Kung Pao Chicken is a famous dish, and plenty of people love it.

But there are actually two versions of this thing. One is the northern version, the one that spread the widest—supposedly tweaked by Shandong cuisine. That’s the one you get with peanuts, cucumber, diced carrot, and the chicken itself.

What’s the original, then? The original is the Sichuan version. No extra cucumber or diced carrot, the chicken has to be thigh meat rather than breast, and the finished dish shows only chicken—none of that other stuff.

Of course I’m not making the original. Maybe next time, if I get the chance. After all, Sichuan and Chongqing are full of perverts and gays, and to show off my northern traits as a non-pervert non-gay, I’ll make the northern version of kung pao chicken.

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I figure a lot of people spun pens back in school.

I mean you at least imitated it, or tried it. In middle school I happened to see someone holding a ballpoint in his hand, gave it a flick with two fingers, and the barrel went dancing between his fingers. Looked sick. So I copied him. And of course the result was predictable: the useless thing spun less than 180 degrees across the web of my thumb before plummeting out of my hand.

But I wasn’t discouraged. Practice makes perfect, and spinning badly doesn’t get anyone pregnant, doesn’t hurt you either. Idle hands, so why not.

Over time my right hand, whenever it wasn’t writing, kept endlessly messing with the pen between the web of the thumb and the index finger. They say persist at something long enough and it becomes a habit. So one day in class I suddenly noticed my pen had dropped to the floor from a failed spin, and realized I’d been spinning for over 40 minutes without noticing. That was when it hit me: I’d picked up a bad habit called pen spinning.

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For something like visual novels, I’ve seen plenty of people claim they’re all about the story and don’t care about the art style. Yet 99% of the time, their avatars in ACG circles are still cute girls.

This isn’t surprising, really — everyone appreciates a pretty face. And for something like visual novels, which in the mouths of Sendai aunties sits not far from Adult Video, judging by looks is about as normal as it gets.

In other words, for a visual novel trying to boost sales and expand its reach, the first thing you need is good-looking characters. It’s rare to see a game with ugly-as-hell character art still sell like hotcakes — maybe Gakuen Handsome (学園ハンサム) counts as the exception?

So if a game’s characters aren’t drawn well, you can basically declare it dead on arrival. Unless the character has some long history and a massive fanbase behind her—but even then, you’re only fooling the diehard fans, and only a fraction of them at that. You won’t reach the “silent majority” of users, and what good is that? Definitely not gonna work.

So the first time I laid eyes on Kanojo to Ore no Renai Nichijou (彼女と俺の恋愛日常), I was dead sure this thing had to be trash.

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I’d been using the official Live Case from Google on my Nexus 6P the whole time, and honestly I was pretty happy with it — except it was sometimes slippery as a bar of soap.

The Live Case has its shortcomings, though: the top and bottom aren’t protected. If you, like me, sometimes shove the phone into the car’s phone slot, you’ll find out where the problem is — the edges get dinged up easily.

So I decided to swap cases, but I didn’t know what to get. Then I saw people on XDA recommending this thing… They call it a Bumper.

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BlueZ 5.43 has better compatibility with BLE devices and fewer bugs. Ubuntu Mate for raspberry 16.04.2 backported it, but the official release didn’t. Fine, whatever, guess I’ll just compile it myself.

wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/bluetooth/bluez-5.43.tar.xz
tar xvf bluez-5.43.tar.xz
cd bluezbluez
sudo apt-get install libusb-dev libdbus-1-dev libglib2.0-dev automake libudev-dev libical-dev libreadline-dev
./configure --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var
make
sudo make install

That should do it.

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Linux kernel 4.10 is out, and supposedly it brings a lot of improvements, so let’s take it for a spin:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:canonical-kernel-team/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install linux-headers-4.10.0-8-generic linux-image-4.10.0-8-generic linux-image-extra-4.10.0-8-generic linux-headers-4.10.0-8

A reboot should do it.

Then you’ll find VMware no longer works — the modules fail to compile again.

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Tsukikage no Simulacre was last year’s supposedly “free” “visual light novel”—and oddly enough, it’s rare for Japanese developers to label their own work that way. They usually just call it an eroge.

And just like that “free” game said at the end, it only told an incomplete story. There were a ton of loose ends, and the devs themselves said the free version wasn’t the point—the real deal was the project coming after it.

So what was that project? Well, look, the January eroge release schedule has a new entry called Tsukikage no Simulacre -Kaihou no Hane-, doesn’t it?

Right—that free version was literally just a “trial edition.” A demo, basically. The final version is this game.

Honestly, when you think about it, they just released a demo early, then put out the full game later. Dressing it up as “first we give you the free part, then the follow-up project” is the same old playbook.

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I’ve got a pair of Edifier Bluetooth earphones, and I’ve got more than one music player.

I recently started exercising again, so I dug the earphones out and started pairing them up… and now the question is: should the Bluetooth earphones go with the Walkman A35, or the FiiO X7?

First off, worth mentioning: the FiiO X7 added aptX Bluetooth audio support through a later firmware update — you can see the aptX label up top. The Walkman A35 only supports Sony’s own LDAC.

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Majo Koi Nikki (魔女こいにっき) left a hell of an impression on me last year, for two reasons: the story itself, and the way it’s told.

The structure is pretty intricate. First, there’s a timeline spanning hundreds of years inside the game. Then there’s a story-within-a-story setup—and the kicker is that the whole centuries-long timeline is itself a story inside a story. In reality, all those tales are just phantoms.

The ending made me want to curse someone out. The protagonist goes through hell to achieve a genuinely moving HAPPY END, and then the TRUE END drops a few lines telling you it was all fake, all just a story, and the real protagonist is trapped forever in the witch’s curse with no escape. A lot of people promptly turned on the scenario writer Shinima Yuu, calling him a bastard who’s out to screw players over again, blah blah blah…

Then, not long after the game’s release, a PSV port was announced: Majo Koi Nikki Dragon×Caravan. Along with the port came news of two new scenarios—one upgrading a heroine to a romanceable route, and a new chapter called “The Passionate Prince and the Little Dragon” (灼熱の王子と小さな竜).

I didn’t pay much attention at first, because for most PSV ports the extra content is irrelevant cash-grab filler. Upgrading a heroine? Seen it a million times—they just cobble together some story to force a route. So I ignored it. Until I saw a Japanese player’s review on ErogameScape that changed my mind. This person said the new PSV chapter wasn’t just random fluff—it was a completion of the original story. The Passionate Prince and the Black Dragon chapter apparently depicts what happens after the original ending, reaching the true conclusion.

That was both expected and surprising. Expected, because Majo Koi Nikki’s story clearly wasn’t finished—the protagonist was still trapped in the diary, so of course there had to be more. Surprising, because they actually finished the story in the PSV version.

So I started figuring out how to get my hands on it. First I waited for a crack, but unlike the PSV version of Shepherd’s Library, nobody dumped it. So I had to camp out on Surugaya for a used copy. Eventually I snagged one in good condition for a relatively cheap price. Not bad.

Back home, I dug out my long-neglected PSV, inserted the game card, hit the power button, and the game started again.

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I was going to make ehōmaki today, but Zhengzhou’s PM2.5 is at 400 and I don’t want to go outside. The leftover rice can only become fried rice.

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