Almost slipped my mind, but it’s just before midnight my time, so I did it:
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I lost track of the day of the week, but here it is now
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Sorry I’m a day late on posting that, and my lack of actual contribution to the thread…
I’m having lots of other health flareups, chief of all a whole lot of hand problems that I’m guessing are the result of inflammatory arthritis (which is not uncommon in long covid sufferers). Whatever it is, hurts to use my hands much at all, so to be honest I’ve largely been pretty depressed and doing not much of anything. I don’t know if I’m even learning Japanese anymore, but I’m certainly not at the moment 
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Damn that sounds hard, sending you my thoughts!
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That sounds rough. Sending my thoughts too. 
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Don’t worry about being late, it’s all good! I hope you’re able to find a bit of relief and comfort soon. Most importantly your physical and mental health takes priority, if you need a break or some help with running the club feel absolutely free to ask. In case of the latter, if I’m not misremembering we can ask the mods to change the ownership of a thread, so it wouldn’t be an issue to transfer them back to you afterwards, just as an option.
We needed a break the other time, it’s okay if we need another one again 
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This is a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to share the info that the author of our current visual novel (in addition to classics of the medium: Higurashi and Umineko), ryukishi07, was just announced to be the writer on a new Silent Hill videogame. I’m a huge fan of early entries of that series and pretty skeptical of any new attempts at this point, but I am super curious to see what he’ll do with it.
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Interesting. I only saw the trailer for the Silent Hill 2 remake which seemed… fine (Ok, I’m definitely going to play if for no other reason than nostalgia). I’m kind of interested in the new one in that the setting is actually not in the US which might bring in some fresh themes to the series. It’s kind of ironic that the series that popularized psychological horror as a game genre kind of went nowhere with it. Like most other fans 2 & 3 were my clear favorites, but I feel like Downpour was passable even if it wasn’t amazing. The rest of them went actiony, culty, or just kind of weird (I’m really not sure how to feel about shattered memories)
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I’m in kind of a biased position because I absolutely love the original entries. I think I’d consider Silent Hills 1-4 the scariest pieces of media, full stop. Such amazing atmospheres. 4 is an odd, somewhat flawed experience, but I’m someone who thinks its strengths still really carry it.
Pretty much can’t stand everything since though, heh. Konami seemed to repeatedly outsource new SH entries to cheap dev teams who hadn’t really made a decent game before and that’s kind of my cynical take on what’s happening now too, but I’ll have to at least try them and I’m going to do my best to give them a fair shake. No Code (the Annapurna associated dev) seems alright, though we have no clue what kind of game Townfall is yet. f has another seemingly unexperienced dev team, but I’m very curious about ryukishi07 and the trailer is cool. I’d nitpick that it looks like they’ve gone SO far from Silent Hill that unless it plays like the others (which seems unlikely?) the name is pure marketing only, but since we’re getting several games and it’s trying something new I won’t harp on it too much.
The remake though… well, it’s Bloober team. The devs specifically criticized for (implied SH2 spoiler I guess) handling mental illness really badly in all their games, and whose brand of horror I’ll be diplomatic and say is very far from my tastes. The trailer looked really over-emotive (he basically does the Tommy Wiseau “everyone betray me” pose haha) so they’re clearly changing the tone, and I get that it’s probably impossible to get a game company in 2022 to ok sticking with the David Lynch style awkward stilted delivery, but it’s still a shame. Intentional or not, it added a lot. I hope it turns out well but I’m not holding my breath.
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I’m not sure if this is the right thread to ask but since we are getting near the end of our first VN, do we have plans for future VN readings? I haven’t really participated in other book clubs on here so I’m not sure what the proper etiquette is and if clubs usually wait until the book is over before starting to nominate new stuff etc.
I hope your health problems get better soon! I completely understand if the VN club is more of a one-off thing for now.
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I was just thinking about this yesterday. Even if we’re not done yet with ルーパーズ I honestly had a blast with the VN discovery as a new medium for me. I really like the delivery and the atmosphere it creates, and most importantly it’s such a great language learning medium in case Textractor works. Having said that, after browsing a bit here and there about titles, prices and whatnot, I grew a bit disappointed and worried that I might not be able to handle the cost past a certain price. Many of them (especially the more popular ones) seem to be very highly priced and I feel like that might heavily condition our choices and make us rely primarily on sales, also conditioning our choices further while probably delaying the schedule of the club. Those sales might happen while we’re in the middle of reading a VN and in that case we’d probably need early voting, etc. It’s also probably not realistic to expect a lot of participation in the club if the entry is very expensive.
