Posted by: EvilOtto at February 11, 2009 02:54 PM (Ybc00)
2
I thought worshipping Haruhi was mandatory, or the Universe would end. Hakufu looks not just dwarfed, but a little overwhelmed by Haruhi in that one pic!
Posted by: Toren at February 11, 2009 03:58 PM (EyyBN)
And my reaction was "Fusion Ho!" (A very obscure reference; I'll be surprised if any of you get it.)
Is it just me, or is the second series more ecchi than the first was?
UPDATE: Also more lolicon. There are now three lolis, and one episode has them in swimsuits the entire time, and one shows them at an onsen.
UPDATE: Speaking of which...
UPDATE: Done completely, and I ended up with 154 grabs total. I won't be able to use all those, probably 135. But that's still a lot. I'm feeling better about this now.
1
Toward the end of the manga series, one chapter has the still-a-little-loli trio without the swimsuits. I think they provided most of the fan-service in the last few volumes.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at February 11, 2009 01:17 PM (9Nz6c)
2
They show up like that in the onsen episode, too, rather more explicitly than I would have liked. And there were a couple of locker-room sequences which came close to the boundary.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 11, 2009 02:22 PM (+rSRq)
3
Chika does look at least somewhat loli-ish. But the other two? Not so much--especially Chizuru, who is actually kind of stacked. The trio are all in high school, anyway, so that cuts down the loli factor. I'm not sure high school girls should really be considered lolis...or an awful lot of anime fan service fits the bill. I do enjoy the top rotation pics. (In fact, I actually picked up one series because the top rotation images here caught my attention--Magikano. ) I almost wish they played as a slideshow while I'm on the site, since there's no way I could have any chance of seeing more than a fraction of them even if I visited 30 times a day.
Posted by: Toren at February 11, 2009 03:55 PM (EyyBN)
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I think the problem is that Chika is initially introduced as "very young", and if you don't track time carefully, you won't notice that the artist considers her "old enough" until you're hit in the face with three sets of what you thought were early-teen breasts. Her friends are definitely more mature, but if you've mentally classified them as "Chika's age"...
[on a side note, I'm not actually sure what the common Japanese understanding of "loli" includes]
-j
Posted by: J Greely at February 11, 2009 04:21 PM (9Nz6c)
I think we're used to having our protagonists in harem shows be high school students (sweet 16, just at the Japanese age of consent), so any girl in the "much younger competitor" category has to be really quite young. In this show the norm is college age. Aoi, Tina, Kaoru, and Taeko are all over 21 and can legally drink, so the "much younger competitors" this time are high school age.
Because Chika wears her hair in twintails, and because she's thin and not very developed and wears casual clothes and doesn't wear makeup, it's easy visually to think of her as being a lot younger than that.
Which was probably deliberate on the part of the mangaka.
Also, all three of them are short. If they're really 16, they should be at their full adult heights. Tina and Taeko shouldn't tower over them the way they seem to. (Tina and Taeko are not all that tall themselves, compared to Miyabi or Suzuki.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 11, 2009 05:16 PM (+rSRq)
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If I recall correctly, Chika's about 14 when she's introduced, but doesn't change much physically over the two years that the story covers. She and her friends are written as never-been-kissed girly girls who want boyfriends real soon now but not today, which adds even more contrast between them and the college girls.
Thinking more about the "loli" classification, I think it has less to do with physical development than with the perception that "she's still just a girl inside", with things like hairstyle, clothing, and lack of makeup showing how she thinks about herself.
A good example of marketing abuse of the term would be 17-year-old idol Erika Yazawa's photobook that promised "loli-cute looks and 88 bust with G cups" on the cover. She has a sweet face, but doesn't look particularly young, and the attitude she projects is more devilish than loli. More of a Tina than a Chika.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at February 12, 2009 06:13 AM (2XtN5)
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Unless I'm incorrect, Steven, it's a DBZ reference. Not all that obscure...
