The quick side-by-side images here (note that the third image has the new crap on the left instead of the right) suggest that Apple has thrown out everything they might ever have known about accessibility. Tiny! Gray! Low-saturation! Low-contrast! The weather image is particularly hilarious, with the ever-so-thin white font on a light background.

Not that the old one was any great shakes when it came to font size, contrast, and color-deficiency-awareness, but they thought this was good enough to show off to the world, so it’s unlikely they’re going to make drastic changes before release.

Let’s say that you have purchased a shovelware disc of Japanese fonts, such as this one from DynaComWare (discontinued, but it turns up occasionally; I bought mine at a going-out-of-business sale).

[Note that when I describe this particular disc as “shovelware”, I’m really referring to the collection of 3,000+ renamed ripoffs of Western fonts (from font pirate Bay Animation) that are thrown in; for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean fonts, DynaComWare is a legitimate foundry.]

The ripoffs (as well as the Korean, Chinese, special-effects, and kana fonts) are just stored on-disc with no protection, but the good stuff is hiding in files with the .t4_ and .t9_ extensions. The only supported way to install them is by running the included Windows program (which might not display correctly on non-Japanese versions of Windows, and of course doesn’t work at all on a Mac), but it turns out that they’re just encrypted ZIP files with a simple 8-digit numeric password, six digits of which can be inferred from the timestamp.

One thing to note is that the disc contains two sets of kanji fonts, in directories labeled JIS90 and JIS2004. The difference between the two is a subtle appearance change in a small number of characters, neatly described in this Adobe PDF file. A small number of fonts are available only in the JIS90 flavor, mostly pseudo-bitmap fonts of little real value; most people won’t notice the difference, and if you do, well, you’ve got both.

I highly recommend the disc, by the way.

This one took a while. Not because the story was as baffling and filled with nonsense as book 11, but mostly because a lot of characters talked funny. Lizard-girl Sawori’s accented Japanese is indicated with katakana and the occasional mispronunciation, much like American cowgirl CIA agent JACK, who’s also in this book, with more dialog than she’s had in the last six books put together. Then there are the various international spies and government agents pretending to be exchange students on the Catian ship, whose mostly-fluent Japanese tends toward the official, and the bonus pile of new vocabulary used to explain Gaavuru culture. Add to that the usual fun of figuring out the childlike writing of the assistoroids, and it made for a bit of a slog. There are sections where my comprehension was maybe only in the 60-70% range.

Much is accomplished, however, including the most significant plot development in the entire series: Kio finally stops addressing his junior girlfriend as Futaba-san and starts calling her Aoi-chan.

more...

And by “up”, I mean going from 103 to the dollar to 96.5 in a bit over a week. I was kinda liking the trend before Memorial Day…

"The recipe to an unhappy life in Japan is to want to be Japanese if you are not."

(Pico Iyer in WSJ, via Japan Intercultural Twitter feed)

Katana fast-draw competition timers, modeled on the sort of devices used in pistol competition.

I particularly like the fact that the scoring rules in the manual give a half-second penalty for splitting open your scabbard or bending your sword, but a two-second penalty for missing the target. Actually cutting yourself is a disqualification, at least, but This Will Not End Well.

The prologue of the book is a quiet scene of an unnamed male staring out the window of a spaceship as his female companion reflects on what he’s feeling. Spoiler: it’s Aoi’s dad and his alien second wife, Rauva of the lizardlike Gaavuru race. It doesn’t tell their full story, but does reveal that at the end of their epic duel N years ago, he was near death, and she took him away from Earth as much to get him properly healed as to claim him as her mate. She even returned him to Earth five years later to search for his wife and child, and his belief that they were both dead allowed him to move on and accept his role in her society.

Their ship isn’t far from Earth, and he’s not just thinking about the old days; he’s also worried about his second daughter Sawori’s official first hunt. Neither one of them knows that Aoi is alive, or that Sawori has chosen her half-sister as her target.

Aoi needs the full power of her Catian-provided battlesuit to survive the duel, and barely manages to win by outthinking lil’sis just before collapsing from exhaustion. A bit out of sorts, Kio manages to deeply offend the Gaavuru observers, but is rescued by the unexpected arrival of Uncle Yuuichi and a strangely familiar gorgeous blonde catgirl in a red china dress.

Familiar to the Gaavuru, too, since it seems she beat the crap out of a whole team of them 50 years ago. By the way, when the Gaavuru were being explained to Kio and company at the end of the last book, it was casually mentioned that in their last duel against Catians 20 years ago, the targets were Kuune and Chaika, who also wiped the floor with them. Clearly lizardfolk should steer clear of anything with cat ears.

Hot blonde catgirl turns things around, and gets them to explain the whole little sister thing. Sadly, they teleported out with Sawori right after dropping the news about Dad being alive and well.

Hot blonde catgirl is of course Ichika, but all grown up and looking very different. Seems her magic extends to shape-shifting, and this was the body she’d been wearing way back in book 2 when she helped Kio rescue Aoi from Antonia’s ship. He’d been so busy at the time that he’d forgotten about that little mystery. I hadn’t realized there was a mystery, since the description was pretty vague.

In any case, it came as no surprise to the reader in this book, since she’s normal-Ichika when she hitches a ride with Yuuichi, and china-dress-hottie when they reach the scene.

[I don’t know if they’re done with Sawori for this book now, but I do know she comes back soon, having gotten the idea into her head that losing the duel with Aoi means they should marry. This includes the sight of a lizard-girl in a maid costume.]

No, seriously, this is what girl-power comics have come to. Amusingly, the two sidekicks drop into standard gender roles without hesitation.