That weird feeling where import costs essentially double the price of this order, and it's still cheaper than like... Buying two books in this country.

Watching Ingrid gameplay in SF6... There's got to be an Athena color unlockable, right?

Plane tickets booked. Paying about the same amount as last year because oil prices have gone up a lot, and people are afraid of booking long-term so airlines in Europe are trying to fill their flights by waving around massive discounts. It weirdly evens out.

All that said, Kafka on the Shore (海辺のカフカ) is still very good.

Was looking around for second opinions and it's really not just me. Murakami's works in Japanese are *shockingly* easy to read. Likely to hit a wider audience. Light novels and VNs tend to be aimed at more nerdy audiences so the writing tends to be much more complex.

Thinking of Tales skits and how much better they probably are with much more defined character writing untranslated... ... I probably need to play those games again.

Apparently the live-sized Unicorn Gundam is getting taken down this August. Glad I went to see it while it was still there.

Not having an easy to use built-in dictionary at hand like I had on my ereader was really the boost I needed in getting to that point of reading comfortably. Glad to read on paper. Immediate access to relief with momentary struggle is really bad if you want to actually improve at things.

There's an interesting undercurrent in the Bookworm light novels where Myne struggles with short-term memory because she's "used to writing notes for later." While the rest of the characters never had that luxury and are used to remember small details for immediate use themselves.

Looked up what I should expect from hotel prices for the trip ahead of time so I can get a decent idea of what shape this year's trip will take... ... And now entire Insta algo is fake travel and language advice.

Something I find really interesting with certain Japanese things. Sumo has it, but kabuki does this too. Live houses it's normal too. It's perfectly acceptable to not be there from the start and just come in during the part you want and dip after.

I guess this is the way 9 throws back to pre-Kitase titles. Because Kitase really brought his A game in terms of character depth and thematic exploration in a properly fleshed out setting strengthening the message with 10. Compared to 6-7-8-10, 9 really is just very polished up simplicity.

FF9 goes especially hard with the special speech quirks in Japanese, and it kinda just clicked how it's written like a stage play. Not just presented as theatrical. The hammy writing style and how characters move is the overacting of a stage play to the back of the audience.

If all goes well, I should be buying my tickets for my October vacation this week. And then I get to worry about whether or not I'll actually be able to fly there until the moment I land!

Also most of the names all have a very different ring to them. Like here we have Chitan, Fraiya, Bibi, and Kuina. Kuina is a pun on 食う (kuu), 食い (kui). To eat. Everything with that race is an eating pun. They also have that faux-Chinese "aru" speech thing going.

Here loc at least tried to differentiate the characters, though the lines still read like anyone could've said them. (And only Dagger's is actually intact from the original) I like how Steiner and Dagger are on the same page with their own way of talking in JP, while Marcus is the odd one out.

One of the shittiest things when I went to see the two Japanese metal acts playing in my city was overhearing venue regulars discuss the concept of an all-female metal band. They couldn't wrap their heads around women like... Playing instruments. Writing music. Playing songs. Without a man there.

FF9 Character Rankings: 1. Marcus 2. Vivi 3. Everyone else

Past FF games had issues conveying similar tone by erasing personality from characters. FF9 seems to take a more progressive route by just deleting the script entirely. Was wondering how they'd keep this "Degojaru" "deojaru" thing going in EN and... Not even remotely similar text.

Anyway, finished up reading Part 1 of the light novel series about sickly inpoverished girl trying to mass produce paper in a pragmatic borderline calvanist fantasy world, and actually moved reading to paper. Going to start reading my favorite Haruki Murakami novel in Japanese. Kafka on the Shore.

I should be allowed to punch whoever added translated thumbnails on YT as a feature. Being non-monolingual this is actually really fucking awful for searching in specific languages.

Finished up dragon game. Went on longer than I thought. Not a bad game, but it really just made me want to play a proper farming game like 3 or 4 Special again.

Finished Bookworm vol 3, concluding Part 1 "兵士の娘" Past this, Myne will enter the church. Want to go on a limb and say if you're in the upper intermediate Japanese plateau, this might be the series to for you. No weird anime language. No extreme 役割語. Lot of cultural advancement and class struggle.

