I am now climbing out of my own hole. The holiday sales on Bookwalker left me with a -8 (although to be fair I was expecting it to be worse…)
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Haha, I even thought of that as I was writing it, and then was like " … meh! who cares?" 
Thank you!!
Thank you! I discovered this feature of bookmeter’s last year and it’s already a highlight of the new year that I look forward to anxiously. 
Thank you for keeping me updated! I appreciate that we both started the new year in the deep negative numbers lol. I mean, the greater the struggle, the greater the sense of accomplishment, right?
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Ooops, I didn’t scroll back far enough before posting!
I really recommend it! I feel like Kaguyahime is referenced ALL over the place so it’s nice to have an understanding of the full story. And the bug-loving-princess story is a gem. I so appreciate knowing that it has existed for like a thousand years now.
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Ooh I can’t wait to read it. I hadn’t looked at the preview yet, that could be a great physical book, it looks adorable
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January 11, Sunday
Somehow it feels like a lot has changed since the last time I posted … I posted on the first just to share my yearly reading summary because I had been looking forward to that so much. And before that I wanted to share my success with the Kaguyasama book.
But what has actually changed? 
Basically I just crashed and needed a day in bed. The trip to visit my partner’s dad was tough because I was pushing against fatigue almost the entire time. I didn’t feel like I could take time off from work last week after getting back because someone else was taking time off. On Friday my body was like “go home now or I will give you the flu”, so I did and spent all of Saturday in bed rereading a comfort book (Network Effect by Martha Wells). I did take this Monday (tomorrow) off, so hopefully I can cram some additional high quality rest in on this long weekend.
I have so much I am excited about though.
- I am reading 魔女犬ボンボン ナコと運命のこいぬ | L23 at night before bed, which was my first ever novel, which I read until page 190 out of 220 and then couldn’t make myself finish (burnout? I’m not sure I just couldn’t do it). And I LOVE it. I’m enjoying (re)reading it so much. (NB this book will be worth 4 tsundoku points! Also, pretty sure it’s the same author as Zenitendou.)’
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I decided I should add Harta to my morning Japanese routine which is currently quite light, just review kanji and add new kanji if necessary. Three times a week I would like to read one chapter of Harta after that. (The other three mornings are reserved for exercise, and the last day is Sunday when I will do fuck all (unless I feel like it).)
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I remembered that I was planning an anime binge-watching study plan where I watch my way up the Natively scale. I don’t know when I will do that, but at least now I remember it’s a thing.
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Spanish is at loose ends, and I haven’t been listening to anything on my commutes because my brain appreciates having the quiet time in between home and work.
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I have started working my way through a specific “session tunes” CD, playing along which I think is good practice (hopefully) for sessions in Ireland this spring.
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I took advantage of the book clubs for free tsundoku rule and ordered myself a paper copy of 二十面相 because I find that particular book really hard to focus on on screens.
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I’ve started catching up on forum reading, which is lovely and people are sharing all kinds of interesting and inspiring adventures and ideas.
Ummm …
- I have been getting into watching this awesome Valheim streamer, Emma T Potato. She’s from Belgium so sometimes she talks about Dutch language which is cool, but mostly it’s just fun and relaxing to watch her play and chat while I’m sewing or knitting something.
I thought about doing more specific New Years reflections, but I am too tired now, phew. 
Okay, more later.
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ooh, you’re also a part of the ハルタ club! maybe i should be putting more effort into reading my volumes ^^
good luck on the ハルタ catchups!
Funnily enough, I think I read a bit better on a display rather than in a book format, interesting to hear there’s people who are the opposite
With book, the book is moving around and so are your eyes, if it’s a display, I always focus on one place and it makes it a little easier to focus
It’s about to be a really good season of anime this season, with フリーレン and 推しの子 at least, I might finally get back to watching something ^^
What are you planning to watch?
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Valheim is a great game for such relaxed chatting!
It’s very beautiful and, as long as you don’t go to dangerous places, very calm and relaxing. It’s the kind of game one can go to just hang out with their friends / viewers and relax. The kind of game where it wouldn’t feel weird to spend whole session just sitting next to a fireplace or on a balcony and enjoying the view! 
Also, that game takes the “You are what you eat” principle to a next level, because in that game food affects your ability to fight as much as (and sometimes even more than) your equipment! 
Anyway, best of luck with your studies and other cativities! 
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Yes, it’s great! It’s where I learned most of my kanji actually. I took a short break that became a long break and getting back into the routine hasn’t been very smooth, but I still fully intend to keep going and someday (!) catch up! It should be easier now that I know more 常用 kanji than I don’t.
