I’ve been using the Moto 360 2nd for over a year now, and honestly there’s nothing to complain about — except the yellow blotch around the screen. I was hoping a new Android Wear device would come out this year so I could swap it out. Instead we got the LG Watch Sport and LG Watch Style. The latter has no sensors, and the former doesn’t let you change the strap. Both have the same flaws: short battery life and chunky as hell. Huawei’s new stuff wasn’t any good either. So I thought it over and decided to keep using the old watch. Besides, I’m not really dissatisfied with old products anyway…

Same story with the Nexus 6P, now that I think about it. Can’t afford the Pixel, other phones are hard to find with stock Android, and the OnePlus 3T screen isn’t 2K. I’ll just keep using what I have and call it saving money.

So anyway, the leather strap on the Moto 360 died on me again — almost a year of use — so I swapped in a new one. Cheap Taobao bestseller…

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Starting with Firefox 52, Firefox dropped all NPAPI plugins except Flash.

Which means you can’t use Alipay in Firefox anymore.

Sure, you could open Chrome. But if you hate Chrome like I do, there’s a way to work around it for now.

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A breakfast I stumbled on while randomly watching Japanese cooking videos on YouTube. Takes about 10 minutes.

Ingredients:

1. Sliced bread
2. Soy sauce
3. Eggs
4. Lettuce
5. Chicken bouillon

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One regret of mine: the game Mahoutsukai no Yoru never got an OST release.

Sure, you can extract the OGG files from the game, but those aren’t lossless—I actually ripped a set myself, just couldn’t be bothered to type in the names for the tags. I kept thinking an OST would come out eventually, and, well, you know how it goes. Years pass, the next game is about to launch, and the previous game’s OST is still nowhere.

The composer is Meto. This isn’t the first time he’s worked with the writer Rukuru, if I remember right—Unmei Yohou wo Oshirase Shimasu had BGM by him too, so did Mahoutsukai no Yoru, and the composer for Suisou Ginka no Istoria, out next month, is him again.

I don’t know if they’re doing it on purpose or what, but none of the games Rukuru and his crew work on ever get an OST release. Even Unmei Yohou wo Oshirase Shimasu was originally supposed to include an OST with the special edition, and then right before release they just… cut it. And Suisou Ginka no Istoria is only getting the theme song Azurite no Hitsugi as a bonus.

So I poked around Meto’s personal site out of curiosity and found he’s been composing music on his own all along, and he sells CDs of his own work right there. So I picked up the package versions to show some support.

(A few CDs in there are just gate-crashing, please ignore them.)

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I’ve made salad before, but only recently have I started getting slightly better at it…

Usually the ingredients are these:

1. A head of romaine. (Not regular lettuce — the little ball kind.)
2. Lean beef
3. Cherry tomatoes (I just like them, so sue me)
4. Cucumber
5. Boiled egg
6. Avocado
7. Black pepper

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Xuebi’s surname is Wang, and he’s the only son in the family.

By “only son” I don’t mean anything special—it’s just that he’s the only boy in this household.

Wang Xuebi’s mom runs an antique knick-knack shop, but she’s scary fertile. After popping out Wang Xuebi, she went on to have four girls in a row: Wang Asahi, Wang Sayo, Wang Mahiru, and Wang Yayoi. The four girls have completely different personalities, but they’ve got one thing in common—they inherited their mom’s genes, and each one is prettier than the last.

Of course, as the only boy, i.e. the only big brother in the family, Wang Xuebi looks… a little unfortunate. Probably because his mother spoiled him rotten, Wang Xuebi’s waistline has gotten another ring around it lately, and he’s about to need a custom belt.

His classmates all call him “fatty,” but Wang Xuebi doesn’t mind at all. He’s the eldest son, the only male—and more importantly, he has four pretty sisters. Even more importantly, all four of those pretty sisters are crazy about him.

Wang Xuebi has never interacted with other women. He’s got four knockout girls right at home—why go out and get stuck in traffic? So whenever his female classmates give him a look of disgust, Wang Xuebi fires back a look of contempt.

