This was the first light novel I started struggling through, way back when, and it took a month of painstaking kanji and vocabulary lookup to finish the first part of chapter 1. Much later, I scanned and OCR’d the same 30 pages and ran the results through my custom-reader scripts, and read it in about two hours. These days, I can manage a typical chapter in about an hour, and last month I discovered that someone had OCR’d the first four books and made them (coughcoughperfectdarkcough) available. Much easier than scanning them in myself.

I haven’t had a lot of time to read recently, so it was only last night that I managed to finish book 1 (which was covered in episodes 1-4 and 6 of the anime). The stories will be more or less familiar to people who’ve seen the series but as I discovered with chapter 1, the characters are much more interesting.

So far, the character who was changed the least for the anime is Genie. Louie is much less of a goofball, Ila is significantly more interesting (and dangerous; those glasses aren’t just for show!), Melissa’s difficulty accepting Louie is less melodramatic, and Merrill gets a lot of character development, replacing the slapstick and caricature that she was subjected to in the anime. You get more of Jenny’s backstory, including her adventurous youth with Rijarl and Carwes. The encounters with Celecia and Conrad are more character-driven as well.

The stories also have a lot more nuance to them. For instance, in the anime, the “sealed door” in the ruins was just something that the girls found while adventuring; in the book, it had been found quite a while ago by a member of the Thieves Guild, who sold the info to Merrill for a significant sum. When it turns out to be a dud, she goes back to the information broker for a refund, and also learns that the Guild is very interested in finding out who Louie’s parents were. That’s just a teaser so far, along with Jenny’s unspoken knowledge that King Rijarl only has one living bastard son.

I’ve just started book 2, which is shaping up to be the basis of episodes 9 and 10. The prologue is two scenes: the first with Banarl activating the ancient weather-control machine, and the second with Celecia feeling it happen and being ordered by her village elders to investigate. Being young and interested in the human world, she’s delighted at the chance to get out, and hoping to meet a certain young man again…

Side note that I don’t recall from the anime: many of the elves in Celecia’s village are old enough to remember the great magical kingdom that fell 500 years earlier, and their subjugation during that era has a lot to do with their current hatred and mistrust of humans. Celecia’s mission is in part a punishment for having defended Louie and company when they were prisoners.

In Lion, there is a single global setting for “applications reopen every document that was open the last time you launched them”. The intent is to blur the distinction between putting your computer to sleep and rebooting it, and is supposed to mesh seamlessly with the new “silently save every change you make to a document, requiring you to restore from previous versions to undo them” and “relaunch every open application on reboot” (which does not have a global on/off setting; you have to override the default every time you shut down).

In Lion, they’re poorly-tested “version 1.0” code that have caused a lot of people to revert to Snow Leopard or simply not upgrade. But Apple knows the best way for you to work, so even if the design is flawed and the implementation is broken, you’re stuck with it (much like the initially-broken-and-still-a-bit-flaky Spotlight replaced the search systems from earlier releases).

So, enter RestoreMeNot and iKluge’s login hook, which get rid of two of these annoying misfeatures. Sadly, only Apple can fix the brain damage in their autosave implementation, and they seem to be too busy pushing everyone into iCloud.

Note that the installation method for iKluge’s fix is a really bad idea, and I’ve reproduced his run-once shell script below.

#!/bin/bash
echo "#!/bin/bash" > /tmp/loginfix.sh
echo "rm /Users/*/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow.*" >> /tmp/loginfix.sh
mv /tmp/loginfix.sh /usr/bin/loginfix.sh
chmod +x /usr/bin/loginfix.sh
defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /usr/bin/loginfix.sh

[Update: official web site and Youtube channel]

Someone liked the style of the Index and Railgun logos so much, they made a generator page.

This turned up in an image search for 死屍累々 (“heaps of corpses all around”; sadly, not everything that search returns is so whimsical), which is a tag on Pixiv that also turned up this bit of Railgun fan-art.

The latest episode of Bodacious Space Pirates wasn’t up yet when I started my morning workout, so instead I sweated to the first two episodes of Angelic Layer. It’s a fun series that I haven’t seen in quite a while, but this time, I noticed something.

Spoiler alert: it’s an old series, but if you haven’t seen it (and you should), stop reading now.

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It used to be that the phrase “Mac marginalization” referred to poor support for Mac users by peripheral makers, bank web sites, etc.

Now that Apple has announced that the now-annual OS releases will accelerate the iPadification of the Mac user interface and dependence on iCloud, it appears that Apple will be doing most of the marginalizing.

Although they do promise that Mountain Lion will be renaming applications for consistency, so the fact that Preview silently modifies your documents should cause them to rename it FuckWith.

…because then I’d have to talk myself out of buying the just-announced Sony 500mm f/4 lens. They stopped making the old 600/4 when they bought Minolta’s camera business, but the modern optical design of this should more than compensate for the slightly shorter focal length.

Of course, I’m still drooling over the Sony/Zeiss 135/1.8, and technically I could afford that one…

FYI, legitimate shipment notices from DHL do not open with the words “Hello Dear”. That just might reduce the chance that someone will be stupid enough to open your infected zip file.