A while back I saw someone on the HiPDA Discovery board recommending bootleg LEGO, saying this 78-yuan WALL-E was actually pretty good quality.
So I went and bought it on impulse, thinking I’d never played with LEGO before, might as well start with a cheap knockoff and see how it feels.
It arrived and I burst out laughing — theirs is LEGO, yours is Lepin. Though this “Lepin” is actually pretty famous in bootleg circles.
前一阵玩nukige太多了，然后nukige玩多了又玩了一票废萌キャラゲー，觉得自己还是应该回到“故事导向”的基本路线上来，搜了下看到了我个人非常喜欢的《紙の上の魔法使い》的脚本师的一个早期作品，叫做《運命予報をお知らせします》,简单看了下日本人在中二空间对它的评价，觉得应该没问题，也就开始玩了。
The game is supposed to be only a dozen hours or so, but it felt longer than I expected. I came away pleasantly surprised, maybe because it’d been a while since I’d played something with writing this good. It got to the point that after finishing it, I booted up the newly released Floral Flowlove (フローラル・フローラブ) and just couldn’t take the gap in prose quality between the two. The former reads like something a college student would write; next to it, the latter is straight-up middle-schooler level……
Anyway, probably because my Japanese has gotten better, I’ve started finding a lot of really dumb phrasing genuinely stupid — it’s not just about clawing my way to understanding the meaning anymore.
Tamagoyaki is apparently a simple Japanese dish; in China we just call it “yuzishao” — basically scrambled eggs. Except Chinese cooking is crude: crack them in the pan, stir, plate. The Japanese are fussier, so they insist on cooking the egg into a block and rolling it up…
I got into HookSoft games pretty early — back when I was still a virgin.
I remember the one I played was called HoneyComing. I actually found it on the school FTP out of boredom, and it was one of those green install versions with no translation.
I couldn’t understand the text back then, but the game did have a manga scanlated by Sumisora! I flipped through it out of boredom. Fortunately the setup was simple enough that after reading the manga, I could roughly follow the dialogue from the tone, the character sprites, and the occasional kanji. Something about an idiot protagonist taking a class on how to pick up girls at school… all that nonsense.
I do remember there was this one girl with a chopstick stuck in her hair who was pretty cute. I liked her. Can’t remember her name now — something-gaya, I think.
Anyway, I thought the game was pretty good at first. Mostly because the art was nice and the girls were cute. I wasn’t watching much anime back then, but this game really sparked something in me — activated my inner moe pig genes, I guess. Kind of nostalgic to think about. Oh, and it was definitely the 18+ version. First time I saw a girl gobbling down mosaic censorship, it scared the shit out of me so hard my dick got hard. Took me a while to calm down.
But time flies. Nearly ten years later, that virgin who first touched a Hook game has grown up into an old virgin. Really makes you sigh — Time flies, huh. Though I don’t know why my eyes are watering as I sigh…
So I switched to a 4K monitor a while back, and the old Ice Dragon 770 4G just couldn’t keep up with Doto 2 or Overwatch at native 4K. Overwatch was still playable, but from what I could tell it was rendering at 2K and upscaling to 4K — not exactly the pure experience I wanted!
So I figured it was time to sell it and get a new card.
Ubuntu 16.04.1 came out on July 21, 2016. I’d been complaining that Ubuntu 16.04 was basically an unusable release, and apparently the folks at Canonical felt the same way — when 16.04 launched they said they wouldn’t recommend 14.04 LTS users upgrade until the first 0.1 point release, i.e. 16.04.1, shipped.
Thinking about it is just painful. This is supposed to be an LTS release. Back with 12.04 I started using it from the alpha and never had a single problem. And this 16.04 ends up this unstable — no idea whose fault it is.
There are still two fatal bugs hurting Ubuntu 16.04.1’s stability:
One is the wildly ballooning memory usage everyone’s been reporting, possibly a leak:
Ubuntu 16.04 Unity desktop uses much more ram than Ubuntu 15.10 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1572801
The other causes unstable network connections — the laptop drops offline on its own after waking from suspend:
Not working network connection after boot https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/1434986
The kicker is that neither bug shows as fixed in the 16.04.1 release…
A while back I was scrolling through Twitter and saw Herkz—the guy who helped Sekai Project put out Grisaia no Kajitsu—posting some personal thoughts on the sequels, Grisaia no Meikyuu and Grisaia no Rakuen.
“Personally speaking, even if I had zero interest in the sex scenes, I’d still wait for the 18+ uncensored version. If you ask me whether the handful of new CGs in the all-ages version are worth it, I’d just say no.”
“Also, like I said on ask.fm, it’s not just the 18+ content that got cut from Grisaia no Meikyuu.”
Looking back, that comment is pretty interesting. First, it comes from a lead translator on the localization team. Second, that same translator realized the game he was translating was going to have content chopped from the final build for certain reasons, and then told the fans: he personally wouldn’t touch his own company’s castrated release and would wait for the 18+ uncensored version. Makes you stop and think. Is it really worth building a separate “censored version” of an already-released “complete uncensored version” just so you can sell it in more places? Or dropping a trimmed “censored version” on players while they anxiously wait for the uncensored one?
So here’s what happened. A few days ago I went for a run, it started raining out of nowhere, and the next day I got home and found the bass gone from the right unit of my IE80…
Thank god I bought the domestic version! Sent it in for repair.
After that I started seriously thinking about whether I should get a waterproof pair of sports earbuds. I mean, you’re not really chasing sound quality when you work out. After looking around, the best recent option seemed to be the Meizu EP51, so I grabbed one on Taobao for 150.
I honestly have no idea how to translate the title Yome Sagashi ga Hakadorisugite Yabai, because of that ヤバい in there. According to some Japanese department professor’s explainer article, writing yabai in katakana is a trend among young Japanese people, and it means the thing has the opposite meaning. やばい originally meant “oh no,” while ヤバい carries the same double-edged opposite sense as badass, meaning “so good it’s kind of alarming.” Honestly, translating this やばい as “insane” fits better, because whether something good or bad happens to you, you can just say “well, that’s insane.”
So at first Yome Sagashi ga Hakadorisugite Yabai should mean something like “the wife hunt is going so well it’s insane.” Then I played the game and realized I’d overthought it. Better not jump to conclusions about that やばい.
The Phicomm K2 router is a fairly controversial product.