Posted by: Wonderduck at February 12, 2009 07:25 AM (sh9fy)
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bing bing bing We have a winner. Yeah, it's the Fusion Dance that Goku teaches to Trunks and Goten during the Majin Buu arc.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 12, 2009 09:38 AM (+rSRq)
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Aoi, Tina, Kaoru, and Taeko seem to be over 20 (second year of college) at the
beginning of the series (20 is the legal drinking age in Japan). If I
remember correctly, Chika is in 9th grade at first, so she's most
likely 15. When she moves in later (and gains her pals) she's in 10th
grade, so they are most likely 16. So then it becomes a question of "how old do they look," "does the fine print matter" and "what makes a loli a loli"...? And I'm not touching that mess with a ten foot pole because, as Zymurgy's Law of Evolving Systems Dynamics tells us: "Once you open a can of worms, the only way to re-can them is to use a larger can." And we don't want that.
Posted by: Toren at February 12, 2009 05:07 PM (EyyBN)
Ordinarily I am really loath to use frame grabs in the top rotation that include guys. But I have to make an exception for these two:
What's Mayu doing with a figure like that? Somehow I had come away with the idea that she was 12. But I reread the spoilers, and see where I made my mistake. She was 12 when she met Kaoru, back before he left his family. I am not sure how long ago that's been, but probably 4 years, so that makes her high school age -- and makes her figure quite plausible.
UPDATE: Pity I can't use this one:
But there are limits.
UPDATE: This one I will use:
Ah, Taeko! What indignities have they forced on you?
UPDATE: It really is hard to resist the temptation to gather about a thousand pictures of Taeko, you know that? I just finished the first series, and I've got probably 90 grabs so far and the Majority of those are Tina and/or Taeko. Here's one I can't use:
Pity, isn't it?
UPDATE: I can't use this one, either, but I'll be damned if I'll let it go to waste.
1
Taeko actually looks even better with her glasses off and her hair down. Now, I'm all for meganekko, but this is a rare exception. I think we see her like that in a later onsen episode (but beware--there is some loli action from Chika in that one). Mayu is 16 when she first gets back. She skipped two grades while in England in order to rush back to Japan and Kaoru.
Posted by: Toren at February 11, 2009 10:02 AM (EyyBN)
2
Glasses and hairstyles notwithstanding, I for one am impressed by the young ladies merits.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at February 11, 2009 07:22 PM (V5zw/)
Been keeping an eye on this ever since Fallen Angels came out in 1991 (new ice age coupled with anti-tech, socialist government -- not that that could ever happen here).
Pellet stove in the basement, down comforters & jackets all round... plus plenty of guns, ammo and canned goods, too.
Whenever there's data such as this, Glenn Reynolds invariably cites FA, too. As well he might this post of yours.
Posted by: Tiberius at February 10, 2009 04:13 PM (TXmvK)
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It's a case of "I sincerely hope I'm wrong". While Jim Hansen and his Prophet Al Gore is still selling their snake oil, we can't help but noticed that the world is getting colder. PDO (the 30 year cycle of long term Pacific ocean phases) have flipped to cold phase. The previous time when we're in a cold phase is in the 70s, and back then these very same Warmists are talking about coming Ice Age.
But the sunspot count is very troubling indeed. Sun will do as it please, politic be damned.
Posted by: BigFire at February 10, 2009 04:15 PM (Kwn4z)
Do I have this right? The way I understand the cause-and-effect goes like this:
A lot of times clouds need something to seed them. Conditions may be such that clouds are possible, but without some sort of seed to start the process, the clouds may not form on their own. Seeds can be silver iodide (legendarily) or dust or any of several other things, but one of the most common seeds is cosmic ray traces. The atmosphere is a giant cloud chamber.
The rate at which cosmic rays arrive at the earth is a function of the solar wind. When it's strong, fewer arrive. When it's weak, a lot do.
The strength of the solar wind correlates with sunspot activity. When the surface of the sun roils, more gas is expelled.
So when there are few sunspots, the solar wind is weak, so more cosmic rays strike the earth, and there's more cloud formation.
Clouds increase the planet albedo, resulting in more sunlight being bounced back into space, and less striking the surface and turning to heat, so the planet cools.
