I cannot improve on the original headline. All I can do is imagine the tens of thousands of Certified Organic head explosions around the world.

In a move that will surprise no one but the California Legislature, the $200 million dollars that California expected to get out of Amazon will instead give the state precisely $0 to waste. As they’ve done every other time a state has redefined “nexus”, Amazon has ended their Affiliate program in California, effective immediately. Brown signed it, and Amazon sent out the termination notices.

With luck, this will leave the latest phony-baloney budget enough out of balance that the legislature will continue to go without pay.

[Book four finished; I think I’ll go back and review for a few days to clear up some rough spots, then spend the holiday weekend reading book five]

“Splendid villain! Very exuberant!”
    ―Uncle Max, from Zot

“As evil plans go, it doesn’t suck.”
    —Wesley Wyndham-Pryce, from Angel

In the anime version of AsoIku, Jens is a terrific villain. Smart, tough, competent, dedicated, and ruthless. At first, she has a bit of a chip on her shoulder about pathetic humans, but then, the only ones she’s really spent time with are pretty slimy. She’s the sole member of her race currently on Earth, and she runs the whole operation with her aide Muttley: smuggling alien technology, manipulating governments, planning covert operations, and leading full-scale military assaults. She’s good at it, and once she starts taking them seriously, Our Heroes need brains, skill, guts, and luck to overcome her.

Her motives make sense. Her actions make sense. Her final plan is brilliant and vicious, meticulously planned and expertly carried out, and if it had succeeded, it would have accomplished exactly what she wanted. She’s head and shoulders (and bust…) above the usual Bad Guy in anime.

In the books, Jens and Muttley play catch with an idiot ball.

But first, a cast picture, and a spoiler warning…

more...

You know, if people came out and said, “legalize marijuana so we can get high”, I’d likely vote for that. The social impact of their drug of choice compares favorably with tobacco and alcohol, and I’ve yet to hear a pro-prohibitionist argument that’s sturdier than tissue paper. I find the smell vile, even worse than stale cigarette smoke, but I also can’t stand thick perfume or strong BO, which are at least as common in public places today.

But don’t try to bullshit me. Yes, there are medicinal applications for marijuana and THC, but when I drive down the highway in San Jose and see a billboard advertising medical marijuana evaluations at sj420.com, it’s about as “medical” as a prescription for Lucky Strikes and Coors.

[ditto last year’s trip to Las Vegas, where the billboard was for DrReefer.com]

The morning after all the excitement, the film-club beach trip comes to an end, with Antonia’s maids frantically pestering their chief Maya with questions and problems. Most are trivial, but they’re driving her nuts because her assistant Sara is nowhere to be found. Their biggest problem:

摩耶様、テントの中でカントクさんが起きてくださいません。下品な寝言を言いながら股間を……

Translated, “Maya-sama, could you please go into the tent and wake [Kawasaki] Kantoku-san? He’s talking dirty in his sleep, and his crotch is…”.

Where’s Sara? On cloud nine. Something to do with the assistoroids calling her “Mommy” after she came to their rescue inside Unaa-tan…

[I’ve finished the book, and I think I’m going to start book 4 rather than writing up book 3 right now. Book 3 covered the same timespan as episodes 6-8, but some significant differences are starting to appear, and I want to reach the point where the anime ended. Book 4 covers the attack on the Catian mothership, including Kio’s command decision, but does not include the arrival of the Christmas Tree; that shows up at the end of book 6. Other material was rearranged and compressed as well; for instance, Manami hasn’t thrown her hat into the ring yet, so only Aoi and Eris are openly competing for Kio’s affections right now. (that is, we haven’t been shown that Manami wants to compete)]

Seen on a nice large color ad on the side of a bus:

Offer good till supplies last

To my surprise, this little gem is not particularly rare on the web, thanks to an enterprising comment-spam bot.

…at least for now. I’m still finishing up my notes on book 2 of Asobi ni Iku yo!, but I’m also enjoying book 3. I’m about halfway through chapter 6, and I’ve now had four pleasant surprises in the development of minor characters.

First, Ichika has a much larger role, and doesn’t just appear out of nowhere on the beach. She had an interesting scene in book 2, but she’s fleshed out a lot more here. Her home, her friend/ally Tabito, her work as a model-maker, a hint of her power as a sennin, the lack of any attempt to hide her ears and tail in public, and the reason she went out to the beach to check up on them in the first place, after she meets up with our second surprise development, Assistoroid #6.

When the assistoroids were introduced in episode 2 of the anime, one of them behaved slightly differently from the rest, in what seemed to be a small bit of visual comedy. That wasn’t mentioned in the matching scene in book 1, but in book 3, it’s revealed that #6 is definitely different from the others. When house-sitting Chaika orders them to take a break from their work, the rest do normal things, but he goes off exploring the neighborhood on his own. He’s just normal enough to pass all the usual diagnostics, so neither Eris nor Chaika has realized that they have a unique individual on their hands. He ends up playing games in the park with Ichika and a group of small children, and comes home with a resin model of himself that she made for him. As the kids head home for lunch, we finally learn her name, as they call out a happy bye-bye to Ichika and 6-chan.

The third surprise is in the scenes between Jens and her new assistant Muttley, assigned to her in the epilogue of book 2 after her failure on Antonia’s ship. She had asked for a full squad of reinforcements, and she got him instead. Their relationship is different, and in particular, he’s a much better tactician, spending a merry day slaughtering her in various wargame scenarios before relaxing in front of the TV to watch anime.

The most recent surprise (and I suspect not the last) is who else showed up on the beach: campy film director Kawasaki, who came to Okinawa looking for Manami and Aoi, to show them the rough cut of his latest movie, featuring them. The sight of a crazed pervert running across the beach leads Maya to order the maids to open fire (while Manami frantically tries to intervene in time), but he evades their hail of bullets with the grace of a ballerina, and when Maya orders the maids to shoot again, he not only evades, but ends up behind her, admiring the fine muscle tone of her buttocks and thighs.

Maya loses it at this point and fires wildly, until Antonia rebukes her for putting everyone in danger. After that, things settle down, and Kawasaki gleefully pulls out a portable DVD player to show off his movie, to the admiration of the film-club members. But a bit later, talking alone with Manami, he drops the act and gives her some serious advice about fully enjoying this too-brief time in her life. When others start to join them, he camps back up and heads off into the sunset.

Let’s say that you have somehow acquired a video in MKV format, where for no particularly good reason the creator has chosed to encode the audio as FLAC (we shall neglect for the moment their poor taste in embedded fonts for animated karaoke and special-effect subtitling).

If for device-compatibility reasons you would prefer a better-supported audio format like MP3, and you’d really rather not re-encode the video to MP4 with hardsubs, the simplest solution is to extract the FLAC audio with mkvextract (part of Mkvtoolnix), decode it to WAV with Flac, encode it to MP3 with Lame, and then reinsert it with mkvmerge.

You also have to figure out which audio track, if any, is FLAC-encoded, but mkvinfo will do that for you, in a relatively-sane format. I have of course automated the whole task with a small Perl script.

Finding a video player that can smoothly scrub forward and backward through an MKV video for screenshots is left as an exercise in frustration for the reader.