This week I watched eight more episodes of re:zero, so I’m up to 19 now and will hopefully be finishing season one next week. I had two realizations while watching it: one, I somehow understood Rem’s confession scene worse when I first watched it in English than this past time in Japanese, and as a result my poor opinion of Subaru is somewhat improved. The other was a lightbulb moment when I realized that けい, a mysterious word that クルシュ kept using, was actually a second-person pronoun (卿) and suddenly a bunch of her past sentences made sense. I had to look it up after the fact of course, I don’t have stuff like that sitting in my passive memory, but it was pretty neat how the pieces suddenly clicked.

I read 呪術廻戦 vol. 6 and most of vol. 7. Both great, still trying to hurry up and get past the end of the anime.

I started reading プチデビル後輩 as my last novel of the year, and I’m already well ahead of schedule, 18% through. Having prior knowledge about Laplace’s Demon got me through the pseudoscience part with relative ease and I’m into the meat of the story now.

Finally, I signed up for the JP region network test for Elden Ring and was lucky enough to get picked, so I’ve spent nine hours so far this week playing it. There’s not a ton of text and the spoken dialogue is all in English (though it does have Japanese subtitles), but I’ve been reading item descriptions and stuff so there’s been a decent amount of immersion happening. Super excited to get the full game next year.