Dutch audiences to live shows are funny because they kinda just stand there completely unreactive... And that's the good audience! The bad one just has household conversations right in the front row in front of the artist's face. God, I miss Japanese audiences actually being in the moment.

Saw Maki Oyama live. She absolutely has the energy she had on YT in person. Phenomenal artist.

Grand how every jawbreakers scheme the past decade are all solutions looking for problems. World's is littered with problems nobody wants to fix. Instead of fueling the car, they're trying to reinvent the perfectly functioning wheel with increasingly cost and resource inefficient alternatives.

Apparently Miso Cola exists? ... I might be curious enough to track this down next trip.

The question always is how much should you compensate for a cultural gap when the interested audience for material is obviously already interested in stepping over it themselves. American-centric views still aim at complete cultural erasure even when audiences specifically want foreign content.

There's definitely a lot of cultural things with JP where no amount of studying about it from English sources, you're always looking from the outside in and will never truly get it. Then you look at a JP source literally written for children and it's easy enough to comprehend completely.

"Fixed" my sleep schedule from waking up at 4AM, to living normal human hours and... Yeah, I probably need to wake up early in the morning again. I'm not a morning person, but the environment is way too noisy to muster up baseline concentration after a workday. Can't get anything done.

Found out a dorama series I used to watch with my ex that stuck with me is actually based on a novel by a famous author. Keigo Higashino's 白夜行 (Byakuyakou) www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc-5...

Almost done with Rune Factory dragon game. I think it ran out of steam at the halfway point. It just keeps going without the gameplay escalating. I blame the stat system being so heavily flattened, and the Genshin trash item reward shower being unwieldly for a game with little crafting.

Since that autotranslate function became a thing I've seen the same exchange play out a few times. Some typical isekai show has a trailer posted. Arrogant westerner QRT's the announcement with "Don't Japanese people ever get tired of this shit?"

Center right political party's local headquarters in my city bombed. General response from people has been they had it coming because they're lefty scum, but you shouldn't condone it. Too cowardly to own it, I guess. In case anyone is wondering what that's all about.

uneasiness

Commissioned Sakura Ebi to draw my VRchat avatar.

Kinda felt bad about how few books I've read so far this year, but then had to remind myself all three 本好きの下克上 volumes are near 1K pages. On average counting for 3-4 volumes of what I'd been reading last year. In actual text volume, I've already read more than last year.

Finished Re;Zero S3. Interesting to see a season play out with little Returns. Felt like a normal action series at points, but it's good to bring weight back into situations after Subaru relied on it too easily. Hard to put real value in connections when everything can conveniently be reset.

Nintendo logging in to make a game announcement with no prior notice as if they'd just remembered their social media pssswords is alright by me.

I guess my ability to discard English language releases so easily is informed by growing up with PAL versions of videogames, which were so shoddily slapped together and full of new issues that spending any time on US internet forces you to abandon those versions too.

Suteki Da Ne (Isn’t It Wonderful) 「素敵だね」 Performed this live for the first time this year on Uematsu-san’s birthday. Will be performing this with Nobuo Uematsu & con TIKI on the European tour! Hope to see you there🇮🇹🇳🇱🇫🇷 #ffx #finalfantasyX #NobuoUematsu #植松伸夫 氏

Went to Amsterdam.

Oh cool, my favorite yukkuri channel covered Ys 1+2. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxrh...

Punk with another classic Second Place choke.

In some ways it does feel like the brunt of the JP study is over so the training weights come off. Life starts now.

One of the few places close to legitimate nature we have basically doubles as a military training ground. Also after warnings regarding fire hazards due to ongoing droughts, they kept using live rounds anyway. So now there's a wildfire.

!!!

Kawazu popping off about old Dragon Lance artwork, someone quote retweeting it saying this Takhisis art looks really cool. ... And then Kawazu just replying back "Yes. FF1's Tiamat's design was based on this."

Everyone I know who uses "RetroAchievements" never sounds like they're actually having fun