Now of course this could be prevented to a certain point if we aim for affordable VNs like we did with ルーパーズ, but at the same time it’s disappointing that price is such a limiting factor when it comes to this medium in particular. I wonder, for those of you who are much more informed than me, are sales frequent and decent enough so that this wouldn’t be an issue? In the case of book clubs, usually there are many nice and affordable options to pick from without it necessarily affecting the quality of the content, but is that the case with VNs? Is there also a decent amount of affordable options to pick from that aren’t too short for the club?
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Kind of, it depends. DLsite usually has a lot of different sales that vary from 50% off or all the way up to 90% in some cases. The ones in the 90% range are usually either indie titles or heavy on the 18+ stuff but I still find some good deals on there every now and again. Depending on where you live, it can make things even cheaper with how yen is doing right now.
There is a decent selection of VNs on steam too and steam tends to have sales throughout the year.
The one plus side is that the shorter VNs that I think would get nominated are usually cheaper. Our current VN Loopers is very much on the short side of things. Most VNs around this length tend to be around the $10-20 without any sales compared to the $30-40 pricing of those 500k-1m character titles like Little Busters or Clannad.
I guess it would be good to get feedback from the people who have participated in the club and see how everyone felt about the length of Loopers to see if we’d want to stick to shorter stuff or branch out more.
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That sounds hopeful then . I would really like for the club to continue, it’s also my first proper club and I don’t know the etiquette either so I’m not sure how we should go about voting and such. Maybe the others can enlighten us, or we could always try asking in the read every day thread since many people in different book clubs frequent it.
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Short summary of how the ABBC club runs, as an example:
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Nominations can be made at any time, but there are specific points in time when we advertise for nominations, usually a couple of weeks or so before we post the next poll for voting in the selection.
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Previous nominations all carry over (with exceptions for those that have been around for multiple polls with not many votes for them – <25% in 3 consecutive polls, but this rule should probably be a bit more lax for the VN club until it gets larger, I would think).
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The poll for voting is created approximately 7 weeks before the start of the next club, and we shoot for that poll closing within a week. For the books, we try to have a 6-week gap between when the selection is finalized and when we start the next club to allow for shipping times for those who prefer physical copies. This obviously could be a smaller time for the VN club since it is pretty much a purely digital medium.
There is usually someone specific who runs the organizational thread, posting all the selection polls, vetting nominations to make sure they meet club criteria, keeping the main thread up to date, etc, etc. I’m the most recent person who has been doing it for the ABBC. It’s a couple of weeks where it’s a bit of work, but the rest of the time, it’s just sit back and relax between selection polls.
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Wanted to add that we have an overarching home thread for the Visual Novel club, it just hasn’t seen action since we started reading Loopers (so easy to forget!).
Edit: The link I meant to include… Visual Novel Book Club // Planning next VN! // Reading ルーパーズ 
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That’s very informative, thanks for typing it out!
I’m at fault on this because I knew about it and thought about answering AzusaChan there but decided to just reply here for simplicity ;-; sowy.
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I think it was kind of good to have it here. There’s been a core group of users that have kept up with the Loopers book club and I personally think their opinions should probably be weighted a bit more when ya’ll decide the next one.
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Yeah I mean either place is fine, I just figured I’d put it back in the main one in case a discussion on “general VN club” topic drew a few more eyes than “topic on specific club I’m not in,” on the assumption core people this round would show up either way, but even that is probably overthinking haha. Either way I totally want to focus primarily on what the people who we know read along, or who had to drop early (if that was in any way related to the way it was done and not just a personal thing) thought of how it went, yes.
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Oh yeah, I totally get that.
I also meant to, you know, also include the link. >_<
I just thought I should mention it, in case someone had forgotten.
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I probably forgot to link other chapters but have this one! ルーパーズ ♾ Chapter 16 (Visual Novel Book Club)
It’s the penultimate chapter! I’m excited to see where it’s going and just happy we made it this far.
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