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A PS3 repair for a special PS2 game (Pt. 2)
The ribbon I ordered came at record speed, pandemic be damned. Ordered Saturday, shipped Sunday, turned up at my door on Tuesday. If you ever need some rare part for an aging console, MyGameParts delivers legitimately good service. Taking apart the PS3 the second time was several orders of magnitude faster now that I knew what I was doing. The ( Read more... ) -
A PS3 repair for a special PS2 game (Pt. 1)
Back in the time of the fat PlayStation 3 and roughly at the end-of-life of PlayStation 2s, there appeared a PS2 game called Eternal Poison (Poison Pink in Japan). This was a darkly gothic, richly designed and intricately-plotted tactical RPG-by then itself a dying genre-that had enough serious flaws it almost immediately fizzled. The company that ( Read more... ) -
10,000 Dragons
This may be the most political story I ever write. It's not my usual line of work. The occasional political essay, sure, but not fiction. It's also sci-fi, which again is not my usual line of things. But there really wasn't any other way to frame this story except as SF. How else could I explore a truculent mainland China, with its island-building ( Read more... ) -
An odd intersection about pain management in Chinese hospitals
I still remember back in the 90s about at least one evening news segment that demonstrated the integration of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in China's Western medical practice which featured the famous shot of a heavily pregnant woman in childbed serenely pincushioned with acupuncture needles. This was meant to exemplify a way of giving birth ( Read more... ) -
Labyrinth of Refrain: Darker and deeper than we would have hoped
Every so often, along comes a game that captures our attention and lead us down a rabbit hole of unexpected wonder. The last time we felt that way was after finding Eternal Poison (Poison Pink in its original Japanese release), a punishingly hard turn-based strategy RPG with many interlocked replayable stories, each told from a different character' ( Read more... ) -
So this is grief.
It feels a lot longer than slightly over two weeks since Sif left us. My brain tells me it has been about a month, my calendar says otherwise. I still look around expecting a fluffy cat with the best tummy waiting to be rubbed just behind me. Since I hardly ever leave the house, most of the last bunch of times I've left, I've wound up strongly ( Read more... ) -
Bitey Chai
So I got into this chai thing fairly late into the game. It started with some tea bags the spouse got me from Numi, which is out in Oakland and whose loose leaf teas I am very fond of. Their tea bags tend to be on the weak side for me, unfortunately. It's even sadder when you consider that most of their weird, creative tea mixes only come in tea ( Read more... ) -
The short and somewhat tedious Tart Saga
After learning rather recently that the spouse loves pineapple, and knowing that I only eat pineapple in jam form, preferably on jam tarts, I have resolved to make pineapple tarts at some point before the end of the year. Pineapple tarts are a staple festive biscuit in Malaysia during Aidilfitri. It's kind of like love letters for Chinese New Year ( Read more... ) -
The Return of Food Inspector Cat
Early this morning, Seth rolled me out of bed to see something, "disturbing but also adorable". When I trudged into the kitchen, a small grey creature was sitting above our kitchen cabinets (the world's most ignored dust trap) making angry noises at all and sundry. My perfect, beautiful cat had probably gone up there to check for breakfast. My ( Read more... )
