Back in middle school I read all kinds of web novels, so naturally I ran into power fantasy and harem stuff. Power fantasy needs no explanation—the protagonist shows up, is insanely OP, plays the pig to eat the tiger, and sometimes doesn’t even bother playing the pig and just instakills heaven, earth, and the entire world. As for harem novels, I stumbled on those later; I’ve always thought Chinese web novel romance is pretty terrible, but the “harem” tag in Chinese web fiction really does mean a true harem. The protagonist has several girls around him, and every single one of them is totally fine with him having other women, and they all coexist harmoniously…

That’s not weird at all, though—you’ve read The Deer and the Cauldron, right…

After that I got into the Japanese “light novel” thing. Japanese light novels also have power fantasy and harem stuff… it just feels completely different from the Chinese version.

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Recently I messed around with the GPD Win. Bought it to play games, but somehow everything I actually play on it is pixel art.

First off, Taobao has skins for the GPD Win now — only one seller, though. My initial thought was that it should fix the GPD Win’s ugly-as-hell looks.

Except this skin is a “beta version,” just like the seller said.

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The plan was sautéed fish slices. Recipe still from Xiachufang.

Things went fine at first — marinating the fish, getting the ingredients ready, that sort of thing.

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Pointless, restless tinkering — I had some of that “carbon fiber” sticker sheet lying around (I honestly doubt it’s real carbon fiber).

Searched online and the method looks simple, but it’s also a pain. First cut out a rough size, then trim bit by bit with a sharp utility knife.

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The thing people shit on the Walkman A35 the most has always been the unresponsive touchscreen.

And it’s not just the A35—Sony’s WM1A and even the WM1Z have the same problem. So Sony recently pushed firmware 1.20, and the changelog explicitly says it improves the touchscreen experience.

After updating, the touch feels instantly smoother. Silky, even.

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Last year — no, the year before that — I played a game called Ten no Sora Retrospect (天ノ空レトロスペクト). I actually thought it was pretty good at the time. It fizzles out late and gets muddled in the middle, but the opening was solid, it made clever use of the infinite monkey theorem for a genuinely fun premise, and a lot of the scene transitions in the prologue had a bit of a cinematic feel.

But Japanese players didn’t really click with it, apparently. The reasons were the same as for a lot of games I think are good but Japan doesn’t: most of them said “what the hell is this, how could the world be made by monkeys, how could some monkey bang out Shakespeare on a typewriter, why would a god in the sky have anything to do with monkeys, it’s a mess, bad review.” So yeah, I really don’t get these Japanese players sometimes. It’s like how I thought that game about raising a Canadian goose and flying with it was good too, but they gave it bad reviews because “raising Canadian geese is a crime.” Under the infinite monkey theorem, there could be infinitely many possible worlds that monkeys banged out by pure chance. They refuse to accept that setup, but they’ll happily accept something even dumber like the world ending tens of thousands of years ago. A lot of Japanese called Ten no Sora Retrospect a “denpa game.” Honestly, go call the “Kisetsu Kururu” series a denpa game first. What I really can’t wrap my head around is that the latter outdoes the former by about 20 Chaos;Childs in both chuuni and sheer insanity, and yet it got tons of praise. Some people say Ten no Sora Retrospect reads like a chuuni kid’s embarrassing old novel. If that’s a chuuni’s embarrassing old novel, then the “Kisetsu Kururu” series is toilet paper from a psych ward.

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Saw a recipe on YouTube a while back, figured I’d give it a shot.

Turns out it’s a massive pain in the ass to actually make.

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Solaar is a Linux device manager for Logitech’s Unifying Receiver peripherals. It is able to pair/unpair devices to the receiver, and for most devices read battery status.

Installing Solaar on Ubuntu is easy with a deb file, but that build is a bit out of date and missing plenty of new features. So I’d just install the latest version from github manually.

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My Microsoft Designer mouse that I’d used for two years finally kicked the bucket… so that gave me an excuse to buy something. Decided to keep the old MX Anywhere 2 for portable use and get a big one for home, and the target was locked on the MX Master — after all, a whole bunch of people call it “the best office mouse.”

Grabbed it cheap on Taobao. Feels fine, honestly, even if the warranty is only one year; replacing the switches on Taobao isn’t expensive either.

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The electric toothbrush I was using before was the cheapest Oral-B you can get. I used it on and off for almost half a year, but I always felt the vibration just wasn’t satisfying enough. I even figured that’s probably just how electric toothbrushes are.

Then the thing broke a while back, so I started thinking about buying a good one. Originally I wanted the Philips DiamondClean HX9352 — it had dropped to around 900 RMB on Amazon UK at one point, and JD had a promo recently where you got one free with furniture, so you could pick one up on Xianyu for around 800.

But when I posted on WeChat Moments that I was going to buy this toothbrush, my ex (sort of, I guess?) said she wanted one too. So I figured I’d just give her the DiamondClean and, since I couldn’t afford a good one for myself anymore, settle for the second-tier HX6711.

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