Much thanks to the Duck for his review of this film, which led me to include the DVD in my latest order from Amazon Japan. I was able to find a set of soft-subs for it that seem to be reasonably accurate (and were apparently used to subtitle the bootleg DVDs that people were selling on Amazon US for a while). It’s a gorgeous, ugly, moving, and quite sad film, and Joe Hisiashi’s score suits the material perfectly.

The few non-Duck English reviews I’ve found come at it with an axe to grind, making them basically useless for evaluating the film. Oddly, they all seem to think that no one outside of Japan would be interested, which says more about them than it does about the film.

It’s not available on BluRay, but the image quality is still superb (Handbrake ripped it at 850x364). Sample screengrab below, from late in the film.

more...

I received a little piece of email sent to an address that I’ve only used with Oakley, in ever-so-slighty-off English, claiming to direct me to download a new version of Adobe Reader from adobe-pdf-pro.net, which is registered to a company in Moscow and hosted in the UK. Visiting that site (with wget, not a real browser!) redirects me to signup-way.com, which redirects me to pdfnewdownload.com, which tries to get me to become a member to gain access to this and other free software. I strongly suspect that someone visiting with a real browser will get a lot more than a deceptive and pointless offer.

Hey, maybe it’s not from Adobe after all!

Sadly, the real Adobe does not provide a way to inform them that this is going on; it doesn’t qualify under any of the feedback categories they permit, sigh.

[and it got past my spam filters because I whitelist the special addresses I give to companies I’ve done business with in the past; looks like someone “acquired” a copy of Oakley’s mailing list…]

Thanks for enabling two-finger trackpad zoom on the desktop in Snow Leopard. One accidental swipe and my carefully-arranged icons are all over the place, with no undo and no way to turn off the feature without disabling it system-wide. Gosh, how clever of you. “It probably won an award.”

Or, more precisely, boy band meets girl band. They had me at Sooyoung stretching in tight sweats…

The main focus of the mildly-NSFW and likely-staged photo isn’t particularly subtle, but I had to stop and think for a moment about how I immediately knew that it was taken in a Japanese book store.

After the fact, it’s easy to find all sorts of supporting evidence, but the original pattern-matching process was unconscious and instant.

Back-to-back short reviews over at Marginal Revolution, from Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok.

The gist of this and other reviews is that it’s exactly what the trailers promised: gorgeous graphics demos strung together by a weak, derivative story that hits you over the head with a whopping big moral sledgehammer.

Found a picture online and want to figure out where it really came from, so you can see it full-sized, without captions and site banners and censorship and loltext? TinEye to the rescue. It hasn’t been able to track down every picture I’ve fed it, but it also hasn’t had a false positive yet.

After some of my earlier searches, I’m not surprised that Amazon Japan occasionally recommends porn novels to me. Today’s top dirty book has an interesting title, 一発やりがい.

一発 means “one shot”, either literally, like one (1) bullet, or more generally, like a knockout punch; やりがい means “(s.t.) is worth doing”. In context, the phrase would seem to map cleanly to:

"I'd hit that"