taking a break from our regularly scheduled random bookwalker manga to start the 蟲師：外譚集 manga that arrived the other day. it’s a series of five short stories all by different mangaka set in the mushishi universe.
first one was by 熊倉隆敏 and was about a man who pretends to be a mushishi for money (and the inevitable consequences thereof). very very good, thoroughly enjoyed. second one was by 吉田基已 about a mangaka who goes to a small onsen town. much more slice of life-y but it all comes together in the end and i also enjoyed this one!
words that stood out
a few archaisms this time
蟲師：
リウマチ - rheumatism
焼け石に水 - a drop in the ocean, pointless exercise, too little too late, like (pouring) water on a hot stone
妄り - reckless, with disregard for order or rules
悪しき - bad, evil
進ぜる - to do something for someone. humble, archaic term. similar to てあげる
Made some good progress yesterday, partly because I’m currently waiting on feedback for the first draft of my paper, so have been slacking taking a well deserved rest.
Days have been a bit stressful, so I don’t post yesterday, just stopped after about 14k characters. Today I did another 20k… and finished Chaos;Head Noah! Maybe I’ll post somewhere around the VN club later with in-depth thoughts about the VN like I did for another before, if I get the energy. I’ll just say it was really good though! Loved the atmosphere, and how increasingly wild the ride kept getting. I probably won’t move on immediately, but now I have a whole series to work through.
With that, according to jpdb.io, I read 762,074 characters, or 318,499 words! That’s a lot of Japanese! If nothing else, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the word 妄想 (もうそう, delusion) after this. If anyone is curious, here are the VN stats: Chaos;Head Noah – Prebuilt decks – jpdb
Yesterday I was at work for 24h, and did not take my laptop with me, so I only read 2 Satori Reader episodes during a break. Today I was able to make some more progress and finished Chapter 8 of LOOPERS.
Had to stay at home today. Reading was all over the place: read a bit on desktop, got tired and went to bed, couldn’t sleep so read a bit on phone, felt better and went to read on desktop, got tired and went to bed again. Rinse repeat. Energy level owatteru, majide
2 sessions of animal crossing and another 10 new words. Little bit slower to play because of setting it up to play in docked mode, so I have to look up words on my phone. It’s not too bad unless I hit a real wall of 設置説明 type stuff. I assume at some point once I’m through the kinda “tutorial” parts of the game that it’s gonna get a lot easier
switch docked mode problem solving
For a while now I’ve had a really bad problem when I try to play the switch in docked mode but also use headphones/line-out audio. I only have one monitor on my desk, so I use an HDMI switcher to swap the source between my computer and switch, but when I play it like this I can’t get audio except to the speakers built into the monitor.
I had tried running an audio cable from the headphone jack into both the line-in on my mobo and also into my audio interface, but I was getting a super bad ground loop whenever and wherever it was plugged in, and you can’t unpower the switch dock and still play in docked mode.
But for some reason, if I run the 3.5mm → RCA → my component switcher and then open OBS to listen through my capture card that’s hooked up to that, I get like way less. It was kind of a last ditch thing to try and I honestly don’t know why this works, but it does
I really hope I don’t have to move soon because all of this is going to be a real nightmare to tear down and figure out how to set back up again. Trying to be good about documenting solutions to problems as I find them… but still
I did also open up my joycon today to see why the left L button hasn’t been working and… yeah, that’ll do it
But now that’s fixed… I also have a backlog of japanese switch games that I wasn’t even counting in my planning list because I didn’t have a good way to play them that have suddenly been added to the pile
I went into this book intended for Intermediate learners thinking it would be extremely difficult for me only to find that I could read most of it without much trouble? I ended up reading 2 of the 10 short stories that are in this book. But also, they are very cleanly written (and by cleanly written, I mean specifically for learners of Japanese; these are not stories intended for native readers )
Grammar point of note:
I thought I had parsed out all よう constructions in N4-N3 Bunpo, so I was caught off guard by ようになります。Sort of remembered Noun + になります from when I studied in uni, but the よう part made me think it was a deviation of another ように or ようとする or even ようにと。Wow did everything make sense when I found the construction hidden in the N4 chapters…
Honestly, being able to easily read these first two chapters was a massive confidence boost. Turns out I have been doubting myself too much lmao.
The stories are supposed to get more difficult as the book progresses, though, so we shall see how this develops…
Haven’t done very well after coming back from holiday. However, I did read daily. Some of these were days off, but I’ve been catching up so much on work that they haven’t really been proper days off.
I’ve kept up to date on a few manga and nearly caught up on セーラー服と機関銃, but fallen behind on the rest!
same here! they’re a bit tricky (some archaisms, plus some dialect and old people speech, and a very sparse writing style) but well worth the effort, i had an excellent time reading them!
(1000 words) 谁生活得更美好 (Pg 20-27/34)
today, 3500 characters. I want to finish this route, but I don’t want it to end!
7月19日 
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