Yeah, go ahead, tear out my heart. It’s not like I was using it for anything.

Dear Tokyo Game Show, never change.

…and I love Aya Hayase’s twitter feed this week.

There’s an app for that: “A Lake Elsinore man was bitten by a rattlesnake Monday as he picked it up and attempted to take a selfie.”

Could have been worse, I suppose; he could have tried to get his picture taken with Hillary Clinton.

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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