9-nine- 9️⃣ (Visual Novel Book Club + offshoots)

Week 8 planning reply

Yeah I always just skip previously read text otherwise it would take forever to finish things (and I would also get bored rereading something that soon). In other VNs there is a “next” button that skips to the next unread text or choice (whichever comes first) and makes things a lot faster than pressing the skip button and waiting.

I think another “long” week is fine. At this point, there’s only like 4 of us actively reading and none of us have complained? :joy: Like you said, it’d be a good test for pace too in case we continue onwards with episode 2 or even a different VN since at some point it would be fun to try longer VNs but not be tied to it for forever due to pacing.

I tried out the deluxe edition that is sold on dlsite. It is considerably more expensive (they do have sales at times though) but it does have all 4 games in it. Anyways, I wanted to mention it because when I tried it I found out that all of the texthooking issues were fixed in that version for some reason. In the steam version I was occasionally having issues where short sentences would be copied over twice or the start of a sentence would be cut off etc. I played through all of last week on the deluxe edition and had none of those issues. That version supports 1080, has some new art and the sound mixing was also notably better.

I thought I’d mention it in case we do continue to read the rest of the series and people are getting annoyed with the texthook issues etc

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Week 8 Planning

Exactly. It’s fairly obvious which is good and which is bad, especially if you can remember what happened on the last playthrough. I’m not sure what happens if you mix and match, but I will say parts of the good route I’ve read so far seem dependent on having picked the good choices so my guess is that anything but all good choices result in the bad end.

I think we’re on the same page. Honestly, if you think back on what lead into the bad ending it’s probably an easy guess as what changes.

I realize now that I didn’t explain my thoughts in the last post, but I left the breakpoints like that because:

  • 5/01 - Ending here makes for a good catchup week if anyone was behind or needed a break. The content getting back to that point would be the equivalent of an anime recap episode. However, this also means that there’d be very little to discuss in the thread.
  • Part of new day - Purely to get closer to the 10k mark. There’s pretty much no question what’s going to happen afterwards so I feel like stopping there would have been more of a tease.
  • Finishing new day - New content wooo!

So really it’s easy week recap vs. longer week with better discussion or something kind of in the middle.

Given the relative popularity of Bustafellows and the otome stuff in general I feel like we’re better off considering them the main club and treating 9-nine as an offshoot. I think it makes more sense for the bigger group to do what they want as it’s mostly a handful of us here doing our own thing, especially if we end up reading more of the 9-nine one way or another.

Ah, I forgot to test that. There is a skip to next choice, but I don’t know if that means it also skips over all the new “unread text”. Tbfh, not much changes so I doubt someone would miss out on much that couldn’t be summarized with a few sentences in the discussion threads… However, the skip read text button was essentially a quick fast forward. I didn’t find myself waiting all that long to get to new sections.

The steam sale is probably close by anyway: Steam :: Steamworks Development :: Changes to Four Major Seasonal Steam Sales + Upcoming Seasonal Sale Dates

At the current pace I’m speculating 3-4 weeks of reading left in 9-nine: episode 1 which would end right before the next sale. Personally speaking I think I’m going to buy and read the rest of 9-nine regardless of what the VN clubs choose to do. My JPDB experiment has been a huge success and continuing with more of the same series will be beneficial for now.

That said, there’ no guarantee 9-nine would be on sale in the spring… Maybe I should have bought episode 2 last time… whoops.

Edit: Now that I’ve said this in multiple places watch Week 9 be the ending just to piss me off.

Ooof, now I kind of regret not getting that one. I’ll put up with the steam version just because it kind of works in my environment for now. While jank, I’ve changed my extension order to this
image
which works probably 90% of the time. Every now and then I’ll have to delete a line and force a reparse by pressing the “J” key which tricks the game into re-rendering the same Japanese dialogue. However, it does have issues with certain things like characters saying ふふふ or the like. It’s not perfect, but imo miles easier than trying to say read a manga out of the beginner book clubs…

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:joy:
Starting with the ABBC tomorrow, let’s see if you’re right. Last time I tried, it was definitely too hard and unfun for me.

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Best of luck! I dug out a physical manga I had and reading it seems tolerable after the experience I’ve picked up with Loopers and 9-nine. I don’t think I could justify it from a learning a perspective (text hooks + yomichan are so nice), but I could see it being more fun.

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Week 8 planning

Alrighty! Skip it is then, going for another 14k character week c: Thanks for the input!