Is that the theory?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 10, 2009 04:29 PM (+rSRq)
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I cannot bring myself to believe that the solar wind affects cosmic rays enough to affect anything. It goes down to this: if you cut a cone starting in the center of Earth and ending at the solar system's shockwave, is there more solar wind particles in it than, say, protons and electrons in the upper ionosphere (where collisions cannot create clouds)? I bet you donuts to dollars there isn't, even though the height of the cone is unimaginably enormous. It's a very good vacuum out there. So, the effect described is very small. The most of the effect we see from solar wind comes from the way the wind itself interacts with magnetic field and atmosphere. It's the first order effect.
I have my father's textbook on ionosphere and stuff, which goes into lengths regarding the solari wind, but sadly it does not deal with clouds. They are too low in the dense air for him, sadly. So that's no help.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at February 10, 2009 05:03 PM (/ppBw)
5
I believe that is a correct statement of a theory. It seems to be controversial, but seeing through the politics-induced noise for climate issues is so hard now that I can't even guess at the credence of the theory or its criticisms. There are still people running around claiming that the world has gotten warmer for the past three years, for pete's sake, which requires some serious data torture.
I've been falling back to the simplest, basic test of science, which is: "Do your predictions come true?", which is what has really been feeding my skepticism lately. We're falling off the bottom of the error bars of the predictions from just a few years ago, and it's distressing to me how few people seem to understand exactly how much of an indictment of the theory that is, namely, it basically disproves the models making those claims.
Posted by: Jeremy Bowers at February 10, 2009 05:30 PM (7LWnd)
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A someone who has always been uncomfortable in any temperature over 78, even back when I was skinny, "I, for one, welcome our Ice Age Overlords!" <--(I'm beginning to think I spend too much time on Slashdot.)
Posted by: Siergen at February 10, 2009 06:33 PM (syMpe)
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I wonder if there's any relationship between solar minima and global economic recessions...
Posted by: peolesdru at February 10, 2009 06:42 PM (v7UIA)
Pete, I think the inverse relationship between the rate of arrival of extra-solar cosmic rays and the solar wind has been confirmed experimentally. After all, we can measure them.
The idea that cosmic rays seed clouds is somewhat more controversial, but apparently not all that much more so. It's a recent theory but I gather it's respected. I gather there's some pretty good hard data about that.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 10, 2009 07:02 PM (+rSRq)
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The link between sunspots and temperature is a lot simpler than that: there are more sunspots when the sun is hotter; and when the sun is hotter the earth gets hotter.
The increased solar wind during sunspot periods does shield the earth from cosmic rays, but I think the indirect effect on climate is small comparted to the direct effect of increased solar irradiance.
Posted by: pete at February 10, 2009 08:10 PM (tBPlp)
It is a fanart of Miku Hatsune, the first 'vocaloid', i.e. the covergirl of a song and singing program that you can buy which allows you to create your very J-Pop songs. This has allowed a fairly spectacular number of Miku Hatsune-renditions of existing songs, some of them quite good (Check out vocaloid version of the closing theme to the Ghost in the Shell movie.).
Miku Hatsune herself has become quite a common sight, used in all sort of art (Right up to decal works on cars.), as well as all sort of fanart and doujinshi.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at February 10, 2009 07:50 PM (ypRP3)
5
I know who Miku is, just wondering about the picture.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at February 10, 2009 08:28 PM (/ppBw)
We all know who she is. The question was whether this picture was a spoof, or whether some doujin-soft group has produced a fighting game that features her and the other vocaloids.
That would not be completely far-fetched; there are a lot of fan-produced games out that featuring anime characters.
For instance, Magical Battle Arena features a lot of the girls from Nanoha A's, plus it has Lina Inverse, and Sakura (the Card Captor), and just a swarm of others.
I've also seen video taken from a sort of RPG fighting game which featured Kagami (from Lucky Star) as a miko, but I don't remember its name. (The other girls from Lucky Star appear in it as cameos.)
Some doujin-soft games have amazingly good graphics, too, so that image is not implausibly good.
