We’ve always said the Japanese have an island mentality.

What does that actually mean? It has two senses. One is the textbook island mentality — a reluctance to take in culture from the outside world. The other is the one we toss around online when talking about Japan, which is sort of the opposite but comes from the same root: the feeling that you’re on a tiny patch of land with no resources and no long history, squeezed on one side by America and on the other by a rising China, with things not exactly peaceful at home either. So you’re always on alert, feeling like you’re at rock bottom in the dark, on the edge of being ruled by someone else, and you’d better be ready to suffer.

Honestly that sense of crisis is correct. The old saying goes, “Born in adversity, die in comfort.” Which is why the Japanese work so hard — and at least on that count, I’d say it beats China’s habit of being woken up from its “celestial empire” daydreams by a slap across the face.

But “island mentality” isn’t a nice word. It’s distorted, a little forced, and a little delusional, and it shows up in Japanese culture and all sorts of works. You’ve seen it in anime — Japan gets colonized, Japan needs a revolution, Japan gets surrounded like livestock, the world ends with Japan at the center. Etc. Etc. (I’m just talking off the top of my head. I didn’t name Guilty Crown, I didn’t name Code Geass, and I certainly didn’t mention Attack on Titan.)

And by extension, of course there are visual novels that display the same mentality. Like the one I played this time… From the Future Undying.

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PSV is jailbroken now!

Not that it does me much good. I’ve had the PSV for nearly five years, and I only remember it exists when a game I want comes out. Heard about the hack, looked at the list — bruh, it’s still the same handful of titles. Had no idea what to play, so I just ignored it…

But! I found out someone dumped the PSV version of The Shepherd of the Great Library (大図書館の羊飼い)!

Jailbreak jailbreak jailbreak!

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I’m not really a fan of “guns, cars, and balls” games—I find they get old fast. After all, run-and-gun always boils down to the same few formulas, so even during the years when CS was huge, I didn’t play it for long.

If I had to name what I genuinely enjoyed playing the most, it’d be Chinese RPGs. Like everyone else, my first was the Xianjian series. Before RPGs I never read the story — the run-and-gun stuff wasn’t translated back then anyway, but it had GPS-style navigation: open the map, follow the route, kill whoever you run into. RPGs don’t let you skip the story, though. It’s a narrative, and no walkthrough is gonna sit there and recap the plot of every game you’ve played the way I stupidly do.

So starting with the “Xianjian” series, at first I was mashing Enter to skip every conversation with anyone in Yuhang County, until I got to Suzhou City, where I started actually reading the story properly. Bit by bit I settled into it, and felt the pull of “game plot” for the first time. Of course you can’t say the “guns, cars, balls” games of that era had no plot — it’s just that games back then didn’t say much about their plots. How was I supposed to know that Delta Force 3 Land Warrior had a cute little sister character named Mako who nearly got killed off… the game didn’t mention a damn thing about it.

What I’m actually getting at is this: riding that wave of Chinese RPGs, I started playing games “as stories to read,” and somewhere along the way RPGs drifted apart from the whole “guns, cars, and balls” crowd. The latter chases a “rush”; the former chases a “read.”

Chinese RPGs had a golden age once. Plenty of them, even now, could wipe the floor with a lot of Japanese visual novels — China’s history is longer than Japan’s, after all, and there’s a lot more material worth showing off. Even if the cultural climate on the mainland keeps getting worse, at least the Chinese-speaking world still has Taiwan. The Xuanyuan Sword (轩辕剑) series counts as a pretty unique presence in Chinese-language RPGs: it was the first to fuse “history” with “mythology,” and the side stories in particular weave “emotion” into the mix.

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arc-flatabulous is a fork of the famous Arc theme. The author tweaked the colors in a few places and changed the button colors so it looks more like MacOSX (huge doubt).