True. I guess I considered both the main club in my head :joy: . I was just wondering if there was an idea of merging and going for a single nomination, not sure what the results of the polls were, I admit I haven’t been following them :sweat_smile: .

That’s convenient :pray: .

That’s probably what I’ll do too, I’m enjoying it and unless it drops the overall vibe and becomes full eroge with nothing going on then I might drop it, we’ll see. But so far it’s interesting so I’ll continue.

Also what’s the JPDB experiment? >:D

Something tells me the character count is going to end up much shorter than what we all have in mind, just you wait :joy: :joy: .

Honestly I’ve continued to look for the perfect hook I mentioned a while ago and have been going with that, no issue whatsoever. The only thing is having to spend about 2 or 3 minutes to find it but after that it’s all good to go. At this point having Episode 1 on steam already I’ll probably continue just getting them there, and I feel like this way I can also quit if I suddenly don’t like where the story is going (which would be rare tbh, I tend to enjoy most stuff).

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Off topic on manga

If you read digitally you can use Mokuro in order to use yomichan and whatnot. It lets you scroll over text to either copy/paste words or just yomichan the word

example

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From what I’ve seen I’m pretty optimistic about things. I was hesitant before we started, but right now the series kind of fills like B-tier content for me. It’s not amazing, but enjoyable enough to have my fun. Since Episode 1 seems so heavily focused on Miyako I’m guessing the other VNs pivot pretty hard. The store page screenshots for Episode 2 looked very enticing me given what we’ve read so I’m low key excited.

I wanted to get back into studying properly after Loopers and decided to use JPDB’s word lists (sorted by frequency) + kanji cards instead of WK + mining. It’s been a huge success so far. After two months on a mostly fresh account these are my stats for our current VN:

As implied by that coverage number, having just the top 1k words specific to this VN has gone a long way. The word lists are also pretty different sorted by frequency within the novel compared to frequency within their corpus (similar to the core k decks). I had a decent advantage given my prior studies, but this was much more relevant to our reading material overall and helped me uncover weaknesses I wasn’t spotting with the other methods.

The end result was that I’ve had a relatively easy time reading episode one so far with my biggest weakness being a lot of the casual speech and grammar related stuff (thanks yomichan for handling hard vocab!).

Check if your install path is in Program Files or Program Files (x86). When I wiped my pc I used the default installer and Textractor wouldn’t save my hooks. As soon as I dug out the portable install that was on a different drive things just went back to working.

manga

That is very nice. I’ll keep it in mind if I find myself reading another manga in the future. The other issue I had was that digital manga tends to be poorly scanned and compressed in official and unofficial channels, but after trying out their demo it looks like they’ve mostly sidestepped that issue. I don’t want more physical stuff like books in my home anymore, so it was a bit upsetting to see how much more readable the print versions were even if some of the kanji and furigana was clearly meant for ants.

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Week 8 Thread:


@ccookf I have to leave at the moment but I’ll make sure to answer later when I come back :slight_smile: . If you can when you have a moment let me know if the info in the new thread is correct and I haven’t missed or misunderstood anything ^^ . I don’t trust my lack of clarity today ;-; .

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Well, so far the result of the polls suggest we(Bustafellows) have a majority for continuing to read Bustafellows, and everyone seems interested in the VN club in general. I guess the question for the main VN club will be whether we continue each current VN as an offshoot club, and get a new pick for the club as a whole, or whether we continue with each pick.

I can figure out some way to poll for that in the main VN club thread this weekend, and hopefully we’d have a better answer sometime next week. If we send our respective readers there. :slight_smile:

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JPDB and stuff

Oh that’s really good! I’ve tried JPDB before and one thing I liked over Anki is that if I remember correctly it adapts overdue reviews so that the more time it goes until you pass a card then the more time it will add to that card later, so it doesn’t entirely force you to review every single day and that’s pretty cool. The only reason I’m using Anki right now is because of monolingual cards, which I’ve had decent success with and they’ve been really good for telling apart synonyms. However, lately… ahhhh I’m actually pretty tired of Anki, I always reach a point eventually where I just seem despise it :joy: . I’ll spend one, two, three months super motivated with it and then it all crashes, it’s happened several times over the years, and I even have it customised to make it a bit more appealing. But the whole card creation process even if it takes a couple clicks with Yomichan, and the never-ending search for suitable new words to add… eh, it eventually bores me.

