Land: burned; sea: boiled; unable to acquire sky, please wait…

— Blizzard Matchmaker

Dear Hollywood,


WTF is this? Sherlock Bond?

Dear Apple,


I get it, I do; you felt it was necessary and cool to have little video clips playing on the System Preferences panel for the new trackpads, to show all the cool multi-touch gestures.

But did it ever occur to you that the videos keep running as long as System Preferences is open to this panel, even in the background, even when the app is hidden? That’s 15-20% of one of my CPUs devoted to showing off multi-touch, when what I really care about is that you keep resetting the tracking speed of the trackpad whenever I plug in an external mouse.

Could you take some of that effort you put into the first five minutes of the user experience with a new piece of hardware, and maybe spend a little of it on how the device behaves for the next five years?

It was an innocent search, honest...


I’m transcribing lyrics from an album I found in the discount bin at Kinokuniya, 草原の人. It’s the soundtrack from one of Hello!Project’s musicals, featuring Aya Matsuura and Melon Kinenbi, and the songs are short and mostly missing from the Project!Hello lyrics site.

I’ve done this a few times before, and the hard part is figuring out the names of the songwriters and arrangers. They’re usually printed smaller than the lyrics, and my usual electronic dictionary doesn’t have names. I can get placenames and family names on my Sharp Papyrus, but first names are tricky, and in one case, the reading was so unusual that Enamdict didn’t even have it (知枝 as かずえ instead of ちえ or ともえ).

My fallback solution in such cases is Google, doing mixed searches of the kanji, kana, and romaji until I find a person who appears to be in the correct business. Instead, I found two partial name matches in an adult video titled 巨乳携帯ショップ (NSFW! NSFW!). It’s not what I was looking for, being the erotic adventures of the busty staff of a cellphone store dedicated to support and アフターサービス, but it’s amusing to come across. By the way, the store’s called PAIMOM, from the slang phrase パイ揉み.

(I wouldn’t buy it, because Japanese porn tends to focus on domination, but I might look up the pretty girls in the cast to see if they’ve done anything less explicit)

[Update: Amazon has one that is trending toward five-bladed razor territory for fetish overload: 巨乳女子校生中出し, Volume 4]

Usually the bait is more appetizing than the switch...


Browsing the folder all my spam lands into, I find the subject line 「お食事のお誘いです♪」, which can be translated as “this is a meal invitation”. The URL in the message is randomstring.com/sexcircle, which sounds a bit more… filling.

Spam knows no borders


Best spam subject line I’ve seen in weeks:

Stimulez votre baby-maker

And here I thought the French hated the creeping spread of English…

"Somebody, anybody, please buy our apples"


Just got back from Costco, where I was surprised and amused to discover that every apple in the place was “certified organic”, at the same price they were selling conventional produce last time I visited. My usual response when I see “organic” produce is to search for the conventional alternative, which is larger, cheaper, and safer, but there weren’t any.

It looks like at least one major Washington apple grower is taking it in the shorts as people reassess their willingness to pay extra for a sticker on the label.

Electrical Service


The NSFW teaser trailer is out for Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan. Youtube has already removed at least one version of it, so that link might not last long (now updated with alternate site…). The show is either going to be much less revealing than this clip, or heavily censored for broadcast, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about. Instead, let’s look at the relationship between heroine Plug Cryostat and her rival Arrester Blanket:

Plug taunts Arrester

After her intimately-detailed transformation scene, Plug intrudes on Arrester’s intro and holds up a sign reading 「メガネ乳女」, “megane-chimé”. 乳女 is not a word you’ll find in dictionaries, but it’s in common use on the Internet, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who recognizes the characters for “breasts/milk” and “woman”. Clearly she feels comfortable enough about her own figure to tease her top-heavy senpai.

[You’ll also find the characters in the other order, 女乳, read as めにゅう, “menyuu”. Searching for either one will bring up lots of sites featuring women possessing Arrester’s bustline, if not her glasses. The odds of those sites being worksafe are very, very low.]

Dear Apple,


Why is this option here, and only here? And off by default?

Leopard printer driver auto-quit option

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”