Bought this because my old Microsoft Bluetooth mouse kicked the bucket, and there was a coupon on JD. A guy at work wanted one too, so we combined the two for a 599 - 120 coupon and each walked away at 360 yuan. Not a bad price.

Once it arrived I realized there’s nothing really special about it, since I already had the first-gen MX Anywhere on hand, and the second gen is almost identical in shape to the first — only the materials differ. Feel is about the same too; the main upgrade is Bluetooth support, and three Bluetooth devices you can switch between.

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Every month there’s a visual novel that gets pushed hard. Neko-Nin exHeart (ノラと皇女と野良猫ハート) a while back, last month’s Wagamama High Spec—that whole “buy the sales numbers with money” school of release. Except Noratoto was actually good, and Wagamama rode a full-court marketing blitz to outsell ISLAND and Chaos;Child last month. So apparently in the visual novel market, if you’re willing to push, you can still move a respectable number of copies.

This month’s most-promoted title is probably Seiken Tsukai no Meidai (聖鍵遣いの命題). I kept seeing news and updates about it in Dengeki Hime every time I turned around, but oddly enough, very few Japanese readers had anything nice to say after the demo dropped… I got curious and looked at the setting, and it’s kind of RPG-ish, but it doesn’t really reek of landmine either. The OP is genuinely great—there’s even proper animation—so clearly they spent real money on this thing.

By all logic, a game made with real money shouldn’t get torn apart too badly unless the story pulls some spectacular self-destruct maneuver. So I decided to trust in the quality and went and played it.

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I don’t really need a mobile router that badly, but even so I still take one out now and then. I got a plan that’s decent enough, and I’ve been using it for a fair while.

The router I had before was a TP-Link TR761. It’s actually got a lot going on — a screen, indicator lights, all that — but here’s the thing… inside it’s basically an Android system…

Yeah. If you dig into its update firmware, you’ll find it’s really just a modded Android phone.

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A while back I was reading some anecdotes on a blog by someone claiming to be an eroge industry insider, and I came across this line:

つまりシナリオとは発売後に作品を支える要素であり、昔から初動の売り上げにおいてはイラストの方が重要であった。

(A game’s opening sales mostly come down to the character designs and art style; the scenario is just one element that keeps a game going after release.)

And then an even better one:

だから打ち合わせでは「キャラとイチャイチャしていれば話の中身なんてなくていい」と本当に言われるし、「○○先生に原画を担当してもらえる時点で売り上げは確保できているから、シナリオなんてクソにならない限りどうでもいい」とさえ言われてしまったりする。

(So at planning meetings people really do say things like “as long as the characters are flirting with each other, it doesn’t matter if the story has any substance,” and even “the moment you’ve got Sensei XX doing the original art, sales are guaranteed, so the scenario can be whatever as long as it doesn’t turn to shit.”)

Of course, none of that beats this one:

ゲームの傾向も変わってきていて、２００４年頃は「エロなんかいらねぇシナリオの質が重要」なんて一部で言われていたりもしたが、今企画会議でそんなことを言おうものなら袋叩きにされる。 理由は簡単で、シナリオを重視した作品よりもキャラクター性を重視した作品の方がグッズの売り上げがいいからである。

(The direction of games has shifted too. Around 2004 some people were saying “who needs the ero, what matters is the quality of the scenario,” but if you said that in a planning meeting today you’d get the shit beaten out of you. The reason is simple: character-driven works sell more merch than scenario-driven ones.)

Man… what can you say? That’s just how it is, I guess?

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I picked up this HP 39Gs calculator on Taobao for 10 yuan, for the reason… I honestly don’t know the reason. Probably because it was cheap. You can install apps on this thing — originally meant for extending calculation methods, though of course someone eventually made games for it.

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Cooked again — last week was spent at a wedding in Luoyang, after all.

This time the results were salted egg braised tofu & salt-and-pepper shiitake, recipes from Xiachufang.

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Some post on the forums hyped the Etymotic MK5 as a 2000-yuan IEM killer. It costs about 370.

You buying that? I’m not.

So I had to listen to it before I could decide.

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I keep asking myself one question: when is Lashi-sha gonna croak.

Then last time they shoved out some half-assed cobbled-together nukige, and instead of dying they went and opened a new label.

Lass Pixy, dedicated to putting out Lashi-sha’s pure-love stuff. Like this new one, Pure Marriage Akai Ito Monogatari, all about pure love and brides. Completely different from that ninja training thing they did before.

Then I looked closer. The game has three heroines, and the first release is titled “Pure Marriage ~Akai Ito Monogatari Madoka-hen.” They’re selling it split by heroine? Price is cheap at least, a bit over 1,400 yen. Cheaper than some singles.

What does that remind me of? Isn’t there some X no Seiiki?

Probably eroge just don’t sell anymore, and eroge companies are having a rough time of it, so everyone’s trying the low-budget, sell-in-pieces approach. Not just Feng—Frontwing is doing the Neko-para thing on Steam, and there’s light’s Four Seasons lie series. But do the math on Lashi-sha’s plan: three heroines, and the whole game still ends up cheaper than the usual 9,000 yen for an eroge. I know Lashi-sha is dying and flailing. At that price, can you even break even? Make any money?

So out of curiosity I played it. And after playing it, I understood. I can tell you responsibly: this piece of crap from Lashi-sha really would recoup its costs with more sales. It’s cheap as hell to make.

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There was this weird new show in the April anime lineup called Wagamama High Spec. The Chinese title got rendered as something like “Wagamama High-Spec” — the thing has almost no content, runs incredibly short, and makes absolutely no sense to watch.

Turns out it’s an eroge adaptation, and the game hadn’t even come out yet when the anime started airing, so it’s basically a promo ad for the game. Whether it’s a short-form anime or not doesn’t really matter.

At the end of the day, what this thing is worth comes down to the game.

A while back I saw someone saying DOOM was going for a retro route. I don’t buy that. DOOM just went back to the essence of games — that’s not retro, that’s what games should be in the first place.

Speaking of retro, I’d say Wagamama High Spec is closer to a kind of retro — a retro of eroge.

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Picked up another Chromebook recently, off Taobao. Probably some factory leak or whatever. An Asus Chromebook Flip, the ARM CPU version. The upside is obvious: IPS screen, 1280x800, convertible, touch, long battery life.

The last Chromebook I bought got sold off. Reason being I never actually used Chrome OS — I wiped it and installed Ubuntu the moment it arrived. It felt exactly like a ThinkPad, and a worse ThinkPad at that, so what was even the point.

This time I decided to actually give Chrome OS a fair shake. Problem is, I’m in mainland China. For certain reasons this thing is obviously not going to be as smooth as in the US, there’ll be plenty of hurdles — though that was the story around 2014. How is it now?

Answer: not bad.

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