That’s so funny, cause I experience it kind of exactly the opposite: with a book the letters stay in one place and you move where you are relative to the letters, which is much more grounding and less confusing than on a device where they’re always moving around and the same place doesn’t always have the same letters! Like a magical labyrinth! 
It seems like we conceptualize space as it relates to reading in really different ways.
I started with the lowest level I could find:
Which is really cute and sweet.
After that probably 彼女と彼女の猫 -Everything Flows- S1 | L16 and then probably 海辺のエトランゼ | L19.
Yes! 
I’ve actually tried to build the perfect Valheim fireplace for just sitting next to but haven’t perfected it yet.
I never particularly thought of it that way before, maybe because I’m not a big gamer so I’m not used to other combat systems. It’s kind of ダンジョン飯 adjacent! Hehe 
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January 13, Tuesday
Very important announcement! I have reached an even 1700 kanji in my study routine!!!
Okay, and I’ve just spent a lot of time procrastinating Doing The Thing by trying to figure out if I can do the thing. The thing is this: read Silent Witch at an average pace of 12 (or more) pages per day in order to read it in 4 weeks, finishing before the next Children’s book club starts. Maybe I should just give it a shot and see what happens instead of spending time trying to locate old comments on book club threads on the off-chance that I talked about my reading pace in them … (Which I already did pretty thoroughly actually, and the answer is no, I did not talk about my reading pace besides saying that I was keeping up.)
Wow, I’m just procrastination central today.
Goal: 12 pages per day, 28 days
| day | time | pages | m/p | day total | notes | vocab |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1/13 | 34 | 4 | 8.5 | 4 | Mostly recap so far. | 茂み、会得、三昧、筋金入り、派遣、絶え絶え、疲弊、ロバ、ごめんあそばせ |
| 1/13 | 22 | 2 | 11 | 6 | Having to remind myself of a lot of already known things. To illustrate, I’ve left more leeches in this batch of vocab. I saw multiple known kanji that I just completely blanked on. Feels like something is off with my brain today … | 逃避、施す、衝撃、緻密、傍目、兼ねる、教会、設置、徒歩、そっぽを向く、華奢、ビロード、佇む、亜麻色 (this one is essential in Silent Witch ) |
| 1/13 | 19 | 3 | 6.3 | 9 | I refused to give in! I got some snacks and tried one more reading session. This one was so much better! | 鐘、バツが悪い、後者、遮断、うずくまる、あばよ、急かす、行き交う |
After the second reading session I thought it might not be possible, but the third session gave me hope again. Reading three quarters of the daily goal on the first day is not bad at all. (First day is always the slowest/hardest.)
More soon!
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I think coming back for a third session itself is a pretty solid reason for hope too, so if you feel like you can physically handle a double-shot of hope please enjoy! 
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Congrats!!! That’s amazing! 
How are you learning kanji actually?
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There is an audiobook, if at some point you need to cheat and read faster.
But I have faith in you. Gogogo! ファイト!
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Saved for posterity, my slightly feeble attempts at reading Silent Witch
| day | time | pages | m/p | day total | notes | vocab |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1/14 | 5 | .5 | 10 | .5 | … Then I paused reading in order to have a |
性急、はぐれる、露店、しばしば |
| 1/14 | 10 | .5 | 20 | 1 | After work, before dinner, and not making any attempt to read quickly. | 甚大、きまぐれ、and then too many leeches and new combinations of well known kanji to list |
| 1/14 | 11 | 1 | 11 | 2 | Today was not my day, but this last page went not too bad. | 泣き言、程がある、強敵 |
Okay, having tried it for two days, and intended to try again today but I haven’t been able to start yet and it’s only 45 minutes til I have to go to work, it might actually not be possible to read the whole book in 28 days. (Not if I also want to read 3 Harta chapters a week, at least, which I very much do.)
What I can do though is focus on one chapter at a time, without a goal to finish the book in a specific time frame. Or switch to the Bone Dragon’s Daughter. I think actually I may need one of those “look what I can do now!” reads.
Turns out bingeing (is that how you spell that? but it can’t be binging, can it? cause that rhymes with singing and sounds silly, right?) Silent Witch is not in the cards for me sad face. 
I wrote this thing ... It's kind of about ... what it's like to be in the lower classes in the USA right now.
I wanted to post it somewhere, but this is the only place I post things ever anymore so … I’m sorry.
12-Step Process to Obtaining Medication in Today's USA
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Call the pharmacy. They have replaced the automated menu system with a fake-human AI answering service which is 1000% less usable and somehow feels as though it is mocking you.
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Tell the AI you need a refill. It will now list every medicine that has ever been prescribed to you at this pharmacy, including things like that antibiotic you needed one time a couple of years ago. “Which medicine do you want refilled?” the AI will ask you.
