July 9
Busy day so I could only manage to play バリバリ for 20 min before falling asleep 
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Day 10!
I figured I’d start early again today! I knew I’d be setting up Zero Escape, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t do it last minute in case any Issues™ would arise. Guess who was right. 
I am absolutely losing my mind trying to make Textractor work with this game. It took an hour to find a working hook, but at least it ran super smoothly for around 20 minutes after that.
Then the game introduced a new font (??) and Textractor proceeded to convert everything to weird, unreadable characters. I’ve been trying to rehook it ever since, but it’s not working and now I’m Angry. I’m probably gonna have to start the game over because I was too distracted by the issues to really take it all in. I’m so bummed!!! Taking any and all advice from pro VN readers. 
Replies!
Ooh, this is good to know, thank you! Slang is definitely tripping me up, so starting with the less slang-y game first might be a good call. I love mystery games, so I think both of these are right up my alley! If I can just iron out all the technical kinks, this will be super fun for me. I’m pretty good with dialogue due to reading manga, but I’m having trouble with the tutorial screens, lol. There’s so much information and my brain wants to skip to the fun parts!! but I’m not great with struggling with things, so understanding what to do is probably the best call
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The Tanuki Beach Resort: Date 20220710 
No Longer Tanuki Progress: 86.98%
Only time for a short read today!
Learnthings
掻き「かき」ー Stroke (like a swimming stroke); arm stroke // or used as a prefix it adds emphasis to words (also かっ )
催眠剤「さいみんざい」ー Sleeping medicine/pills; hypnotic
お馴染み「おなじみ」ー Familiar; well-known; regular (like a customer… ！！or regulars on this forum)
致死量「ちしりょう」ー Lethal dose
Forms
電燈 ＝ 電灯「でんとう」(Electric light; lamp)
ＤＩＡＬ
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Home
ジョジョの奇妙な冒険19
29 - 62
Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take ya
Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama
Key Largo, Montego
Baby why don’t we go
Jamaica
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Read another page of the prefectures book, and 8 pages of Spy Family before my late shift. Started mission 3.
Need to sleep now…
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17 more pages of よつばと！ today; up to p. 159. I’m so glad I have a few more volumes of her to look forward to…
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Did that happen when the game switched from the regular VN scenes with voice acting and all to the first “escape the room” section?
textractor stuff
If so - same 
In my case it was that some, but not all, hiragana were converted to half width katakana (?? honestly wild would be really curious as to why) so it looked like this:
Since that’s still technically the correct Japanese phrase just in… weird, I ended up converting that to normal text on my clipboard extractor page thingy when I didn’t find a better hook that… doesn’t do whatever this is 
More a workaround than a solution but works fine IMO. Is the text the same for you or are you getting actual gibbrish? 'cause that seems harder to solve…
Anyway, I’m by no means a pro VN reader™* (this is the only one I’ve tried so far) but Zero Escape works okay for me now so could attempt to help trouble shoot if you want? 
*edit: I can’t believe I wrote ‘VPN reader’ at first, my brain is a potato
That reminds me, I really gotta get back to this game, why do I always get sidetracked
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July 10th!
Today I read the final chapter of Mitsuboshi Colors Volume 3. Finishing a volume always feels so satisfying 
I also finished reading the first chapter of Orange, its really interesting so far. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens.
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Gasp… Yes…
We are troubleshooting
This lines up exactly with what I experienced. It started happening when the tutorial with the yellow font color showed up. Me calling it “unreadable characters” was maaaaaybe a bit dramatic But yes - definitely these odd squished katakana that ichi.moe didn’t recognize. How did you convert it to normal text, exactly?
It’s weird - I haven’t been able to find the “good hook” again, either. It only worked right at the beginning of the game. Now when I try to use the search option, it just tells me it can’t find any text. 
Maybe that won’t be an issue if I start over and convert the odd katakana. Thank you for helping me troubleshoot!!!
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Still largely prohibiting my arm from much use but a short, mostly one handed update:
Too early in my Japanese learning I tried out Dragon Quest 11. I knew it was too early but I’ve always been pushing myself heh. We’re talking like spend an hour looking up every other word to talk to the first 10 NPCs haha. Like 3 or 4 game sessions to reach a save point. But I soldiered on a while, enduring the headaches til I was tired of it.
