Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro. was naturally on my radar. It got delayed a bunch of times, a trial version came out, I played it, and I felt… weird about it.

How should I put this—Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro. is put out by QUINCE SOFT, a subsidiary of Lump of Sugar. Quince is a fruit, a very peculiar one with a complicated “don’t just bite into it” nature. The reason the sub-brand is called QUINCE SOFT is probably that Lump of Sugar wanted to spin off that whole line of “somewhat playable, complex games” into its own label. What do I mean by “somewhat playable, complex games”? I mean stuff like Unmei Senjou no Phi, Magical Charming, Rensou Relation. Games that aren’t just simple branches but have a ton of complex choices. Honestly, I like these kinds of games. But for Mono no Aware wa Iro no Koro., it’s a bit too complex.

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Kernel Linux 4.13 is out now, and you can install it through the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:canonical-kernel-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-generic-hwe-16.04-edge

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I went to Beijing a while back, and took the chance to buy a few things.

First up is ZMI’s latest USB-C charging cable. It’s a decent cable, braided, and the best part: the plug has a little white light.

I know ZMI isn’t the first to come up with this, but it’s there and it works well enough.

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For Mid-Autumn Festival I made a few cookie gift boxes and gave them to friends, including the ones I met up with in Beijing.

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It’s CD show-off time again.

I bought quite a lot this time, and it’s been a while.

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The Thunderbolt 3 dock I was using before was Dell’s TB15.

And that dock had one huge problem:

When you use it to drive dual 1080p monitors, one of them will likely go unstable and black out, either because the dock itself overheats or for some other reason.

The only fix is to pull the dock’s power cable, plug it back in, and wait for the damn thing to reboot or snap out of it. Then the problem goes away temporarily.

Yes, temporarily. It’ll blow up again soon enough.

If you’re only running a single display, you’re probably fine. But I couldn’t put up with it, so I threw more money at the problem and bought the official ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 Dock.

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While everyone else was eating chicken, I went with shrimp.

This isn’t my first time baking shrimp in the oven, but this time I went with something more direct: fresh shrimp, marinated straight up, then straight into the oven, with a sauce on the side. Tastes pretty fresh.

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I’ve been playing some visual novels lately, but I keep getting sidetracked… ended up digging around for gossip about them instead.

Did find some good stuff though. Two stories, both pretty interesting — one from other people’s discussions, one from the developer’s own leak. Writing them down here for anyone who cares.

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