This week was the first week since the reading club began that I didn’t finish an entire 単行本 of manga, which feels a bit bad. I did have a good mix of input though.

Two more episodes of HKBK under my belt, and the last one (13) was actually somewhat within my ability. The topic was Perfume, one of my favorite bands and in fact my introduction to Japanese music and even media in general. I know a decent amount about the band and I’m very familiar with their music so that helped a lot when it came to following the conversation. There was one moment I thought was kind of funny, where the two hosts were second-guessing themselves over whether A-chan’s name was “A-chan” or “Ai-chan” and all the while I knew the right answer.

I finished 月がきれい with a total of 8 episodes watched this week. Towards the end where the plot started to get a little more complicated, I know I had a hard time following some of the secondary threads, but I was still able to keep up with the normal conversations. I finally got to hear ならまだしも in the wild after struggling with it on Bunpro basically every time I see it, so hopefully that helps it stick a bit.

My manga this week was supposed to be マグネット島通信, which I got for free on MangaZ back when I first started trying to read manga (but never managed to get very far into). I thought was about halfway done with it and on a good pace to finish by the end of the week…until I realized that I was actually missing a fair number of pages. Something went wrong in the ebook conversion process I guess, so I put that one on hold until I could get it resolved (late last night). Once I got an accurate page count I ended up being 37% through it, so I expect to finish it up next week. So far though, I’m enjoying it a lot. There’s very little furigana but I’m not having much trouble at all, and the dialogue feels very natural and grounded, not like what you so often see in anime and manga.

While マグネット was on hold I went back to 甘々と稲妻 to keep me busy. It’s always nice when you revisit a series after a long break and find that it’s gotten a lot easier to read. I read two chapters here, bringing me up to 34%. I plan to finish this volume next week as well.

The most recent thing I’ve read is this article about a glitch in Bloodborne that systematically reduces the pool from which the random dungeons can be drawn. It’s actually a Japanese translation of a Reddit post in English so it feels like a bit of a waste of time, but the server I found it in was reading a Google Translation and I wasn’t about to let them suffer like that. Looking up the Japanese terms for Bloodborne items was fun; for whatever reason the JP wikis for souls games and such are never all that good, so it can be difficult to find the right information.