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.

After all, these people were mainstream American entertainers.

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Pretty girls are not summer-camp crafts projects.

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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.]

If you start studying Japanese, one of the first —and best— pieces of advice you’ll see is “avoid romanization”. The stated reason is simple: almost everything you see written in the roman alphabet is intended for non-Japanese readers, so learning to read romaji saves you some frustration up front, but cuts you off from anything that wasn’t specifically converted for Westerners.

There’s more to it than that, though, but there are plenty of anti-romaji rants out there. Today, I’m going to whine about furigana, small-print phonetic spellings of kanji commonly used in print, and almost completely unsupported on the web. They look something like this (CSS replaced with a GIF, because IE 7 is still broken):

The advantage is obvious: if you can read hiragana, you don’t necessarily have to look up unfamiliar kanji, and even if you do, you don’t have to identify radicals and count strokes. They’re also “real Japanese”; books and comics meant for children and younger teens are full of them, and even adult-oriented material needs them occasionally, to deal with unusual readings and rare kanji. They also get used to add emphasis and subtext.

Some of the disadvantages are also obvious:

• They have to be added by hand.
• They increase the required whitespace between lines of text.
• If multiple words on the same line have furigana, without careful placement they may overlap.
• If the original text is small, the furigana have to be tiny. This is particularly bad with manga, which are reduced 50% or more when reprinted.

One less-obvious disadvantage that’s been biting me recently is that someone who is accustomed to reading furigana will look at them first, even when he knows the associated kanji. I’ve studied over 1,000 kanji (and written out over 2,000), and if I retained them all, I’d be able to puzzle out the vast majority of the Japanese text I see, and quickly build my vocabulary by reading.

In reality, on a good day I recognize about 800 of them, and often don’t remember all the common readings, because I read the furigana first. I’ve gotten very, very good at reading even fairly small furigana, and can skim through a fully-glossed text quite quickly. The Ask graded readers I mentioned a while back are excellent, and I’m enjoying levels 3 and 4, but I’m reading kanji-with-furigana, not kanji.

Some textbooks try to keep you from falling into this trap by only using furigana the first time a word is used in a page or section (it’s also a lot cheaper…). Unfortunately, this only works when you’re reading the text in order, and really sucks when the teacher asks a student to read something aloud. Better books will use furigana for all new kanji, but expect you to be able to read words from previous lessons. My class didn’t use one of those; ours basically assumed that kanji would magically imprint themselves into your brain without any work on their part.

So, I need to read to master more kanji, but I need furigana to read, which keeps me from mastering more kanji. The best option I’ve found for breaking out of this little catch-22 is the Unicom JLPT Level 2 prep book for the reading section, which includes 30 essays arranged by increasing difficulty, each one printed with and without furigana. I’m also planning to resume my old habit of writing out everything I read, which is tedious, but extremely helpful.

[the other three JLPT2 books in this series are also good, but I’m less interested in them right now. I’ll probably start using them around July.]

[Update: I just skimmed through the raw of episode 10 on youtube. They found an unanticipated way to trim Rubi’s story, and solved the continuity problem by quickly moving on to the next scene. The fight apparently used up the last of their budget, however. Wow, I’ve never seen character art and animation go downhill that fast. I notice that they worked Rubi’s song into it successfully, though.]

Continuing from where I left off, the last three episode titles have been revealed. It looks like:

• 11: New school term: chapter 8
• 12: Public Safety Commission: chapter 9
• 13: Tsukune: chapter 10

So, 3.5 chapters of Rubi’s story will get crammed into episode 10, and whatever doesn’t fit will spill over into 11 along with however they resolve the continuity break at the end of episode 9. They’ll swipe the ending from chapter 19 to bring Rubi back in at the end of episode 13, which will put them on track to start a second series at episode 20 or 29.

ANN has reported that Sekirei will be animated this summer.

By coincidence, volume 1 of the manga arrived at my house a few days ago. I was putting in a large order with Amazon Japan, it popped up as a recommendation, and looked like an amusing ecchi fan-service comic, so I threw it in. Sadly, it’s aimed at a slightly older audience than usual, so there’s no furigana, which will significantly slow down my reading.

So, bearing in mind that I can’t just skim through it and get the gist of the plot, I would describe it as “the bastard child of DearS and Ikkitousen”. I’m not sure which parent it got the brains from, though.

Note: the heroine is Rushuna-scaled, enjoys bathing, and repels fog and other obscuring effects.

Today’s discoveries:

• Sailor suits and Heavy Tanks
• Moe yo! Tank School; also volume 2.
• Moe yo! SDF School
• Exciting, filled-with-maidens Imperial Army Primer
• Moeru Battleship
• Moe moe Small Arms Encyclopedia
• Moe moe Weapons Encyclopedia
• And lest you think it's all about war, Moe moe Goddess Encyclopedia and Moe moe Fairy Encyclopedia

What’s the connection? “People who bought these items also bought the Queen’s Blade panty-fighter books”… :-)