July 28
Read chapter 3 of それでも歩は寄せてくる (17-21%). Recognizing some more kanji this time around.
I also like Crypt of the Necrodancer, although I never got past the second level. It’s hard to make those quick decisions while also staying on beat. But I do love seeing what genres you can blend with rhythm games. One game I played recently was called Soundfall. It’s a top-down looter shooter but you have to shoot to the beat.
Day 28:
Another “I’m totally reading just a lil bit so I don’t break my streak”-day. AKA reading the subtitles to an ASMR video that I watched to calm down after today 
I’ve been all over the place buying furniture and paint and all kinds of stuff! I’m spending so much money! But my place will look so nice! But wow money! Help!
Things are probably gonna be hectic while I juggle work, moving, taking care of my mental health and my JP studies. I guess that’s life, huh?
Thank you! It’s exciting and terrifying at the same time!
Okay I finally finished Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind for Nintendo Switch in japanese.
The difficulty was somewhere between N3 and N4, some rather old fashioned words were used which makes sense the game is a remaster of an old game. Characters used different speech styles and politeness levels and some older characters had weird quirks like using わし instead of わたし.
There weren’t really any puzzles to solve. But it was sometimes hard to figure out what to do next it seems the game expects you to do things in a specific order in many instances. I wasted lots of time on clicking on random things hoping it will progress the story. Even though I don’t like murder mysteries that much I still enjoyed the story. It was quite predictable but fun to play nonetheless.
What I really loved all the animations like people changing face expressions or sometimes people moving in the back-ground. It is was a great game and the first one I actually finished in japanese while reading all the text.
That reminds me I once did a poll in one of the read every day challenge threads and this was the game which won the poll. When I have time I will make another poll but this time I will provide pictures for all the games in the poll.
July 28
(home post)
Grazing : 
→ (
pages)
So not an exciting reading day today. You could say I grazed some descriptions on books. Although I mostly google translated them, and only checked the Japanese to try and make heads or tails of the weird translations. 猫猫 was most likely a name, not “cat and cat”. 
But I wanted to post today because I did something else important instead. My stress have been raising steadily over the past week which is visible in how many days I haven’t read (or barely read) in the past week. I was being squeezed with obligations from different directions that I couldn’t slot into my schedule. And the pressure just rose and rose, and today I finally realized I wouldn’t be able to solve my situation. Something had to give.
So I’ve initiated a reschedule of the visit from family that was planned for next week until hopefully end of August or even September. I don’t know exactly since my brother had to talk to his partner and consult his schedule, etc. But the pressure on me immediately let up, and I felt like I could properly start breathing again.
My energy didn’t snap back instantly, but I could feel every cell in my body unclench and begin to relax after I initiated the reschedule, so I’m hopeful I’ll get back to normal fairly quickly. And suddenly, I have energy for all those things I need to get done, now that I have a bit more time to get them done. ^^
I’m glad I for once didn’t blame myself for not being enough and tried to fight through the overwhelm (which I can’t do in a good way). Instead I asked myself if there was something I could change and decided to try. If I couldn’t change things, I could have always fallen back on my usual method of trying to forge on and putting a serious dent in my mental health.
Take care of yourselves, all you lovely people here. 
Busy day today, so only managed to squeeze in a couple of pages of reading in よつば&! between a visit with a friend and dinner/tonight’s Japanese class. These few pages at the beginning of chapter 4 were challenging for me; in the end, I came away with the impression that Mama Ayase is a bit of a sad specimen.
町内会 (ちょうないかい): neighbourhood association
正解 (せいかい): correct answer
大げさ (おおげさ): exaggerated
失敗 (しっぱい): mistake, failure
許す (ゆるす): permit, allow
July 28th!
Chapter 93 of Yotsuba today. It was a sweet chapter about princesses, there were a lot of cute panels!
I’m painfully close to running out of Yotsuba to read now, with only a volume and a half remaining. 
I’m going to miss my daily dose of joy!
I really do need to decide what to read next, I’m looking for something of a similar difficulty which is also similarly cheerful.
If anybody has any recommendations I’d love to hear them!
Home post 
July 28th 
・ わたしの幸せな結婚 4 (65% → 100%)
Finished the fourth book in the series. It was… okay, I guess xD Not my favorite so far, that much I can say. I think the next book will be better 
(Am I the only one getting disoriented when reading about something that is not set in the current season? I swear I thought it was winter time right now.)
Also read a bit of a 試し読み of a book I thought maybe could fit for the advanced book club. I feel like I have to research more about the book first before deciding whether to nominate it. And I didn’t make time for that, so that’s for another time.
In other news, my new pfp is from the show Lycoris Recoil, which I still haven’t watched a single episode of, but it seems very fun. #リコリコ
Wow, you are super amazing, do you know that? You identified the main issue and came up with a strategy to improve the situation. I don’t know many people who can do that while already being in a stressful situation (me included)!
I’m sad for you that you can’t see your family&friends that you were probably looking forward to, but I’m really happy for you that you found a good solution to the stressful situation you were in 
For my reading, after having finished 詩的私的ジャック, I continued with 海辺のカフカ as well as Flesh&Blood over the past few days. I like both a lot in their very own ways.
Day 25-28 
:
化身 ~ 5-12%
For three days I had been leaving reading to the end of the day, and my energy lasted for only a tiny read before I passed out. Today I tried to correct that and did some of my reading in the morning. It worked much better - I managed a 6% of the book today, compared to the not even 1% of the days before. The book is either harder than I expected, or I’m just very tired - possibly both. The first few pages were deceptively simple, but this is a story about a man stranded in a tropical lake, talking about his thoughts, his surroundings, and his survival efforts, so there’s lots of unknown vocabulary, and several unexpected observations.
