ooh thatās such an impressive collection! (that Nigel shikishi 
)
Iām totally down! Itās amazing how much extra content this series has.
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This is amazing, what with all the history research and stuff! Nowadays we can simply use Wikipedia to research all these facts, but Wikipedia only started in January 2001, so there probably wasnāt that much information about the historical figures from the 16th century, I would expect 
Please feel free to add a link to the OP if you decide to turn this into a Google spreadsheet.
Sure, why not! BTW I assume these stories are also written by ę¾å²”å ē? Or are they stories written by fans?
How long are those stories? Would it make sense to have one thread per story? I think this might significantly reduce the confusion of mixing different stories in one thread as people will potentially read at very different times, and so comments will get mixed over time. Threads are cheap 
, and we donāt really use that many for this club compared to e.g. some long-running manga clubs with one thread per chapter, so I donāt see a need to be frugal on threads here. We could interleave the story threads with the volume threads in the OP and make it clear which order they can safely be read in. (And once we read the stories, we can even adjust their position based on what we then know is required knowledge for them.)
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Theyāre all official ę¾å²” material! Iād be curious to see any fan-åäŗŗčŖ, but none has popped up in all my searchesā¦
So Iāve been keeping track of all bonus material in this post, and hereās a breakdown of # of bonuses per souce:
| Type | # of stories | Extra Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Volume Bonuses | 7 | |
| Chara Birthday Fair | 15 | |
| Chara Bday Fair Premium Sheets | 5 | one more at the end of 2022 |
| Chara Collection Extra | 15 | |
| å°čŖ¬chara | 11 | |
| Drama CD printed material | 1 | |
| Drama CD Special Talk booklets | 7 | |
| åäŗŗčŖ | 15 | 10 doujin total; some contain multiple stories |
| Misc | 12 |
Which brings us to a total of 88 stories, not counting one thatās going to be released in a month or so. Page counts vary; the smallest are 8 pages, with the longest so far being 95.
So I donāt think it would make sense to have one thread per story; some are just a sheet folded over on themselves, after all. Iām not sure if it makes sense to divide threads up by ātypeā of story either; itās impossible to tell what source a story comes from when youāre divorced from the physical book.
We could ask people to use a specific template when they comment, so that we all keep track of whoās talking about what, but thatās not exactly enforceable.
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Sounds like a good enough solution for me. Weāve been pretty good so far in the discussion threads, but I think we can all be even better to mark which chapter comment weāre replying to. I forget all the time. But, that sort of thing could work so you essentially ātagā your comment and any replies with the name of the story. 
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Uuuuhhh, and you want to discuss all of these in a single thread? 
I donāt think I would be able to use that thread, thenā¦ Iām already kind of at my limit with the three of us using one thread for one volume with 10-12 chapters tbh Itās easy to follow when Iām ahead of everybody because then I can just read everything at once, but right now I scroll through the whole vol. 5 thread whenever I finish a chapter to pick out all of the comments for that given chapter, and this is already quite a lot with 68 messages in that thread.
I could imagine having one thread for e.g. all of those 8-page folded things, but for using one single thread for many larger stories, Iām not too sure about thatā¦
Do you think we can find a middle ground somehow?
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Hahaha, very true. I didnāt really do any math before spitballing ideas; I agree that would get really hectic really fast. ^_^; I promise Iām not trying to murder anyone here.
I was considering dividing threads by years, to see if we wanted to split things up that way: one thread for stuff published in 2007, one for 2008, etc. The heavy hitters page-count-wise are the doujinshi and a handful of miscellaneous stuff. I donāt have a total page count per year, unfortunately; I can try to work on that later if thatās an possibility we want to pursue.
Or we could definitely do a thread per printed material type; one for individual volume bonuses, one for the chara birthday fair pamphlets, etc. But that does bring us back to the issue of some of these having far chunkier bonus stories on average. The special talk CD and doujinshi threads, for example, would still end up covering a ton of pages.
I guess we could have a combination of aggregate threads and single-story threads? Maybe we could set a page limit for when a certain story deserves its own thread?
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I appreciate the sentiment 
That sounds like a very good idea. Iām not very fond of running 88 threads either, but I guess if a story has a certain length, then its own thread might be well in order. I think the pamphlet style things can share a thread without issues, but maybe the volume bonuses might want to go into individual threads as a rule of thumb?
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That would make a lot of sense. So, like, we include them with their main volume thread counterpart, i.e., when we hit volume 12, we read the two volume bonuses with it then? Or should they stay in their own bonus story threads?