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Get stuck in an infinite loop. After you tell the AI which medicine, it will tell you that that medicine isn’t elligible to be refilled. “Can I help you with something else?” If you tell it you still need that medicine refilled, it will say “You need a refill? Okay, I can help with that.” Repeat steps two and three as many times as it takes you to realize that the AI is happy to play this game all day long and will actually never learn.
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Try to talk to a human. You can brute force it by just repeating “I need to speak to someone” until it gives in. (You can also try to convince it by yelling nonsense at it to make it give up on understanding you, but it may just try to transfer you to the grocery department instead.)
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Joke’s on you, there is no human. Your only option is to leave a voicemail and wait for a callback. Okay, fine. Leave a message.
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Receive the callback. You absolutely do not want to miss that call, because it will throw you all the way back to step four if you do.
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This step is a bit of a wildcard. Any number of things could be going on, but the most likely one is that the insurance says you are trying to get a refill too early, and have to wait until 1-3 months from now. In that case you have to explain that you were given a 30 day supply last month. The pharmacy staff now has to spend 5-15 minutes clicking buttons, typing, and sighing heavily as they wrestle with the system.
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Success! They convinced the system to let them refill your medication! But hold your applause, because you still have a few more steps to go.
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Wait for the prescription to be filled. This is actually pretty straightforward, and will take between 15 minutes and 36 hours.
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Go to the pharmacy to pick up the medicine. There is one main pitfall here, which is if you try to stop by between 1:30 and 2pm. The pharmacy will be COMPLETELY CLOSED “for lunch”. Because apparently pharmacy staff can’t handle taking lunch in shifts? My theory is that the pharmacy isn’t legally allowed to be open if a board-certified pharmacist isn’t on the floor, and the higher-ups are too cheap to hire more than one board-certified pharmacist. If you were trying to run this errand while on a break or on your way to work you will need to make a completely new attempt later that day, in which case you run into the massive 6-7pm pharmacy rush and have to wait in line for ages. Or attempt on a different day.
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Be informed at pickup that the price you pay for this medication has increased. The amount it’s been increased by will be between $4 and $100. Depending on the amount, your income, and the nature of the medication (is it completely necessary, or only kind of necessary? How certain are you that it’s really working?) you may need to take time to think about it, in which case go back to step 10.
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Congratulations, you have paid for and received your medication. Okay, time to get on with your other day-to-day tasks now.
This has been the long way (if you were brave and opened the dropdown) of saying that I feel tired and overwhelmed and sad and kind of want to quit my job and live in a cave where all I ever do is read Japanese. And maybe knit sometimes. (I’ve been told this is how they want us to feel. (Maybe not the reading Japanese part.))
Thank you!! I use a combination of upgraded Takoboto and Chase Colburn’s kanji study app (also upgraded). I use the kanji drawing search function on Takoboto (it’s very good, not dependent of stroke order or direction or anything) to look up kanji I don’t know yet and use the “view in Kanji Study app” function to add kanji to my “general reading” list. Every time I look it up I move it up one slot in the 6 subsets, and once it reaches the sixth one then I add it to the guided study function.
Thought I could handle, but I could not handle. Got woozy and puked up all my hope. 
That was entirely my fault, though, so thank you anyway!
Oh noo I have betrayed you shirei-chan! ごめんなさいます！ 
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You can also just scream at it. Very cathartic.
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response
I’m so sorry to hear about that. Aside from being shocked at all the steps aside from # 9 (prescription being filled) and #12 (medication received), wtf is step 11? Shouldn’t the prescribing doctor be asking some of these questions like is it necessary and working, and not the pharmacist? And that affects the PRICE?? No worries, please don’t answer, I don’t want to cause excess rage, there is defo a surplus going on. And what happens if you skip all this nonsense and just rock up at the pharmacy without the phone call (like, the sane way it used to work??). big hugs, please rant here as much as you like.
I’m glad you wrote about your experience, it’s important for people to know personal stories about what is going on and to think through how we got here, and to show actions have consequences (
). Not that I’m expecting any self reflective epiphanies, but perhaps there are more people like me who are related to a lot of those (blanks) who support(ed) this nonsense and I retell these stories as part of my (albeit losing) strategy to maintain relationships with them and have something to say since they are very much in a post fact world, but personal stories still carry a bit of weight.
Pallet cleanser
I love your kanji study heuristic, that’s so interesting.
Super cool way to track how often you look something up and then connect it to your learning. Are these 6 subsets on Takoboto? Or am I missing something on the Kanji Study app? In the Kanji Study app I’m just aware of 4 levels (white star, yellow star, orange star, red star). And I don’t think I realised you could manually add items to the guided study function. So that means you can override its default study order and it will give you items from your custom entry? I might need to reinvestigate what that is all about.
