日本鬼子 (ri ben gui zi) is a common disparaging term in China for Japanese people, dating back to the Sino-Japanese War(s). After the recent Diaoyu/Senkaku geo-political drama, the term has seen a resurgence in popularity in China, where the anti-Japanese movement comes back in fashion every so often.

Some creative Japanese folks noticed that 日本鬼子 can easily be parsed as a female Japanese name “Hinomoto Oniko” and the moé-fication project began.

A Japanese blog (that has since been made private) translated some responses obtained from Chinese netizens. Most of the reactions can be summarized as, “What is this I don’t even-” but one guy calmly said, “Please give her long straight black hair.”

More pics on Itai-News and this Chinese blog. More discussions on Slashdot JP. There’s also a YouTube video compilation of the images. I won’t be surprised if Oniko doujinshi start popping up in the Winter Comiket.

Anime otaku: helping to realize world peace one politically-inappropriate personification at a time. Personally, as a Nanjing-born Chinese, I think this is awesome.

Found a semi-interesting somewhat sensational NYT article on 2D love in Japan. (You can get a login from bugmenot.com) There’s a Boing Boing blog post on it too. Predictably, it didn’t take long before commentators started to sound the paedophile alarm. Cue the righteous condemnations.

Honestly speaking, this topic has been way overdone, though most of it in unintelligible babblings on 4chan and friends. But of course, “look at how weird Japan is” is always a favourite hail Mary for desperate newspapers on their death beds. There is some degree of irony in the fact that the article was written by the blogger of TokyoMango.

“I think we should all pray to God that he gets over his silly delusion…” I think this Boing Boing comment sums up the whole thing perfectly. It’s interesting how 2D love is almost universally looked down upon with scorn or pity every time the topic is returned from the grave by yet another newcomer. Somehow, people’s brains shut down whenever the words “protect the children” show up, leading to massive groupthink exercises and delicious hypocrisies.

P.S. Nemu is just bad taste though.

[ Read the original article on New York Times ]

Part II of DM’s domain-registering misadventure. Long story short: I decided to make it a picture-of-the-day thing.

After hours of WordPress hacking, I finally got it down to something close to what I imagined. Why I didn’t just use one of those ready-made POTD scripts is beyond me, but what’s done is done. There are still a lot of functionalities that I want to add, but it should be sufficient for now.

MoéFactor.com

Update: It’s dead now. That was fast. XD

www.moefactor.com

Some ideas so far:

• moé picture of the day (NSFW galore?)
• peer-ranked Digg-style anime news
• user-submitted anime news but with moderators instead of peer ranking
• translation-related stuff
• a blog in Japanese (できるかな・・・)
• something so crazy, cool and revolutionary that I haven’t thought of it yet
• leave the domain to mould because I’m too lazy to actually implement anything

So what’dya think? That last option sounds pretty good to me right now…

Well, apparently Dengeki G’s Festival Vol.6 will come with…

A FEENA PILLOW COVER!!! o___o

It will be out on 30th Nov and the pillow design has yet to be released. But considering how these magazine bonuses tend to be too lazy to commission new art, I’m betting that the pillow cover will be reusing this picture…

Click for full version

The price is around ï¿¥2,000. So… who’s getting one? :3

Image from Akiba-blog

From Akiba-blog: Enter 「ツンデレ☆りなっくãã€ or “Tsundere Linux”, a book that supposedly teaches you about the famous open source operating system in a totally moélicious manner. It even has a cute abbreviation もえりな (moerina).

Image from Akiba-blog

The book apparently covers various topics such as getting cheap second hand computers, explanations of the various distros and installation procedure for Debian, Firefox and 2ch browser. And a tsundere girl. Don’t forget the tsundere girl.

They totally need to make one of these for Cisco networking, the most goddamn boring topic in the world.