If you’re going to dress up as a samurai stormtrooper at conventions, try not to confuse every Japanese person who reads your banner. The nicest comment you’ll get is “it’s like the [bad] English t-shirts junior-high students wear”.

Truth in captioning.

In book 7, Eris’ slightly-ditzy mother misread her letter home, and got the idea that she was in a serious relationship with both Kio and Aoi. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” and Mom went so far as to reassure Aoi that Catian scientists had plenty of experience helping interspecies gay couples have children together. Cue blushing all around, and stammered explanations of the actual state of affairs.

Except… Aoi really is developing feelings for Eris that she doesn’t understand, and that her emotionless-killer childhood hasn’t prepared her to deal with. It’s a tangled-up mess of friend, comrade, big sister, little sister, rival, and, most recently, as she helps Doctor Dyureru give a feverish Eris a sponge bath, “wow, she’s hot”.

Where’s it going? No idea. At this rate, I think we have to wait for Eris to go into heat again for anything to happen in this relationship. Given that the good doctor grins to herself when she sees Aoi’s reaction, and also listens in approvingly a bit later as Aoi pulls back just before blurting out to Kio that she wants to be his wife, I suspect she won’t be providing any heat-canceling pills next time. And since Captain Kuune is also gleefully shipping this trio, Kio and Aoi will probably find themselves locked in a room with a horny catgirl and a week’s worth of food.

Note that despite my expectations that book 10 will have major plot-advancing action, as of the end of chapter 5 (of 9), Eris’ sponge bath is the most significant event.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

Amazon Japan has a very different image of me as a customer. While I’ve overtrained Amazon US to the point that it uses the most tenuous and obscure connections to come up with recommendations, the Japanese site has no such difficulty. I get the occasional curveball after I’ve used it as a search engine for obscure words, but for the most part, recommendations are plausibly based on things I’ve actually bought.

In this case, because I once tossed a few random light novels (mostly still-unread) into an order, including one called School Succubus Panic (in which the titular succubi are available in maid, catgirl, vampire, meganekko teacher, and other flavors; why, yes, it is porn), Amazon Japan just sent me a recommendation for Imouto no Rippubaajin wa Onii-chan no Mono. I had to click through just to see if I’d parsed it correctly…

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Apple’s latest update for the RAW camera support in Aperture and iPhoto adds several new models, and, rather surprisingly, a Minolta camera that was released seven years ago, the Dimage A200. This is a cost-reduced version of the A2 that I own, which these days is part of my book scanner.

These were great little cameras at the time, and the A2 in particular is an excellent studio/still-life camera, but there aren’t a lot of them available on the used market, and of course Minolta got out of the camera business a long time ago, so there’s no service.

(and, actually, book 10 started; I just didn’t have time to write anything about it earlier)

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Between the product page that focuses almost exclusively on vague descriptions of bundled apps, the extremely weak coverage of yesterday’s press conference, and the distinct lack of detailed product reviews based on actual shipping hardware, one might wonder if you’re not terribly excited about releasing the ThinkPad Tablet, even with the real digitizer hardware that makes it possible to use a stylus for more than fingerpainting.

I managed to find confirmation that it supports the regular Android Market as well as the Lenovo App Store, but does it work with Amazon’s App Store? Can you cleanly delete unwanted bundled apps, such as McAfee for Android? Does the note-taking app include all of the optional handwriting recognition languages, such as Japanese? If not, are they available as add-ons?

The product doesn’t seem to be really getting launched, y’see. Most of the press coverage is still from over a month ago, and is a mix of direct quotes from press releases and handwaved comments about how good it will be when it’s finished.

Which suggests that until this week, it was still so rough that it couldn’t be sent out for real reviews. This might have been okay if you’d been the first company to launch an Android tablet, or perhaps even if you hadn’t already shipped a similar one (without the pen) in the IdeaPad line.

[Update: the ship date keeps slipping on lenovo.com, and I don’t think it’s due to a huge number of orders…]

I make fun of Amazon’s recommendations a lot, but they do put a lot of work into improving the system, and the latest effort seems to be the interactive betterizer.

[Update: sample output; it doesn’t know me very well yet.]

[Update: with a bit more training, it offered me the complete Incredible Hulk TV series on DVD for $29, so I can’t complain.]