“Rejoice, Comrades! It’s the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Be sure to torture a dissident, starve a kulak, censor a newspaper, and shoot anyone who disagrees with you. Comrade Lenin would’ve wanted it that way.”
— Rotten Chestnuts celebrates
Azumi Kawashima
Last year, I struggled to find the name of one of the cute, wholesome girls in one of my cheesecake posts. It turned out to be the cute, wholesome cover of a porn flick featuring AV actress Azumi Kawashima(川島和津実), whose popularity lasted a lot longer than her brief career.
And, hey, she’s not even 40 yet!
Sounan desu ka?
In an idle moment, I checked out the glass-half-empty that is the current anime season on Crunchyroll, and found a series where the weak pun in the title is being mistranslated as Are You Lost? (more sensibly, “Are We Shipwrecked?”).
The first 15-minute episode sets up the scenario quite simply: four busty high school girls are washed up on a deserted island after their student cruise goes wrong, and must survive with their convenient array of tropes. I watched it only a few hours ago, and already I can’t remember anything but their defining clichés and their bustlines.
I think the second season of DanMachi starts in two weeks; maybe that will suck less than the Sword Oratorio side series (aka “Is It Wrong To Make A Deranged Lesbian Fangirl The Protagonist In A Spinoff?”).
Practical Thanko product: floormat alarm clock
An alarm clock that won’t stop until you put your weight on it for a few seconds:
This wouldn’t have worked for me in college. I had an incredibly loud, obnoxious alarm clock that had no snooze button, which I kept on the first floor, with the switch wrapped in duct tape. When it went off, hitting “snooze” meant I had to get up, walk downstairs, unwrap it, manually adjust the alarm time, rewrap it, walk back upstairs, and go back to bed.
I generally managed to do this four or five times before actually starting the day.
How Open Source 'Works'...
Seems there’s a trivial denial of service attack against GPG via the keyservers, and the fix is… well, there really isn’t one:
“…the SKS software was written in an obscure language by a PhD student for his thesis. And because of that, according to Hansen, ‘there is literally no one in the keyserver community who feels qualified to do a serious overhaul on the codebase.’”
If you like Piña Co Lada...
…there was a spinoff manga featuring her adventures before the gate opened.
…at a generously-drawn age 14.
File under peculiar the fact that while Amazon is swimming in a sea of rapidly-translated dumpster-fire light novels, Gate is nowhere to be found. If you want to read it in English, there’s a mostly-complete fan translation of the first novel series, but not the eight-volume side stories or the new “season 2” series, because the only group that’s interested can’t find a Chinese translation to work from.
Someone briefly licensed the manga, but abandoned it after releasing the first volume.
Well, that won't be fun...
Around 9.5 years ago, I bought the Japanese DVD release of Otoko-tachi no Yamato, ripped it, and added a set of soft-subs I found online. There were a few minor rough spots in the translation, but it was good enough.
I recently bought the Bluray release of the film and ripped it, only to discover that there are just enough differences to render my existing subs unusable. Applying a constant offset in VLC wasn’t sufficient; it seems there are some subtle differences between the releases that will require real cleanup. For more fun, the three different subs I found on subtitledb.org just now were all missing the last third of the movie.
I’m not going to get around to it any time soon, sadly.
For anyone who really, really wants a legitimage copy and can handle Region B discs, there’s a German import on Amazon Canada with English subtitles.