As far as content is concerned, the horror is still nowhere to be seen. It has now evolved into a straight survival story - think any castaway stranded on a desert island, only this time it’s a lake in a hole in the rainforest. After despair and hunger comes ingenuity and clever use of resources, getting used to the surroundings and all they have to offer.
But, this being a horror award book, I don’t expect a happy rescue at the end of the story.
Home
ジョジョの奇妙な冒険22
51 - 54
My parents called after midnight, so I just didn’t have time to read. I might need to reread these pages anyway, whoops
I’m actually watching this show now and while it seems cute and fun, I find it very thought-provoking. This is not a show that I would choose to binge-watch so watching it every week is a good thing for me.
I read a decent amount of 本好き 1 today, gotta say I didn’t like the scene with the pigs.
I also saw someone adding a ton of Aozora short stories to their wish list on Natively so I impulsively read one (cause why not) but it ended up being a bit disappointing. ああ東京は食い倒れ | L33 for those who are curious. I think learning 食い倒れ is probably the best part of reading it tbh. I’m not sure if it’s the author’s writing style I didn’t vibe with or just the content.
Also small shout out that the Natively Mystery Book club has chosen 十角館の殺人 | L35 as the book to read! Voting on reading cadence here if you’d like to participate.
That’s interesting. I actually liked that volume a lot due to the main character getting more active (making a friend, especially, regardless of how that turned out). That being said, for some reason, that epilogue stopped me right in my tracks and I have yet to start volume 5 (which I own). Let me know what you think of it!
On my end, I finally read something after my gaming binge, specifically 怪人二十面相. I reached the end of the first part, I guess. I found it hilarious that, despite losing everything he tried to steal, having (one of) his hideout stormed by the police, and having one of his men (well, just the cook, but still) arrested by said cops, the main antagonist still find the time to write a letter saying “haha, you can keep those diamonds [that took me an inordinate amount of resources in planning and execution to steal] because I don’t really care; also that national treasure level Buddha statue? Just keep it, whatever. I win!”. And everyone else grinding their teeth saying “damn, he is so good”. I couldn’t really refrain myself from laughing. Sounds like a complete loss to me, but whatever, it’s fun.
July 28 
Home Post
I finally overcame my mental block and finished this week’s reading for 海辺のカフカ, yay! 
Chapter 18’s probably one of my favorites so far, I just had to get there first But yeah once I settled in it was pretty smooth, I think I actually read faster than usual? So hey I’ll take it 
Now I just need to get through my バディミッションBOND rut lmao, I’ve been on the same investigation for what feels like forever I know as soon as stuff starts happening again I’ll lose my entire mind and never wanna stop, but I have to get there first! Anyway I played some more today and it was a good time as always, though I could still feel my brain fighting it a little but
(I was also inspired and finally changed my icon, seemed like it should actually be representative of バディミッションBOND era 
so a dramatic チェズレイ seemed fun, there he is, I’m new now)
(adjacently, I confirmed my mandarake order today so I’ll be low-grade vibrating in anticipation until it gets here we love new books!)
Wow yeah that’s really great, I’m glad you’re taking care of yourself! Sorry you’re stressed in the first place though, I hope it gets better now 
TIL the unvoiced consonants aside from ‘p’ are called 清音. At least, that’s how Shirabe Jisho defines the word. I tried looking it up on Goo, but my brain didn’t wanna process that many unknown kanji and words in a single line, so I dunno if that’s entirely accurate. Because ‘n’ and ‘m’ are both voiced, yet they don’t have 濁点, so are they still 濁音 (which Shirabe defines as voiced consonants), or are they 清音? ‘P’ is unvoiced, but it’s called 半濁音 since it’s expressed with 半濁点. So wouldn’t 濁音 be consonants expressed with 濁点 and 清音 be “pure” consonants not expressed with a diacritic? I dunno, my brain doesn’t really wanna work today.
So I took it rather easy today, reading along as I listened to ch 1-5 of ジャム屋さん on Satori reader. I had already read the first two, but since it’s been so long and the chapters are so short anyway, I decided to just start over. There were a couple bits in ch 4 and 5 that I had to go back over at my own speed to understand, but it wasn’t too bad today.
Day 28: July 28th 
Another small reading day. Need to try and read lots tomorrow as I may have minimal reading time over the weekend.
orange Volume 1 (60% ➨ 76%)
July 28
This is definitely not my week. After yet another busy day I had finally secured an hour to play and relax but after about 15 minutes of バリバリ I accidentally leaned on my Windows tablet and the screen cracked and stopped responding. That tablet is where I do most of my book and manga JP reading so I was really upset, plus I’ve had it for over 6 years and it’s held up surprisingly well. I’ll have to see if by some miracle I can fix it cheaply but in any case it seems I’ll have to read on the PC for the time being, which I don’t usually want to do after working all day on the computer already.
Ok, rant over. Let’s hope I can at least have some free time to read more things this weekend.
One of my favourite book series AND also my favourite movies of all time! My first time reading it was when I was seven, and then I reread it six/seven years later. Now I’m feeling like reading it for the third time, but I should space it out to keep the magic there also I wouldn’t be able to fully enjoy it because I have practically no time to read at the moment 
I just read a chapter before bed. But I stay up really late last night so I was going in and out.
