9-nine- 9️⃣ (Visual Novel Book Club + offshoots)

Japanese Language Book Clubs
82

I’m sorry to hear that… hopefully it resolves soon and you’re back to normalcy again. Sending some hugs your way :heart: .

Regarding taking over the club, don’t worry we can for sure take care of that. I haven’t done it before for any club so it’s a first for me but if @MissDagger or someone else doesn’t mind briefing me about how things should be done or how it’s best to copy and post everything and all that I don’t mind at all. Seems easy enough, right? :slight_smile: New week comes, copy&paste everything with the updated info (and screenshot) and done?

Sadly this week I haven’t been very diligent with reading and I still have to read the current chapter but I hope to complete it between today and tomorrow before the new one comes. I also wanted to read a bit in advance regularly just to be ahead to take the screenshots and all that so it should also be good in that regard, though I wouldn’t mind a little help at all until I catch up <3 .

5 Likes
83

You’ve got it right. The only other thing is to both update the OP here with the link and also update last week’s reading with a link to the new one (Daisoujou would have to do this for week two but going forward you’ll be able to edit your weekly posts). And typically we make a new post here with a link to alert those watching the thread that a new week have started. But don’t worry if you forget something. :slight_smile:

And if there is no screenshot by the first day of the week. It is fine to edit that in a couple of days later.

I’d also say this gives you final say on when a week ends. A couple of extra thousand one week doesn’t break the club’s pace. That is fine. Sometimes a week might come in a bit short instead to get good breaks or we’ll just have to have an awkward break. It happens.

Also thanks! I wasn’t looking forward to leading three clubs at once. :joy:

5 Likes
84

Alright seems easy enough! I suppose I just kindly steal the template from quoting the whole post and then update everything accordingly.

Yeah I was thinking about that :joy: . As much as I appreciate you offering help, I don’t think I can let you take over another thing considering how busy you are right now. Rest easy, I got you :slight_smile: .

7 Likes
85

:smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

4 Likes
86

I just finished 4/20 and updated that spreadsheet with character counts for all of the background transitions and screen shots of the first and last screens for each part when possible. It’s a relatively long chapter clocking in ~15,623 characters total or ~14,536 leaving off from the scene I recommended stopping at last week. Following that is the movie/anime OP sequence for the game with the theme song and all that.

WARNING

The music video that plays at the end of the chapter has a very brief moment of Kujou with naked doll body going on.

My honest recommendation would be to just finish the whole chapter and stop at the 4/28 transition.

final screen

55-end
55-end1381×827 55.1 KB

Also, (massive spoilers) image dump for the chapter here.

My reasoning is pretty straightforward (light spoilers) From where we left off a major incident happens at school for like 6k characters. There’s a couple thousand characters where he talks about what happened with another character. A third joins for half of that conversation. After the third party leaves. For like the last 3kish characters of the chapter the protagonist finishes the conversation with the remaining party and settles on a course of action for the story moving forward. We could force a stop in the middle of that, but really it’s all pretty much related content focused on the day’s events. The last bit in particular gets a little repetitive and (light spoilers) the third party briefly returns to follow up on the prior discussion with just the protagonist. I could see an argument for stopping where (light spoilers)the third party leaves if we have a good chunk of people that need the extra time. Since it’s a long chapter there’s always an option extending the week if we really need to as well.

How is everyone holding on? Honestly, it looks like most of the thread participation at this point is from experienced WK users or people with a history of participation in book clubs. With 4/20 complete the total character count comes out to around 35k or so which is a lot of progress compared to our initial run of Loopers.

4 Likes
87

That’s a really helpful analysis, thanks a lot!

It is indeed a long week taking into account the character limit we settled on :thinking: . I personally don’t mind at all myself, especially if it contains repetitive language and so on where 2k don’t make much of a difference, but it might make it harder to manage for the ones currently catching up. Splitting in two weeks probably isn’t ideal either, as that would make it too short IMO. I guess it’s one of those awkward points where we have to make compromises ^^ . It does seem like a good endpoint though, and if everyone is on board we can go with it. We can make it a tentative endpoint for now, and update it as we go if needed. I’ll check the other stopping points you mention regardless, but as you say it doesn’t look like there’s any particularly better ones this time. And of course there’s always the option of inserting additional time for people to catch up or rest whenever we need throughout the course of the VN like we did with Loopers, or even finding an earlier endpoint next week to balance this one.

