“J, sometimes a feather is just a feather.”
— Brian Keller"Cake or Death", revisited
Another random discovery in Kinokuniya: 死神とチョコレートパフェ. Three light novels, adapted into a manga series. I have no idea what it’s about, and yet, I do.
The first light novel looks like this.
Needs more punk
The phrase “voted best punk band by Shoujo Beat” pretty much sums up this song by Ketchup Mania. I think it’s a bad sign when you can listen to punk rock and visualize the anime series that it would make a good opening-credits song for.
[Update: animated music video for another Ketchup Mania song.]
The slender way to booze
A frequent annoyance for manga and anime fans is the inevitable loss of information in translation. Little things like the use of -san, -chan, -sama, -dono, et al can be simply left in or explained once, and if you’re watching the subtitled version, you can pick them out of the original dialogue.
Often, though, cultural context means that a single line of dialogue can’t be fully understood without half a page of explanation, but sometimes it can’t, or shouldn’t, be explained. One of the dumbest things I’ve seen a fansub group do was fill the entire screen with a detailed explanation of a very small joke that added almost nothing to the story.
What we see a lot of today, though, especially with the insane pace of manga translation, is information lost because the translators didn’t have the context themselves; either they’re not native speakers who grew up in Japan (as pointed out in this Amazon review), or they’re not reading an entire story before translating a chapter (too many to list…).
So, here’s my tiny joke of the day, courtesy of a manga volume I spotted in Kinokuniya: 酒のほそ道. It’s the story of a salaryman who loves to drink; I can’t tell you any more about the story, because it’s entirely lacking in furigana, and I didn’t buy it anyway. It’s popular enough to have 22 volumes out, though.
Anyone familiar with classic Japanese literature will get the title immediately, and wonder just where the author is going to go with it. “Sake no hoso-michi” translates literally as “the narrow road of sake”, but it’s really a reference to “Oku no hoso-michi”, a very famous book written by the haiku poet Bashō.
Dear Hello!Project Costume Designers,
Yuuko’s outfit is simple, and her hair is for once a color found in nature. Okay, she’s wearing a nightie, but that’s not a bad thing. But when I look at Nacchi, I just have to ask, DEAR GOD WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!?
Aperture 2: smells like boosters
Sad, really. Amazon finally delivers my Aperture 2.0 upgrade, and my first thought upon opening the package is, “wow, this manual smells like a freshly-opened Magic: The Gathering booster pack”. Not those cheap, modern, anyone-can-get-some boosters. The good stuff, from the old days, when people would line up around the block to buy a case, then get back in line to buy another one.
Oh, and I didn’t expect it to work, but no, it doesn’t support my old Minolta A2 in its new tethered mode. That was my second thought.
Okay, maybe the Japanese are the sane ones...
After all, these people were mainstream American entertainers.
Pop-up furigana test
When I first decided to hack furigana for the web, I simply used HTML tooltips, with a bit of CSS to highlight the glossed word. It mostly worked, but the presentation was iffy, and by default IE didn’t use a Unicode font for tooltips. I also knocked together a script to simplify the process of marking up a lot of text; that one needs some more work, still.
My second try used the popular jquery JavaScript library, which abstracted away most of the browser dependencies, and left the HTML clean. I liked the results, but I got sidetracked before I managed to clean up the code. Also, at the time I was reluctant to add the overhead of even a relatively compact JS library to every page.
After my recent discovery that IE7 is still hosed for basic CSS, I broke down and cleaned up my JS code, and I’m going to start using it. Here’s the first test: 漢字には全てふりがなが付いています。
The big feature of this version is that if JavaScript is turned off in the browser, the pop-up furigana still display as tooltips. One known bug is that they appear in the wrong place if the window has been scrolled horizontally.
[Update: hmm, the offset function in the new version of the jquery dimensions plug-in isn’t calculating the correct bounding box for the base text in IE 6. I’ll have to look at that. However, the ifixpng plug-in does finally make my site logo work in IE6.]
[Update: I’m behind the times. offset() has been rolled into the core jquery library, and it’s fine; the problem was that IE6 doesn’t bother calculating changes to a hidden DIV. If I show it and then update its position, it works fine.]
