Kokoro ga Tsunagu Koi Shirube (ココロが繋ぐ恋標) came out last month. I wasn’t even planning to play it, but then I saw a Japanese review saying it was worth an “80.” And like an idiot, I believed them. By all appearances this is MORE’s last gasp: a shell company of a shell company of MME, a factory-line product from KATE. Word is MME disbanded right after this shipped. The whole thing reeks of LASS on its deathbed. Nothing about it says “quality.” But I saw Japanese players online saying the game has multiple routes, and that aside from the other routes being dogshit, the main Kokoro route is actually good. And like an idiot, I believed them again.

The Odroid Go is a handheld project built around a dev board that you assemble yourself. In theory it’s open source, and you could put one together entirely by hand. Of course, someone also sells you a finished kit, and I happened to catch it on sale, so I ordered one.

As someone who’s been out of the audiophile game for ages, I find the current enthusiast market kind of funny and kind of sad at the same time. Ever since I redirected the money I used to spend on headphones into buying music albums, I feel like my horizons have widened. “A ten-thousand-yuan IEM isn’t worth hearing ten thousand albums,” or something like that. At least I’m not like some grade-schooler on Reddit, buying insanely expensive IEMs just to listen to a music library that hasn’t been updated in years, flipping back and forth through the same dumb test tracks. Or running high-end gear to listen to doujin music produced in some low-end studio. That’s just unscientific. High-end audio gear really does work, sure. But for most people it’s useless, and for most audiophiles it’s also not much use — unless you’re a die-hard classical fan and love other large-ensemble music so much you refuse to listen to anything that isn’t a SACD from a famous studio. Then yes, high-end gear does work. But for most people like me, who listen to pop, occasionally some small-ensemble stuff, and just want to feel the charm of a melody — as long as the headphones don’t have that “boom-tss boom-tss” low-brow tuning and aren’t distorting or off-balance, that’s about enough. Yes, about enough. How do you know that the ten-thousand-yuan suit-and-tie stack you bought wasn’t used to listen to songs made by someone using a garbage 5-yuan USB cable? With that money you’re better off just listening to more music. So I’ve been increasingly abandoning wired gear and trying Bluetooth. The biggest advantage of Bluetooth is convenience. The biggest disadvantage is, naturally, sound quality. But with APTX and LDAC gradually opening up, Bluetooth has more or less reached the “listenable” stage. So I bought the FiiO BTR3 Bluetooth DAC/amp, two and a half months ago… Why did it take me this long to write up my impressions? That’s a long story.

I decided to buy a Pinebook at least a year ago, back when all the Linux news sites started covering it. Most of them called it “the $99 Linux laptop,” and sure enough it really does cost $99. But there’s nothing especially novel about it, because the so-called Pinebook is just the Pine64 dev board that was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, shoved into a laptop shell. There are already plenty of similar products out there, mostly “Raspberry Pi laptops”—a Pi stuffed into a laptop case, or a 3D-printed shell with a battery and so on. Let’s look at the main specs of the Pinebook first. 11-inch or 14-inch 1366x768 screen (11-inch is IPS, 14-inch is TN) 2 GB RAM 16GB eMMC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MicroSD card reader USB port, headphone jack, HDMI output Nothing impressive there, and none of it is what got me interested in the Pinebook. The biggest selling point of the Pinebook—and its biggest appeal—isn’t performance. It’s that it looks good. Yes, compared to the whole flood of similar “Raspberry Pi laptops” on the market, the Pinebook is drop-dead gorgeous. Combined with the fact that it’s not expensive at all, I decided to buy one to play with. It’s cheap, and Pine64 claims to be a more advanced 64-bit ARM processor than the original Raspberry Pi (back when Pine64 was crowdfunding, the Pi was still on gen 1, if I remember right). At the very least it should make a decent toy. But I never expected that from deciding to buy it to actually holding it in my hands, it would take me a full year and more. Once the machine arrived I played with it for almost two weeks. There were pleasant surprises and disappointments. Picking up shells on the beach, sorting out my thoughts, let me sum up the sweet and the bitter for you.

I wanted a phone to play games on. Originally I wanted a tablet, but it turns out tablets aren’t really an option anymore — Google went and released the Pixel Slate, so a big-screen phone was the only choice left. What I wanted from a gaming phone: Enough performance Strong battery life A large screen Decent feel in the hand No touch dropouts or connection drops As cheap as possible Xiaomi phones all seem to have that tradition of the touchscreen failing when it gets hot, Meizu phones all have connection drop issues, the Smartisan Pro 2’s build quality is a joke and the screen even lets water in, and there are plenty of MediaTek phones, but their performance is absolute garbage. Then I saw 360 phones were on special on JD. Took a look — the 360 N7, originally discounted by one yuan to 999 yuan, and paying with Baitiao knocked another yuan off, two yuan off total, so I got it for 998 yuan.