I’m honestly feeling pretty good so far. After Loopers my endurance has gone up quite a lot, playing うたわれるもの and now 9-nine-. I find the language in the VNs I’ve tried much more manageable than the language of novels so far. I can perfectly read 10k of a VN in one sitting, whereas in novels it would take me so much more time and effort for sure, in part because no shiny little gems like Yomichan. It’s probably not so much the language because I still learn a lot from VNs but I guess the medium is much easier on me than just pure pages of words (though I’ve been a PC goblin since always, so… natural habitat I guess).

Difficulty wise I find 9-nine- comfortable but engaging at the same time, I wouldn’t call it easy but certainly not hard, just about right. The character number now feels much better than Loopers, I think the minimum for me right now for an engaging week is 10k, but at this point I wouldn’t mind even weeks up to 20k or more :smile: . Then again, VNs are as of this moment my main reading medium and I don’t participate in other book clubs, so deadlines are not an issue. So my personal opinion is that I’m happy that we’re reading a bit more than before c: . I guess it’s great on one hand because we can read more and discuss a larger chunk each time, but perhaps bad at the same time because it might push people that consider joining away. Judging by the participation it’s looking a lot like a core of regular members, but I kinda wish more people tried the medium and see that the number of characters in visual novels are not as daunting as they seem, in my own personal (and limited) experience. Rather, they’re much more manageable than they seem, and I find that language in VNs repeats relatively frequently, but the same could be said about books I guess?

6 Likes
88

New thread for week 3 is up!

6 Likes
89

I have no problem with an extra 2k words this week. I’d rather read an extra little and have a proper stopping point than end in an awkward spot for the week.

I have no problem with the pacing so far. Although like rikai, I don’t participate in other book clubs so its a bit easier for me. Most of my jp reading is just this club and then a personal VN I read too when I’m already caught up for our cub. I am a little surprised that most of our readers appear to be the same core from Loopers though, based on the voting I thought we’d have a couple new faces for at least the first few weeks.

I can definitely relate to this! All the pictures and voice acting etc seem to help a lot. I read so much faster for visual novels than I do actual novels. I tend to get too distracted when reading novels compared to VNs. As for yomichan, if you do some searching you can find ways to use ebook readers to use yomichan for novels/light novels. I’ve used it before for stuff like やがて君になる 佐伯沙弥香について and 推し、燃ゆ (I had to put that one on hold though because even with yomichan it was too hard for me :joy:)

5 Likes
90

Attempting the poll in a new post also for the sake of better organisation, hopefully I’m not doing something wrong.

Week 3
  • 2k additional characters is fine (better endpoint but more commitment)
  • 2k is too much, keep it between 10 - 12.5k (awkward endpoint but less commitment)
  • Split in two weeks

0 voters

3 Likes
91

Oooh, うたわれるもの! I made the mistake of watching the 2015 anime without realizing it wasn’t exactly a standalone title and the series has been on my Japanese bucket list ever since.

I’m in a similar boat. The bite sized text boxes and yomichan are keeping me from getting overwhelmed. 9-nine- is… sometimes I find myself struggling to comprehend things thanks to the writing style, but having the E/J toggle has been helping me get through some sore spots. Voice acting has resolved a lot of my parsing errors too. I don’t really have enough experience to handle exaggerated sounds and stuttering well, but it’s definitely been getting better since tackling the club readings.

Probably not the best thing to say here, but switching to JPDB has also been way more effective than I was expecting for dealing with my poor vocab/kanji pool. Thanks to that I was able to pick up a lot of keywords like 石化, 髪飾り, ぬいぐるみ beforehand and I’m finding connections between SRS items and what we’re reading much more frequently than I would have otherwise.

At least with this setup I think I can reasonably handle 20k, maybe 25k a week with room for life to get in the way a bit. However, this club is also the only one I’m seriously participating in and it’s also my main JP reading for each week.

This is what I’m kind of afraid of. I’m also wondering if there are things that I could have done that would help bridge the gap for new members better. Hindsight being 20/20, it would have been really easy to say make a guide/video for setting up text hooks on this specific game beforehand.

Ah, I’ll have to do some digging into this at some point. I’ve been giving preference to web novels in stead of novels/light novels for this reason (and well, publication woes), but at the same time they’re often just rough drafts with little to no editing… sigh Doing things properly sits better with me, but for a long time it seemed like the only practical way to do things at my skill level involved sailing the seven seas.

5 Likes
92

I voted that 2k characters would be fine, even though I haven’t started yet. My super busy period is ending so as soon as I catch up with Bustafellows, I’ll get started on this.

