Yeah, they suped up the poll options in general a little while back - it became a thing at the same time as the ability to limit voters by trust level and so on.
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Done with volume 5.
Sooo here’s the infamous (?) bath episode. Not sure why authors keep putting those in, and having peeping tom played for laughs isn’t funny. That’s literally a crime.
Still, considering it is a trope it wasn’t too bad compared to other things I’ve seen. My main issue is (again) with the illustrations. Why did the illustrator think full frontal nudity would be a good idea, and why didn’t anyone stop him? While putting random obstacles in the way is unnatural, it still beats showing everything… except you don’t ‘cause it’s not porn so girls end up with the anatomy of a Barbie doll. Like… just don’t draw that.
/rant
As usual the action was pretty good, and there are tense moments. And I don’t even feel like elaborating on that since my anger towards the aforementioned scene just took everything.
Fun fact, books from this series are the only ones I put down face down. Usually, I have the front cover of whatever I am reading facing up, but I just can’t do that. My spouse noticed, agreed, and told me I should use a cover.
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Thank you to all for the input! As voted, I’ve started All You Need Is Kill. Today I read the first section (up to 6% on my kindle), though I think I’m going to go back and reread it because there was just a lot going on and I don’t have a good enough base of knowledge for this book to pick things up easily.
As usual with a new book, I encountered a lot of words that I saved for anki, and this book perhaps more than usual due to army/warfare/mechanical/death subject matter, which is not my usual thing. I put a list of words I looked up under the details cut. I haven’t gone through and done the fixing yet, but it looks like more than half of them were already in my deck (seen once and suspended), so those ones will get readied to learn. The others are new to me, so they’ll be suspended for now. There were two or three that I looked up that I’d already learned, which is always a strong hint that a certain card isn’t sticking. I tend to look at those cards and see if I can improve them for increased comprehension. If nothing else, now they have another example sentence!
Words
土埃、砲兵、砲撃、赤熱、銃身、相討ち、友軍、屠殺、光点、クレータ、土くれ、黒蜜、岩盤、制圧、糞尿、くたばる、流砂、ジャック、戦果、鮮烈、砂地、徽章、冥界、アイコン、屠る、蛮族、叡知、別個、棘皮、血反吐、アラート、ひしゃげる、埃色、さいはて、ダンプカー、誇示、機関砲、射出、薙ぎ、ヒトデ、外形、擦過、土煙、戦況、兵（つわもの）、歴戦、積層、セラミック、ヘッドアップディスプレイ、白兵、装弾、薬莢、杭、半壊、大破、残弾、グレネード、気化、いかれかける、機械油、包囲、パイル、初年兵、敵弾、機動、ジャケット、ロータ、最先任、軍曹、各個撃破、埋伏、兵員、大隊、連隊、歩兵、師団、中隊、摩擦熱、着弾、胸下、衛生兵、鏃、串刺し、敵陣、リロード、換装、マガジン、弾切れ、機銃
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Hmm, I kind of want to start doing this, but it seems like a lot of extra work. Especially since I sometimes don’t add the words I’ve looked up to the SRS until a few days later (instead of as I go).
Also, I recognize a few of the words you looked up, but most I don’t recognize at all. Those I do recognize I probably picked up from キノの旅 and the few war/military anime I’ve watched.
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For me it ends up being barely any extra work, but it really depends on your process, and everyone does things differently. It’s worth it to me because I have, at present, 759 unseen cards, all of which I know to be quality cards of words I’ve seen multiple times, and 5,737 suspended cards, which are words I’ve likely only seen once, many of which have unfinished cards. I don’t learn that many new words a day, so I would much rather learn from those 759 words than the suspended masses. (I know I will learn the suspended masses someday–they turn into the quality cards when I see the word in the wild again, for one.)
Some of the words I thought I recognized were being used in different ways, too! Mostly the katakana words, like パイル and ジャケット.
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I kinda want to buy a bunch of manga from Amazon Japan before they inevitably stop shipping “non-essential” items. But I haven’t read enough of what I have yet to know if I’d want to read more… Still haven’t read a single chapter of まちカドまぞく or とんがり帽子, and only one volume of こみっくがーるず. So it would be silly to buy more. But by the time I read them and know if I like them, I almost certainly won’t be able to buy more. 
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Sounds like it might be time to come over to the dark side!
We have ebooks. 
I do miss actual books. 
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There are a few manga I was gonna read as ebooks because they didn’t seem worth physical copies. Plus I still plan to read the book 空ろの箱と零のマリア, which is only available as an ebook. So I will be doing that to an extent. But I will definitely hold off on reading more of certain manga rather than buy ebook versions. (Particularly manga with really good art or oversized Manga Time Kirara manga.)
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Wait, I’m 3/4 of my goal, barely 1/4 of the year in. What happened to slowing down on reading to focus on other things, self?
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Not to be a bad influence, but are you planning to catch up on 獣の奏者?
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At some point. I have to admit that past the initial rush of “oh! Reading is so much easier this time around” and understanding a few more things that I missed here and there, I’m not so exited about reading that book for the second time. I’m kinda keeping track of where you guys are, and I’ll probably try to regroup around the time you read past the end of the 青い鳥 volume 1.
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Anyone have any recommendations for some easy to read, light-hearted books?
I feel so blah right now I need a book that’s a bit mindless. Like the Japanese-equivalent of pulp books.
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I have no idea what a pulp book is, but I find the 銭天堂 series to be pretty light-hearted and easy to read, especially since each chapter(usually 20-30 pages) is a different unrelated story. The only caveat is the amount of onomatopoeia and varying speech patterns, so if you’re the kind of person who just has to understand every last word, they can bog you down pretty quickly. If not, they’re great!
(I know I talk about these books a lot, sorry y’all, still trying to build up my list of completed books 
)
Edit: Also, does anyone know why so many of the Ghibli books(specifically the ones with screen-caps from the movies for covers) on Amazon JP have ジブリの教科書 written on them? I mean, they’re not actually textbooks, right? It still says they’re 文庫 size (unless I’m misunderstanding what that means) and they have roughly the same pages as other versions? My Japanese Google-fu is failing me…
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I don’t have an answer, but if you haven’t seen inside them, you can find photos of some pages at some of these links:
Here is from the Totoro book, for example:
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Man I have no idea what these are then haha genuinely thought they might just be normal books, but clearly not.
Thanks for finding that! It was super helpful 
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I learned something very distressing when I went to BookOff one last time before leaving Japan. I was selling a few books and I got both cash and coupons! Oh noes! I had to buy a few more mangas to use up those coupons because I was leaving after all. Such a distressing event. 
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That must have been horrible! I totally feel your pain
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I should really get around to finishing がっこうぐらし. I read the first 7 volumes in a rush because they were free for a limited time, and then read volumes 8-10 over a few weeks. Now it’s been over a month since I finished volume 10, but for some reason I haven’t been in the mood to read the last two volumes.
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Aww, it’s finished?
Yep, volume 12 is the last one.