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.

People like Will Shetterly:

"I have no regrets for voting for Nader twice, and I'm a little sorry I voted for Obama. I knew he was a neoliberal, but I thought it would feel better than it did to finally be able to vote for a black prez."

They only had to prove they weren’t racists once. With that achievement unlocked, they’re free to vote for the candidates they actually approve of.

Never change.

(how-to guide on making boob-shaped puddings in sizes from AAA-cup to G-cup)

For anyone who might be interested in a top-level view of how Sato is adapting the Miniskirt Space Pirates novels for anime, here are the chapter titles of the first two books, along with the volume titles of all seven.

Mild spoiler potential, of course. If they keep the current pace, I’d expect book 2 to take the series up to around episode 9.

more...

Just saw a piece of email get caught by my spam filters. The subject line read:

Find the best mount for your vehicle

Despite its resemblance to the sort of awkwardly-euphemised spam that offers sexual enhancement products and/or partners, it’s actually a perfectly reasonable ad from GPS City, a company I bought something from in May, 2004.

Apparently, about six months ago some circle did the OCR and proofreading for the first four Rune Soldier novels. I had done the first two chapters of book one myself, to get them into a readable state, but it was slow going, so I never got around to finishing. Now I can run them through my scripts and read them at a reasonable speed.

(and in case anyone’s wondering what happened to my progress on the AsoIku novels, I just got busy with the pre-holiday work, the trip to Japan, helping some new friends study for the JLPT, etc, and haven’t picked them back up again yet. I’m near the end of book 11, and I definitely want to reach the revelations about Aoi’s family, which are perhaps the most significant things coming up soon. I’m hoping that the side stories that were included with the Blu-ray discs are eventually collected into a book, but otherwise, it looks like book14 is the end of the series, with an awful lot left unexplained)

In an unrelated note, my mom gave me a copy of the English edition of 1Q84, and I read it over the weekend. Short take: a plus-sized Charles de Lint novel, with Tokyo replacing Newford. I think de Lint would have done it better, and in about half as many pages, but I still enjoyed it. There were a few places where Jay Rubin’s emphasis on precise translation produced phrases no American novelist would choose, but there was already so much about the book that screamed “originally in Japanese” that it didn’t bother me.