…some assembly required.

You can also get a Chiaki-chan, a Lamp House waitress, and a Hakuou schoolgirl. And, coming soon, this.

(somewhat unexpectedly, Nyaruko has more merchandise)

I believe I’ve finally found a case where the above weak English pun on “martial arts” actually works in Japanese. Staff fighting in Japan and Okinawa is known as boujutsu, written 棒術 (pole + technique). Identical pronunciation with different kanji, however, yields 房術 (room + technique), meaning “the art of lovemaking”.

This appears to be a deliberate pun, with the more usual words for lovemaking being bouchuujutsu 房中術 (“within a room” + technique) or keiboujutsu 閨房術 (bedroom + technique). A bit of casual wiki-surfing suggests that the pun comes from the popular Naughty Ninja Girl genre of novels and movies (much the way that the words ninja and kunoichi are basically post-WWII creations, along with the scary-black-pajamas look).

Generally, I do not expect to learn about upcoming features in a video game from Forbes.

Security advisory from Adobe about all versions of Photoshop/Illustrator/Flash/Acrobat except the just-released CS6. The fix? Buy CS6. The workaround:

"For users who cannot upgrade to Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe recommends users follow security best practices and exercise caution when opening files from unknown or untrusted sources."

…unsurprising.

Doctor’s orders. The science is settled. I need more cholesterol.

So, basically, I get to google for “high cholesterol”, avoid all the foods they recommend, and eat all the foods they say to avoid. I love modern medicine.

Just a quick FYI: the default encoding for text files on a Mac is UTF-8 with no byte-order-marker, with each line terminated by the ASCII NL character (0x10); this has been true for many years. I say this because Microsoft Word is still incapable of opening a UTF8-encoded text file without turning it into garbage, even if I explicitly override the default (wrong) encoding in the dialog. Outlook does some goofy text-molesting as well.

I can, at least, override the default (wrong) encoding in the save dialog, and it will write out the file in UTF-8, but then it will add a byte-order-marker for no good reason, which then has to be edited out. Quoting:

UTF-8 always has the same byte order. An initial BOM is only used as a signature — an indication that an otherwise unmarked text file is in UTF-8. Note that some recipients of UTF-8 encoded data do not expect a BOM. Where UTF-8 is used transparently in 8-bit environments, the use of a BOM will interfere with any protocol or file format that expects specific ASCII characters at the beginning, such as the use of "#!" of at the beginning of Unix shell scripts.

Ironically, the best way to get Unicode text files into Word is to convert them to HTML first…

[Update: two problems so far: 1. video codec eventually crashes, requiring a reboot (after a few days). 2. increased power draw in sleep mode, even with wireless and bluetooth off. So, I expect an update soon.]

Well, my Sony Tablet S does now, anyway; my doctor still frowns on gratuitous sugar for me.