Ehoumaki (ehoumaki) is a food from Osaka, Japan. Personally I think of it as a big fat sushi roll, the kind you don’t cut. Around February 3rd you face the “eho” direction and eat a whole one, and you’ll have good luck next year.
Of course “eho” means the direction of “eho”… basically the lucky direction. Which side is lucky I don’t know since I’m not Japanese, I’m just here for the ride.
Following up on last time, I made fish-fragrant puffy omelet a whole bunch of times.
All of them failed. Not in the flavor department — the flavor was fine. The problem was that it wouldn’t puff.
So I stopped forcing it and just made fish-fragrant scrambled eggs.
I watched the Spring Festival Gala over Chinese New Year. Actually I’ve always watched it. I don’t know if it’s genuinely getting worse every year, but from where I’m sitting it’s definitely gotten less interesting — I can’t remember a damn thing from it anyway.
A few days later I went back and watched a couple of the performances on YouTube, and they seemed… fine? At least there was something to them.
And today I’ve already forgotten those too.
Why? Setting aside the political bits and the self-congratulatory propaganda, some of the song-and-dance numbers, skits, and crosstalk are decent enough. While you’re watching you might catch a joke and think “oh, that’s clever,” or “that’s pretty funny.” Then it ends, and there’s nothing “gripping” about it, and you forget the whole thing.
Basically: not terrible, not great, no real highlights, and not much heart in it either. You watch it, you laugh, you forget it.
Some games are like that too. Like this one — Kimi no Hitomi ni Hit Me (キミの瞳にヒットミー).
Salt and Pepper Fried Shiitake — I made this once before and it basically failed.
Simple reason: the batter I mixed was way too thin. This time I learned my lesson.
A crowdfunding product I stupidly backed last year. The JD crowdfunding page probably has a fairly detailed writeup.
And as I said a while back, the company had no real intention of crowdfunding — they were just using it as a presale. Plenty of KOLs had already reviewed the thing before the campaign even finished.
The box was actually pretty decent when it arrived.
I’ve bought plenty of cheap earphones — the Edifier H293P, the Amazon Fire Phone stock earbuds, the QianShui 39, the QianShui 25 — and they all broke.
Yeah, all of them. Some cracked, some snapped, some got mysteriously eaten away by liquid. Not sturdy at all. My main use for them is leaving a pair by the bed plugged into my tablet. I don’t listen to music, I just game with them, so you could call them sleep earphones. But these things just don’t hold up. The only two that survived any abuse were Apple’s EarPods and the Xiaomi Hybrid.
That said, the EarPods sound kind of muddy and don’t seal that well, so the ones I actually used most were the Xiaomi Hybrids.
Right, the original Hybrid that sold for 99 yuan. My verdict back then was it’s not as bad as people say — it’s at least a proper hybrid driver, and the sound is passable for games.
Then my dad asked me for a phone — he had a Redmi Note 4 — so I ended up giving him the Hybrids.
But out with the old, in with the new. I happened to see Xiaomi had released a Pro version, so I just bought it. That was back in November last year.
Waiting, waiting, and at last Spring Festival arrived — and with it, the long-awaited release of the Astraea no Shiroki Towa FD!
Astraea no Shiroki Towa was probably one of the first untranslated games I ever played, and it left a hell of an impression on me. Three things stood out above all:
The music! The effects! And Nitta Emi!
Then Yoshizumi Hina retired, which left any follow-up to Astraea no Shiroki Towa stuck in limbo forever. But FAVORITE isn’t about to pass up a chance to milk a sequel, so pretty soon we got an FD for Astraea no Shiroki Towa with a recast VA — namely Astraea no Shiroki Towa Finale -Shiroki Hoshi no Yume-.
Sometimes I think about this: so many scenario writers in Japan do original drafts for anime and games — are they just mass-producing the same thing over and over?
…………I mean, whatever a given writer puts out, doesn’t it always follow one pattern no matter how you look at it?
Code Geass, Guilty Crown, Valvrave, and the latest one — what was it called? Kabaneri?
I’m not saying Ichiro Okouchi is bad; the man won a best screenplay award, didn’t he? I’m talking about visual novels — whether some writers end up reusing the same套路 across multiple games.
I noticed this pretty early on. For example, the Shiiba route in Yuzusoft’s Sanoba Witch overlaps heavily with the Riru route in Kujira Kami no Tiastila, which came out not long after. I don’t know if that’s Tota’s doing or just coincidence. But a “competent scenario” shouldn’t have the problem of “can’t adapt, only ever writes one path” — otherwise you’re just showing how tapped out you are.
But man… for Hoshi Koi * Twinkle… I don’t even know what to say anymore…
Late last year I saw a webpage someone had shared on my feed, and it told me something shocking…
Popular Software (大众software) ceased publication back in 2017, and the final 2016 issue was running a crowdfunding campaign on Modian.
What shocked me wasn’t that Popular Software was dying. It was… “didn’t it already die back in 2014?”
If you’re any good with a search engine, you can easily find out that back in 2014 Popular Software had already announced it was closing. Later reports suggested it existed in name only. I didn’t keep following, and I’d always assumed Popular Software was dead. Now I was being told it was still alive — and before I could even be happy about that, I was told this was the last issue, and it was about to really die. I couldn’t help feeling conflicted.
As you’d expect, I backed the crowdfunding campaign and got the final issue. When it arrived, I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed.
I’d set up libinput for my touchpad before, but it came with a pile of problems, so I ended up going back to it recently. Writing down the config process.
sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-libinput