But I do request one to two weeks, around or slightly below 10k for those of us reading multiple things or who might need to catch up. ^^

5 Likes
93

I was wondering, I’ve been keeping count of the characters of all weeks so far. For this VN I usually have two HTML files running, one that I don’t reset which keeps track of all the text and cumulative characters so far, and another one that I reset every week for the new club thread. Would adding the total characters we’ve done so far or the character count of each week be any helpful at all? I don’t usually care about this sort of data but I thought that perhaps it might be useful to see the average we’re doing weekly over time and see if we need to adjust at some point, or even just to see how awesome we are that we’ve read that much :sunglasses:. We did with Loopers so that’s why I was wondering if we should add them for this one too.

5 Likes
94

I wouldn’t say no to that. It’s certainly a fun thing to keep in mind and seems to be one of the sort of common denominators as far as tracking goes. I definitely like it more than say page counts in books. For similar reasons I’ve been going kind of nuts with that spreadsheet both as an experiment for myself, but also so anyone can look into it themselves if they want to repartition things in the future.

Speaking of the spreadsheet, I finished 4/28. It’s ~12,197 characters by my count and is pretty safe to stop in most places. The first 2/3 of the chapter has some longer scenes in it, but that’s about all that’s noteworthy. If we want to take a break closer to the 10k mark row 25 is a pretty soft spot where characters quite literally say goodbye to each other at a cozy ~10,025 characters for the day. However, there are other safe spots (see below)

spoiler summary for the day +screenshots

7.7k - Kakeru, Sora, and Kujou chat in the apartment
7.8k - Sora goes home
8.8k - Kakeru & Kujou chat a bit more about a plan to go to Cafe Nine Ball
10k - Kakeru leaves Nine Ball with Kujou to call it a day
Rest of chapter - Kakeru does stuff at home

Pretty much everything is connected, but not in the same way 4/20 was with all of the major events and reveals. There’s going to be a bit of anticipation if people stop at say 7.7/8.8k, but nothing big. Here’s some final screens:

7.7k last screen in the apartment

18-end
18-end1381×827 304 KB

7.8k sora leaves

19-end
19-end1381×827 275 KB

8.8k kujou and kakeru chat a bit

20-end
20-end1381×827 259 KB

10k kakeru and kujou split up

24-end
24-end1381×827 373 KB

end of 4/28

27-end
27-end1381×827 200 KB

4 Likes
95

I would definitely appreciate having the character counts per chapters in the OP here, like adding another column to the table would be great. Thanks!

Because it would let me know the work load each week. Considering I’m behind, it’ll help when I get around to catching up. (I hope I can still catch up :sweat: The Bustafellows weekly portions are quite long it turns out, which is good for the length but it means it’ll take longer to catch up than I thought…)

4 Likes
96

Alrighty, adding them then :wink: . I said I don’t care but secretly I actually do like to see how far we’ve come :eyes: . The thing with statistics I feel is that sometimes they can be very beneficial if used properly but some other times they can be detrimental to one’s study if you get hung up on efficiency or going super granular with it so I tend to just take the minimum I need to assist my study. Similar thing on Anki, I’m mostly concerned with retention rates and one or two additional things and that’s it. I thought I should consult with the club before adding anything. Anyways I’m just rambling :joy: .

Edit: OP is updated with the info.

With all the potential endpoints from your spoiler summary that’s certainly handy. I think even the full day could work this time because turns out that even with the longer week we just had we’re still within the 10 - 12.5k range. The weekly average for Week 3 was 11.8k, and for this week if we finish 4/28 it would be 11.9k. It’s slightly high but it’s within limits, we can keep it there or bring it down a little. The additional amount we did on Week 3 we lacked on Week 1 so it balanced out in the end. However that’s purely weekly average, in the end it depends if we want to use that measure or if we don’t want any week to go neither over 12.5k or below 10k, which I don’t mind in either case. Personally if we aim at keeping the average within the range we established I think we’re good, but if anyone has a different preference please feel free to suggest it. And as always, there’s the possibility of inserting a break week whenever we want or need.

Edit: The thread for the new week is ready, just waiting on confirmation for the endpoint and will post afterwards.

4 Likes
97

I think only looking at weekly average can get a bit wonky, since it doesn’t take into account the workload week to week. Also important to remember, if we use weekly average as a guiding post, then the weekly average we should aim for (overall) is the average between 10k and 12.5k, since we had half saying 10k was preferred and half saying 12.5k preferred.

