I bought my mom a Xiaomi Mi Band 2, so her old optical heart rate Mi Band landed in my hands. I tried wearing it on my right wrist, since my left one already has a Moto 360 2nd.

Honestly I wasn’t expecting much from this thing. I even installed the pairing app on my backup Nexus 5X. My demands were low — mostly I just wanted to see if it could track my sleep quality, and whatever else it did, whatever. Since it has an alarm function, I set an alarm on it identical to the one on the Moto 360 2nd.

The original band strap was disgustingly filthy, so I swapped on a spare yellow one that came free when I bought the thing.

Read More

I never had a lamp by my bed, just this thing that looks like a Shift key and glows when you press it. I used it as a desk lamp, more or less.

Unsurprisingly, it died pretty fast. It cost 10 yuan, so whatever.

So to imitate the sheer flex of my personal idol, that miboy Wu Lao’er, I figured I had to buy a lamp. Can’t afford a fancy one, so I went cheap, and it turned out the Mi Home LED desk lamp was actually in stock. So I bought it.

Read More

I bought a Mi Robot Vacuum because my room gathers way too much dust—the kind where you leave your phone out overnight and wake up to a layer of dust on the screen.

I tried sweeping once a day, but it still wasn’t enough, so I figured I’d get a robot vacuum.

I looked on Quora and couldn’t afford anything they recommended, until I was scrolling X (Twitter) and saw that creep Wu Lao’er’s avatar, and thought, why not just follow Wu Lao’er and buy Xiaomi stuff?

I assumed the Mi Robot Vacuum would be hard to snag, but it turned out to be in stock on the official site… so I placed an order. Ordered in the morning, and EMS delivered it that afternoon. Damn impressive…

Read More

I’m a person with some integrity.

Mostly this shows up as my OCD. If I say I’ll do something, I’ll finish it, and if I don’t finish it I feel guilty, worried someone will call me out and roast me over it.

Taken a step further: if I’ve opened the full release of a VN, I won’t drop it. One day I’ll finish it, no matter what.

Note I said “full release.” Translation: if it’s just a trial version, yeah, I can absolutely bail.

Magical☆Dears is one of those games I left sitting forever… one of many…

Read More

I figure everyone’s got a dream, but it keeps shifting with age and circumstances.

The very first one we ever had—aside from those endless dumbass questions teachers ask, “what do you wanna be when you grow up”—was probably always school-related, deep down.

A buddy of mine, Crab Boss, his dream was to open an internet cafe right across from the school.

“I’ll open a net cafe right across from school, rig it with the sickest machines, run the sickest membership perks, pull in the sickest kids, and piss off every last one of those dumbass teachers.”

Crab Boss really loved hanging out at net cafes back then. Hmm… sometimes he’d drag me along too.

Another friend, Tao-san, his dream was to bang every woman on earth.

Read More

Everyone step aside, I’m telling a story again! This time it’s in parts!

Read More

October was a shit month. I spent almost all of it revising a dumbass thesis.

Short version: my workplace recommended me for some graduate program. Two years passed, and now it’s time to graduate, which means writing a thesis. Except the topic wasn’t even my choice — someone else picked it, and the content is dumb as hell. The kind where you look at the title and immediately know it’s just flexing with zero substance. Fine, flexing is flexing, it’s not like I’ve never written a bullshit paper before. But after I turned it in, the review crew started howling: “This content is kind of meaningless, isn’t it?”

Yeah, I know it’s meaningless, thanks. If you’ve got a problem with that, go yell at the idiot who assigned me the topic!

Read More

Not long after Corona Blossom wrapped up, Vol.2 got announced. Not really a surprise — the series was billed as three volumes from the start.

The funny part is that Corona Blossom launched in Japan a month after Steam, meaning Steam got it first. Same for Vol.2: a visual novel with a Japanese release slated for November, and it hits Steam ahead of schedule. Gotta hand it to them.

Vol.1 didn’t score well on ErogameScape. Most of the complaints were that the story doesn’t go anywhere, the slice-of-life is boring, splitting it into volumes is shameless, etc. And honestly? Fair. These days if your eroge doesn’t have a shrine maiden with a deep grudge, or an idol restoring a fallen nation, or a cursed katana you can bang, or a train module you can bang, who the hell cares? Standard developments are played out. A lump of metal falls from the sky, goes duang, and turns into a cat-eared girl — light novels were doing that ten years ago. All tropes, bruh.

Read More

There are a few ways to type kaomoji on Ubuntu. Let’s start with input methods — Fcitx’s “Jiong Lian” input method has a fairly unique approach to kaomoji.

You can install a standalone table:

sudo apt install fcitx-table-emoji

Read More

No idea what those Japanese eroge developers were smoking this year, but most of this year’s new releases felt like… a huge step backwards compared to before.

From Hinakami Clover at the start of the year, through all the weird stuff in between — Sakura no Mori † Dreamers with its strong opening and weak follow-through, Kimi to Yume Mitsu which was so baffling it made me sick, even the well-received Maitetsu had that self-indulgent political show dragging it down, and Saga Planets’ new game had a creative final ending but couldn’t hide how boring the common route was. August I can’t even be bothered to talk about anymore. The more I think about it, the worse it gets. Every so often I genuinely want to see if those double-standard Japanese would dare to review-bomb this game below 80.

Broadly speaking, the story-driven games have all clearly regressed. Not a single one gave me that from-start-to-finish high like smoking weed. I had to go back to older games to numb myself. Every time I play a new story-focused release it just feels like getting shit smeared all over my face.

Read More