AAAAAA xddd
that was terrible xddddddd
But no, I slept in a 15 floor building in Helsinki, but my current hotel in Riga was only 4 stories tall ^^
Frieren, now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while 
I need to let myself be influenced by the Mitrac influencer again, I know @trunklayer regularly posts new panels from Frieren each day, soo 
Well, my physical copy of Volume 7 is at home, so it might take me a bit to restart it again ^^
Unfortunately, the Japanese reading updates today are a little less exciting because my inner “noooOoOoooO” tripped in after walking so long, but I still read a nice 200 pages today regardless ^^
Today’s Kaguya was the first appearance of a staple persona, Love Detective Chika, whose advice about love is to get riled up against the ills of society and volunteer together, this came up at the time when the new Simon Clark video appeared on my thumbnails and I was like <huff> xddd
Also, the right panel with Chika is how I respond to people if they ask me how my Japanese is going 
Also, when I was in Rīga, I found a weeb shop that was selling just bits and pieces of manga in Japanese, sooo obviously I decided to give them a visit ^^
I chatted with the shop owners and told them that this is essentially a bigger Japanese bookstore than all Japanese bookstores in Berlin combined, and they were surprised to hear that too xddd
Obligatory @akatsukinoluna, we are winning (woo) xdd
Ahhh yes, Rīga C:
I was so surprised by the city today, when people speak of the Baltics, Latvia is the one that never comes first in the conversation, but so far I think I might enjoy it more than Tallinn? It’s one of those, pulling from the opposite sides all at the same time, but everyone is aware of the conflict and everyone participates in the push and pull from all sides, like Philadelphia, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, or, well, frankly, Berlin xdddd
So first off, EGG, who wore it better???
A friend recommended to me to go to a game store in Rīga called Enjoy the Game, it was on the top floor of a video game shop, and both the shop and the museum had a really good collection of things
The guy working in there was very passionate and eager to talk about video games, so we stopped by and yapped about Silent Hill f, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, the guy’s favorite handhelds, Decky plugins for the Steam Deck, text scrapers, amazing stuff, I was really happy I got it recommended ^^
Also, don’t tell anyone (embarrassing), but the museum was my first time playing Banjo-Kazooie and Star Fox 2 
Back to the city though, there’s a lot of verticality in Rīga! It has the tallest buildings in the whole Baltics ^^
BUT THEY TOOK OUT THE FLOW CAT ALREADY, and replaced the cat with a dog, as seen in the header above
I found, eee, Latvian Nesting Dolls with Minions… and musicians from Bremen. Yes, the actual ones xddd
And I also set it out for the Palace of Culture and Science… wait… xddd
Very Soviet, very similar to the one in Warsaw, but the sights from the top were great C:
Here’s the old town!
And of course, a Nett Hier sticker at the top xddd
One thing about cities like Rīga, Berlin, Taipei, Philadelphia or Kuala Lumpur is that sometimes in the distance you go like “WHAT THE HECK IS THIS” and you immediately feel the temptation to go and visit those things because they just look like they don’t belong and stick out like sore thumbs xdd
Unfortunately, both of them were closed today ^^
Latvia continues on the trend of supermarkets clearly labelling Latvian products, in addition to actually marking the origins of all of the products in stock, it turns out a lot more things are Polish than I gave it credit for ^^
Aaaand my favorite photo of today ^^
This is the life 
I had a dinner in a restaurant that for some reason had live music, went for something local, so potato pancakes ^^
And yeah, really pretty at night, would recommend ^^
But yeah, the push-and-pull dynamics are probably the most pronounced with the language barrier in there, while in Estonia Russian language felt like it was being really strongly eradicated and replaced with Estonian or English or something, Latvia couldn’t eradicate Russian as easily and Russian could’ve been the language I’ve heard today the most, and I saw plenty of bookstores that had only books in Russian today, while the bookstores in Latvian were way smaller
Also, pics rel ^^
Also, what the FRICK is this how did this materialize xddd
So I’m in Vilnius right now, which is my final destination of the trip! I’ll be in Berlin by evening tomorrow, but let’s see what adventures I get to have tomorrow ^^
Also, Vilnius has one of those terminals that connects you to different places on Earth, and that was the very first time I saw it actually operate LIVE, and I knew it did because people did mimic my silly gestures I was doing at them and showing them the suitcases, so: Dublin, Philadelphia, Lublin and Vilnius, those ones I know of ^^
See you tomorrow! C:
This is funny because a few years ago we went back to the UK for Christmas and my Nan had bought my daughter a big carrot teddy for Christmas. I had no idea about Kevin the carrot, everyone was gasping in awe like oooh you got a Kevin when she opened it. Apparently, that year they were sold out everywhere and very sought after. Unfortunately, we also did not get the carrot hype.