Meaning, our weekly average should be around 11’250. Meaning our current average skews high. So if we keep having weeks closer to 12.5 or higher, then our weekly average will keep climbing and leaving those who said 10k per week would be better in the dust.

Something else to consider, perhaps not counting the first week’s count in the average might be appropriate since it was chosen partly to be low because it was the first week. Edit: Considering it is low by 200 characters, it is basically within the 10k-12.5k so ignoring it seems silly. I should have looked at the count before posting this message. :sweat_smile:

Not to say, next week can’t be ~12k. But it is something to keep in mind. Also, in general, it will help people falling behind, if the count goes low the week after a high count.

For me personally, the lower the weekly counts are, the more likely I am that I’ll have a chance to catch up. Because if I get to catching up with BU$TAFELLOWS only to realize I’m so far behind on 9-nine that it will finish before I think I have a chance of catching up, then I’m not sure when I’d read 9-nine. D:

4 Likes
98

In that case since we have an easy week to organise this time with many potential endpoints let’s bring it down a little. The only issue is that we don’t really know if we will get another short week next, and have to go over 12.5k again to balance it. The opposite is true as well, it’s just the conditions we have to work with unfortunately, that’s why I thought working with the weekly average could be useful (within reasonable limits, we don’t want 3k or 20k weeks :smile: ).

About the polls for the average, we had people voting who never made an appearance afterwards and most of us voted for both, only that you voted in favour of 10k and Azusa voted for 12.5k. Which doesn’t mean it makes it any different nor what you say is wrong at all, it’s just that at this point in time I would rather ask you personally what you thought.

All of this is helpful, so thanks! It’s a bit hard to balance the normal pace of the club without disrupting it while still allowing people to catch up. Add to that my inexperience with it.

If we don’t take into account Week 1 for the average, my suggestion would be to cut it short with the 7.8k screenshot, have a short week on purpose and bring the average down to 11,1k to try to make future weeks more consistent. It also seems like a point that no new conversations take place yet, and a good chance for people to catch up easier. It would also act as a hard reset for the pace.

If we add Week 1 for the average, my suggestion would be the 10k screenshot with what seems to be another end of conversation, bringing the average to 11.3k.

Out of the two, I think I prefer the first one just to fix every open spot we have at the moment. I will use that as the tentative endpoint for the new thread, but any other suggestion is as always very welcome.

4 Likes
99

The thread for Week 4 is up!

3 Likes
100

Oh trust me, if you ever end up leading a book or manga club, you’ll learn it is easier in dividing up the pace, but still feel nerve wrecking and dictatorial at times. xD

However, I am learning with BU$TAFELLOWS that leading a VN club is worse, especially mine, since right now we’re just doing two weeks per chapter and I’m crossing my fingers no chapter will suddenly be super short or crazy long. I just finished chapter 1 and that felt pretty long, but I’ve also had to divide up my reading for that across a month basically. :sweat_smile:

Especially since I’m behind, I have to trust in everyone else reading to say if the pace feels off for some reason. ^^

I think it is gonna be all about balancing the length of weeks against each other as much as possible, and throw your hands up in surrender when the VN refuses to cooperate. :joy:

Might also be that eventually there won’t be a good place to split, and that is just how it is sometimes. At that point, it is up to each participant to choose if they stop as soon as they hit the point picked as the stopping point, or if they keep reading and get a bit ahead on next week.

It happens, we’re all adults and can pick a way to deal with it that works for us. So don’t stress too much about it. :slight_smile:

3 Likes
101

For this one in particular, at least for what I felt from the first weeks with Daisoujou and these last couple of weeks with me, it’s actually proving to be very manageable. I suppose it’s a case by case thing and it greatly depends on the VN, but I’m very satisfied with aiming for a character range, to be completely honest. It’s also a massive help that @ccookf is researching in advance <3 , that makes it much much easier for me at least. It’s also a fun little game, looking for the convenient spot of the week :stuck_out_tongue: , you always end up finding one.