I would probably use JPDB if it supported monolingual cards, honestly. Lately I’m trying to test if I could keep learning without any SRS, if I have reached a point where I’m able to just read to keep learning just with dictionaries alone, but being used to different SRS apps for so long I don’t know, it kinda makes me scared of finally letting them go for good. It’s a mental thing more than anything, I never even used SRS for English. It’s the constant struggle between thinking that I might be limiting myself when I could just be consuming more, and thinking that SRSing still helps me to a certain extent. And it’s not even like I can 100% understand monolingual dictionaries either, I still get definitions I make little sense of frequently enough and I double-check with a bilingual dictionary all the time just in case, which is exactly why I still have a long way until I get there, even if I also get many definitions I understand with no issues whatsoever. I just didn’t want to go back to bilingual dictionaries as the default now but since I check them anyways I’m thinking that maybe I could try doing it the opposite, having JPDB as default but still check the monolingual definition for pretty much anything :thinking: . I know JPDB is popular around the community even among very advanced people so it’s certainly worth another try, it does have some really cool features.

None ^^ . I have two drives that I use for steam with a games folder each, the SSD for the games I want or need fast loading times for and the HDD where I put the rest, including VNs. The hooks still restart every time I close the game, sadly.


Oh, right sorry, this is exactly what I meant to say :slight_smile: .

Alright cool, thanks! :wink:

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JPDB

The time save was a big motivation for me. I loved the act of mining, rather I think it helped me retain new words a lot to go through the steps of adding them to a deck, but it completely takes me out of reading. Before I had a process where I was skim an article for new words, study them all, then re-read the article “for realsies this time” which was fantastic when I was super new and now just feels cruddy.

Honestly, I hate using SRS in general it’s a total chore and time sink I put up with because my progress would be horrendous without it.

The support they have for it is so bad I’ll probably end up dropping it when I get to that level. Thankfully, I think that’s a while away for me. I’ve been thinking back to what it was like learning to read as a kid and I remember just how much I glossed over and didn’t understand back then… I feel like regaining that level of innocent/reckless thinking is near impossible as an adult, but my current long term goal is to get back that mindset and switch to monolingual just like my childhood.

I think where SRS excels the most is low frequency stuff. I used it a good bit in college because even for subject matter experts there’d always be terminology that would come up once every few weeks at best.

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Week 9 thread:


This week finished in a pretty good spot at 10 900 characters and wrapped up all of its content nicely. I decided not to continue because afterwards it seems like a complete change of vibe, and also I don’t know when or if we’ll be able to stop in another nice spot for a while so it’s probably best that we finish there.

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I thought I’d bring this up here since its looking like we probably have maybe 2 more weeks until we are done with the first episode? Are we waiting on the results of the poll from the main VN club thread or should we start discussing if we want to continue after ep 1 together or read alone? The next episode is a bit longer (this one is 142,217 characters while ep 2 is 197,167) so if we do continue to read together I think it’d be good to up the pace (based on the poll in the other thread, I think everyone currently reading 9-nine voted that they’d be okay with a faster pace than our current one).

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Ok, so because of the whole medical issue I forced myself through the rest of the VN. There will be light spoilers. By my count there’s about 20k left for a total of 126k. Considering the JPDB script includes adult content it’s not all that far off from their mark of 142k.

planning

There’s 3 in game days and a short post credits scene left for a total of 20,214 characters. This brought my total for the VN up to 126,326.

First day: 5,911
Second day: 9,878
Final day: 3,708
Post credits scene: 717

I have one recommended breakpoint for the second day: the end of the cafe scene.

The image isn’t really a spoiler, but does ruin a gag. Sorry.

Up to the end of this scene is 5,934 characters for the day, so just under 12k for the week if you include the prior week.

thoughts for people who don't want to continue reading the rest of 9-nine (mild spoilers)

I’m not going to sugarcoat it, episode 1’s ending feels incomplete. There’s also a post-credits scene which is mostly fine, but the last couple of lines and final CG are a setup for the rest of the series. If you want to stop for whatever reason just stop reading when she goes into the kitchen. All that happens is that she drops a spoon then cliffhanger.

Honestly, I’m not sure if it’s worth stopping… at this point I think we’re all kind of impatient. As you can probably tell by the remaining time left it just sort of jumps right into climax and resolution so while there is a good breakpoint it just feels like putting off the ending to stop there. It might also be a good idea to just dump it all in one week and take a short break given the whole voting and sale period.

Well, I’m not even sure if I’ll be around. Depending on the research I’m either getting outpatient treatment or getting sequestered in a hospital for a month or more starting on Monday of next week.