Just picked that back up, turn based RPG sounded easy on my hand, and it seems I can finally just comfortably sit and read that! Kind of a big step for me because it’s both hugely obvious progress, and also the way I’ve been always moving forward to hard reading has left me almost never just doing this comfortable, half automatic reading. So it’s cool to find something (that I very much do want to read) where that works now! I’ll be mixing it in with my other already-too-many reading projects.
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We are troubleshooting some more
Okay, so, I have no idea what your current VPN reading set up is so forgive me if I’m overexplaining
One of the most common ways to use textractor is to use a texthooker page in a browser, right. So basically you open a blank page (potentially one with some extra functionality) in a browser, install a clipboard inserter browser extension, fire up textractor and then all the game text gets copied onto that page - from there you can easily use a browser dictionary like yomichan (or do whatever else with the text). This one is an example of a page you can use, but back when I started I didn’t know that existed so I kind of just made my own local one. Then when I ran into that Zero Escape issue I added a button and wrote some javascript functionality that does the conversion.
Looks like this:
(I tried to find a converter online first but turns out half-width katakana → hiragana might not be a very common thing to have a need for )
My suggestion would be I give you the file and you just more or less copy my setup? Seems like the easiest solution, unless you want some specific functionality (character counting, for example) that this doesn’t have, then we’ll have to see
Hmhm yeah no idea, I’d say try starting over first and if that doesn’t work we’ll go from there 
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more Zero Escape stuff
Ooooh yeah I wasn’t thinking about textractor, I never really figured that one out At the time of playing Zero Escape I didn’t really grasp the difference between that and like game2text, so I just used game2text which was also far from perfect but did the job well enough I suppose; everything else I’d been reading at the time was non-digital though so maybe my standards were low Unfortunately that means I won’t be much help for textractor advice 
Tutorial screens are always 1000% harder than everything else in a given game lmao, it’s just densely packed information that isn’t fun to read, like how many times have I vaguely skimmed tutorials even in English and completely missed what it was trying to tell me?
Oh something else in case it’s not clear yet, I know I had to do some googling to figure it out: the whole ADV vs Novel screen thing is a holdover from it being on the DS I believe, but basically ADV mode just gives you dialogue and Novel mode makes it read more like a book with narration and all that. It’ll force you over to one or the other sometimes but you can always swap it back. There’s definitely some description that doesn’t carry over into ADV mode, but it’s really up to you and how you wanna read it!
4 Likes
July 10
(home post)
Hotel 2 page 5 → 58 (54 pages)
This manga just keeps being so cute and wholesome, and this was a two chapter story, so I had to read two chapters, right?
Happily, I stumbled on a few things I’ve seen/learned recently like っす (です, from short grammar questions here), 花嫁 (bride, from a book description, I think?), 内緒 (secret; from my Orange reading yesterday) and possibly some others.
Anyway, I can heartily recommend this. So good. And I’m gonna be sad when I finish the second volume. No idea when a third volume will be published (I’d have to look at how quickly this series is published in Harta magazine), but even then, I’d also have to order it and have it shipped here. So I’ll probably wait until I have more things I want to buy… 
I guess that is the problem with reading something that recently came out. If it is too enjoyable, you have to wait for a long time to get more.
25 Likes
Home post 
July 10th
・詩的私的ジャック - JACK THE POETICAL PRIVATE (54% → 57%)
・SAO Progressive 1 (80% → 84%)
Started chapter 7 of Saikawa & Moe book and read chapter 11 of SAO book. One thing that was brought up in the SAO book that I thought was interesting, was how a character pronounced a word with a different accent than what the main character expected.
Page 417 (Spoilers)
Some context: Kirito was previously a beta tester in the game and they are disliked by the new players in this official version of the game. The word ビーター is a contraction of “beta tester” and “cheater”.
《ビーター》という単語も、エギルの口から出ると新鮮に響く。俺を含めた大多数のプレイヤーは《チーター》と同じく平板に発音しているが、エギルはビーにアクセントを置いてターを下げるので、なんだかカッコいい名称に感じられないこともない。
Just pronouncing it in a different way makes it sound cool? wot
It’s also fun how pitch accent comes up in the book I’m reading shortly after I’ve made the effort of learning the names of the four pitch accent patterns.
I’ll include photo because why not. Quote from where the pink arrow is pointing.