Same as installing Arc-Theme, you need to delete the old stuff first, if you’ve installed it before. (Skip this if you haven’t.)

sudo rm -rf /usr/share/themes/{Arc-Flatabulous,Arc-Flatabulous-Darker,Arc-Flatabulous-Dark}
rm -rf ~/.local/share/themes/{Arc-Flatabulous,Arc-Flatabulous-Darker,Arc-Flatabulous-Dark}
rm -rf ~/.themes/{Arc-Flatabulous,Arc-Flatabulous-Darker,Arc-Flatabulous-Dark}

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First off, thanks to the people who cracked the PSV. Yeah, it’s not exactly ethical, but I’m genuinely broke. I’ve bought a pile of PSV games by now, so let’s call it even on the guilt front. Next, thanks to the person who dumped this game. Without that legend sharing it, a cracked PSV would mean basically nothing. And last, thanks to the driver who posted the link: Eric Sitounel. Without his tip I would’ve assumed nobody had dumped this thing at all…

The game I’d been wanting to play was this one, because it has an additional route and a new character voiced by Ari Ozawa: Ichinoe Kingyo. I got it downloaded and the PSV cracked in a hurry, and since I’d already played the original Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai and the FD too, I went straight for the new heroine.

How do I put it — way better than I expected. Quick impressions.

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A while back I had the Mojo modded and hooked it up to another computer as a DAC, so the laptop has been without a portable DAC lately. Figured I’d pick up something cheap as a replacement.

The requirement was to get charge-and-play working as much as possible, instead of the Mojo dying on me every other minute.

And the bar for sound quality isn’t that high either — just needs to be a real step up from the laptop itself, ideally without too much hiss. Obviously none of this compares to the high-end demands of mystic audiophile tycoon Wu Lao’er, who runs desktop amps straight into Xiaomi hybrid IEMs — the very setup that pulled him out of the Philips fan camp and got him hooked as a proud Miboy.

Given my lowly requirements, I thought it over and went with a Japan-import CYBERDRIVE USB DAC.

This CYBERDRIVE USB DAC thing is made by a Taiwanese company, ran a crowdfunding campaign on JD.com, and went for 240 or 300 RMB there, can’t remember which. Claims to be USB-stick-sized and decode DSD.

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What we think of as curry today probably isn’t what it originally was — the Japanese just improved on it… or rather, completely changed it.

Japanese curry is basically stew ladled over rice at this point.

So I figured I’d give it a shot.

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First off, to use Vulkan on Linux you need an Intel or NVIDIA GPU. I’m not sure about AMD — it probably works too.

On NVIDIA, you need the latest 370-series driver before Vulkan support can be enabled.

If you don’t have the latest driver installed, use the official PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-370

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Haven’t cooked in a long time. It’s been a while.

Recently I’ve started trying to handle the whole shopping-and-cooking routine. Picked up shrimp at the supermarket — actually a “green peas and shrimp” combo pack — and also grabbed okra, cherry tomatoes, cabbage, and cucumber. The last three are for a fruit salad.

The weather was nice today, so I made the shrimp and the okra.

The okra is dead simple: chop the garlic, drop it into medium-hot oil, stir it around, take it out. Make a dressing with light soy sauce and a spoonful of sugar. Blanch the okra in boiling water for 1 minute, and after taking it out you can run it under cold water to make it crisper — I didn’t, because I forgot.

Then plate it and pour the dressing over. Done.

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As a total novice in the audiophile mysticism scene, I inevitably had to go consult a master.

So I tracked down Wu Lao Er. Wu Lao Er is the ultimate veteran audiophile — he knows more mystical buzzwords than TFBoys has released singles.

I asked Wu Lao Er if he could recommend any earphones, preferably comfortable ones, for lying in bed.

“Xiaomi Circle Iron.” Wu Lao Er didn’t even hesitate. “Xiaomi Circle Iron, the ultimate endgame pair. Buy it and you’ll be as free of worldly desires as I am… oh right, what do you listen to?”

“I don’t really listen to music. I’m mainly buying them to listen to eroge.”

“Then you should want the Xiaomi Circle Iron even more!” Wu Lao Er’s voice went up. “The Xiaomi Circle Iron… the vocals are forward, the mouth shapes are big, sibilance is low, the soundstage is wide but controlled, the mids are fairly tight, leans warm, and there’s a whiff of rosin to it. Perfect for a vocals person like you.”

“But my budget is only… 20 yuan.”

“What the hell are you gonna buy with 20 yuan, you dumbass? You gotta add some money!”

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