Oh, frack...

Woke up this morning to find my desktop $HOME directory locked. The hard-drive was set into read-only mode and marked "unreliable". I've ordered a new one (man, disk drives never go down in price, only up in capacity) and it'll be here in 4-6 business days. In the meantime, my desktop is off and I'm down to just having the P2 laptop. Bleah! Fortunately, it looks like I caught it before anything really bad happened and I should be able to pull the data off the dying drive before it really goes down for good.

The Kashimashi Conspiracy

I have this weird conspiracy theory that Kashimashi is an attempt at international politics. The vocabulary and grammar of Kashimashi is exactly within reach of anyone who's finished the Pimsleur Japanese 90-day course (Yes, that link is exactly what you think it is) and the content of Kashimashi is the sort of thing that seems to appeal to the American otaku audience as much as the Japanese.

Combined with the sudden appearance of subtitling tools for Linux and the rise of "soft" subtitles (those in which the subtitles are provided as a text file rather than embedded in the image), there are a whole bunch of amateur SRT (Soft Subtitle) files translating the first and second episodes in a variety of languages, including English, French, and Italian. None of them are excellent, and my Japanese is good enough that I disagree with many of the bits in them.

So, bear with me: both America and Japan have much to lose in the economic struggle with China. Traditionally the #1 and #2 economies, we tend to rise and fall together, and our biggest weakness is the language barrier.

The part of me that delights in conspiracy theories proposes that part of the reason that Japanese companies don't fight fansubbing is not because fansubbing provides a barometer of American interest. Instead, I propose that the Japanese government has discouraged lawsuits against fansubbers because the more Americans there are who can speak Japanese, the better for both nations.

It is a silly idea, but I can't help but be surprised by just how accessible this show is.

Beta-Testers wanted

If you go look at the Journal Entries Index Page, and you haven't had Java enabled for a long time, you might notice something interesting about the page: the clock has started working again. I've completely re-written the clock in Javascript, which means that it should be accessible to damn near everyone and scales appropriately when applying the Text->Larger option for those whose eyes are getting older.

Just something to share with you before tomorrow's release. And yes, this means that the algorithm is downloadable for those of you able to find your View Source button. It's a complete hack, meant just for this page, and is not to be taken seriously.

If it's borked, obviously, tell me here!