However, it's drawn rather than being rendered, and given that camera angle then I would expect a game framegrab to be 3D rendered instead. Hand-drawn art as good as that isn't practical for animation in a game like this.
That's why I think it's not a frame grab from a game. BUT... it could be concept art. And I love the idea of her using leeks as if they were fighting sticks.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 10, 2009 08:31 PM (+rSRq)
7
Graphics are pushing the boundary between "drawn" and "rendered", but we're not nearly that far yet. I like how Valkyria Chronicles looks, but it's still pretty detail-light, and this pic ain't. Zero chance it's from a game. It is, however, still bloody awesome.
(Good god, if it was from a game, what kind of monster box would you have to have to run it with a good frame rate?)
I've been seeing plenty of Figma characters dual-wielding leeks over on Mikatan's blog; whenever they roll a new Figma (or Nendroid) out, the first thing they do is play accessory-swap. ;p Here's San with the negi-negi action while one of the vocaloids borrows her sword, Miku with dual leek-flail keychains, and going too far with the leek thing.
I gotta quit looking at these sites. It'll bankrupt me faster than cel collecting!
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at February 11, 2009 01:26 AM (7TgBH)
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A mid-range modern PC probably has the raw horsepower to do the job, but rendering 3D graphics so that it looks like cel animation without making it also look like crap is something that no-one really seems to have mastered yet.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at February 11, 2009 05:57 AM (PiXy!)
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Coincidentially, I ran across a little clip... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWwMIb5AbGc (Make sure to see the ending.) Why is Miku so popular? A rhethorical question, largely. Amazing, simply amazing.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at February 16, 2009 12:34 AM (/ppBw)
I can't believe I missed that this was present: my camera does have a macro mode, and it's pretty darned good, for a cheap camera. Combined with manual exposure control, it's possible to get really quite decent closeups of things even using the flash. I've got four pictures below the fold, as examples.
I believe I'm going to have to read the manual to find out what other things this can do that I wasn't aware of. (I know it can take 640*480 video.)
UPDATE: Two more added.
UPDATE: This camera cost me $130, about. Kodak or Polaroid film cameras from 10-15 years ago, were there any in this price range which had remotely this kind of feature set and image fidelity? Not even close! It's no wonder digital cameras have long since killed off film for consumer use -- and for most other photography, too. Film is a niche now, and it's a niche that's continuing to shrink.
UPDATE: They did considerably improve the lenses in the newer version. In my L-18 the macro mode is limited to a range of 6 inches. In the L-19 it's 2 inches.
1
A few years back I got what I thought would be just a little pocket point and shoot Canon SD200 with a semi-decent lens. I just wanted it for some security work at the time. I orderd a larger after market memory for it also. After I got the thing I realized I had massive overkill. With the larger memory chip it could be used as video camera not just still shots. It also had the macro, landscape, etc. modes. If they just made a comparable photo printer. The reasonably priced ones are all rape you on the price of ink jet cartridge types.
I also read complaints that if you don't use the printer often enough you get nozzle clogs.
Posted by: toadold at February 10, 2009 05:44 AM (zcbXo)
2
CCDs and flash memory have revolutionized more than a few areas in the last few years. How long before even Hollywood stops fiddling with film?
toadold, I don't do much printing anymore myself, but I'm told that it's sometimes cheaper to get it done at a place like Walmart than it is to buy the ink and paper yourself. They apparently have kiosks where you slot your card, pick the pic, pay up, and take the freshly-printed copy out of the hopper.
Posted by: BigD at February 10, 2009 10:18 AM (LjWr8)
3
Ayup, I figured it was cheaper to go to Walgreen's photo kiosk with a flash drive or a burned DVD than pay about $0.30 a photo to use an ink jet. Of course the last time I tried that the flershinger machine at Walgreen's was out of order.
Posted by: toadold at February 10, 2009 01:49 PM (zcbXo)
So a while back I bought a cheap camera, partially expecting it to be a tryout where I'd figure out what I like and what I want different.
I've been really happy with the Nikon Coolpix L-18, but in fact I have found one thing I wish I had: a macro focus mode, to allow me to take closeup pictures of very small things.
