It looks like 徒花異譚 won in a close race. I’m excited to read it 
I know usually the person that does the nomination runs the threads etc but would someone else be able to do that for me? I plan on reading along of course but I am not sure I will have time to read ahead each week to find suitable stopping points and everything.
Yeah that’s a cool looking one, I think I’ve voted for it constantly since you nominated it. Ace Attorney next maybe? 
At this moment I’m managing lots of Japanese but if at all possible it’d be good if someone other than me ran that because I’m gonna be back dealing with the medical system sometime, who knows when I might get a blood clot again, etc 
For the time being I can’t say I’ll be able to run it either unfortunately. It’s been a shit month for my mental energy where I’ve barely done any proper Japanese study and I have a ton of catch up to do with Fatal Twelve at the moment. Most importantly I have to work on slowly stabilising my everyday life and study in general before anything, though it’s starting to get clearer and easier now again. I can’t know how I’ll be doing by then and it depends on how stressed or chill I am once I get there, but if I’m back to normalcy I suppose I wouldn’t mind running it 
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Looks like a really interesting one! Unfortunately, since I’ll be playing on Switch, I won’t have as easy access to character counts, which would make it a lot trickier for me to run it. 
I wonder how accurate are character counts supposed to be? Like, excluding new lines and space characters (2k out of 29k, because almost 2k lines)? Excluding punctuations (another 3k)? I typed in around 0.2k into the log.
Another thing is repeating and selecting a second choice.
I would say don’t bother with punctuation stuff at all, would be an unnecessary headache. For 9-nine- I used to just copy the number the HTML page gave since I knew everything was clear text (meaning all the text accurately represented game text). For Fatal Twelve I used to manually get rid of the furigana format when it happened, only leaving the kanji as if it had no furigana. But honestly even if you leave that it doesn’t throw numbers off in any significant way IMO. Whatever is easier to manage.
As for choices and repeated text I only counted new text for the character count because there’s usually a skip button, so for us we decided back then that already read text didn’t count for new weeks. If I remember correctly Zero Escape only counted new scenes as well.
More accurate counts are naturally better if at all possible, but if there’s a difference of 1, 2, 3k characters personally I don’t think it matters much at all. Managing VNs in a reading club is already challenging at times 
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Since I used a text file not the website (actually, *.md, also I forgot the website URL), and I already made a counting script; I probably should keep the punctuations. Removal is ln.replace(/\p{P}/gu, '')
That would make it 27k.
Ah I see. I think the usual parsing HTMLs don’t track punctuation or spaces at all so it’s not an issue:
It picks the three lines of text, but it only counts 今日はいい天気ですね as text for 10 characters:
I use the HTML file but locally, I downloaded the one I prefer and just open it when I read with textractor. If your script works different then I don’t think I can help since I don’t know how that works, sorry!
If you’re using the text count to help with the weekly threads, I would recommend not including punctuation since it will bloat the count by a decent amount. An extra 2k per week from punctuation over the course of something like Fatal Twelve adds about 40k characters/two extra threads.
If you have the text already, you can copy & paste it into one of the texthook pages like Texthooker or Clipboard Insertion Page - Anacreon Edition and it will filter out punctuation for you automictically.
I got 24k from both websites.
About 100 less than my script, though. (Maybe not only \p{P}.) Perhaps this many I don’t need to care.
Since Fatal Twelve is almost over (I think we have 3-4 weeks at most left based off the character count), when should we start 徒花異譚? Do we want to start it right after Fatal or do people want a small break period in between the two games?
Does anyone have any suggestions on how we should do the threads too? One of the tags on vndb for this is “episodic story” but it doesn’t seem like its actually broken into chapters/episodes from what I looked at. I think it has that tag since the game goes through different fairy tales but they seem to be different lengths from what I found.
I can’t answer the first bit personally since in the end I haven’t caught up as I planned, unfortunately. I’ve been having a pretty bad mental period energy wise that I was hoping to get out of when I last posted but it has been going on for longer than I expected. Hoping to be more recovered by the time 徒花異譚 starts.
About the second paragraph, I’ve been curious to know how the Flowers club feels like in terms of having an open pace in a “single thread” (or per part in that game’s case). Genuinely curious because having that sort of organisation would make running VN clubs much easier and accessible in comparison to the high commitment that it is currently for the person that makes the threads for a given pick. As I see it it would solve two challenges that we’ve had so far: one, the high commitment of requiring the organiser to be up to date and ahead at all times, which may be stressful or straight become impossible if someone’s life circumstances or schedule change; and two, people wanting to read at different paces without dividing the club into a regular and an advanced one, fragmenting the membership which is already really small. My concern though is if this would discourage participation, since everyone would be reading at their own pace and at different points every time. We can still use a guide to drive the discussion, and perhaps make a template of the guide with text hidden in spoilers and checkboxes that people can paste into their posts for others to see where they’re at. I don’t know, we can get creative with it, the text as always would be hidden in summary boxes describing the point you’re at. The suggested characters per week would still work the same to mark the end date, subject to change as always to a lower or higher mark after voting.
