“She danced like one of those things they put outside of carwashes, the tubes with faces and arms attached to a fan. She had no mystery, no allure, no skill, no art, and her lunatic visage was so off-putting you were heartened by a sudden new-found certainty: an entire culture had realized that keeping your tongue extended like a basset hound with heat stroke was unbecoming, and unlikely to be repeated except as a sarcastic reference in Instagram selfies.”
— James Lileks reviews Miley CyrusNot a pick-up line (2)
Unrelated to this picture, the DanMemo mobile game is currently running bonus drama vignettes related to each episode of season 2 as they air.
Some of the many side stories in the game are focused around the waitresses at Bell’s favorite pub. They might collectively be called, “Is It Wrong To Force Level 4 Adventurers To Wait Tables In A Dungeon Town Restaurant?”.
Pro tip: grabass == permadeath.
Dockerizing DeKindle
DeDRM and KindleUnpack are packages designed to extract the contents from ebooks purchased through Amazon, with multi-platform point-and-click GUI wrappers. (DeDRM includes decrypters for many other platforms as well, but I don’t need any of them)
My Japanese-book-hacking workflow doesn’t play nicely with point-and-click, and now that I’ve gone to the effort of resurrecting and updating it to work with modern versions of Perl and TeXLive, I thought it was time to dig out the core of the extraction tools and repackage them in a format more useful to me.
Faster, please.
A Glorious Future Approaches!
You know what this means:
Service Elf
Pet peeve: romanizations from the Japanese creator that don’t match their own text. For instance, the heroine of Cop Craft is named ティラナ, which is pronounced Tilana or Tirana, and that’s how everyone in the anime cast says it. But in the color art supplied with book one, it was written “Tilarna”, which makes that The Official Name.
I bought the Kindle edition of the novels on Amazon Japan, grabbed the
latest version of DeDRM and KindleUnpack, and dusted off my
Yomitori scripts (last updated
in 2013…) to extract the pictures and make the text easier to read. To
my surprise, the scripts mostly still worked, except for the one that
uses dviasm.py to optimize the furigana, a tool that no longer
handles uplatex output correctly (looks like I’ll have to switch to
dv2dt/dt2dv to molest DVI files now).
After the jump, the magic words are: “She’s 26 In Elf Years!”
Dear Amazon,
Please stop putting things in the “New Releases” recommendation list three months before they’re released. This has been showing up on my lists for weeks, and not only does the Kindle edition not come out until September, the paperback edition doesn’t come out until December.
Pixiv: R-18
The Pixiv tag “R-18” means different things to different artists. For some, it’s equivalent to “NSFW”, but for many, it’s closer to “includes censored penetration”, and quite often “my mother would kick me out of the basement if she knew I fantasized about this”, with anything not quite as raw left open for all to see.
Gratuitous Mahoro to make it clear that this set has work-safety issues:
[amusing note: Google image search thinks this Mahoro image is related to the Mongolian Society of Interventional Radiology]
Cop Craft
He’s a jaded chain-smoking detective out to avenge his partner.
She’s a loli knight elf with a chip on her shoulder.
THEY FIGHT CRIME.
From the author of FullMetal Panic! and Amagi Brilliant Park, with character designs by Range Murata (who also illustrated the light novels). The first two episodes were better than I expected, so I watched the third as soon as it was released on Funimation. There’s nothing terribly new here if you’ve heard of Alien Nation or Bright, but so far the execution looks solid, if a bit rushed. I doubt it will get as lively as the OP animation, however.
They’ve got 6 light novels of source material to work with for 12 episodes, so they shouldn’t run out. Just in case, though, the credits promise loli-elf-service, and episode 3 delivers a bit of it. Caveat: there are some gaps in the storytelling that feel like they were a little too focused on making sure they only spend four episodes per book.
On that note, it looks like book 7 is timed for mid-season, after a three-year hiatus.
Short clip after the jump.