So I wondered if it was possible to fit a macro lens into this kind of pocket format, and I just now visited the Nikon site to see what they had.
And it turns out there's a new model, called S620. There's also the S630. That one's got a 7X zoom, which is cool. But its minimum focusing distance is 24 inches, and using a zoom lens from away just isn't the same as using a macro lens.
I've been doing that with my current camera. The problem is that when you're in zoom mode, light gathering suffers, and my camera starts using the flash, which often I don't want. And even in that mode I can't get as narrow a field of view as I really want. Also, the camera shifts the CCD down into low-light mode, so the images are grainy.
Anyway, the S620 only has a 4X zoom, but that is still better than the 3X zoom on my current camera. And it says this about focusing range:
Approx. 1 ft. 8 in. (50cm) to infinity, Macro close-up mode: 0.8 in. (2cm) to infinity.
I do believe we have a winner. I guess next time I go to Fred's I'm going to have to check the camera section and see if they have it. The MSRP is only $270.
The only thing about it I don't care for is that it uses a rechargeable battery instead of AA's. That was one of the things I really liked about my current camera. but it's not really a big deal, and in every other regard it's what I think I want next.
UPDATE: Of course, maybe I should get this one instead. It's half the price, focuses down to 2 inches, and runs off AA cells.
Looks like they added macro mode to the cheap line just after the one I bought. Man, if only I had procrastinated a bit longer...
UPDATE: Wait a minute. I just checked the manual, and my current camera has a macro mode. It's just that you have to manually enable it.
So a couple of months ago I triumphed over my fear and installed a year's worth of Vista patches, including SP1. That also included a year's worth of patches to IE.
As to Vista, frankly I haven't really noticed any difference. Whatever they were doing, it was under the hood. The IE patches didn't seem to add any features, either, but now IE tends to behave strangely some of the time.
There are two failure modes. In one of them, it locks up and goes completely CPU bound. This is a dual-CPU system, so I can still interact, but it's still a bit creepy when suddenly the CPU cooling fan shifts up and starts running as fast as it can.
The other mode is more common but just as annoying. IE locks up cold, again, and ignores all input including mouse clicks, but the CPU doesn't get hammered. The only way I've found to kill it is to use the task manager. This happens to me several times per week, and it's really a pain. And it doesn't correlate to visits to particular sites. (Nor, please, do I need any suggestions or advice on this subject.)
On balance I've found Vista to be serviceable. I suspect that XP would consume less CPU and less HD space, but I've got both to spare and it hasn't been so piggy as to be unpleasant.
So it hasn't really been substantially worse than XP. And it hasn't really been better, either. there are things they added in Vista, but I don't use any of them, and I've got most of them shut down. The Macified OS graphic gimcracks, for example.
Based on my experience, Vista doesn't deserve the bad rep it's got in some circles. But it isn't anything special, either. If you have XP on your system and it works, there's no compelling case to be made for upgrading.
I've been reading a bit about Windows 7, and everything I've seen makes it sound even less appealing to me. Microsoft's biggest competition has always been older versions of their own products, and when it comes to operating systems they've pretty much run out of worthwhile additions, and have taken to adding crap and frippery just to differentiate the new ones from the old.
UPDATE: Originally it was planned that the big deal in Vista was going to be the new filesystem, which used a relational database for its file index. But they ended up postponing that. Is it expected to be in Windows 7, or was it postponed again? Or did they scrap it entirely?
What I had heard about Vista that concerned me most was stories about end-to-end OS-enforced DRM. If they'd been true it would have been a deal breaker for me. But the rumors turned out to be false.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 09, 2009 06:35 PM (+rSRq)
I just had IE lock up again, and somehow I also managed to lock up the task manager. Ended up having to hold the power button down for six seconds to force a hard shutdown.
