dBrand is a sticker brand from Canada.

Sure, you can find plenty of skins on eBay, but dBrand’s advantage is pretty obvious: the fit is exact.

They do ship to China, but it’s a hassle. By default they send via postal envelope, which means once it’s out the door it’s a black hole and you just wait. My first envelope went a month with no word, so I emailed dBrand to ask. They shrugged and said they’d send another one, this time by DHL. That second one hasn’t arrived either. DHL tracking showed it went to Germany first, then got sent back to Canada. God knows what the hell happened. Then out of nowhere, a surprise: my first envelope showed up.

Yes, the one that had vanished. The courier said, “We were about to return this thing when we realized the address was in pinyin. Took us forever to translate it before we could deliver.”

Pinyin. You had to translate pinyin, you morons?

Anyway, it arrived.

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Recently I hooked my ThinkPad up to a dock and ran dual monitors, and the thing kept spiking to 90°C at the drop of a hat. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I decided to do something about it.

The mod went two ways: repaste the thermal compound, and add external cooling.

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When Onii-chan, Kiss no Junbi wa Mada Desu ka came out, I looked at it and thought, holy shit, this looks familiar. First off, the title. It’s the exact same sentence pattern as Onii-chan, Migite no Shiyou o Kinshi Shimasu. I looked it up — same planner, one of the same artists, and a good chunk of the same voice cast. Only the company is different. I remembered Galette’s siscon series… no, wait, its family series. The next entry was supposed to be Onii-chan Teacher, and this Onii-chan, Kiss no Junbi wa Mada Desu ka thing is by Tinkle Position. Yeah, that company name, read out in katakana, is uncomfortably close to “chinbo.” Their mascot is literally a yellow dick with a smiley face. The promo and the premise gave me wall-to-wall déjà vu, and the gimmick is basically the same head-pat setup from Onii-chan Teacher, except now it’s kissing. So I played it out of curiosity. Not because of the premise or the content. Trust me.

So how is it? All I can say is this game made me start reflecting on my life.

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Windows To Go is one way of installing Windows onto a USB drive or other removable media.

Generally speaking, with USB drives you either buy one that’s Windows To Go certified, or you go with some third-party method off the internet.

I tried the third-party route. It worked, but it’s not reliable, not stable — a couple of upgrades and it’s probably dead. In the end I just bought a Kingston with Windows To Go certification on eBay. For the list of certified products, see Microsoft’s official page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_To_Go

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A while back I saw BBM and that dumbass Takeshi in a Discord server talking about buying TOMY die-cast cars. Looked them up and turns out they’re not even expensive, so I grabbed a few.

Short version: the build quality is nothing special, but the paint job is shockingly good. Says Made in Vietnam too — wonder if the ones made in China also have paint that’s gone to shit.

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After sorting out HEVC playback, I ran into a new problem: playing this stuff in VLC is laggy as hell.

Did some digging and found a few pretty depressing results.

1. HEVC needs hardware decoding to guarantee absolutely smooth playback and low usage.
2. My CPU is Broadwell, so hardware decoding is rough, and on top of that it’s a Linux environment — rough on top of rough. Put simply: not supported.
3. The libraries VLC’s support calls into need at least Ubuntu 16.04 to basically work, and I just rolled back from 16.04.

So is there no way out? Of course there is — just switch players.

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Last week was my first time making these. Sticking to my plan of doing it at least 5 times, this week was round two…

Plating looks a bit better than last week:

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The reason ISLAND caught my attention is that everything else releasing around the same time was way too easy to read.

I was going to say those other games were “boring,” but Wagamama wasn’t really that boring—it’s more that most titles, just from their intro blurbs, obviously aren’t going to pull anything unexpected.

So ISLAND came charging out with tags like “all ages,” “story-driven,” “high-end foreshadowing payoff,” and announced an anime adaptation not long after reveal.

For someone who loves plot developments, that should be unmissable. But after a long and frankly painful playthrough, I realized it wasn’t the kind of game I imagined at all.

Not that it’s bad—if anything, the rigor of its plot is taken to some kind of extreme. It’s just not for me. Maybe the EVER17 / Steins;Gate time-loop crowd will eat this up.

In other words, there aren’t many game types I hate, but one of them is exactly the kind of development ISLAND pulls. So no, this game didn’t give me even a little joy. Only pain.

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Play enough visual novels and eventually some questions start nagging at you. Stuff like this:

“What the hell kind of setup is this? Is the scenario writer an idiot?” “The earlier part was written well enough, so why the hell does it suddenly turn to shit and go full retard in the back half?” “Why is there such a forced, moronic turn of events? You couldn’t write this even if you thought with your asshole. This is a mistake not even an elementary schooler’s essay would make, okay?”

That’s why I’ve got plenty of complaints about a lot of the stories in these games, even though they’re mostly decent. Right now visual novel plots always feel a bit off—like movies from mainland China. If one can just tell a complete, coherent story, you should be thanking your lucky stars. Usually it’s good up front and then tacks on a dog’s tail of an ending; the better ones just flip that around.

A while back I played the trial version of August’s new game, Sen no Hatou, Tsukisome no Kouki (千の刃濤、桃花染の皇姫), and my feelings about it are… complicated.

I usually don’t write impressions for trial versions, but recently I read a pretty interesting blog that covered some behind-the-scenes stuff about eroge production and development. Looking at it alongside this August game, I can’t help but feel a bit of déjà vu…

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I used to cook, back when I was still in school.

All things considered, it’s been years since I last cooked anything, and even back then I didn’t do it all that often — so starting again now is basically starting from zero. Anyway, I’ve decided to stop being a useless lump and pick the cooking skill back up.

The rough plan is to nail a few basic dishes first, then go after the harder stuff. If the everyday stuff works out, I’ll try desserts.

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