Back to nihongo stuff, I feel like my progress has improved a lot. It was forcing the matter, but I was able to clear 10k characters in a little over 2 hours. I’m not sure how long it’ll take, but I think I’d like to get to the point where I can comfortably read about 40-50k a week which would really open up some room to read the more middling length VNs in a reasonable-ish time frame. I feel like my comfort level now is around 5k/day, probably around 20-25k a week which is a lot higher than when we started.

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I think we probably should start discussing it regardless of the club’s poll results, since from Episode 2 onwards it will be something that is pretty much read exclusively by the people who finished Episode 1 (I wouldn’t expect new people for a direct sequel that continues the previous story, unless someone rushes the whole VN before Episode 2 starts but probably unlikely ^^ ). It doesn’t need to follow the pace of the club either so we can decide how slow or fast we want it to be, a good chance to test the increase in pace early if we decide to continue. But since we still have one last week and the poll will be closed tomorrow, it doesn’t hurt to wait and see how that turns out anyway.

I guess the important thing to acknowledge is that we’re in a tricky spot: depends on how long it will take for a new pick in the main club to be picked, if both current clubs will continue on their own or not. I’ll admit I can’t remember if this has already been decided :sweat_smile: . We polled that both clubs were going to continue as offshoot clubs with its members reading it, with a new pick for the main club coming somewhere around March. But we also decided that the picks should be read from start to finish, so I’m not sure where that leaves us right now, might just be for future picks. Personally as I mentioned I will probably only read one together with the club, either continue 9-nine or jump on the new pick. I do want to continue 9-nine, I’m perfectly happy with the few of us, but at the same time if we can be back to just managing a single club with a single pick that goes from start to total completion this time, and with the majority of its members together again, then I’d prefer that and leave 9-nine as a personal unscheduled pick. But this is me being super hopeful that the next pick will have 10+ people together reading :joy: . And also supposing we don’t end up with another situation where the club is evenly divided into two picks again or many people aren’t interested in joining the winning pick.

I don’t know, both options seem like a tradeoff to me so I personally don’t know what I want to do myself. I want to keep reading 9-nine with you guys, it’s fun, but I don’t think I can commit to two picks so for me it’s either 9-nine or the new pick. I probably would be able to still keep up with the pace for both but it’s just way too much time and money commitment on a schedule, and I would rather keep some time to read freely for myself too, as we all likely would. We’re also in the process of increasing the pace, and this will also impact the Bustafellows club: it’s likely that people there won’t commit to reading two things if the pace is fast. At least I wouldn’t expect so, it’s natural for us all. Probably the new nominations would give us some sort of idea of what to expect I suppose, but for the next voting I’d personally try asking people to commit to only voting for something if they’re willing to participate in the club, because the polls so far have been terrible at predicting this and in a club as small as this one it ends up being disappointing. It makes no sense influencing the results of a club nomination if you never show up afterwards. Not including people who want to read but end up being unable for whatever reason; those did have an initial intention and that’s perfectly fine. Mostly talking about people who’ve never dropped a message but have voted they’d read. Perhaps this is just me, but if someone votes they will participate, I expect participation from them, unless told otherwise afterwards (change of plans is no biggie, a simple message goes a long way).

In any case I’d want to get Episode 2 on sale if possible and Steam’s spring sales start on 16 March. We’d have a week to think about how we feel about the whole situation and see if any more opinions come in the meantime. What does the rest want to do? Would you join the new pick if we continue 9-nine or exclusively commit to finishing 9-nine together? I admit suddenly cutting the discussions for a VN that keeps on going feels somewhat bad, but again, tradeoffs… eh. If we could have the guarantee that the new pick will be super active with lots of discussion I’d probably choose that personally, as the more people means the more discussions, theories and whatnot and that’s always fun for me. But still, I don’t want to just quit 9-nine :joy: . If we continue 9-nine we have about 570k characters left, and while we don’t really need to commit to everything necessarily, I think I’d like to at that point.


Yup, sounds good to me. It’s also the last week so there’s no real need to finish it “in time” anyways since no new week will come after this. Let’s finish in one week and start preparing the whole club management thing again, see how things end up :slight_smile: .

Reply to nihongo stuff

That sounds a lot like where I am! :slight_smile: We have to be doing something good, I remember Loopers was slower for me and now I’m reading this one at a faster pace. I don’t currently feel a terrific jump in skill but I definitely must have improved in the shadows.