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I continued reading 5分で読める恐怖のラストの物語. Started short story eight but this one is harder than the other stories, so I read just six pages. But regardless I should finish this book in two weeks.
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Day 9 
穴 ~ 36-39%
Day 10
穴 ~ 39-43%
Erm, things have gotten downright bizarre in the story. I have no idea what to believe about what’s happening at the moment. 
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was out for almost 8 hours today to see the tour de france. very tired after that, almost fell asleep during reviews. needed to read still, opened やが君, saw the page of text, and gave up immediately.
but the kindle has been reminding me that i never finished the Kase-san series (あさがおと加瀬さん etc.), which i’d started over a year ago, and which i remembered as very easy. so loaded that up to read a chapter, so i can check the box. finished the 4th volume and half-way through the 5th before i noticed
山田さん and 加瀬さん are just such cuties together, and they adore each other so much, it’s lovely. and even though 加瀬さん is the brash tomboy, just now 山田さん was the one who actually went for their first kiss. and then got so flustered and embarrassed, totally cute!
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Home
ジョジョの奇妙な冒険19
62 - 94
It was another day where I looked up and it was already past bedtime… Very busy day. I’m surprised I read this much, especially with how many words I had to look up. Polnareff uses a colorful variety…
I’m also starting to wonder if I should track how often bathroom actions are mentioned or shown. Part 1 has at least 2 and Part 3 has 3 so far and I know another is coming up. I feel like every Part has an oddly large amount of them… That’s not normal right?
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July 10 
Home Post
Today I read chapter 14 of 海辺のカフカ which went pretty smoothly I think! I was very intrigued by the things happening in it, and it felt like a comfortable read so that was all cool. It did still take me a couple hours, so even though I tried to play some バディミッションBOND after because I have no self-control I was too tired and just did one little section still a successful day all around!
That’s super cool, congrats!! The impact of powering through difficult content
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I read 3 pages of 2.43, leaving off on pg 90. Just 10 more pages left in this subchapter! Ochi knows the names and positions of each of the members of the Seiin team, but not most of their faces, which makes sense, since Seiin has never really been a rival for Fukuhou until this year, and you likely wouldn’t be able to see their faces very well in the videos of their games. Plus in a real-life setting, Kanno wouldn’t actually have reddish hair and Chika wouldn’t actually be blond, so they wouldn’t stand out that way. I’m pretty sure Ookuma bleaches his hair though, so he would probably still be blond, although only his build is mentioned.
Also, no Aoki yet. We haven’t even properly gotten to the clash. But I’m too sleepy to keep reading…
I think I’m getting better at guessing what the dictionary form of a conjugated verb is, even when I haven’t come across that verb before. Like, んだ is the た form of both む and ぶ verbs, and I can accurately guess which one for an unknown verb just because it feels right.
In non-reading news, I started rewatching ユーリ!!! on ICE again like I’ve been wanting to. I watched 3 eps, trying to listen out a little more for what they’re actually saying rather than only reading the subs, since I’ve got the ENG ones. I learned that, though they say “triple” in English, quads they call 四回転, which I never caught before. I’m still annoyed that Crunchyroll translated 恋人 as “girlfriend,” but like, there’s still no making this show any less gay. Man, I remember watching this as it was airing and absolutely losing my mind over it. Most sports animanga are only gay by circumstance, but this one’s deliberately and overtly so. Same with kazetsuyo (although not to the same extent). It’s great. Maybe one of these days we’ll get a roller derby anime and it’ll be even more undeniably gay, because apparently there are people who say that YoI isn’t even though Vitya and Yuuri literally kiss and get engaged. Although roller derby is girls, so they could have an uncensored kiss and people would still be like, “oh, they’re such good friends!”… -__- But yeah, roller derby anime! Then we’ll have all 3 types of skating! (I still haven’t watched the last few eps of SK∞ though, whoops.)
Some vocab of note:
不躾 (ぶしつけ) [noun, な-adj.] impolite; rude; insolent; impudent; blunt
ガタイのいい [expression, い-adj.] big and brawny; well-built; gigantic. Also, ガタイがいい.
おろおろ [onomatopoeia, adverb, する verb] in a fluster; in a dither; in a panic
赤らむ (あからむ) [自マ五] to become red; to redden; to blush
振り付け (ふりつけ) [noun, する verb] choreography; dance composition; program; routine
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