My loathe-hate relationship with the Hello!Project Costume Designers is no secret. They specialize in converting rather pretty girls into walking, dancing, singing, eye-searing fashion disasters. My goal in these little critiques has a long history in Japanese culture: hammer down the nail that sticks out.

Sadly, it doesn’t work. And it can’t, because a while back I figured out their real goal, and there’s nothing I can do to compete with that audience.

more...

I find myself wondering if this verb has ever caused a problem with female tourists in Japan: ぶら下げる = bura-sageru = “to hang; to suspend; to dangle; to swing”.

To prevent things like this:

Xenon - 8 SP1
3D finesse without constraints, solid & surface modeling, drafting, rendering.

So, what features does it have?

Web site account activation system:

1. Ask new user for name, email address, password
2. Send confirmation email containing:
   • carefully randomized confirmation URL
   • name
   • email address
   • password (helpfully converted to lowercase for ease of use)
3. Provide no method of changing email address or password

(site name omitted because no one has any reason to give them a credit card anyway)

Q: What happens when you print white text on a black background?

A: The black ink bleeds into the letters, making them thinner and obscuring fine details. The extent of this problem depends on the specific printing technology, but a good rule of thumb is to use bolder fonts when you do white-on-black.

Q: What happens when you print white kanji, really small, on a light gray background that’s constructed as a color halftone?

A: Garbage.

more...

“Hey, that’s a really cool 45K JPG that’s perfect for the front page of our manga review site! I bet this guy will really appreciate the traffic he’ll get when we link directly to it!”

…

“Hey, why is the picture now upside down, backwards, grayscale, and low-resolution? And why did it disappear when I reloaded the page? And why can’t I see his website at all any more? It’s almost like he’s completely rejecting any traffic from anyone who ever viewed that picture on our site! I can’t even ping his server!”

[Update: “Hmmm, I can reach his site from a different machine, but when I try to load our home page that still has the link to his copy of the picture, I get this funny error code. I don’t speak any English, so can someone tell me what ‘403 some bozo deeplinked’ means?”]

Every time I think about Aya Matsuura’s new single “Chocolate Soul”, which attempts to fuse her newer adult-contemporary style with a less-manic version of her early goofiness, I hear a completely different song.

First, here’s Aya:

The problem is, the word for soul is “damashii”, making the song “chokoreeto damashii” チョコレート魂, and you know what that means…

more...

I’m reading Kanna’s mind here, and she’s thinking, “I’ll kill them later, but y’know, I think I can actually work this outfit.”

more...