It doesn’t appear that the Mai-HiME manga has been licensed for the US market yet, despite the expected popularity of the anime. Pity, really, because I’m curious how the usual hack translators would deal with the last page of the first volume. A Strange Cute Girl (one of many) has just entered Our Hero’s dorm room, stripped off her panties, and pushed him to the ground. The volume ends with a full-page panel of her straddling him, speaking the line:

私の鍵穴も開けて下さい。

Our Hero seems more shocked than excited by this statement, but it’s understandable, since he’s still discovering just how peculiar his new school (and its girls) are. Unfortunately for him, I’ve seen enough spoilers from the (very different…) anime to know that neither shock nor excitement is the right response to a bold invitation from this girl. “Fleeing in terror with his manhood protected by a sturdy shield” just about covers it.

My other response to this scene was “hey, I just read that, and only had to stop and think about one of the kanji” (鍵, which I haven’t gotten to in my writing practice yet; I know the word, and they provided furigana that made it clear). Okay, the others are extremely common, basic kanji, but the point is that I was reading rather than deciphering.

I had an epiphany this weekend at KublaCon, sometime before we ran Rory’s usual monstrous Dwarven Forge MasterMaze D&D adventure (this time with added “live” roleplaying).

I do not like cons.

I do not like gamers.

I particularly do not like loud, clueless, obnoxious, asocial, grotesquely obese, unbathed gamers whose greatest ambition in life seems to be saving money on a hotel room by sleeping on a chair in the hallway. Cons are full of people combining at least two of the above characteristics, frequently more.

In truth, I don’t much like people in general. I’d like to use the term “energy vampires”, but it looks like the woo-woo pop psychology cranks have already sucked it dry of meaning. Besides, they seem to think that only some small minority of the population consists of soul-draining monsters, whereas for me, there are very few people who do not eventually wear down my thin veneer of sociability to reveal the cranky bastard within. And I can only recharge when I’m alone.

[our event went surprisingly well, by the way]

[and a lot of cute JAL stewardesses stay in that hotel…]

Jeff learned an important lesson about technology today.

Today I did my part to keep the Cha-Cha Maru afloat. No, I didn’t send Robert a box of Chachamaru cookies, or a case of Chachamaru for kitchen. I just ordered a few more anime DVDs to add to The Great Unwatched Pile on my coffee table, which I hope to make at least a small dent in soon.

• Ah! My Goddess TV, discs 4 & 5 (good stuff).
• My-HiME, discs 1 & 2 (fluff! super-powered schoolgirls with mecha!).
• Kaleido Star New Wings, discs 2 & 3 (if it's even half as good as season 1, it's worth every penny).
• Girls Bravo, discs 5 & 6 (well-drawn plot-free fluff).
• Tenjho Tenge, discs 5 & 6 (hot girls, big fights, trainwreck of a plot)
• Maburaho, discs 6 & 7 (yes, I know Yuna turns into a nagging bitch; I always liked Kuriko better anyway, even though the phony-widow landlady is the real prize).
• Daphne in the Brilliant Blue, disc 7 (wins the award for "most obvious use of fan-service to hide the inept scattering of plot crumbs", but Maia's adventures are fun, and the series has inspired two of my Bad Haiku: "pointy chin, nice ass, / someday there will come a plot; / meanwhile, that must chafe." and 「その服に寒いよね。でも、お尻いい。」
• DearS, disc 4 (they had to do some plot surgery to the manga to tell a complete story, and they left a lot of threads dangling for a second season that will never come, but I really like it, and you can never go wrong with dancing chibi in the credits).
• Burst Angel, discs 5 & 6 (pretty drawings, poorly-integrated CGI, trainwreck of a story).
• Crest of the Stars, box set (recommended by some guy I trust).
• Stratos 4, box set (likewise).
• Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase, manga volume 3 (nekomimi gothloli vampire, what's not to like?)
• Hyper Police, manga volume 6 (I always thought the anime deserved a second season...).
• Haibane Renmei, original soundtrack (I can never manage to get that song out of my head, so it might as well be on my iPod).

I think I’m way overdue for twin posts on music and manga, especially since I just finished region-converting my dozenth Hello!Project DVD. The latest one is the concert video Folk Songs 3, which not only has the usual cute jpop idol girls, but an older male vocalist whose work I’ve acquired an interest in recently, Gen Takayama.

And I’m still trying to relocate the reference in one of my books to the original Cha Cha Maru. I’m sure the ship in Plastic Little played some part in the naming of the robot girl in Negima, but the name 茶々丸 goes back at least to the Ashikaga period. Tea cookies, kitchen cleansers, pet hunter ships, and robot girls are an odd group to be tied together by a name, and I just want to know how it got started.