What do you mean ? C’est parfaitement comprehensible. フランス語は読まないの？ 
Another ~700 pages of manga to the pile today, I was clearing up the things I got from scraping weird websites and the second volume of めぐる未来 was the last one I had for free, and HOO I didn’t expect reading it would be so exhilarating today
Less because of the content matter, more because the difficulty level to being happy with the prose quality level met up right in the middle of the flow chart and I was reading at a speed faster than speaking being like “WHAT NEXT WHAT NEXT WHAT NEXT”
I still think it’s probably somewhere around level 25, there were a lot of exposition scenes in the second volume before the pacing of the action sped up, but the last 100 pages of this volume was just pure, uninterrupted flow
If this manga is level 25 indeed (someone else set it up ahead of me xdd) then my flow zone on Natively is level 25 manga right now ^^
Yes, I did do Mokuro lookups, but some of the words I was regularly struggling with, like 協力 or 刃物 just were coming to me automatically without a sliver of hesitation, so we stan. I left an updated review on the second volume, less because of quality of the story, more because of the flow xddd
In other news, Tokyo Ghoul, physical couldn’t Mokuro this one, read it on a plane without a single lookup and ehhhh??? I’m sure I read some kanji wrong and internalized those lookups, but the illustrations definitely carried the understanding of this manga, I think I did pretty well for a physical level 29 on this one, similar to 宇宙兄弟 ^^
Then, someone on our Discord mentioned Happiness being a perfect beginner manga and since I don’t think I’ve ever read a true “beginner manga”, I decided to give it a shot
xddd
That being said, it went by really quickly and I enjoyed it!
As for サターンリターン, I made a horrible mistake of laying down on my sofa after returning back home and then it was over, my reading marathon was interrupted and I couldn’t get myself to read anymore xdd
Anyway though, incredibly hard and at least if you looked up the words, the grammar wasn’t that big of an issue, but I’m still doing dozens of lookups each page
Now that “little text = easy text” no longer applies and this manga is walls of dialogue boxes, it’s a little harder to move it onwards xddd
So yeah, in a week since Level 60, huge progress in terms of reading, at least a few thousand pages:
…so I went, friends over at my place → anime convention next day → German seminar → Lucca Comics & Games → Work event in Dublin → Level 60 → Baltics tour, all in a single block, without a single break
I did manage to read a lot over that time, but I’m so, so, SOOOO tired, both mentally, physically, and even just looking at Japanese characters, so I need to take some time to just catch up on my doomscrolling on the internet xddd
Well, I’m writing a German language proficiency test in 8 hours, so AAAA xddd
I SHOULD BE SLEEPING, but nooo,
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA!
This shot was a bit of the highlight of my day: the person you can see protesting there is not having it with the corrupt politicians and is participating on a protest, more details can be found in here. In many places around Vilnius, people have the same stickers glued to their windows or tills to let people know they do not support this treatment either.
The story is the same as in most of the European countries right now: right-wing populism manages to get a lot of votes and gets representation in the government, at which point people realize that the populists are not their allies, they are there for the craic rather than to do politics.
Next to the person standing there, two other women were interested in explaining the electorial process in more detail, what happened and how can someone like me help them, and yeah, exposure, that’s probably the strongest weapon I have. They were very polite, interested in German/Polish politics and wanted to hear about my trip I mentioned above too, so hey! Oh well
on a more cheerful note,
If we were to make an alignment chart between Ukraine and Russia support, all Baltic states do really well on the side of Ukraine, but Lithuania is probably the highest out there from what I’ve seen xddd
Even the buses would shout out in support of Ukraine, which was very nice of them to see ^^
Also, random coin locker Arduino display Japanese language jumpscare xdd
In the middle of the pandemic lockdowns, when the cafes and shops needed to be closed for social distancing, some places would put out bears on a display to make you feel as if at least someone benefits from the social distancing, the bears xdd
Apparently they left this bear around for four years now and the bear has been politely eating their breakfast for the last four years now 
Mine on the right ^^
One thing that stood out to me about Vilnius was the amount of shop decorations on the front that they were pushing in everywhere: yeah, some buildings had cracks and looked unrenovated, so the private owners wanted for the restaurants to still look pretty ^^
And churches, chuuuurches everywhere, where did they find so many churches xdd
Vilnius comes with a more modern side as well! I completely expected for them to just be a church city, but no, there are some skyscrapers and fancy buildings too ^^
Also, local artists xdd
Overall, to sum up the whole trip, those were completely unexpected, completely spontaneous 2.5 weeks booked as I kept going, so I was really glad I could afford with my energy levels to go for it, but also IM WAKING UP IN 6.5 HOURS TO TAKE A GERMAN TEST
so see you tomorrow, i’ll see if my legs finally give up under me if all of the pressure is finally gone ^^
Good luck on your test! This is the official C1 exam, right?