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hotdog
Lol, maybe I will try this someday.
response to mitrac
Sorry if step 11 was unclear. I meant that in response to the increase in price (if it’s a big enough amount to worry you) you’re going to have to ask yourself these questions.
But speaking of infuriatingly not doing their own job, when the health insurance denied coverage of my most important (and most prohibitively expensive) medication and I pointed out that they had already approved it for me in the past they claimed that they were making sure the FDA hadn’t issued any warnings about it. Which 1) was patently false 2) would be the pharmacist’s job as far as I’m concerned. (What they were doing was saving money by delaying paying for it by repeatedly demanding more and more invasive personal medical history before they eventually approved it. Because they are allowed to require you to try cheaper medicine first before they will cover more expensive medicine. Even if your doctor considered prescribing you the cheap stuff and then decided it wasn’t a good idea.)
Thank you. I indeed wrote it because I think personal stories are really important to help everyone understand what is happening in the world. (Like, if anyone out there is wondering why we aren’t protesting more: one of the reasons is because we are going through twelve-step processes just to get our medication. We are exhausted.) But the thing that really pushed me to write my experience was reading a facebook post by an acquaintance who is in home hospice and her husband had THE EXACT SAME EXPERIENCE trying to get anti-nausea/vomiting medicine for her. (In their case step 7 was the insurance saying it was too soon for a refill even though it was a BRAND NEW PRESCRIPTION. Like, what???)
This is the good news, you can skip straight to step 7 by doing this! And that’s what I’ve been doing, I don’t even try to call them anymore.
I’m super against this thing where we’re being pushed to interact with other humans less and less and less. Like filling grocery stores with self checkout-out and only having one or two cashiers available. Or replacing a human receptionist on the phone with AI.
We can only have solidarity if we actually interact with each other. Something pretty amazing happened actually, when I chose to wait in a slow line for a human cashier a couple months ago. The woman in front of me didn’t have enough to pay for all of her groceries. And because I was there I had the opportunity to help! I gave her 20 dollars and she got her groceries and it’s probably the best $20 I spent in 2025. Every time I think back to it it gives me a happy and sort of peaceful feeling.
Thanks so much for listening and asking questions, you have made me feel super heard and supported.
Yes, absolutely! Kanji Study is super customizable – you just have to click around a fair amount to find out what does what.
From this menu you select “custom sets”.
These are a bunch of my sets that I use to keep track of kanji I haven’t learned yet. Although I think the more “normal” use for these is if you want to study a specific subset of kanji. I just like to watch the numbers go down though and use the guided study review schedule.
General reading, where the magic happens! Set six has 六 in it because a subset will disappear if there’s nothing in it, and I try to keep 6 empty. Right now it has two kanji in it because I keep trying to avoid learning the kanji for すごい
The triple dots in the upper right corner on a kanji’s page will open this menu with “Add to Guided Study” as the third option.
I also love that the guided study has a lightning bolt button you can use to catch up quickly if you have too many reviews. It helps so much if you start feeling overwhelmed.
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I’m building my collection of Mara quotes and this will be one 
Another favourite you said: joy is a form of resistance
Magic, such a simple and great idea! I use custom sets but I don’t move kanji between them so I didn’t even think of making a group with my own made up levels as sets 
I’m going to have lots of thoughts about this.
Right now I use them as I study kanji in mini sets to see when the last time I did my KKLC-GRS reading (since for each set it says eg ‘last studied 2 days ago’ so I use that as my cue for doing my reading at intervals of 2 days, 6 days, 6 weeks, 4 months). I merge them into bigger groups for the longer intervals and it works great
Right, I didn’t play much with guided study so I need to reconsider that option, thanks!
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Well, I’m sure you can get prescribed something for that and receive relief in somewhere between a day and 837 years. 
And yeah, the 1:30 to 2pm thing seems to be universal in pharmacies, almost like pharmacists unionized and the only demand they have ever made is an absolute refusal to work during those hours.
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I have a couple of friends who work in pharmacies. I didn’t ask, but based on their stories my less pessimistic guess is that they don’t want people working solo so they can’t steal drugs and my more pessimistic guess is that they don’t want a single person to be in the pharmacy by themself because they don’t want them to get robbed.
Ah, American healthcare, stay classy.
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That sounds like a perfectly reasonable explanation, which means it can’t possibly be the case because American Healthcare system and all. 
I have a feeling that the real answer would be similar to the universe in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy lore, where if you ever figure it out it will immediately be replaced by something even stranger (and this has already occurred several times). (And now I need to check to see if his books have ever been translated to Japanese because I haven’t tithed to Bookwalker recently enough).
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