Telegram got an update, and the Linux build picked up a genuinely useful feature.

You can reply to messages straight from the notification.

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Meis Clauson dropped another disc, but this time he ditched Yuiko and teamed up with Rita, released under his own circle “The Root of heads”. I preordered it. Originally I was going to order through Toranoana, but they’re a pain about proxy shipping — they wanted my real name in kanji. So I write my Chinese name, and they tell me the kanji in my name don’t exist in Japanese. Bruh. Ended up going with Melonbooks instead.

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Canonical rolled out the Ubuntu Livepatch service for 16.04 users. As the name suggests, you no longer have to put up with that fucking “Reboot required” message every time the kernel updates.

Go here:

https://ubuntu.com/livepatch

Log in with your account, or just register one if you don’t have it.

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iQunix makes a tablet stand, and unlike every other tablet stand, it has no slots…

Just a bare flat panel.

So how exactly is this supposed to hold a tablet up?

The official line is some kind of adhesive coating… meaning the surface is packed with tiny suction cups, and your tablet sticks to it the moment you set it down.

I tried it with the Pixel C…

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I don’t know how other people chase that “immersion” feeling when they read a story. Let me just say what I think.

Most of the time, when I come across a story, I notice some plot point that mirrors something that happened to me. Maybe the ending lines up with a stretch of my own life, maybe it only shares the same beginning but not the same end, maybe some character reminds me of a friend or an acquaintance, maybe the protagonist is a lot like me, and so on. Whenever I hit a story like that, I start thinking about my own stuff. Sometimes I even feel a bit of regret or wistfulness because the story went differently than reality did.

That’s it.

Yeah, that’s all. I’ve never imagined myself as the protagonist. I’ve never imagined the girls the protagonist meets as my girlfriend. I might think a character is cute, but that’s it. Anyone who knows me has probably noticed: I’ve never called a game girl “waifu,” I’ve never said “XXX is mai waifu” or anything like that. I like a character because I like her story, her personality, the things she says. As for looks… come on, Japanese art styles are all basically the same handful of templates, and one artist’s characters all look mass-produced. Everyone looks the same. So personality and story carry way more weight.

One principle I hold: characters become full through their stories. And that’s not just true in fiction. In real life too, someone who’s been through a lot, who has a complicated past, naturally has a certain charm in how they talk and carry themselves. Hell, anyone can pull out some old war stories to impress people. Look at me, a washed-up old fuck, still bringing up the past to show off.

So I rarely look at standalone artist illustrations. On Twitter I might like an artist’s style, glance at it, share it, sigh about how cute or pretty it is, but I don’t save it. Sometimes I’ll use one as an avatar, but I switch it out pretty quickly—it feels kind of rude, somehow.

Right—without a story to prop them up, an empty character means nothing. Someone just standing there, and you don’t know their personality, their voice, their mannerisms—you know basically nothing about them. Saying you like them is almost empty talk.

I don’t collect character art, but after playing this many games, I do have a collection of sorts. Mostly game music. Same style as before: the game songs I listen to are almost always from games I’ve actually played through. Especially OSTs—when I hear a track, I remember the story and the characters in it. If I happen to hear a good song from some game, I’ll listen for a while and then pick up the game, wanting to see what story is behind that song.

So one day I heard “永遠の魔法使い.” I got curious. What kind of story produces a person who’s a jack-of-all-trades (八面玲瓏), who even with magic can’t grant a single wish and almost gives up…?

So I played “魔女こいにっき” (Majo Koi Nikki).

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This method is outdated. There’s a newer, officially supported way—click here to see it /archives/5013/

Yakkety (16.10) has been out for a while, but the official Ubuntu 16.04 repos still haven’t picked this thing up.

So I had to install it myself. Great.

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I’m an iQunix fan. Their stuff is generally good-looking, works well, and it’s all metal — hence the “aluminum factory” nickname.

Downside is it’s a bit pricey, but you just wait for a sale and then pounce.

This time I picked up a few of their small batteries, mainly to give to my parents. They need a power bank that’s really portable.

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The reason I bought this is simple: the ZX1 ran out of space…

Just a quick write-up on this thing; maybe I’ll go into details someday.

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I’m an Indiegogo backer. There’s a lot of story behind this thing, and I’ll get into it properly some other time.

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I’d always sat on a wooden stool.

But as the flesh on my ass got thinner and thinner, that stool started feeling genuinely awful…

So I decided to buy a chair. I looked at Quora, where people casually recommend 2000-yuan-plus stuff, and I’m curious — is that shit really worth that much?

Figured I’d start with something low-end and see how it goes. Ended up buying one for just over 500 yuan, the Sihoo M18. Someone on Reddit had done an unboxing, basically said the value was okay, only the armrests break easily. I thought about it — I don’t really use the armrests anyway, so if they break, they break…

The shop shipped fast. I assembled it myself once it arrived, done in no time.

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