“Why did it end up like this… A perfectly good moe nukige brand, just like that, dead…”

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I’m a seiyuu fanboy, and I know most voice actors don’t have it easy — plenty of them can’t make a living off it. But my working assumption has always been that voice acting is a job where, even if the pay is bad, most people keep the title for life.

Meaning: you might stop wanting to do it, you might take fewer gigs, but you don’t just come out and declare you’re quitting forever. Even when it happens, it’s rare.

And yet here we are with a retirement, and from a CV I actually remember: Shimura Yumi (志村由美).

In visual novels she’s better known as Inoue Hana (井ノ上花).

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I downloaded Koiken Otome (恋剣乙女) ages ago, heard the story was pretty mid, and never finished it. Then recently I was startled to hear that Shimura Yumi is retiring from voice acting for good…

Which reminded me that Inoue Hana is also in Koiken Otome, so I grabbed it to wallow in nostalgia for a bit.

So how is this game… yeah, exactly as expected, pretty mid. Not that it has zero bright spots.

Worth mentioning in passing: Koiken Otome has an FD called Koiken Otome Sainen (恋剣乙女～再燃～). My personal advice is to play both together, because if you only play the main game the story just ends on a wet fart…

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Honestly, the OnePlus 3 doesn’t interest me much, even though foreigners keep hyping it up overseas like it’s the best thing ever—to the point where I wonder if they’re all getting paid. Fortunately, there’s still one Korean who keeps trashing the OnePlus 3, saying it doesn’t deserve the flagship title at all, and that he wouldn’t recommend buying it unless your budget is really tight. That guy raised my opinion of Koreans quite a bit.

But this isn’t about the OnePlus 3 phone—it’s about the OnePlus sling bag. Some of you might know that when the OnePlus 3 launched, they also released a OnePlus sling bag. It looked pretty nice, but the price was a bit steep. What’s even dumber is that the first batch apparently required an invite code. I heard the OnePlus backpack was impossible to buy before too…

I wasn’t planning to buy this thing originally. It’s just that a classmate wanted one, said he was a OnePlus fan, had two codes, and asked if I wanted one…

After much deliberation, I still ended up chopping off my hand.

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Alcot is supposedly on its deathbed. First the pillar of the studio, illustrator Yushi Ninomura, up and quit — went home to play gacha games. So this year Alcot put out nothing but a cash-grab FD for LoveREC with a handful of new CGs, plus an even more blatant cash-grab, Clover Days Plus, which is just the HCGs converted to Emote. The Chinese patch shipped same-day, if that tells you anything.

But even if the main studio is finished, they’ve still got the sub-label Alcot Honey Comb, which tends to put out bolder stuff. I’ve played plenty of theirs — Shunkai Gentei, Mujikaku Mirai, that sort of thing — and this time we get something with a very different flavor: Satukoi Yuukyuu Naru Koi no Uta.

I say “different flavor” because most Alcot games give off a slice-of-life, comedy-heavy vibe. Genuinely sad ones are rare (not that they don’t exist — that Shinigami no Kiss thing at the start probably counts as sad too). So Satukoi Yuukyuu Naru Koi no Uta shows up waving the banner of “a romance between predator and prey.”

Everything up to here was made up. I can’t keep it going, so I’ll just be honest: the reason I’m playing a 2014 game is that I was bored listening to music on YouTube, heard the OP, thought it sounded interesting, and picked it up.

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Around November last year, ensemble (Ongaku-ka) put out a game called Koisuru Kimochi no Kasane Kata, and I thought it was pretty good at the time. The story is whatever, but there are so many characters that you’re bound to like at least one of them — picking a route and going through it isn’t a bad way to spend time.

So as everyone knows, Japanese devs are great at squeezing out surplus value. The moment something gets a decent reception, they’ll immediately crank out a sequel or an FD to milk another round of cash. Visual novel or Shirouto Zukan 7, doesn’t matter — if there’s confirmed demand, they’ll keep selling. On that front Japanese devs have even less shame than Baidu. So less than two months after release, ensemble announced an FD for Koisuru Kimochi no Kasane Kata, and the FD’s name is appropriately FD-ish: Koisuru Kimochi no Kasane Kata Kasaneta Omoi o Zutto. Forever overlapping feelings, or whatever… It finally came out last month.

The game isn’t big, only about 2 GB. Honestly I went in expecting the usual FD stuff — prequels, sequels, maybe a new hook. That might be because the ones I’ve played are things like Wheel Country and the Grisaia series. But really, an FD is basically an After Story: a forced extension of life for a story that already ended. For a character-driven game like this, an FD can only ever be garnish for the sex scenes. I was fully prepared to just skim through it. Didn’t expect this FD to actually have a few things that exceeded my expectations.

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A while back I repasted the X250 and strapped on an external cooler, but it still wasn’t enough. The main problem: temps still blow up when it’s docked.

Three reasons:

1. Broadwell runs hot as hell to begin with
2. The X250 has a single heat pipe, so the cooling is dogshit
3. The X240/X250 dock is badly designed and doesn’t account for thermals at all

Anyway, temps are exploding and I need to fix it, so I’ve got a few angles to attack from.

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I picked up a cheap colorimeter, so I figured I’d try using it under Linux. I expected no software support or a whole lot of hassle, but it turned out way simpler than I imagined.

DisplayCAL is the calibration software that supports Linux, and you just download it from the official site.

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Bought a Dell P2715Q monitor during JD’s 618 sale. This thing only has DP and HDMI. With my current setup, HDMI caps out at 4K 30 Hz, and 30 Hz is basically unusable, so a DP cable was mandatory.

I had some UGREEN DP cables lying around from a previous JD order, so I plugged one in. Big mistake. The moment I connected it, the PC wouldn’t turn on.

At first I thought the monitor was faulty, or that my GPU (an iChill 770 4G) couldn’t handle 4K. Then I tried a hot-plug and it worked fine, no problem at all. But once the cable was connected, the machine refused to shut down properly, and after shutting down it wouldn’t boot again.

After a bunch of testing, I figured out that with this DP cable, the PC just won’t boot. And when it does come back, Gigabyte’s “Dual BIOS recovery” message pops up telling me one BIOS is dead and it restored from the backup.

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One of the writers on Harumade, Kururu is a guy named Watanabe Ryoichi. His latest work is Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm, but before that he and his buddy Kio Nachi worked on a bunch of eroge, including some with seriously weird premises. I looked into it way back, and eventually noticed these works tend to share one thing:

They love a mindfuck twist. Right at the end they tell you the protagonists were living in a dream, or that the world wasn’t the real one.

One of the better-known Watanabe Ryoichi and Kio Nachi collaborations is Sukima Sakura to Uso no Machi. No prizes for guessing, that game ends with exactly that kind of reveal. Though the two weren’t the planners on that one, so who knows if it’s their fault.

Anyway, Harumade, Kururu is one of these two madmen’s joint projects. Why’d I play it?

Because the OP hooked me again, obviously.

Harumade, Kururu… the art’s got those twisted faces again, but it’s not the full NekoNeko Soft crew so it’s not a total disaster. According to the reviews on Chuuni Space, the game wins on story, and I’m a story guy, so I figured I’d give it a run.

That run took half a year. More precisely, I did the pre-OP and a chunk of the post-OP stuff first, then only recently finished the rest.

How do I put this… the story is genuinely insane, tons of imagination. But this game should not be… this long.

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