Just spent a merry, no wait, hellish few hours fighting to get a LaTeX distribution up and running for the sole purpose of running a single script that uses it to convert marked-up Japanese text to PDF in convenient ebook sizes.

I failed. Or, more precisely, I got all the way to a DVI file that could be displayed quite nicely on screen, with all the kanji and furigana intact, but then the PDF converter that was part of the same TeX package that had generated it started barfing all over my screen, and I refused to spend more time on the project. I simply have no desire to navigate the layers and layers and layers of crap that TeX has acquired in its hacked-together support for modern fonts and encodings.

Honestly, if I want to generate cleanly-formatted Japanese text as a PDF, with furigana and vertical layout and custom page sizes, it takes 10,000 times less effort to spit out bog-standard HTML+CSS and feed it to Microsoft Word.

[Note to the MS-allergic: performing the equivalent import into OpenOffice is possible, but not reasonable. Getting basic unstyled plaintext+furigana wasn’t too bad, but anything more complicated would be an exercise in tedious XML debugging.]

[Update: gave it another go, and eventually discovered that running dvipdfmx with KPATHSEA_DEBUG=-1 in the environment returned a completely different search path than the kpsewhich tool used. Copying share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf.ptex to etc/texmf/texmf.cnf made all the problems go away. At least until the next time I upgrade something in MacPorts that recursively depends on something that obsoletes a recursive dependency of pTeX and hoses half my tools.

And, no, I can’t use the self-contained and centrally-managed TeX Live distribution (or the matching GUI-enabled MacTeX). That was the first hour I wasted. Its version of pTeX is apparently incompatible with one of the style files I needed.]

When evaluating submissions to the Mac App store, you really should check to see if a limited-functionality app also happens to include a limited-creativity ripoff of one of your own icons. Like Screen Grabber, which made a few light edits to your Grab app icon.

Note that this was not one of those “let’s stuff the store with crap on opening day” apps. No, this one was approved two days ago.

Just a quick FYI, but you might want to have a chat with the folks who supply your Kindle wireless coverage map.

First, yet another update to the collage-making Perl script. I added a number of tweaks so that I could reduce blank spots and overlap. If my interest holds up, I may add code to search for the largest empty areas more intelligently, but the current version works pretty well, and only took 13 seconds to generate a 1024x4096 collage of 481 naughty-book covers at 36% of their original size.

Warning! Clicking on the thumbnail loads a 1 megabyte JPEG that is unlikely to be work-safe:

Yes, I’m up to 481 covers. Some of them are second-rate, and some of the titles reflect subject matter less innocent than the cover images, but there’s a lot of terrific cheesecake in there. I’m probably going to track down the names of several of the artists so I can look for collections of their work.

One thing I didn’t do as I was idly gathering covers was keep track of the original pages on Amazon, so if I want to do something with the book titles, I have to type them back in by hand. This isn’t too bad, since I can sketch most unfamiliar kanji on my laptop’s trackpad, and find most of the remaining oddballs with Ben Bullock’s Multi-radical search tool, but it turns out that for many of the books, the really spicy bits are in the sub-titles, which are often too small to read. In some cases, the large title is just the series name.

Still, I’ve done enough to confidently state that at least one of the following words appears on the cover of almost every naughty novel in Japan. Sometimes three at once, with three at once. Cut out and save this handy guide!

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While reading the comments over at Chizumatic (yes, dream-eating is the correct way to interpret yumekui, given that hitokui = cannibalism), I belatedly realized another bit of kanji wordplay in my expanding collection of naughty-novel cover art: 蜜楽.

I didn’t think much of it the first time I saw it, on the cover of Welcome to Honeyfun Island, but then I saw it again on Honeyfun-hunting and made a mental note to see if it was a common genre term. When I saw the comments on Yumekui, it snapped into place.

The word on the covers is mitsuraku. Compare these two characters:

蜜 密

The first one means honey, the second one means secret, and they’re both read as mitsu. There’s also a word itsuraku that means pleasure. So, adding an initial consonant sound and substituting a suggestive kanji converts simple “pleasure” into “secret honey pleasure”, which certainly sounds like something you’d look for in a naughty novel.

