Fans of Japanese music often scour the net looking for printed lyrics. Many of the sites that host them “protect” their content from being reprinted elsewhere, usually with lame Javascript hacks.

The oft-reviled uta-net.com goes high-tech, wrapping lyrics in a Flash app. I’d never looked into the specifics of their method, because everything I was looking for was available somewhere else, but today I had a song from 1968 that was obscure enough that they were the best choice.

I’m a fairly clever fellow, says I, so surely I can use one of the many free SWF-decoding tools to crack this open, even if it’s compressed and obfuscated. So I downloaded the Flash-encoded lyrics, and, just on a whim, opened them up as a text file. I found this:

I don’t care what I’ve bought from you in the past, just trust me on this one: I am not interested in purchasing a comic book with the title 「ぶっ☆かけ 3」. Don’t ask, don’t offer. Do. Not. Want.

[Update 4/12: I hadn’t even noticed at the time, but this series is from the mangaka responsible for Eiken, which only increases my lack of interest…]

You’re not fooling anybody, you know.

"Because you bought a pocket tripod, we think you'll be interested in a protective case for Kindle 2. Oh, and because you said you owned VMware Fusion, we're sure you'll like this leather cover for Kindle 2. And now that you've bought that new electric toothbrush, isn't it time to order Kindle 2?"

Web site account activation system:

1. Ask new user for name, email address, password
2. Send confirmation email containing:
   • carefully randomized confirmation URL
   • name
   • email address
   • password (helpfully converted to lowercase for ease of use)
3. Provide no method of changing email address or password

(site name omitted because no one has any reason to give them a credit card anyway)

“Hey, that’s a really cool 45K JPG that’s perfect for the front page of our manga review site! I bet this guy will really appreciate the traffic he’ll get when we link directly to it!”

…

“Hey, why is the picture now upside down, backwards, grayscale, and low-resolution? And why did it disappear when I reloaded the page? And why can’t I see his website at all any more? It’s almost like he’s completely rejecting any traffic from anyone who ever viewed that picture on our site! I can’t even ping his server!”

[Update: “Hmmm, I can reach his site from a different machine, but when I try to load our home page that still has the link to his copy of the picture, I get this funny error code. I don’t speak any English, so can someone tell me what ‘403 some bozo deeplinked’ means?”]

One of the other students in my reading class has a habit of typing in his material really small with no space between lines, in a gothic kanji font. His vocabulary lists are done the same way, and have some other formatting quirks as well.

Several weeks ago, he brought one in that runs to a page and a half of small print, plus an equal amount of vocabulary, and he’s showing signs of becoming a bit cranky that we keep passing it over in favor of other material. He’s a nice guy, if a bit intense, so I figured I’d take a stab at it this weekend, so I’d be ready to read the first few paragraphs out loud at the next session.

Yeah, well, screw that idea. With no room to write in notes or furigana, reading the old-fashioned language of a classic fairy tale was just not worth it. So I went looking for an online version that I could print out in a more useful format.

The story is “Tengu no Kakuremino” (“The Goblin’s Invisibility Cloak”), and I found at least a dozen versions of it, from the modernized to the dumbed-down, but only one seemed like a very close match. Problem was, the hosting site just wouldn’t let me read it.

The site is bunko.channel.or.jp, and it’s not available outside of Japan. It’s apparently a free e-book site for cellphone users, and while they let Google in for indexing, their PHP code rejects attempts to retrieve the complete page. No problem, says I, clicking on the ‘cached’ button, but they had a surprise in store for me: Google’s cache won’t show me the second page.

I know they’ve got it, because I can search for text that appears only on the second page, and see it highlighted with a sentence or so of context. Hmm…

So I’m extracting it a sentence at a time with carefully defined searches. This is still faster and easier than trying to read my classmate’s tinyfonts version and type it back in. And I’ve already caught four errors in his version, so now we have another good reason not to read it this week…

[Update: my classmate got his version from japanesepod101.com, a for-pay podcast, and apparently they never noticed the mistakes when they were recording the story.]

[Update: this story is most definitely in the public domain, so there’s no reason for me not to post the reassembled text below the fold… (formatting will be cleaned up later)]

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Seriously, where are you getting these associations?

I’m just not seeing the connection here.