A while back I was listening to a podcast from Aifou, and one line stuck with me: “I think the most impressive thing about Lei Jun is that he can push prices down so low that nobody else can match him.” In that context, judging by the standard of “pushing prices down,” Lei Jun really is impressive. Whether it’s Xiaomi or Redmi, they’ve definitely driven down the price of a lot of things. But is that what “impressive” really means—driving down the price of something expensive so it sells cheap? Shouldn’t it be the opposite? Isn’t it far more impressive to take something worthless and sell it at a very high price? By that standard, the “Big Monster Block Bluetooth Earphones” are a very “impressive” product.

This isn’t the Pixel Buds 2 that I broke by messing around with it, so I figured I’d find a replacement. The requirements were pretty simple: Supports wireless charging. I can’t stand plugging in a cable every time — it’s just not elegant. Long battery life, and sound quality that’s acceptable. Native Fast Pair support. The more native the better. So I set my sights on the very lifestyle-y Nothing Ear 1. It had just launched in black, so I found a Macau proxy buyer on eBay and got a brand new one. Not expensive, and it had everything I wanted.

Sonora is a brand from the infamous cash-grab factory CUFFS. I’ve said before that CUFFS games, despite the pile of aliases, are all basically the same style—but this Sonora alias actually does something a little different. They built a shared universe across the games under the Sonora label. What that means: the three games released under Sonora all take place in the same world, so you get characters from different games making cameos, which gives everything a familiar feel. Gotta admit, the trick works. Sometimes you play an earlier game, then in a later one you get to see the previous heroine show up and get involved, and there’s this weird sense of closeness—like “oh, the developer actually cares about the players.” Of course, the more important part is that the background art doesn’t need to be redrawn. Reuse, baby. Save that money! So this time we’re talking about Sonora’s new game: Hirono-san Chi wa Eroge-ya-san! (The Hirono Family Runs an Eroge Shop!)