It’s been a while since I’ve put up a new desk picture, I’m pretty happy with the state of things and it’s a pretty easy way to actually update this blog.

Mind you, I could have dusted or done something with the cable mess before taking this.

In a way, I’ve downgraded my monitor solution.  I was using a 28″ Samsung 4k monitor, this is a 10-year-old 23″ Dell UltraSharp flanked by a couple of laptops.

HOWEVER.  The Samsung display was very annoying in a few ways.  It didn’t like to switch inputs smoothly, it was frustrating how difficult driving a 4k display for gaming is, and the VESA mount location was at the very top of the back rather than in the center, making it very difficult to mount.

The Dell monitor here was originally bought for my wife when she was working from home and I always get her things that I would eventually like to have handed down to me so it is a very nice screen, if slightly smaller and considerably lower-resolution.

The MacBook on the right is my 2018 MBP.  I buy a new Mac roughly every 3 years, but I think this one is going to break that pattern.  It’s a ridiculously thin and fast piece of kit, and the sole problem I have with 13″ MacBooks was resolved by hooking up a cheapish eGPU box and slapping an RX 590 in it.  In addition to the eGPU, it’s connected to a CalDigit TS3+ Thunderbolt dock that handles ethernet and audio and has every kind of port you could ask for.

On the left is a Dell G3 gaming laptop, which came to me because my wife’s gaming PC had a power supply blow out and developed all sorts of faults afterwards.  She got a new gaming PC built with the components of my former desktop, and I got this thing.  “Laptop” and “gaming” are not words I often associate, but this has an i5-9300H and a GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q video card and was easy to add a second SSD and 32GB RAM to.  At 1080P it is a bruiser and has chewed up everything I have thrown at it.

Also, Best Buy had a very nice deal on the G3s.

It’s 100% plastic and could use a second USB-C port but these are minor quibbles.

You may note that I am playing ToHeart2.  Really, I should say that I am FINALLY playing ToHeart2.

The first time I went to Japan was December of 2005, and the PC version of ToHeart2 had just come out.  Konomi’s smiling face was EVERYWHERE in Akihabara, and honestly the character designs and music were cute and cheery in just the right ways to make me want to spend time in their world.

I didn’t actually buy it then, because I had a pretty good grasp of my Japanese level and knew that a visual novel was well beyond what I could manage.  It took a couple of years before I could delude myself into buying a copy, and I may have gone a little overboard with the merch.

It wasn’t enough to buy the first press limited edition of the PC version of the game.  I also needed to have the limited edition of the PS2 version and several figures. All of this stuff was bought second-hand, at least.

I tried playing it a couple of times.  It was extremely slow going.  I have a notebook around here, somewhere, with several pages of very painful translations.

A couple of years ago, someone finally put out a full translation patch, and I am a little embarrassed by how long it’s taken for me to get around to starting it up and going through the complicated process of determining Best Girl to woo.

HOT AND STEAMY HAND HOLDING ACTION

I may have to go back and play through a couple of other routes, because Sasara was a character added for the PC version and I get the feeling that her storyline branched off from the main plot considerably.

I also have to pray that the main character is SLIGHTLY less clueless in the other routes, because the only reason I managed to get to first base with Sasara is that the rest of the cast eventually got tired of my whining about how I wasn’t worthy and devised a complicated scheme to get me to stop waffling and just get on with it.

Also the other girls may be less… complicated.  Sasara had some serious family baggage and some very unusual hobbies.

It wasn’t cosplay.