Paper Moon

( I'm sticking the SE Moment of Zen behind a cut because it's a couple of images this time. )

In other news.... Well, it took them a good five months after they originally promised to do so, but GanGan Online comics are now accesible for iPhone/iPad devices. And they finally have their own app instead of using the godawful Actibook app to deliver their content, too!

Unfortunately, I took the app for a test drive today, and sadly it is not very good. The way that the app works is rather convoluted: You have to visit the GGO website with Safari, click on the "iPhone/iPad" links to open up the comics in the app interface, and then read things that way. The good news is that the comics that I read appear to be downloaded to my iPad, so maybe they won't disappear after a month the way that the chapters normally do on the GGO website. The bad news is that the app is incredibly non-user-friendly and counter-intuitive: it takes four buttons to get to your "library" page, the menu often freezes or just plain doesn't show up when you click on the bottom of comic pages, and the "bookmark" feature didn't actually work the first three times that I tried it.

But at least Umineko looks completely fabulous in my iPad. All of the comics do. They just look LIGHTYEARS better on the iPad than they do on the Flash interface that GGO has been using until now.

All of the other content on GGO is still Flash-based and inaccessible, though. And there is, of course, still absolutely no hint of making any of Squeenix's print magazines digitally available any time within the forseeable future. Why so twentieth century, Squeenix? We're more than a decade into the twenty-first century now and it's about time you got with the program!



Speaking of manga-ish things... Flist, may I ask for your expertise? I have a seventh-grade student who asked me if I could recommend any books for learning to draw anime and manga. That is not my area of interest so I had nothing to recommend for him, but maybe one of you guys might have a good book rec or two? Any help would be very much appreciated!



And finally, I'm going to go ahead and link to this post on sf_drama (it's a locked post but the comm has open membership) because the comments are a collective beautiful smackdown of that horrible stereotype about how medication for mental illnesses stifles creativity. That's definitely ranking up there among Nena's Least Favorite Offensive Stereotypes About Mental Illness EVER and seeing it get the takedown that it deserves made my day.

[Poll #1432144]
ETA: livejournal post where you can see the poll!

If I were a better person, I would be distinguishing between the just plain Did Not Do the Research linguistic sins ("Jacuzzi Splot") versus the Chalk This One Up to Good Old-Fashioned Linguistic Barriers names ("Gopher").* But I'm not.

Anyway, feel free to add your own nominations in the comments. Requirements: It must be a totally awesome, complex, fascinating, dramatically "heavy" character who is saddled with a name that makes it difficult or nearly impossible for non-Japanese speakers to take said character seriously.

* I'm sure that, for Ohkubo's intended audience of Japanese speakers, "Gopher" is quite the brilliant name. It's a double-whammy Biblical pun (animal theme + "gopher wood") plus a sly linguistic nod to modern office slang. Unfortunately, the word "gopher" just has extraordinarily silly conotations for English speakers. And even more unfortunately, it sounds exactly like the word for "waffles" to, oh, anybody who speaks a Romance language. Which, yes, of course - I know, you know, we all know that Ohkubo isn't writing for an international audience, he's writing for his Japanese audience - but still. Unfortunate linguistic coincidences are LULZ no matter where they come from.