I finished the main story Sunday, leaving only the epilogue, which was a quick read last night. I didn’t blog about it right away, however, since I started reading Shamus Young‘s The Witch Watch and didn’t put it down until I finished.

As expected, this was the “magical weather control device” story that was adapted into episodes 9 and 10 of the anime version. Also as expected, a great deal of characterization and nuance was lost along the way. And, as Steven hoped way back when in the comments to my first attempt to read book 1, Celecia doesn’t secure Louie’s aid with a love spell; she charms him, but only by being pretty, sweet, sympathetic, and Elven. And her personality and motives are more complex.

True for everyone, actually. Louie is far less of a goofball; yes, he didn’t pay attention in some of his classes and missed things like needing silver or magical weapons to hurt spirits, but he’s much more self-aware and mature. Melissa is less over-the-top melodramatic, both in her fantasies of a True Hero and her disappointment in the reality of Louie; biting sarcasm and a cool head are more common than hysterics of either type. Merrill shows no signs of turning into the comic relief, and is given plenty of opportunities to demonstrate competence and wit. Genie is the most like her anime self, but her current relationship to Louie can be summed up as “hasn’t killed him yet”; everything he does pushes her buttons, and she calls him “amateur” with naked contempt. Ila, whose feelings for Louie are just beginning to transition from “little brother” to “I don’t really go for muscles, but…”, has several moments that make her much more interesting than the somewhat air-headed, clingy wannabe-girlfriend from the anime.

Celecia is much more of an active player in the novel. She comes to town to secure the gang’s aid in fixing the weather, but first sneaks into the Mage College to spy on Louie and Ila as they figure out what’s going on, then tracks the girls down in a bar and basically bullies them into re-introducing her to him as their choice for a new adventuring companion, pointing out his near Elf-worship and Melissa’s divine order to serve him. And Celecia is quite certain that Louie was somehow responsible for the (lethal) goblin attack on her village that he then helped rescue them from, but despite the girls’ fears, she’s not after revenge. Indeed, one of her main interests is finding out why he retains such a high opinion of elves, even after narrowly escaping execution in her village.

Good stuff, and now on to book 3, which seems to have been skipped for the anime. Louie’s accidental engagement! Merrill waking Louie at knifepoint! Genie’s little sister! All this and more!

When I ran the third Louie book through my custom-reader scripts (being nearly halfway through book 2…), it warned me about a conjugation pattern it didn’t know how to handle. This happens occasionally, since my de-conjugator is based on a limited sample of Mecab output, but the word it was complaining about was a real surprise: the yodan verb 戦ふ (written “tatakafu”, but pronounced “tatakau”), conjugated into 戦はない.

The sentence was “人の死なない戦はない”, which should be read as “Hito no shinanai ikusa wa nai”. For some reason, the context matcher did not correctly determine that “人の死なない” was a clause modifying the noun “戦”, and instead fell back all the way to a pre-1946 classical conjugation of the modern verb 戦う, which would have translated into the nonsensical “person’s won’t die won’t fight”. One of the many reasons human translators still have jobs!

(the sentence actually means “this is not a battle in which no one dies”, or perhaps “there are no wars where no one dies”;　I’ll have to look at the context when I get there)

I needed new wallpaper for my gaming machine. Dusting off my collage script produced this, which I think will work nicely.

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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