I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this on the blog more than once—the story of the very first eroge I ever played. I was in sixth grade. I found it on a disc I’d bought called Recoil. It wasn’t even a compilation disc, just a single-game bootleg with a cover that didn’t list anything extra, yet somehow there were other games stored on it too. I can’t remember the title. All I remembered were the characters for “complete bloodsucking.” You’d open it and first there’d be two women doing yuri stuff, then the heroine meets the protagonist, and she suddenly starts going down on his pixelated crotch… and then it cuts to “that kind” of scene. Bear in mind I was in sixth grade. The most explicit thing I’d seen up to that point was probably some TV shopping channel ad for a bra. This was way too much for me. Right when I was completely losing control and about to keep watching, I heard footsteps approaching from somewhere in the house. I panicked and hard-rebooted the PC. When my mother came in and saw the blue disk-check screen, she thought it was weird, and I just awkwardly told her the computer had frozen.

A week ago, that well-known Linux kernel developer Mawei-kun gifted me this game. Oshi no Love yori Koi no Love (推しのラブより恋のラブ). Honestly I wanted Tryment, that reheated cash-grab, but Mawei-kun sent me this instead and hoped I’d walk through the gates of yuri. The game isn’t long, and after finishing it I fell into deep thought. Because this game made me think back on a lot of things… A lot of memories I’d almost forgotten…

Sometimes I stop and wonder how long it’s been since I last played a landmine game. Maybe I’ve just gotten more sensitive lately. One look at a game’s setup and I can tell if it’s shit, so I haven’t stepped on one since the second half of last year… But there’s one thing I can’t resist: the art style. If the art hits my tastes just right, I’ll overlook the landmine parts and be willing to forgive a whole lot more. And it’s not just me. According to a poll I ran on some dumbass social media site, over half the people said “a work with good-looking characters but a boring story” beats “a work with a great story but characters you can’t stand to look at.” It’s a shallow world, I guess. And I love Sesena Yau’s art that much. Even though one of her previous games was mind-numbingly dull, this time I fired up her new one without hesitation—even though I vaguely remembered seeing someone on Weibo tear it apart with a long screenshot post calling it garbage. The game is Natsuiro Ramune. And just like I said at the start, it’s a landmine. Sesena Yau drew another landmine.

Confucius, Jesus, Guang Liang and Shinjou Yuu all said it: “first love is infinitely beautiful.” Especially in Japan, a country with an especially deep complex about “初めて” (the first time), “first love” means a sweeter, more awkward, even slightly painful memory you can’t stop chewing on. “First love” is the first time someone’s heart stirs, the first time they taste what romance is, the first time they start to mature emotionally and learn the playbook. After going through it, a person might turn into a smooth operator or a cynical old hand who no longer gets moved by the simple stuff. Seen that way, first love really is precious.

During a matchmaking session with a music teacher, she asked me a question: “What was your youth like?” I have to say, there aren’t many questions in this world that can completely leave me speechless, but this one definitely counts.

Back when I’d just started university, I bought my first pair of in-ear earphones — an Edifier model, I think. Once I pushed them in, I discovered a whole new world. Over time, “earphones” came to mean “in-ears” as an unwritten rule. After all, if a thing can’t even isolate sound, it just sounds bad, and the lows and highs are hard to get right too. But people are fickle. Lately I’ve been fascinated by flat-head earbuds, because I dug out an old Creative Air, and its surprisingly wide soundstage caught me off guard. That’s when I realized flat-heads can do things in-ears can’t. There aren’t many high-end flat-heads, and even if there are, they’re hard to track down. Luckily, Beyerdynamic Earbuds happened to put out an entry-level model, so I gave it a try — and it felt like discovering a new world again. How to put it… that slightly wider soundstage, bass that isn’t too cramped, paired with full mids, really gives you a different feeling when you listen in the dead of night. Of course, I said the dead of night, because the weak spot of flat-heads is that the isolation is terrible.