Ah, the insanity.

From Akahori Gedou Hour Rabuge ep 12:

(A bit on the show before I start quoting: The main good guys, "Love Pheromone" (two female actors who have "forbidden" fetishes - one's attracted to boobs, the other, little boys, if I remember correctly) fail at being heros - they do more damage than the bad guys as mecha-enabled heros. The main bad guys, "Gedou Otome Tai", (5 sisters whose parents died as masked evil henchmen - watched over by a small demon-sprite-thing) do more good than evil with their magic elemental powers.)

Summary thus far: Death Ant Empire has come to steal *beep* from the earth. They are evil. They have picked up all 5 sisters, but the "good pair" come in to save the day, which... for once, they seem to be doing.

-Evil villain pushes a button that he pulls from his pants. Room turns pink. One of the "Love Pheromone" starts moaning and squirming, as does the daughter of the evil villain. The other "Love Pheromone" girl is standing in the back, her hands on her hips.

Evil villain: "I will explain. This sexy atmosphere enlarges the base size of girls' breasts by 3 times and agonizes them. So uh, why aren't you in agony?"

The small-boobed one: "That's right... ^^; these are just... FAKE TITS!!"

-Cue typical explosion of anger.

Evil villain: "Damn you! Evading this evil plan with mere fake tits like that!"

The small-boobed one: "Stop saying "fake tits!""

-brief pause

Evil villain: !!!. "Oh!"

The small-boobed one: "What"

Evil villain: "Little lady, what is your name?"

The small-boobed one: "Aimi"

Evil villain: "This is sudden but.. Please marry me!"

-Cue immediate face-palm reaction by everyone else in the anime. And myself included. ^^;;;

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(Ok, looking back on this, it wasn't really that funny. So uh, just ignore me. I got a good laugh out of it anyways.)

But oh, look, here's even better.

I'm sure you guys have heard of Second Life, the online uh, reality world/game. Someone made a beautiful parody called Getafirstlife.com [http://www.getafirstlife.com/], and not only did Linden Labs (makers of Second Life) not get annoyed, apparently they even sent a Proceed-and-permitted letter to the author: http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2007/01/my-project-du-jour-getafirstlifecom.html#comment-75509

Rented... Software?!?

http://www.theregister.com/2007/02/01/microsoft_offce_rental/

Apparently, Microsoft has come up with the idea to rent out Office 2003 for $15 per month.

I don't get it. Why would you _rent_ Office? Are people really that desperate to a) not pirate the software, and b) not spend that much money? 'cause it doesn't seem to be a rent-to-buy sort of thing.

World, meet OpenOffice?

Finally! Stupid XML parsing.

Using XML::LibXML::Reader:

( code )

( Resulting text output: )

While, yes, this doesn't actually do what I need it to do, it gives me the ways I need to access everything in the xml file without doing any manual parsing on my own. Finally. There's a stupid lack of documentation out there, although I get the impression now (well, 30 minutes ago) that it's because the function names are supposed to be a set standard that is presumed to be already known...

But still, HAH! It WORKS!

Now for the more tedious but easier part of uh, figuring out which parts of what goes where in the database.

Oh, yeah, the code's here mostly to help anyone who might be googling for stuff.
Problems I ran into:
- Why doesn't the XML::LibXML::Reader work? (creating a new Reader with a string throws an error)
Answer: because I was running LibXML 2.5 on MacOS X.
- How do I access the attributes / How do I get the attribute names / How do I figure out which attributes there are?
Answer: Tricky bastard requires use of moveToFirstAttribute() first. Then name() and value() will snag the proper attributes. moveToAttributeNo( number ) will move you to the number-th attribute. They do not appear to be in any particular order, so assumptions should not be made about which one would be first, which would be second, etc.
- Which module should I use?
Answer: I don't know. See http://perl-xml.sourceforge.net/faq/#dont_parse. I hope I made the right choice with XML::LibXML::Reader............ ::crosses fingers and toes::