Oh no, it’s telc B1, mitrac talked me out of C1 and I decided to go easier on myself for now
i will probably try C1 eventually though, but I haven’t spoken German in over a week now ;-;
I’m sure you’ll do amazing! You’re definitely way beyond B1 with the things you usually write about doing in German
GOOD LUCK ON YOUR TEST!!!
Go to bed!
And good luck, but I’m sure you got this 
I’m very glad you’ve meownaged to have such a nyaaaaaaaaaaaaice trip and not get overwhelmed! 
Your energy levels truly are on an entirely different level! 
Anyway, best of luck with your German test! 
We are all rooting fur you! 
Vilnius looks like it has a lot of flare, amazing
Enjoy the test and getting one step closer to 
!!
A sidenote
No big deal, really, but
Flare vs. Flair: How Not to Confuse Them | Merriam-Webster Flare vs. Flair: How Not to Confuse Them | Merriam-Webster
“Flair” has that “air”
To have an “air of something” meaning link
In case you’re going for a “perfection score” in English lol
—±–±–±–
Golybidoofさん
ドイツ語の試験に
応援します!!
頑張ってください
I am one of those people! It was my first ever volume (and series) of manga in Japanese that I finished and it did feel great that it had so little text. At a time in my journey where it would take me days to decipher 10 pages, going through 4 pages at a time because they had no text or only 大丈夫？, was a great feeling 
I enjoyed the series, can recommend, you should speed run it!
slooowly keep coming
K-Manga is the fastest to scrape so far, I’m not rate-limited by CDN as fast, but comes with worse quality than cmoa, so I’ll probably default to cmoa for my higher quality dumps.
Reason being, the K-Manga DRM is too hard for me to overcome but the taking screenshots of canvas is still doable. With cmoa, intercepting the fetches and then locating a window method to run the fetches through a descrambler was possible, which means that cmoa probably is as close to the native quality as possible, and K-Manga, Bookwalker and Amazon are just lossy copies.
At the same time though, eBookJapan remains my absolute archnemesis and I looked at the Web Assembly module today again and I was like “xd”
i can’t even think of a way how to programmatically trigger a click event on the canvas to advance the page on eBookJapan, I’m sure it’s doable, but im just so over the tainted canvases, iframe, cross-origin requests, attempts to monkey-patch the WASM module, it’s the best DRM I’ve ever seen in my life and I applaud them so hard…
…as I download the same content from cmoa anyway
iTS A BIT MORE OF A PRIDE THING CMON xddd
Aaanyway, I passed my final kanji on WaniKani today, which means this lesson count is now final!
Also, I had the mooost important lesson vocab today ^^
And as I promised, this wasn’t a very reading-friendly day, but hey, maybe staring at the same characters on comic.k-manga.jp counts xddd
Just a special because today I Did Study German (It Doesn’t Happen Often) xddd
I’ve said this before and I’ll say this again: I’m so angry German comes to me so much faster than Japanese and I’m equally as angry that I don’t care about learning it as much, if I spent 1/4th of my energy that I spend on Japanese on learning German instead, I’d be flying with German now xddd
But uuuhhh, the comic got me good ^^
As for the podcasts I was listening to today, I was trying to get myself pumped for the German exam today and it was really annoying to me that I understood 99.5% of the individual words that were being said and 99.9% of all of the context, but yet still I haven’t found the things I’d be interested in listening to in German xddd
Metanoia is the one I found through a solo travel through Japan/Korea podcast. Back then, she made a pretty neat podcast for the first 30 minutes buuuut then she started mentioning Christian faith and how much believing in God helped her out in life, and as a person born and raised in the Catholic faith who since then transitioned away, I was like “mhm, yes, of course, sure” ^^
The episode about depression also mentioned how grateful she is for the fact that each panic attack brings her closer to her faith and I’m like “yeeah, you do you”, probably can’t relate ^^
I desperately need better podcasts in German xddd
As for the Reise nach Japan!, it’s a pair of travellers who made an advent calendar where each day they recorded a 3-minute long podcast attempting to answer a question about their many travels to Japan, and they never do, because the answers are always “oh yeah, my favorite onsen in Japan is EVERY onsen in Japan!” or “the best place to visit in Japan in the winter is EVERY place in Japan in the winter”, something to that extent ^^
They elaborate on things in more detail, but still, sigh xdd
–
It was composed of four parts, reading, listening, writing and speaking, and let me tell you, going for B1 could’ve been a mistake xdd
Reading was the first part, which was 90 minutes long. I finished the section in 25 minutes and thrn I wasn’t allowed out of the room out of a fear of aiding the others. So I just sat in there. In silence. For 65 minutes. Waiting for the reading part to end
During listening, the exam coordinator was collecting our IDs and talked to me longer over two of the questions
that you cannot pause
and you cannot listen to again.