[ah, there he is! I knew I’d run across a Chachamaru in the Ashikaga period. Turns out he was even in the Ashikaga family, and a rather ruthless fellow. I doubt there’s anyone named after him.]

[…and another Chachamaru reference in anime: apparently it’s the name of a bar in Maison Ikkoku]

Every once in a while, I suddenly remember that I’m studying Japanese, and that I have the resources to figure out what things really mean, not just what other people claim they mean. Usually, this involves song lyrics or anime dialog, but today I was reminded of the trendy photographic term bokeh, and decided to sort it out.

Googling the term will turn up dozens of sites that carefully explain that bokeh refers to the quality with which a photographic lens renders the out-of-focus area of images, with a mix of technical jargon and artistic handwaving, and tell you that “boke” is the Japanese word for blur.

There are objective, measurable differences in how lenses render blurred areas of the picture. Minolta even made a monster of a portrait lens specifically designed to produce glorious blur (I tried it out side-by-side with a conventional lens here). Once artists get hold of a word, though, there’s no telling what it might mean, and I’ve seen a number of pretentious explanations of the true meaning of bokeh.

So you’ll understand my amusement when I looked it up and discovered that boke actually means “out of touch with reality”. Less politely, “idiot” or “senile fool”.

The actual Japanese photographic term is ピンぼけ (for the kana-impaired, “pinboke”). It’s a compound word; pin from the Dutch brandpunt = “focus”, and boke from the verb 暈ける (“bokeru”) = “to fade”.

[update! a comment on the Wikipedia page led me to an alternate choice: ぼけ味 (“bokeaji”), which is a combination of ピンぼけ and 味 (“aji”), meaning “flavor”. Supporting evidence for that can be found on Japanese camera sites like this and this (second one mildly NSFW).]

Oh, and the real “Japanese word for blur”? 不鮮明 (“fusenmei”). A related word that might come in handy occasionally is ぶれ (“bure”), meaning “camera shake”.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m generating lots of PDF files that don’t work in Preview.app, and are also a tad on the large side. Resolving this problem requires the use of Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Distiller. Automating this solution requires AppleScript. AppleScript is evil.

Just in case anyone else wants to do something like this from the command line, here’s what I ended up with, which is run as “osascript pdfcleaner.scpt myfile.pdf”:

on run argv
	set input to POSIX file ((system attribute "PWD") & "/" & (item 1 of argv))
	set output to replace_chars(input as string, ".pdf", ".ps")
	
	tell application "Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard"
		activate
		open alias input
		save the first document to file output using PostScript Conversion
		close all docs saving no
	end tell
	
	tell application "Acrobat Distiller 7.0"
		Distill sourcePath POSIX path of output
	end tell
	
	set nullCh to ASCII character 0
	set nullFourCharCode to nullCh & nullCh & nullCh & nullCh
	tell application "Finder"
		set file type of input to nullFourCharCode
		set creator type of input to nullFourCharCode
	end tell
	
	tell application "Terminal"
		activate
	end tell
end run
	
on replace_chars(this_text, search_string, replacement_string)
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to the search_string
	set the item_list to every text item of this_text
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to the replacement_string
	set this_text to the item_list as string
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
	return this_text
end replace_chars

[I wiped out the file type and creator code to make sure that the resulting PDFs opened by default with Preview.app, not Acrobat; I swiped that code from Daring Fireball. The string-replace function came from Apple’s AppleScript sample site.]

Lots of people upload videos to Youtube. Lots of people upload music videos to Youtube. Lots of people upload music videos from the 80s to Youtube. This guy cataloged a whole bunch of them. And for every one he’s got listed, there’s a half-dozen more linked to them. Days could pass before I escape this trap.

When I first looked at one, I saw some reflections from the glossy screen, but it wasn’t obnoxious. Also, while I didn’t particularly like the keyboard (anything short of a Matias Tactile Pro simply can’t be good), it wasn’t worse than my current PowerBook, just different.

Today, the local Apple Store had them set out near the windows. Afternoon sun bouncing off of the buildings across the street gave me a more realistic test of the screen’s usability, and it failed. The reflections produced by diffused store lighting were easy to ignore; the image of the street outside was not. I see a big market in add-on glare hoods.

I wouldn’t have been in the market for one for a few more months anyway, but now I’m definitely waiting to see if they deal with the problem. Right now, I’m more likely to buy a Pro in September, just because of the screen. There’s not much size (or weight) difference between the MacBook and the 15-inch MacBook Pro, and the high-glare screen is still an option.

Also, the exterior of the matte black models were all smudged with fingerprints, visible from ten feet away, and they just put them on display…