Nothing really to add this week. The photos depicted on page 82 are, of course, real - I found this stock photo album with about thirty seconds of Googling, perhaps a more concise one could be found with more effort.
ひねくれ者の潔癖症よ was a fun one. Never heard (read) that one before.
デブリ I could easily understand though
Crazy test, destroying all their work after 4 days, I wonder how I would’ve reacted to that. Wondering if 秋 knew, seeing as he wasn’t helping at all the whole time.
Oh, I meant to ask about that one, thanks for reminding me. It confused me when I looked 潔癖症up and found out it means clean-freak, because I couldn’t remember Marika ever behaving like a germaphobe (unlike Asumi, who’s taking an unholy amount of time washing her hands in that scene).
I also got that impression. But I wonder if he’s still losing points for teamwork, because he’s being such a dick about it.
Are you still asking? in case you are: when they met she wouldn’t shake hands, saying that Asumi’s hands had probably touched a lot of dirty stuff. I think that made a strong first impression on 圭
Both Asumi and Suzuki start the test going “weird, this seems far too easy for a seven-day test” and let me tell you, if I was looking at that many dominoes, that would absolutely not be my first thought. Point is, they clearly suspect something is gonna happen.
Though what bugs me is that long shots of the toilet show it has no lid, yet Kei is still using it as a chair…
Yeah, I completely forgot about that. Thanks for reminding me. I’m starting to feel I got too many bookclubs at once and got trouble keeping things straight.
I wonder what kind of liability disclaimer the parents have to sign when they enroll their kids into the program. The 東京宇宙学校’s lawyers must be busy.
Yeah I re-read the line a few times to make sure she wasn’t saying the opposite. I also felt like their strategy for placing the pieces (which appears to be the same as the boys’) is suboptimal and increases the wasted time when a domino is toppled by accident.
He’s shown placing dominos on p80. He seems pretty casual about it but he’s helping.
Like others, I also think he’s just the kinda guy who looks reeeaaally chill about everything because he already guessed the reason for the test but shows that he’s serious about this space thing when things get really problematic (like when the other dude was about to press that button).
This chapter felt short - I think because the pace is fast and things are interesting! I’m also guessing that this incident will strengthen the girls’ bonds!
ふたつのスピカが支え合って、あの輝きを生んでいるんだよ。 I really like this line. I hope it is thematically relevant to the characters.
I was thinking the same thing. Surely there should have been some kind of medical examination to test these things as part of the application process, where these kids would be properly informed of what they were about to experience. Should being the key word there.
I have some of the sympathy for the kids who left in that section of the test, but most of the sympathy for those who couldn’t because of the whole numb legs thing not being particularly helpful to the task of walking to the button.
The fact that more than one character assumes the sudden depressurisation is an accident amuses me - you’re in a room at standard atmospheric pressure, outside of which is also at standard atmospheric pressure, and you can’t change the air pressure very quickly by accident.
Though, it does make me wonder how they did do it. I wouldn’t imagine air pumps can even partially depressurise a room that fast. Dunno what they reduce the pressure to, aside from the fact that it’s enough to cause their water bottles to swell noticeably, so let’s say it’s the same as the pressure at the top of Mount Fuji (because my water bottle swelled similarly when I climbed it), which Wolfram Alpha tells me is about two-thirds the pressure at sea level. One way to suddenly lower the air pressure is to suddenly increase the volume it needs to fill - i.e. by connecting it up to a tank or something that contains a vacuum - but to reduce the pressure by a third, you’d need to increase the volume by 50%, so every single room would need to be connected to a tank half the size of the entire room, and that’s a lot of vacuum.
(Another thought I had was that they could gradually increase the air pressure in the room over the first four days, slow enough that nobody notices, and then suddenly vent the excess pressure to the outside air, though the issue with that is that if any of the rooms pushed the emergency button for whatever reason immediately prior to the depressurisation test, they’d definitely notice.)
Haha, I went through the same thought process. I wonder if there’s even a lab anywhere on earth where they have the tech to depressurize such a large volume that fast. What would it be used for anyway?
Also I’ve had the displeasure of having my ear canal not equalizing pressure correctly while in a plane that was descending to land and it was quite painful despite being a lot more gradual and probably a lot less of a pressure delta. I can imagine that such a brutal change of pressure could easily cause some significant health issues.
I’m sure the toothache depicted in the manga is based on reality too.
Tbh, I gave this like 2 seconds thought at the time and then just went “ok, sci-fi technology”.
In the real world, there are pressure chambers used in aircraft development where you can simulate how newly developed equipment reacts in case of a loss of cabin pressure. Probably in this parallel world where space travel became a thing much earlier, someone poured funding into developing better methods to do this.
A fun fact: this series is entirely lacking in sci-fi technology. It feels like Yaginuma-sensei made no attempt whatsoever to extrapolate what technology might look like in twenty years’ time after he wrote it. Smart phones are entirely absent. For that matter, I’m not sure any character even has a gara-phone. A laptop shows up later on, and it’s the size of a phone book.
They do also test prospective astronauts in hypobaric chambers, but they do so with medical staff inside the room, watching.
Not sure I would have seen it coming either. Future is pretty hard to predict in my opinion. I think I remember in the year 1997 or something similar, I had a school assignment to draw a city of the future, year 2000. So of course I drew flying cars. Still surprised to this day that we haven’t made that happen yet.
It was one of the things that attracted me to this manga - reading something written 25 years ago imaging today - and seeing what they predicted that doesn’t exist yet, and the things that are normal parts of our every day lives that the author failed to imagine.
in case you are: