The ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 runs on USB Type C power, so your average charger won’t cut it — it needs PD support.
Which also means that Type C port can take a power bank. Not a normal one, obviously. A special kind.
High wattage, PD charging and output. So are there any cheap-but-decent chargers and power banks that fit?
I refreshed Twitter and saw a post from Miboy Wu Lao’er, which reminded me of a brand: Xiaomi.
Since I started playing eroge I’ve eaten a fair amount of shit, and my standards have kept dropping. At this point I figure a game just has to tell one story without being brain-dead, draw the characters decently, and not have some Sendai oba-san for a voice actress — that’s a good game.
Fine, a “not-bad game.”
Japanese people like to call an unexpectedly garbage game a “landmine.” You go in hyped, the drop is enormous, it doesn’t just fail to meet expectations, it’s a turd — like stepping on dog shit, like hitting a landmine, you just explode. Pretty apt, honestly.
I haven’t played many landmines, to be fair. Maybe I just don’t want much, so I don’t expect much, and I’m easy to please. No matter how ridiculous a game gets, I figure it’s at least dumb in an amusing way, at least it’s got something.
Whether a game is dumb or garbage mostly depends on the dev team. Some games, I think the devs could’ve just played them once themselves and known what level they were at — no need to let the players judge, judging it themselves would’ve been enough.
One thing puzzles me though: some eroge are clearly made with zero care in every department. The dev team has to know it’s a slapdash rush job. And they still ship it and sell it.
In other words: you know it’s a turd, you put it on sale anyway, you won’t make money, you’ll only make enemies. Why insist on releasing it?
Today’s subject is a game called Aoiro Note.
Last time I expanded the GPD Pocket’s storage I went with the SanDisk CZ43, and honestly it felt like a waste of money.
Then in the comments, a guy called Maotou said there’s a Lexar USB drive that’s a bit better, and around the same time I saw a Japanese video on YouTube recommending that same drive for expanding the GPD Pocket, so I figured I’d give it a shot.
Turns out it’s way better than the SanDisk one.
Got bored of baking standard cookies, so let’s make something different — a knockoff Choco-chip batch.
Back when I played World of Warcraft, I’d always run into these “casual guilds.”
They didn’t have any strict raid schedule. Anyone could join, and the guild leader would help out the newbies a bit, and the atmosphere was relaxed. Every now and then they’d run a raid, but most of the time there were no rules at all — just people screwing around.
A lot of the hardcore players wanted the kind of guild with a rigid hierarchy and harsh rules that could push into better raids for better gear. They had nothing but contempt for the “casual guild” type. Most of them couldn’t wrap their heads around what the point of such a lazy, ambitionless guild even was. But the members of those casual guilds didn’t care. They just quietly lived their lives.
I’ve had my own hardcore phase too. I used to not get casual guilds either — until I got old, until I no longer had the time to dump into a game as a hardcore gamer, and I joined a casual guild, because no other guild would take me.
Once I was in, I understood. The guild looked like it was just “a tag for people who don’t have a guild,” but it wasn’t that simple. The core of a guild like that is almost always the leader. The leader is very likely a middle-aged guy — good-tempered, easygoing, doesn’t get angry. Because the guild takes all comers, the leader is constantly playing peacemaker.
Members might rub each other the wrong way, but most of them have no complaints about the leader.
Plenty of members leave when they find a new guild, and the leader wishes them well. Some people complain that the guild has no events, can’t down bosses, can’t get gear, and all the leader can do is apologize and say he’s useless.
For a casual guild like this, lose the leader and it’s done for in a heartbeat. But these leaders have a hell of a lot of willpower, and they always manage to keep the guild alive.
Once I was chatting with a guild leader and asked him out of curiosity: “Why do you pour so much energy into keeping a guild like this running?”
“A game is like society,” he answered. “There are always people out there who don’t belong anywhere, who have no home. They need something like a family to take them in, to give them a harbor that feels like home.”
I still think about that line a lot. It makes a lot of sense. Whether our parents are around or not, we always feel lonely — that loneliness of “nobody is here with me” — so we need something like a “family” to let us escape and rest for a while, a harbor for the heart.
That’s why you see people trying to do this in real life too — adopting orphans and whatnot. In fiction there are even more of these characters: the ones who take in lost children, the “hopeless good guy” setup, that’s everywhere. Like this game, Ouchi ni Kaeru made ga Mashimaro desu (お家に帰るまでがましまろです).
If you search Quora for “what headphones are good,” you’re bound to come across a brand called Superlux.
I’d never heard of this brand before, and probably nobody else had either, but there are just a ton of people on Quora hyping it up. Most importantly, it’s cheap—only 78 yuan, and shipping is fucking free.
A while back I stopped even going on blind dates, felt empty inside, and just started buying shit. I’d sworn off buying audiophile-mysticism products, but I just wanted to see whether Superlux was all hype or not.
Ordered on JD.com, said it ships from JD, but it still got third-party treatment. Anyway, it arrived. I listened to it for about a week, on and off. Not long, but I basically get it now—why people hype this thing, and why it’s so cheap.
Playing Blu-rays on Linux is a pain in the ass… but I got it working. The disc is the Japanese release of Kimi no Na wa (君の名は。).
