Space Family Carlvinson v02 c019
OctonionicTo start with, recognizing the meaning of the framed text on page 131 took me far longer than I care to admit - it's easily the piece of text I've had the greatest difficulty translating so far. The first problem is that it's written in calligraphy and is almost small enough that JPEG artifacts start influencing the reading. Then, it looks just like a 5-7-5 haiku (with an attribution), but is written entirely in hiragana, which increases ambiguity. If you pick some archaic words, treat the づ as an accented つ, and assume the incredibly awkward flow of the result is just poetry, you can almost read it as a real poem, albeit one which makes no sense. The problem is that it's not funny, and detailed background text like this would have to be a joke.
Long story short, back in 2004 somebody on a now-defunct IRC channel explained the whole thing simply enough that I could understand it, and if you get enough of the characters right the logs show up in search engines. If you fill in the missing character that Tah's speech bubble obscures, the result (ならへぎづ なせみくのはへ まぶねびで うずべ) is a continuation code for Dragon Quest 1 that makes the hero's name “manko” (pussy).
Anyway, the title for this chapter references “The Fly” (or perhaps a Kamen Rider episode influenced by it) and a film called “The Secret of the Telegian”. The cast break out some rather heavy weaponry, and it becomes increasingly questionable whether they are a completely normal acting troupe.
v02c019