I can’t think of a better summary of a major genre of anime and manga than this:

She is a princess of loving mischief!
He is a dull boy who is not at all lucky!
They are really close couple
though they have a lot of problems.

This comes from the front cover of the groundbreaking new manga series きつねのよめいり, featuring the fresh imagination and original story-telling of newcomer Sato Takagi.

Naaah, just kidding. I’m sure it delivers exactly what it promised on the cover (seen here on Amazon). The title, and perhaps a few tiny nuggets of the story, are based on classic folk tales about trickster-fox brides, but I’d be stunned if it rose above genre clichés.

Here’s my progress report from DHL:

(naturally, the dollar jumped back up 4 yen after my order was processed…)

[Update: and… there it was on my desk waiting for me today. I think I’ve got enough light novels, music, concerts, and bikini DVDs to last me for a few months now. Still one more item on the way, but Amazon will be shipping it free since it got delayed for so long.]

Something that I’ve noticed repeatedly over the years is a tendency for Japanese entertainment products to require a great deal of patience on the part of the consumer.

An obvious example is games with lengthy intros and cut-scenes that can’t be skipped. This sometimes happens in non-Japanese games, but not to the same degree. For instance, the one and only time I attempted to play a hentai “dating sim” game, I gave up before even reaching a nude scene, worn out by more than twenty minutes of introductory dialogue that offered the player no interaction whatsoever. And it’s not like it was relevant background material: “I am the main character in a porn game. I have banged many women under circumstances you will not believe. I will do so again, if your multiple-choice input is acceptable. Be sure to take notes.”

Anime is often like this as well. It’s not unusual for a series to spend most of a season meandering towards the plot, with a sudden burst of (usually rushed, over-compressed) activity towards the end. In many cases, there’s an obvious production or financial reason, but my point is that the target audience doesn’t seem to mind.

There are plenty of others I could bring up (I’m amazed The Prince hasn’t gagged his father with a katamari), but the specific example that brought this to mind was the novel I’m reading, 魔女館へようこそ, “Welcome To The Witch’s Mansion”.

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Virtually every use of “teed off by” on the web is in reference to someone becoming annoyed by golfers. Given that, perhaps you should reconsider this bit of release-euphemizing:

"Lenovo's IdeaPad Y-series consumer notebooks are all going 16:9 widescreen, teed off by the 16-inch Y650, ..."

I suppose I’d get a bit teed-off if my sibling had 16 inches, too…

Fedora 10 correctly handles FA19 in various applications, including OpenOffice.

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There exists a blog called “Japan for the uninvited”. I found one of its articles linked from a fairly reliable group blog. That particular entry was a rehash of claims from other English-language sites about Japan, and was relatively accurate.

The next three entries that I read were complete nonsense. This short-lived blog was created by someone looking for ad impressions, who didn’t pay any attention to accuracy.

[note for the blogger: when the members of a band range in age from 14 to 24, describing them all as “pre-pubescent” is a slight categorization error. Also, when the high point of your site is the unintentional hilarity of the phrase “discrete sex”, find a new hobby.]

After I thought I had a decent script for figuring out what packages Anaconda would install from a Fedora 10 DVD, I decided to test it against reality. Reality made the script cry like a little girl, so it was back to the drawing board.

The problem, simply put, was that I had over-estimated the internal consistency of the data. Here’s what I learned in the process of producing a 100% match between my script and an actual default install of Fedora 10:

1. Packages listed in comps.xml don't necessarily exist, even if they're marked mandatory (like iprutils).
2. Conditional packages in comps.xml often depend on packages that are not themselves listed, but get included during dependency resolution (all of the OpenOffice language packs, for instance).
3. Packages often require themselves (more than two-thirds of perl's requirements are met by... perl).
4. Some packages specify a requirement for files installed by a package rather than features provided by that package (such as /usr/bin/perl; in an amusing note, this file is required by, but not a feature provided by, perl).
5. A few packages require files that are not installed by any package, and that's not considered an error.
6. It's not unusual for multiple packages to satisfy the same requirement, and when they do, Anaconda chooses the one with the shortest name. Seriously.
7. ...unless it's obsoleted by the other one, as in the case of the synaptics driver.
8. RPM doesn't actually care about all this nonsense; when it wants to know what libraries a package depends on, it opens it up and runs ldd on the contents.
9. This is required exactly once during a default Fedora 10 install, to discover the fact that totem-mozplugin requires mozplugger. I had to fake that one.

At some point, this knowledge will be put to use upgrading my EEE PC from Fedora 9, but now that I can declare victory and stop tinkering with the script for a while, I’m going to go finish the Japanese novel I’m currently working my way through (60 pages down, 200 to go).

Yes, it’s the Christmas holidays and I’m tinkering with Perl scripts that parse XML files and SQL databases. It was worth it, however, to discover that the circle is now complete: Emacs requires Perl.

Also awk, bash, cpio, ping, and sed, but hey, who doesn’t need those?

[Yes, that list is so basic that it would be surprising if a package didn’t end up pulling one of them in somewhere down the dependency chain, but Emacs is a Lisp interpreter with delusions of godhood, built around text processing; why would it want Perl? Turns out there’s exactly one Perl script in the distribution, packaged up in emacs-common: /usr/bin/grep-changelog]