I found a less wholesome example on another cover, 蠢（うごめく）, whose main title is a rarely-used character for the verb “to squirm; to crawl like a worm”. The subtitle is 姦獄美姉妹, which is read as kangoku bi-shimai, “prison beautiful sisters”. Or, rather, the first word would mean prison if it were written 監獄, but the first kanji has been replaced with another one that is also read as kan, but has various meanings including “wicked” and “boisterous”. And, unfortunately, “rape”, which is probably the intended meaning in this context. (supported by the people-also-bought list including a number of books with prison bars and tied-up women)

Note to self: do not browse for cover art in a session where you have confirmed to Amazon Japan that you’re over 18. This opens up the search results to include material that’s been flagged adults-only in their database, such as bondage, rape, and lolicon. These really don’t fit my cheesecake-pin-up theme, and the cover art on the lolicon novels is seriously creepy.

[Update: significantly improved the Perl script]

The hardest part of my cunning plan isn’t “making a screensaver”; I think every OS comes with a simple image-collage module that will do that. The fun was in collecting the images and cleaning them up for use.

Amazon’s static preview images are easy to copy; just click and save. For the zoom-enabled previews, it will fall back to static images if Javascript is disabled, so that’s just click and save as well. Unfortunately, there are an increasing number of “look inside” previews (even in the naughty-novels genre) which have no fallback, and which are not easily extracted; for now, I’ll write those off, even though some of them have gorgeous cover art.

[Update: turns out it’s easy to extract previews for the “look inside” style; just open the thumbnail in a new window, and replace everything after the first “.” with “SS500.jpg”.]

A bit of clicking around assembled a set of 121 pleasant images at more-or-less the same scale, with only one problem: large white borders. I wanted to crop these out, but a simple pass through ImageMagick’s convert -trim filter would recompress the JPEGs, reducing the quality. You can trim off almost all of the border losslessly with jpegtran -crop, but it doesn’t auto-crop; you have to give it precise sizes and offsets.

So I used both:

f=foo.jpg
crop=$(convert -trim $f -format "%wx%h%X%Y" info:-)
jpegtran -crop $crop $f > crop/$f

So, what does a collage of naughty-novel cover-art look like? Here are some samples (warning: 280K 1440x900 JPEGs): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. [Update: larger covers, and full-sized]

These were not, in fact, generated by taking screenshots of the screensaver. It takes a long time for it to fill up all the blank spots on the screen, so I wrote a small Perl script that uses the GD library to create a static collage using the full set of images. If I desaturated the results a bit, it would make a rather lively background screen. For home use.

…will use a random set of book covers downloaded from Amazon Japan’s “dirty stories for men” collection. Not the trendy manga/anime-style covers, but the more realistic airbrushed cheesecake style many of them use.

For instance:

The title of this little gem, もっちり熟尻, breaks down into a current slang term for “firm texture”, followed by a kanji meaning ripen or mature, followed by the kanji for buttocks, translatable quite effectively as Firm Ripe Ass. This is not the least subtle title I’ve seen; that award would probably go to ごっくんOL (mouseover for NSFW translation).

[side note: I’ve noticed a lot of invented-word kanji combos in genre titles, and I suspect many of them are wordplay. In this case, 熟尻 might be read as jukkou, which when written 熟考 means “deliberation”]

Other covers I’ve liked in this genre include Wife-play, Temptation Paradise, My Aunt and Me, and Welcome to Honeyfun Island. I’m not terribly interested in the books, mind you, but I do like the cover art. [Update: and another, Saucy Sister-in-law (literally “with extra sauce”, usually used when ordering beef bowls).]

Not all of the artists working on these books are equal, of course. Welcome to the Honey Garden is a poor sister to Honeyfun Island’s main attraction, and Beloved Kindergarten Teacher isn’t as well-drawn as The Naughty Kindergarten Teacher, but there are a lot of these books available (as I first discovered here and later here), many with quite pleasant covers that are considerably classier than this vintage American example:

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…I like the sound of this one better: Ero-dere.

A look at the “customers who bought this item also bought” list turns up titles like Cool masochist, My maid is a classmate, My little sister is a bikini model, My S big sister and my M little sister, Dangerous sisters, School-swimsuit-maid at your service!, Milk academy, My big sister, My little sister, My maid, My princess, My doll, etc.

I think it’s safe to conclude that the main character lives up to her description. Often. With illustrations.

[Yes, all of the “My X” ones are by the same author. I imagine she got some crossover sales from fans of the Mai HiME manga/anime series when she got up to princesses and released My Hime. Interestingly, they also hired her for a To LOVEる book called Dangerous Girls Talk; sounds like someone qualified to work in that universe!]