I’ve been reading good science fiction and fantasy recently, by which I mean “the sort of thing that used to get nominated for awards” (in some cases not that long ago, before the Nebulas turned into the Women’s Award and the Hugos turned into the Superficial Diversity Award). So, Bujold, Powers, Daley, Watt-Evans, Hambly, the Liavek stories, etc.

This has led to the discovery of all sorts of new short stories and novellas released as ebooks. Last night’s was Tim Powers’ return to the world of The Anubis Gates, Nobody’s Home. It’s a pleasant little ghost story featuring Jacky Snapp. A bit pricy for only 80 pages, but it’s not like anyone else is writing Tim Powers stories…

Not cosplay, this is Mikie Hara (NSFW) in the 2007 TV series Cutie Honey The LIVE. There are a few episodes on Youtube, and if you were expecting anything other than campy cheesecake with no-budget SFX, well, really, why? Amusing note: in a DVD-only episode, they cast Go Nagai as her father.

It’s still available as nine overpriced DVDs, but they decided to make a nice (overpriced) box set a few years back with a rather eye-catching cover (NSFW; did you have to ask?):

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So that the rest of us could learn from experience, she shared:

Public Service Announcement for the uninitiated (and others, like me, who don't read labels on things like Bounty): They now make paper towels with dish soap in them. Don't use them to make bacon in the microwave. #justsayin' On the bright side, clean up was suprisingly easy ....

Update: In fairness, they do warn you, but who really looks at the label when buying generic items like paper towels? Unless you read the trade press, you’re as likely to expect dish soap in paper towels as you are jalapeño-infused toilet paper.

Somebody asked me the difference between ai, koi, and suki/daisuki, words commonly rendered as “love” in English, especially in anime and manga contexts. Here’s the short version I came up with:

You can suki pizza, you can ai your mom, but unless you're willing to stick your tongue in their mouth, don't say koi.

The more detailed explanation is that suki is simply typical Japanese cultural reserve and indirection. Suki: “X is liked (by me)”, daisuki: “X is liked a lot (by me)”. The difference between ai and koi is an instance of a general rule: if you have two words that appear to mean the same thing, where one of them is a Chinese-derived on-reading and the other is a native Japanese kun-reading, then the Chinese term is more objective, formal, and/or polite; the Japanese term is more subjective, personal, and/or casual, often describing feelings rather than reality. The historical basis for this is that the Chinese terms were imported and used by the upper classes and the government.

It’s easy to find a lot of examples where the two share the same kanji, but even when they’re different, like ai and koi, the rule holds up pretty well. Ai is your loving relationship to a living being, koi is your passionate feeling about someone.

Not the usual bowtie bunny-girl, but sufficiently NSFW to go after the jump.

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“I am Tigger MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod.
I’m the only one.”

When a disk fails in a RAID array, the primary risk associated with replacing it is that another disk will fail before the replacement is fully populated. At which point you’ve lost all your data.

So you can understand my concern yesterday morning when, as I was walking into the computer store to buy a replacement SSD for a machine that had failed unexpectedly, I got email from a NAS reporting a failed RAID5 disk, and discovered that I had two servers to fix.

The good news is that the RAID array finished rebuilding successfully while I was rebuilding the server that needed the SSD replaced.

The bad news is that as soon as I finished the long drive home, I got email that the brand-new disk I’d just installed failed. Crib death is possible, but this time the GUI wasn’t responding reliably either, and a root shell on the NAS got hung when I ran dmesg. Which means it was the 5-year-old NAS itself failing, and the disks were probably fine. If I could get them swapped into an identical chassis. That part will have to wait until Tuesday, since while I could buy something today, Amazon Marketplace can’t get me a ReadyNAS Pro 6 on Labor Day.

I’d be more upset if the NFS mounts weren’t still working, allowing me to copy most of the data off to random free space elsewhere. I haven’t quite come up with 8.3TB yet, but a lot of that is archived logs that may have to wait.

Oh, and the original, unrelated SSD replacement? I’m still babysitting that one, too, since the system involved is a fairly gross hack, held together with twist-ties and bubblegum.

My holiday weekend is going just rosy, thanks. How’s yours?