So yeah, I’m not sure if something like that would work better or worse in all honesty, and that’s why I was curious about the Flowers club actually having that organisation or other book clubs, but I’m not familiar with those as I’ve never participated in an open pace one before, so if someone has some feedback on that would be appreciated. This organisation pretty much kills theorising about what’s to happen next, though, right? Pick your poison, I guess. I wonder if there’s a better way to mitigate the bad things and enhance the good ones.
How has Fatal Twelve ended up being overall though? Both in terms of organisation and participation.
I like it a lot for Flowers. It helps me personally since some weeks I’m busier than others and vice versa so being able to read whenever and continuously is nice. Flowers is divided into a prologue + 8 chapters in the first game so it makes it easy to just post your thoughts on the current chapter, hypothesize etc and people catching up can easily see what posts to read/avoid based off of chapter.
I think its a good structure and works well for any VN that has chapters or an in-game date since its easy to hide spoilers behind that. The issue with 徒花異譚 is that it doesn’t have either of those, so I’m not sure how well that format would work. I’d say you could hide your spoilers behind a character count but then everyone would have to keep a continuous count + people playing on switch wouldn’t be able to do that so I don’t think tracking by character count would work in a read at your own pace thread.
Using a template with the choices in the game could be a good solution. Looking at the guide though, it seems like there aren’t many choices so could potentially go a long period of time before having a choice to use that as a reference when you post your thoughts in the thread.
It has been going well. Polv has done a good job taking over and organizing the weekly threads. Participation seems on par with the other VNs we’ve read so far.
Yeah that would have worked well for BUSTAFELLOWS too for example.
Maybe for ISLAND it works too, it has only a Prologue and then 3 mains routes as far as can tell.
I definitely like the no-schedule format, I’m definitely nowhere near the 25k / week pace of the VN book clubs 
Yeah I agree that character count would be pretty bad with an organisation like this. My (very?) clumsy idea was some guide template like this (it’s an example template from no VN in particular, I just made it up):
【はじめから】
SAVE 01
1 Example choice
2 Example choice
3 Example choice
4 Example choice
5 Example choice
SAVE 02
6 Example choice
7 Example choice
[BAD END 1]
SAVE 02 から
8 Example choice
9 Example choice
…
etc
Text text text.
However the immediate issue I see with this is that some may not like knowing the layout of a VN beforehand and would prefer going “blind”. So far I don’t think the guides we used spoiled anything just from reading the choices, but it does spoil when the ends come. Personally I don’t mind, nor knowing how many ends a game has or whatever, but others might, I’m not sure. It also has the issue you mention, that there might be a lot of content between one choice and the next… so yeah. That being said, reading this medium with a group of people is automatically going to require compromises of some type here and there.
I’ll try to think of a better way meanwhile but I suppose if nothing better comes we still have the usual way we’ve had with the organiser reading ahead. I do think that while the reading amount has been fine from a reader perspective (meaning that you can skip one week and catch up the next), it would be great if we could reduce the entry effort of running a VN for future or current organisers, and to also “console-proof” it for people reading without a text hooker. When compared to a book club where you can pretty much instantly decide which pages will be read which week until the end, for a VN it sure takes commitment to be on top of the reading every week and it might strain people or make them avoid leading altogether, which I think is understandable, because everyone’s available time might change constantly and it forces that the organiser’s never changes, or forces them to sacrifice other things to keep the club running and it may end up burning people out, especially for a thing that goes on for many months. I don’t have any other examples of people running VN clubs so I really don’t know what the optimal way of doing things would be, I’m completely taking a guess in the dark here 
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I think your idea sounds good. Since this VN doesn’t have any other indicator to track progress, I think using the template you laid out works. It is a big time commitment to lead the VN clubs the way we’ve been doing it so far so it would be nice to find an alternative (thank you to everyone that has led them so far!). The no schedule format might make people more willing to try out the games too as they won’t feel pressured to keep up at a certain pace.
I’m not sure who is all planning on reading 徒花異譚 but I’m open to hear what everyone else thinks or if they have any other suggestions.
Awesome . I mean I still suggest we do a poll in the near future for it since it’s a fairly big change, see what other people participating think and so on.
Also for some fortuitous reason the game is now available both on DLsite and now for Steam EU as well, I guess globally? Unexpected but certainly very welcome. Steam sales on Nov 21, I doubt we get a discount but maybe? c:
Happy to inform I was wrong, it got a 30% discount 
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Also plenty of other VNs with discounts so take a look in case you find something you wanted to read (although many tend to go on sale very frequently for what I’ve seen this past year).
Reminder that there’s only one day left of sale for the next VN club pick!
Speaking of which, only one week left of Fatal Twelve, right? I think I saw polv mentioning somewhere but I might be mistaken. Should we begin moving Adabana’s start soon? I’m not sure who’s participating, a poll both for that and for the new suggested organisation might be good for the time being.
We should probably update the title as well since we’re no longer voting. If someone could update it please, I suppose changing the “voting” part to “next: 徒花異譚” or whatever the usual etiquette is .
Yes, the last week starts on Friday, so it’ll end by Dec 7.