What do we want to call our page cutoff limit? 30? That should catch most of the large ones nicely. We could also do 50 as the cutoff. 30 would catch the special talk drama cd booklets plus about half of the doujinshi and put them in their own threads, while doing 50 would keep the mentioned in their aggregate thread.
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Maybe have a couple of threads then based on media? 
or maybe individual threads for longer stories, but then a āshort-storyā thread for the really short stuff that likely wonāt create much discussion.
Itās also worth trying out the forum search function as a way to find comments within a thread. If we agree on how to ātagā our comments that should make it easy to find comments and replies. With less scrolling or the entire thread.
It might just work.
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What would be the most convenient format for me to upload the bonus stories in? These are going to be in picture form (so either scanned or Iāve taken manual pictures of them), for what itās worth, so likely no selectable text or anything.
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Hmmm, for the smaller leaflets I think individual pictures would be fine for me, but for longer stories with tens of pages this might be a bit annoying on both ends, I guessā¦ What if you pasted them into a Google doc or something? Would that work?
Alternatively, if it needs to be individual pictures, maybe you can upload a zipfile somewhere so that they donāt take so much time and effort to up- and download?
These are just some basic ideas, maybe @ekg or somebody else has more ideas on how to handle these things?
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Would it be possible to scan them as pdfs? I know a couple of methods to scan them with a phone if thatās easiest. That way all of the pages would be grouped together and you wouldnāt need to find all of the pages and put them in the right order. Do you know where youāre planning on uploading them yet?
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Thatās an idea I had as well, but I was wondering how large a PDF consisting of 100 images might getā¦
Yep, the iPhone scanning option is pretty amazing!
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Aah, thatās a good point. I didnāt think about how big that could get for the longer ones. It might be a better option for some of the shorter extras. I know there are some compression options but Iāve never used them so Iām not sure if they would make enough of a difference or if it would take a long time.
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The usual image formats (e.g. JPG, PNG) are already compressed so compressing a PDF consisting just of such images is usually pointless, sadlyā¦
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I was considering looking into that option as well, at least for the shorter-mid range ones.
Oh, do tell. Iāll have to apologize in advance for how bad some of these will inevitably come out; I donāt want to debind my stuff. >.< Iāll make sure everythingās legible of course!
Probably just Google Drive for now? Itās been a bit of a goal of mine for a while now to have my own website where I can catalogue Japanese authors Iāve been researching, but I havenāt quite taken the plunge yet. 
The good thing with the really long ones is that some of them will be easily available digitally already, at least. Not sure what Iām gonna do for the doujin.
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If you have an apple device you can scan things by going to the notes app, opening a note, hitting the camera symbol in the top right and selecting the scan document button. If you have a different type of device, the app for google drive is pretty convenient for scanning, all you have to do is hit the plus button and then select scan. Both let you take pictures to scan and can create pdf documents with multiple pages. Just to make sure they work for this I tested them a bit with some extra booklets that came with some games I have. They work pretty well, itās a little hard to hold the book with one hand and take a picture with another so it might be easiest to find a book clip or something to prop them open. No worries on how they look, thanks so much for going out of your way to share them!
Makes sense, that seems the easiest to share as well. If you do start that site though let me know, that sounds super interesting!
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Alrighty guys, Iāve whipped up a quick Google doc detailing what bonus stories weāll be reading when; the tabs youāll be interested in are tabs 3 and 4, āBonus Stories + Volumesā and āStatisticsā. Thereās still a few places I need to update; stuff I know can be updated is highlighted in yellow (usually because I own it but need to check it again after work). Otherwise Iāve left fields blank if unknown. Please let me know if thereās anything else that would be helpful to add!
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Iāve done the thing!
Anyone interested in giving this series a try through the BLCD-adaption is welcome over to the Listening-subforum! ^>^
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Okay, so how did we decide we wanted to handle the bonus story threads? No immediate rush now, but weāll probably be done with volume 6 in another week or so (for our usual members), and I finally acquired the extra story published after vol. 6 (teaser to get you excited: this oneās got illustrations with it ), so I can start getting pictures of that whenever.
It seemed like the most talked-about option was having individual threads for each ātypeā of story: one for stories found in the Chara Birthday Fair pamphlets, one thread for stories in å°čŖ¬chara, etc. And if a particular story was over a certain page limit (30? 50?), it would be split off into its own thread. How do you guys feel about doing that? Any other ideas youād like to toss into the arena?
A reminder that Iāve started keeping track of page number stats in the linked Google doc above, so you can use that to help estimate size of threads/reading loads. Let me know if thereās anything else useful youād like me to add to it.
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