I occasionally buy stuff off Rakuten. It’s mostly just herbs, but gradually points do build up. I also have a Kobo Libra reader. Kobo is a subsidiary of Rakuten, so you can log in with a Rakuten account and all that “integration.”

The other day I noticed that finally the newest volume of No Game No Life came out, so I went to get it. That took unexpected effort. The payment process just kept failing with an extremely unhelpful “we can’t complete this transaction” error. Naturally it wouldn’t say what was wrong, even though as it turns out it was their system’s brainfart.

The new robot in the house didn’t make a very positive first impression. Sad to say that second impressions are not much more favorable either. Let’s start with the good things though.

The hardware feels good. The machine is sturdy and its navigation seems solid. It doesn’t bump into everything like the Roomba and doesn’t get stuck on the flat legs of my Poang or my standing desk (which the Roomba regularly did).

I’ve been renting robot vacuums for the past few years. In my previous place I used to have a Roomba Combo j7+. This was a pretty pleasant experience. It could handle the shaggy rug in my living room. It didn’t fall off the stairs. It mopped the floor. It didn’t require me to babysit it through everything, it just worked.

But its box was quite big, so when I moved I didn’t want to carry it around, instead returned and replaced it with a cheaper not-combo j7+. This obviously didn’t have a mopping feature anymore, but that was the least of its problems. It would sometimes stop in the middle of the room requiring rescue because it somehow sensed it was “stuck”. Then when it managed to somehow break its side brush thing on I don’t even know what (probably the edge of a rug), I decided to return it and find something better.