“Fatty, you’re so fat you’re dripping grease, it’s gross.” “I hear he’s a siscon too, always tangled up with his sisters.” “Last time Lin Xian, the guy next door to the fatty’s house, said he saw the fatso taking turns kissing his sisters! I almost threw up just thinking about it.” “Holy shit, for real?!”

The chattering girls can’t hold back this explosive rumor any longer, and their shrill voices get even more piercing.

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In college I heard a song. Jay Chou was huge back then… okay, he’s still not exactly unpopular, just not as huge as he used to be. I always assumed that song was by Jay Chou, because it sounded way too much like him…

The same slurred enunciation, the same pseudo-Chinese-style instruments, and most importantly, that nearly identical rhythm.

Plenty of people slur their words, plenty of people use Chinese-style instruments. What matters is that nearly identical rhythm. You could say all Chinese R&B is like that, but David Tao and Wang Leehom never sounded like that, right?

Later I found out the guy wasn’t Jay Chou at all. He was called “Hou Xian hoho” — yeah, with a “hoho” stuck on the end. I looked into it, and Hou Xian’s style was called “palace-mode R&B.” It’s actually a concept he came up with himself, describing how much ancient-style material there is in his music. Fair enough, honestly — he uses a ton of guzheng and pipa, the kind of thing Jay Chou and David Tao and Wang Leehom could never catch up to with their Chinese-style stuff.

I listened to a lot of Hou Xian’s albums in college. A guy in my dorm liked him too, so I ended up hearing a lot of it. Gradually I started to feel that Hou Xian really did have a strong style of his own. Meaning he wasn’t imitating Jay Chou — he genuinely had his own path. Some of the tracks were pretty good, and even the debut album wasn’t uniformly Jay-Chou-ish. Like I said, he used a ton of “imperial court” instruments to build the “palace-mode” R&B he wanted. For a musician, that’s already something to admire.

After that I stopped hearing about him. Then I went off to listen to Western rock, and after that JPop. Then a while back I heard that Hou Xian, after years of silence, had put out a new album with a whole new face.

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Whirlpool — I used to have a pretty good impression of them. Stuff like the old whale-fucking, the robot-fucking, and the early dragon princess-fucking, etc. etc. Feels like Whirlpool just loves playing with human-beast… oh wait, I mean human and mixed-blood. Maybe that’s just their style.

And so Whirlpool’s new game this year just popped out of nowhere, then out of nowhere it was out and on sale… I’d been thinking it wasn’t coming out until May…

The new title is Nekonin Exheart (猫忍えくすはーと), and the premise is dead simple: two cat-eared ninjas show up at the protagonist’s ancestral home, claiming they’ve come to serve as his bodyguards and retainers. That’s the setup everything else hangs on.

So I made a point of hammering these facts: the game itself only costs 2000 yen, and it’s only the first-press edition that comes with a hug pillow that runs 13000 yen.

See? Remind you of anything? Sound like the XXX no Seiiki series? Yep — this game is basically following that series’ playbook.

The appeal here is pretty clear-cut: short story, simple plot, good art.

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Everyone knows I’m not a moe-otaku.

Even so, I still look up to moe-otaku. Years ago — probably five or six by now — I was dead set on becoming one.

Back then I was still watching anime, and when it comes to the stuff that was big around then, it’s gotta be K-On, right? At the time the Bilibili homepage was still wall-to-wall muscle bro memes, so if you wanted to watch shows you had to go to Acfun. But Acfun’s shitpost section was full of K-On MADs — the Cagayake!GIRLS MADs alone were everywhere, completely out of hand lol… I listened to it so much I could sing it. So sometimes when I saw that crowd spamming “My great Kon!” over the song, I couldn’t help feeling a little like I didn’t get it…

There’s a reason I can’t wrap my head around it — I watched K-On! for real, seriously, but I just couldn’t keep going.

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So here’s the deal: LibreOffice has this feature where it supports OpenCL acceleration…

And you can’t turn that acceleration on, because odds are you never enabled OpenCL support in the first place. Even if you tick the box, it just turns itself back off after a restart.

To turn it on you need to install the required packages first, then Intel’s official driver, then edit a config file.

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