>>20
This comic pokes fun at the interface people are forced to use when typing in Japanese on a computer. Normally, typing in Japanese basically boils down to typing the romaji equivalent of whatever Japanese you want to type. (Even Japanese people do it this way; it's not like it's just a crutch for foreigners or anything like that.) So if I wanted to write 吾輩は猫である ("I Am A Cat," a famous work of literature by Natsume Souseki), I could do it by typing wagahaihanekodearu and then hitting spacebar (which converts the phonetic script into kanji automatically). It's a useful tool, but it can be a real pain sometimes. There are times when it converts a word into kanji incorrectly (it might convert "seikou" into 性交 ("sexual intercourse") when you mean to write 成功 ("success"), for instance, because these two very different words happen to have the same reading), or when the interface arbitrarily decides that what you intended to be two words is actually one long word (which then of course gets converted incorrectly), or when the conversion you want doesn't come up on the list of possibilities (in which case you have to add the word to the interface's dictionary on your own). And since the usual interface has a number of different input modes, if you forget which mode you're in and start to type naively, the results can sometimes look nothing like what you intended. For example, if I type "chocolate bars are awesome" while in the standard Japanese input mode (as opposed to the English mode), it might come out as this gibberish: ちょこぁて場rsあれあうぇそめ
In particular, if I were to type "lain" while in the standard Japanese mode, it would come out as this: ぁいｎ
In the comic, Lain tries to log in to her navi, but because she didn't realize that the input mode was set to Japanese rather than English, when she types "lain" it comes out as ぁいｎ. The computer then assumes that this is her name and starts calling her by ぁいｎ (the pronunciation of which is difficult to imagine but surely bizarre in any case), much to poor little Lain's chagrin.
Title: せりあｌ えｘぺりめんｔｓ ぁいｎ
[The title is gibberish, but you're supposed to be able to tell that it's what you would get if you naively typed in "serial" + enter + " experiments" + enter + "lain" + enter while in the standard Japanese input mode. Leaving out the enters would actually cause the title to become more unreadable, since it would convert some of the characters to kanji, but not only might the end result be different on different machines, but it would also be harder to decipher, which is probably why the author chose to do it this way instead. Here, all the characters are phonetic characters, and it's easier to see that "せりあｌ えｘぺりめんｔｓ ぁいｎ" is supposed to be "serial experiments lain."]
Navi: "Log in...who are you?"
Lain: Oh..... User name..... Uh...um..... What should I do...? W-well, okay...
Panel 2:
Lain (Japanese at top): "Re... i... n..."
[This is the spelling of "lain" in Japanese; it consists of three units of sound, which can be seen in the Japanese: れ ("re"), い ("i"), and ん ("n").]
Lain (Roman character): L
Lain (Roman character): A
Lain (Roman character): I
Lain (Roman character): N
SFX: chak chak chak
Panel 3:
Navi (voice): ぁいｎ, is it?
Navi (screen): Who are you?
Navi (screen): ぁいｎ
Navi (screen): enter ID
Panel 4:
Lain: "Oh...! Oh... what should I do? I entered it in romaji... Um... It's lain, in English, not ぁいｎ...
Navi: New mail has arrived for ぁいｎ
Lain: Oh...! Oh...! What should I do...?? Umm...where's backspace...um....
