What happens to Uma Musume when they lose their races too often:
Willfully ignoring crimes against humanity again
As American planes are renditioning people to South Sudan via Ireland, Simon McGarr is reminded of the last time the country deliberately looked away from crimes against humanity:
We have been here before, of course. Here’s the 2007 Irish Human Rights Commission’s report on Ireland’s role in the George W Bush era of extraordinary renditions of individuals for the purposes of torture abroad. This was expanded upon by the Open Society’s Justice Initiative’s 2013 report “GLOBALIZING TORTURE: CIA SECRET DETENTION AND EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION“, which determined that Ireland had “facilitated” the CIA rendition and torture project.
Furthermore, the question of planes landing in Shannon and flying on to Israel has also triggered questions as to whether Ireland is being used as a refuelling stop in the delivery of arms to Israel’s government while it prosecutes its military action against the people of Gaza.
The reason that these are still only questions- as yet unanswered- is that the government declines to have officials inspect the planes which land. Indeed, An Garda Síochana seem as determined as they were in the Bush era to place the level of evidence required to trigger an examination of what might be on one of these planes so high that it would be impossible for any member of the public to meet it. The view taken then was that police would only inspect US planes if a member of the public could already prove that there were prisoners (or arms shipments or even undeclared restricted items such as guns) on board.
It’s not surprising that the Irish government would rather look away than confront either the US or Israel. Better to tolerate this than to dire the wrath of either country, would be the thought. Few European governments would choose to do otherwise. How then, could you force them to do so anyway? As McGarr outlines, maybe you need to use VAT law:
A few months ago Lelia Doolan assessed the legal situation regarding the treatment of planes used by the US government stopping at Shannon.
She wrote to the Attorney General to put him on notice that she had concerns that Ireland was not complying with its duties of systemic inspection of planes for cargo under EU VAT law.
A clever tactic which might work but I’m doubtful it will. Perhaps the only way to stop these renditions is to do on a massive scale what people have done with success to prevent immigration arrests in the UK, by surrounding the arresting officers and physically keeping them from taking somebody away.
Turns out typesetting is kind of important but so is deciding what to translate
Over on Bluesky, Yukino has a complaint about a recent episode of Mono:
my favorite thing in the world is isolated translations of onscreen text that is downright impossible to tell what it’s referring to unless you already know the language
The example she attached was this (image & alt text by Yukino):
Anime publishing legend Justin Sevakis knew why this caption was displayed in this very unhelpful way:
This is done for compatibility with various streaming service’s subtitle/caption standards, which are based on closed captions and are absolutely not up to the challenge of anime and yet are insisted upon by said streamers
Which explains why this happened, but not why the anonymous translator decided this particular tag had to be translated and put on the screen in the first place. there’s no reason for it, the glasses are never seen again; it just seems to be translated because it could be, just like the other examples in Yukino’s tweet. And by floating them on the top of the screen instead of on or near the text they translate, they are as she says, completely useless unless you can already read the Japanese and so work out what they refer to. I’ve seen and been irritated a lot recently by exactly this combination of subtitling over eagerness and lackadaisical placements of captions, so it’s gratifying to see I’m not alone in this.
So often that we get completely superfluous captions translated (like school name plates or class number signs) while actually important text is left alone. When it’s then also displayed as incompetently as in Mono episode four as Yukino showed, it’s adding insult to injury. What it also does is show the importance of typesetting:
That video is four years old and sadly things seem to have deteriorated since then. As I keep saying, translation, including typesetting things properly, is the one added value anime streaming services add. But currently they fall at both deciding what is important enough to translate and then at displaying it properly. If a Crunchyroll has no respect for its own product, how can it expect its customers to have it?
Gee doctor, I have no idea how I got Type 2 Diabetics
Episode six of Hibi wa Sugiredo Meshi Umashi was the dreaded diet episode as surprisingly our protagonist didn’t fit in the new skirt she bought after having consumed this light snack.
And for once it was actually decently done? Usually when a Big Eater like Mako here has to go on a diet it’s done for laughs. They get enormously, grossly fat after they spent the whole of the series up till then eating whatever they want without care, then continually struggle to keep to their diet, using absurd means to lose weight in far too short a time to be healthy. The setup here, with the girls going for a lunch together before going clothes shopping had me fearing the worst. When the issue therefore turned out to be just that she couldn’t do up the zip on her new skirt is was relieved. That’s something that most people have had to deal with. the way she dealt with it was normal too, by eating less and going to a sports school, dragging two of her friends with her. And then the episode didn’t even end with her splurging on all the snacks she had locked away and undoing all the hard work she had done. Finally an anime that’s normal about weight loss and dieting!
De Jeugd van Tegewoordig: Twenty Years Young this Year
Still only available in glorious 240p almost twenty years on, Watskeburt:
This was such a hype when it came out. At the time Sandra and I were living near where parts of the video had been shot, which means seeing it again now, twenty years on, gives me an intense wave of nostalgia. 2005 wasn’t the best of years but did saw us move out from our subrented way too expensive flat into our own apartment elsewhere in Amsterdam Noord and this came out just a few months after we had done so. The first and last Dutch rap song Sandra actually liked.