Whether or not you’re like me and couldn’t care less about the various works under Type Moon’s banner, you have to admit the same thing I do: The Fate series under Type Moon is the most successful visual novel ever made. What counts as success? It’s when a product’s fan effect is so strong that all they have to do is keep reheating leftovers to keep raking in money—where even some slapped-together spinoff with no real connection to anything is a cash-printing machine. If that’s not success, I don’t know what is. From 2004 to 2018, the Fate series has gone through two anime adaptations, a prequel novel adaptation, countless movie adaptations, and all sorts of spinoff games, spinoff manga, spinoff anime, and so on—all the way up to the current mobile game Fate/Grand Order, which still gets hordes of otaku throwing money at it by the fistful. Sure, the Fate brand has now spread into every corner imaginable, but I wonder how many people still remember that the Fate series started as a game—a visual novel, and an 18+ one at that. I know the thing was originally a novel by scenario writer Kinoko Nasu, and it got turned into a visual novel out of necessity to get it to market, but its debut was, in fact, in visual novel form. A whole world expanded out of a single visual novel, reaching the point it has now—if that’s not massive success, what is?

I was thinking about buying a phone to play games on lately. I’d been using a Xiaomi Mi Pad 4, and it’s not like it can’t run games, but that screen aspect ratio cuts off part of my view. When I play a turret-type mid-lane mage I just can’t keep track of everything, so I figured maybe I should just get a phone. At first I had my sights set on the Xiaomi Mi Max (first gen), since its specs are good enough, the screen is big enough, and the battery is ridiculous—it’s basically a handheld console. The second and third generations don’t even bear mentioning; the performance actually went backwards, even with bigger batteries and better build quality. But the Mi Max is obviously not something you can buy new. I found only eBay had them, so I went looking, and after digging around I couldn’t find a single one I was happy with. Ones in good condition were priced absurdly, and the reasonably priced ones were all crippled units. Then I thought I’d check out LeEco phones or Gree phones—hah, Gree phones are even more expensive, and LeEco phones are complete garbage… While I was hesitating, my good buddy, the Guo Degang of the medical world, a.k.a. Duan Ye, answered my prayers: “Master Li, there’s a Smartisan Nut Pro here that Luo Yonghao sold to idiots. Wanna take a look?” “If it’s sold to idiots, then how do you have one, Duan Ye? Don’t tell me…” “Cut the crap. Do you want it or not?” “Yes yes yes…” So I took the Nut Pro off Duan Ye’s hands and began my testing journey.

I’ve played a lot of games with interesting premises, and the one that left the biggest impression on me is definitely the one where a heroine turns into an alpaca. That game was actually pretty touching. The moe girl you love most turns into an alpaca—that’s the moment that tests whether your love is real. It’s worth recommending, too. Besides heroines transforming, there’s also the protagonist-transforms genre. The famous recent one is that game where the protagonist becomes a black cat. It even got an anime, so I won’t go on about it. This kind of game always produces a lot of comedy. It’s a comedy-grade absurd premise to begin with—the protagonist suddenly turns into another species, so of course there’ll be plenty of laughs. So this genre has a new member. More, the well-known rhythm game developer, has a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary whose brand got renamed—and that renamed brand, KATE, released its latest work: Koi wa Mofumofu! Love Me Teddy (恋はもふもふ!ラブ・ミー・テディ). Literally, “Love is Fluffy, Love Me Teddy!” Don’t bitch about why it isn’t “Love my teddy” yet—I looked it up, and “love me teddy” seems to be a reference to something. The premise is easy enough to explain: the protagonist turns into a teddy bear, gets taken home by several girls, and gets rubbed all over.

Growing up, every one of us ends up watching some… physiological, health-oriented, body-art, stimulating, videotapes. And among those… physiological, health-oriented, body-art, stimulating, videotapes, the most famous ones besides the female teacher, the flight attendant, and the OL are probably the prosecutor series. Most prosecutor-series films are about a female cop who, to fight the evil forces of darkness, infiltrates the enemy’s ranks, gets caught, gets tortured and humiliated… oh, sorry, disgraced, and then our unyielding heroine defeats the evil forces and completes her mission or whatever… Of course, this kind of educational plot isn’t only something you can see performed by Matsushita Saeko on videotape. We’ve also got the so-called “2D version” in the visual novel sphere.

Some guy with a screw loose once laid out the whole “old school” vs. “new school” thing. Of course, a guy with a screw loose doesn’t talk like a human being, so what he meant was Old School and New School. Put bluntly: “new type” and “retro type.” You see this pattern in other games, you see it in music genres, so naturally you also see it in the eroge space. Remember what the earliest eroge were like? You’d have a male lead meet a pretty girl, and after about two lines they’d start fucking, and then it was over. Same as what Carmack the Great said about FPS games: “The game is the porn, the story is superfluous.” The subtext: games exist to make you feel good, so why the hell bother with plot and authorship? If it doesn’t get you off, why the hell are you playing it? Normal games are already pigeonholed that clearly, so what about eroge? What’s an eroge for? So you can watch it like porn! So why the hell go through all that asinine setup and payoff? Just drop the pants and get to it!