i’m still probably going to pass, but I won’t forgive those missing points xdddd
And writing is where I actually got to, I thiNKKKK, flex my skills, we had an informal letter and I just threw "ja"s and "doch"s in the middle of the sentences everywhere, I think I did pretty well on that one ^^
And then the speaking section and there was a small presentation to prepare… except that as soon as we finished preparing it, they just wanted for us to have a conversation as two students rather than deliver the presentation anyway ^^
I was speaking with a person from Vietnam and I did ask him a couple questions about the country, but there was some real disparity between the German levels between us, so I feel like I didn’t learn much from him, my part of the conversation was pretty spontaneous and very rambly, so I’d be horribly surprised if I didn’t pass B1 at the speaking part ^^
Overall, five hours of my life wasted on this exam, but I think I did pretty well, hopefully that’ll break the streak of me being very unlucky with taking exams in general, I need some luck for JLPT ^^
OYE THATS ME IM THE JUDGMENTAL ONE :DDDDD
One amazing thing about living in Berlin is that you get banger quotes one after another everywhere as you keep cycling xddd
And yeah, Alexanderplatz is preparing its Christmas Market already! Some of the markets should be out as early as this weekend, hopefully C:
You know we’re getting close to Christmas because Das Nein-Horn (The UniNOrn) is back, fun for the whole family xddd
I hope so too!
When are they going to inform you about the results?
glad the B1 odyssey is behind you, and here’s hoping you have smooth sailing for the rest of the process (and jlpt)
probably a few weeks, but I’ll definitely make an update with my result here ^^
New podcast today!
I found them by talking about 百合姫 and I was curious if it’ll be something that’ll grasp me, and funnily enough, I have a feeling I understand phatic expressions better than the actual words xddd
Definitely still zoned out more often than zoned in, the other episode I listened to was about the more depressing sides of Japan: global politics, women’s rights, gender salary gap, LGBT rights, they also did brought up the American elections and the Signalgate controversy, so this one was easier for me to follow, I just wish I could understand more xdd
Anyway, ANYWAY
It’s too bad that I wrote the Level 60 post already, because, YOMININJA
today was the day when i finally set up everything, remote streaming from Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch to my laptop, I didn’t try the 3DS streaming nor the Android streaming yet, but
In fact, it CAN ALSO REPLACE MOKURO (if reading online) xddd
Here’s my nemesis, ebookjapan.yahoo.co.jp actually running a dictionary you can highlight over on a comic that doesn’t have standard and regular pages, AAAAAA <3
The way how I set it up is that I play on an actual console like I did in the past and I just press a keycombo on the computer if there’s something I’d like to translate, and let me tell you, it’s great!
One crazy thing about it is that it captures an exact frame the moment you press the screenshot key combo, so if you have a lot of text that only appears for half a second or something, you can press the screenshot combination and only then get to read all of the texts that used to appear on this screen at that time
And you can also configure the modded Switch streaming to just work through VLC, so I’ve been Chikoritaing around for two hours today, was great ^^
I’m sorry texthookers, I am really bad with Linux and I’m terrible at setting up things in there, this is going to be my texthooker from now on, I feel like xddd
Anyway, YomiNinja, an absolute god-tier program, it’s so weird how GOOD it is especially considering all of the different solutions in the wild you can just use it on
Including inception and just OCRing your text posts you don’t have to OCR xddd
ccing @YandrosTheSane as I remember you wanted to set it up ^^
Back to the usual grind ^^
Babylon, the cinema I went for an anime film festival this year, now has a Leonardo DiCaprio film festival, I wonder how were they able to secure the licences for the movies xddd
Went to the queer book club again, and all of the stickers in the lift going in there have been torn away, but the illustrations marked with markers are still in ^^
And crazy update, DRAGON SLAYER is back in Berlin! Just for a few months for now, but I was really happy to see him ^^
He was trying his best at drawing people over the course of our book club today, here’s Finnish people for some reason…
But yeah, we were really well organized today as a book club and made plans for Friday to hang out at my place, for Saturday to hopefully do something outside of anyone’s place and we bought tickets together for Wicked 2 next week, so hey, having friends is great C:
Anyway, see you tomorrow!
So glad you got this set-up 
What is your streaming setup for Switch btw?
So cool…
Seems like it would also work on a streamed kindle from scrcpy which I use to capture my chapters since copy paste of the text is limited… Do you know if you can easily dump the text as text in a file or clipboard or stdout ?