Nesting on a summary since I'm going a bit off-topic

This is all going to be coming from me personally as a reader and not as a club organiser (which I don’t see myself as, being completely honest, as of this very moment I see this club as a regency where everyone contributes to make it work together :joy: ). The thing for me, if you don’t mind me exposing my raw opinions on the whole book club thing, is that low commitment weeks just don’t seem to be fun for me. A low workload week can kill the mood for me in the same way a very high workload week can. I know that many people like to participate on book clubs and read many things at the same time, have a little of many things to discuss at the same time. I think for me I’m the opposite, I prefer to take a bigger bite of fewer things. That’s why I tend to view each book club as an individual entity instead of a supplement to other book clubs, meaning that in my mind they should have a reasonable weekly workload that makes it engaging for its members to participate in conversation and anticipate each week. The book club in my mind should make it challenging enough to not bore its participants in the process, and should be enough as the sole weekly assignment you have, if you so wish. Now of course, people are completely free to take up other clubs if they still have the energy for more. But in my mind, I see the clubs as individual priorities that should adapt its contents to the level of its participants, regardless of those participants taking part in other clubs, meaning that participants should under normal circumstances adapt to the club and not the other way.

In terms of difficulty, what I just mentioned is easy to achieve with the other book clubs, because you can simply pick the one you find is challenging enough to keep you active for a week. If the easy one is too easy, you jump to the intermediate. If the intermediate one is too easy, you jump to the advanced one. But in terms of VNs, with the participation as low as it is, we can’t do that because we would have empty clubs. Balancing everything to make it engaging enough so as to keep everyone happy and keep them from dropping out becomes really, really challenging, especially if everyone shares different conceptions of the book clubs. So relying on different tools like occasional polls on pace, difficulty and the like might even be essential.

It’s also a highly subjective thing, sharing one club for any potential difficulty, what is hard for me is easy for another person, and their comfortable workload is going to look a lot different than mine. I think it’s fair to assume, based on the regulars of this club, that the reading we aim for falls somewhere around the intermediate or the advance book clubs in comparison. I don’t know, it’s just a guess. The reading quantity we aim for is probably going to be already high. One good thing about VNs is that there’s a lot of repetitive language, and the voice acting certainly helps a lot. Personally I don’t feel them as hard as a pure novel, so far with the ones I’ve played or that have been nominated.

I’ve mentioned before some other time that this is the only club I participate in, and the same is true for a couple others if I’m not mistaken. That’s a personal choice of course and everyone can take up as many clubs as they feel prepared for. However, personally I feel for me the pace we had with Loopers is already outdated, and prefer to have a higher workload to keep me engaged.

None of these opinions will influence any of the choices I get to decide for the club, as I mentioned initially these are just my very own personal preferences as a reader, so don’t worry about me trying to push the club that way because none of that will happen, I always consult with the rest. Would I love to have permanent 12,5k weeks? Oh for sure I would, but the club has to cater for the necessities of its participants, which is currently 10k to 12.5k characters each week as we have voted. And while this is true, it also needs to make sure that it moves forward relentlessly under normal circumstances, meaning that, as much as I would love for everyone to never fall back or drop out, it’s probably not a good idea to keep it from moving forward with its usual pace. I see it as a double commitment: the club should work for its participants, giving breaks when people need and making it easier for everyone to manage their own private lives, and the participants should also work for the club, committing to a weekly pace they’re comfortable with to keep everything moving forward.

Why am I writing all of this, you may ask. To be fair I kinda lost track of what I was thinking initially because it’s been too long :joy: :joy: lmao forgive me. I guess it was a long cry expressing that managing things to keep the ones that are caught up engaged while making it easy for the ones catching up is a much harder thing than it looks, perhaps. Not that it’s currently the case particularly, it’s no issue that we suddenly have an 8k character week, it’s fine. The 14.5k week wasn’t met with much resistance, either. I guess what I’d love to do is stop the club for three whole weeks and have everyone catch up fully and then come back to a super active thread with a lot of people reading again, but I know it’s not realistic because people have their lives, and it’s also not fair for the other part because it would kill the club. I’m also not dissatisfied with the current participation, I mean it’s just a few of us but I’m happy nonetheless to read this with other people, especially knowing each other for a bit already. I mean I guess I expected more participation in this one as per the polls, everyone did. It’s also unfortunate that you or Daisoujou are unable to participate right now, which makes me a very tiny bit guilty for continuing with the normal pace or increasing it like last week, because while the rest of us are happy to read as much as we’re reading, it’s also the same amount that is added to your catch-up pile, potentially reaching a point of no return and inconveniencing everyone in the process. Nobody’s fault, but still feels a bit sour. That is probably the major challenge, to keep moving forward regardless with as much participation as we can, otherwise there’s no club.

How is Bustafellows faring in terms of participation and drop out rates?

4 Likes