So-called “stress relief toys” are basically the kind of thing that… serves no real purpose in your hand, but always gives you something to do. The big stress relief toy before this was the fidget spinner. Its influence spread worldwide: foreigners hated it, China banned sales, teachers loathed it. Still, I thought it was pretty satisfying. Recently I bought another stress relief toy, this Flipo Flip.

A girl at work wanted to buy a Xiaomi power strip and dragged me along to hit the free-shipping minimum. I saw this thing, so I threw it in. 9.9 yuan.

Probably thanks to the massive reaction to that little fidget cube thing, more and more toys that “look useless but keep your hands busy” are hitting the market. The most typical recent example is this thing: the fidget spinner. Fidget spinner, as the name suggests, is a top you spin between your fingers. Simple construction, clean look. Hold the center pad, find a way to get it going, and that’s it. It really does spin more easily than your average metal disc—feels super smooth. If you get the force right, you can keep it going for several minutes without stopping. Right now fidget spinners come in two main shapes: two-armed and three-armed. Shape doesn’t change the game, though…

The last time I put together a model kit was in elementary school. I remember it was a ship, and it looked hideously ugly. The rest of the time I was playing with Mini 4WD cars, and those are so modular I don’t think they really count as models — you can knock one together in a few simple steps. Guro is something a small toy merchant makes himself, and apparently there’s intellectual property involved and all that. I saw it was a limited sale at the time, so I put in a preorder. It arrived last November, and when I got my hands on it and took a look… Holy crap, over 200 tiny parts, detailed down to every joint. Then I looked at the assembly instructions and my whole body got drunk. So it got shelved. Today I finally finished The Witch’s Dinner Party and felt sick to my stomach, so the only thing left was to assemble a model. I saw someone on X bragging that they finished assembly in 15 minutes. I can tell you that guy is absolutely full of it. It took me almost 3 hours…