I also recently started using JPDB again, the conversation we had the other day got me curious, so I’ll see how that goes for me. But I’m taking it semi casually and only going for very concrete goals, like the first episode of an anime or whatever, and once I’m done then the next. I still need to set the words that I know though which will certainly take a long while, but I don’t mind it. Eventually I just want to mainly consume stuff and not rely on SRS at all, just lookup a word in a monolingual dictionary and understand everything on the spot, just like you mentioned you want for yourself too. I’m either too bored of SRS or it isn’t as effective as it once was, which is weird because I’m not in a very advanced spot yet, I frequently get many things I don’t understand still, but as time goes on the more I’m noticing SRS to be a waste of time sometimes more than anything. I’ve noticed having a word in the SRS doesn’t necessarily always guarantee that I recognise it elsewhere, and it’s happened way too many times by now so I would honestly rather not do pointless reviews at this point. I’ll definitely go with the small goals and decks route though, study the vocabulary of an episode, consume it and see how much it helped me understand it. I’m completely ditching the vocabulary mining for now, I’m so burnt out of that, so JPDB style comes in handy. The last chance I give to SRS probably :joy: .

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Since I’ve kinda unofficially taken over the running of the main VN club, this is how I see it currently and I find it unlikely that will change between now and closing the polls tomorrow:

We’ll call for nominations for another pick for one week, then vote for one week, and then start the next pick earliest one week after that (to give people time to buy it and such; doesn’t need to start exactly then, it can vary with a couple of weeks if needed). There were enough people who were likely/very likely to join a new pick, I feel that to be fairest since we last did a vote in November, and B$ won’t finish until late June at the speed we seem to be picking to use going forward. (Asking those currently not reading with either pick to wait another 4 months seems like a lot to me. And I don’t think 9-nine- would be able to finish all sequels faster than that, but maybe I underestimate what speed you guys would be able to do. xD)

Honestly, I feel in deep water. Making up polls and what to do next, lol. And here I thought it was bad enough to lead a club for a specific pick, running the organizational club thingy is much more involving. xD At least since we’re kinda still in a start up phase.

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To be completely honest I’m just letting you do whatever you want to do :stuck_out_tongue: . Well, letting anyone do anything, I still conceive this as being jointly ran together. But if you need or want help with anything just let me know really, I just assumed you were excited to poll and stuff :joy: my bad.

If this is with the new pacing and time limit polls in mind then I’m happy to know! Excited too :slight_smile: . In that case I suppose it’s probably best that we wait to see the nomination. How early do you think we could do that at most? 9-nine Episode 1 will be officially done 9 March. The steam sale is certainly a good opportunity to purchase stuff, it will go from 16-23 March. Regardless of the starting date of the new pick.

Edit: I will probably get Episode 2 anyways, if not for the club for myself, so consider me interested in both reading it and seeing what ends up happening with the sequels in a club context. Also now that I think of it, the steam sales are always going every 4 months at this point, it would’ve been perfect if we ended up picking the time limit of 4 months so there’s always a fresh sale :joy: . Half kidding though, sadly we won’t always have the convenience of reading something from steam.

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I’m anal enough that doing it myself meant I got to make sure they did what I wanted them to do, so no worries. :joy: :joy: :joy:

And I totally think we are doing it together too, it isn’t like I’m making all the decisions, things would look different then, and probably not for the best of the club. xD

Well, if we start the one week nomination period tomorrow, then we’d be voting on the next pick during March 8-15 or there about, so should be perfect for the steam sale. And maybe for next time, we can actually get the vote done early, like a few weeks before we finish the next pick. :joy:

Absolutely, otherwise what would the point of all the polls have been? xD

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I more or less feel the same way. I’d like to continue reading 9-nine together but at the same time, it would be nice to get a larger discussion group. It also depends on what VN ends up winning the nomination, there’s a few things I’ve already read before so if one of those won, of course I’d rather keep reading 9-nine then :joy:

I don’t think I would read both 9-nine in the club and the new VN in the club together though, I’d most likely choose one or the other. Being committed to two VN clubs would take up too much of my free reading time. I guess to sumarize, I don’t really have a definitive answer yet until I see how everything goes in the main VN thread regarding pace, nominations, etc :sweat_smile:

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Pretty much my thoughts exactly :slight_smile: save the “having read other picks” part. Let’s see how the nominations and voting do and then decide what to do with this.

Alright, sounds perfect c: . I’m wondering how we’ll be able to attract people for the nominations/voting, cause I don’t think we can change the title in the main club without Daisoujou. Perhaps we need to advertise in other clubs and the challenges :joy: .

Edit: nervermind, I’m dumb, that’s a wiki too and we can.
Edit 2: nevermind, no we can’t D: can’t edit title.

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