It was only a half-crash; the mouse still worked, and I could bring up the main windows menu. But choosing "shut down" there didn't do anything.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 09, 2009 10:08 PM (+rSRq)
6
Looking at it from the other side... I have a bug in RHEL 3 (2003), which is two years younger than XP (2001). Apparently, EHCI driver can crash sometimes while processing the so-called "done list". Looking at it now, I have no clue what may be wrong, the code looks perfect (well, I wrote it ). There are no systems to reproduce it, it's a 2.4 kernel, it happens very infrequently at customer system, and the diagnostic capabilities of 2.4 are nil in that area (one of the reasons I created usbmon for 2.6.11+). Practically speaking, there's no way to fix it. In theory, if someone were willing to furnish an exact copy of the failing box which I could test... and it would take a while. Last time I had a bug like that, it took months (also EHCI on Sun x4100, turned out it was reading the new address at the end of the frame instead of the start -- who knew!, and so it would drive one transaction with stale (zero) address). And that was 2003. The idea to go back to Windows XP and fix something in its 2001 vintage internals just scares me. NO FRIKKING WAI.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at February 11, 2009 09:48 AM (/ppBw)
7We aren't going to support the older product any longer has long been one of Microsoft's key ways of "encouraging" customers to upgrade, but when it comes to XP and Vista, the customers pushed back. Microsoft has been forced to reschedule sunset on XP twice now, pushing it back a long way. Last I heard it was scheduled for mid 2009, but I won't be surprised if it's pushed back again.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 11, 2009 10:04 AM (+rSRq)
8
I finally got Vista because I was interested in seeing the marginal difference with DirectX 10. I agree that Vista is no big improvement on XP. My IE has locked up a few times lately (the kind of lockup with no cpu activity) and each time it was me trying to go to Facebook, so go figure. I'm slowly switching to using Google Chrome for my standard browsing - the main improvement being that if a website did lock up, it would only affect that particular tab and wouldn't drag the rest of my tabs down with it.
Posted by: peolesdru at February 13, 2009 06:18 AM (jawYe)
So our new President has been in office for three weeks, and how does he look so far?
Like a man in deeply over his head. He looks inept. He looks underqualified. He looks like someone who isn't prepared for the job he's supposed to be doing. He's been making mistakes, lots of mistakes.
He looks like someone who is waiting for someone else to tell him what he should be doing. He looks like someone who expected to be a figurehead, with all the real work being done by his advisors.
Unfortunately, what he looks like is an affirmative action hire*, in the worst sense of that phrase, and I really wish it weren't so.
If he doesn't get hold of himself soon, we're all going to be in deep trouble. The President of the United States doesn't get to vote "present".
(*Back in the 1970's, "affirmative action hire" was a term used for someone who was hired to satisfy a quota, without regard to their qualifications.)
UPDATE: Standup comedians say, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
For politicians, criticizing is easy. Making promises is easy. Leadership is hard. This country elected a politician. Now it needs a leader, and so far it doesn't look like we have one.
I do hope he gets his act together, sooner rather than later.
I'm rewatching Macademi Wasshoi, because I have in mind to do a TMW about it and I'm preparing my thoughts.
Listening to it, there's a word stem they use, shin it sounds like to me, which they're using to mean "god". For example, at one point they refer to shinkai to makai and it means "the realms of the gods and demons."
makai is perfectly fine; I've run into it before. (That's the name of the place Glenda comes from in Petite Princess Yucie, for example.)
é” ma means "demon". 界 kai means "world"
But I've been burning up the dictionaries tonight and I cannot identify any kanji or any other use of shin that means anything remotely like "god" or "deity" or "angel". The only word I know for that is 神 kami which they aren't using.
Anyone care to give me a hand here? What am I missing?
UPDATE: And no sooner do I post this than I find the answer. shin is one of the pronunciations of 神. How common is it?
So shinkai would be 神界. I wonder why they're using shin exclusively in this instead of kami?
UPDATE: I was wrong. They also use kami in some cases.
1
Maybe there's a subtle difference in connotation? kami having more of a 'spirit of a place or object' element, whereas shin having more of a 'spirit from a different place' element?
Posted by: metaphysician at February 08, 2009 09:57 PM (h4nEy)
2
It's the difference between the on and kun readings - in just about any compound, you'll see shin used instead of kami. When used as a separate word, kami.
Posted by: HC at February 09, 2009 05:21 AM (y9yco)