Final reminder to update the wiki with your bingo total by the end of the day!
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I sent Brandon a mail with the instructions + table from the wiki for getting badges set up, so I’m now considering the 2024 bingo wins closed for further updates. 
Thanks to everyone who got their updates in!
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Ooh, I suddenly got a lot fancier. 
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I think it’s all working and awarded now! Let me know if anyone didn’t get it!
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Thank you so much to @brandon and also @eefara & @Naphthalene for helping with the instructions and driving this 🩷
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@brandon just double-checking that the fifth badge got entered, 一目十行? A quick glance at my badge screen doesn’t have it show up as far as I can see, even in the gold/silver areas.
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It should have, because I was awarded it 
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Okay, good; just wanted to make sure. As long as people report having it.
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Oh, it appears I only got the top tier badge and not the tiers leading up to that. Is that intentional? I see @eefara has multiple, so I’m guessing you did decide to give all tiers up to the final tier
EDIT: Or Maybe I’m misreading their screenshot
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No, I just have the one bottom-tier one. The others show on my profile, but don’t have that green checkmark in the top-right corner of the box.
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I also only have the top tier one and not the ones under it
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People were awarded the “rank” they won based on how many bingos they had and were in the table, not all of the badges in descending order - I misunderstood and didn’t realize this was desired? Should we have it so every badge is unlocked up to the rank that was won?
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I think people were just kidding misreading the screenshot (I know I did at first haha). I personally don’t think it’s necessary?
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Why would you want to have (and probably display?) a lower rank, actually? I think it would only make sense if those badges would stack (i.e. we’d get the same badges next year and their counter increases) but right now the year is included in the badge title, so stacking doesn’t really make sense…
But I agree in general: if we had generic badges with the bingo count and if they’d stack, then the lower ranks should be assigned as well.
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I remember someone mentioning that they liked the title from a lower tier better.
本好き was awarded to literally nobody too 
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Going through the responses and rereading, it seems like @araigoshi was interested in a different badge than the one received? Was there anyone else?? I will try to facilitate that if users reply to this post. 
(within reason - if everyone suddenly wants all of the badges I think that will require more extensive coordination such as peeps letting me know through the wiki post, more reminders, and Brandon being kind enough to help…Discourse is unfortunately not a great tool for organizing this type of thing but I’m making it work!!)
@araigoshi, could you let me know what the lower rank you wanted instead was?? Thank you
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Finally have the time/energy to actually update with the results of my 2024 bingo!
So, this was my original plan:
And this was my original bingo card.
However, a few things happened:
The first is that I ended up remaking my card so that it had a better color scheme for my Notion page, then totally neglected to update the post in this thread with the new link… 
The second is that in literally mid-December, I ended up totally changing my mind on my original goal of completing the bingo in as few books as possible, and instead aimed for completing it with 16 different books, all because I really, really wanted to put Nashi’s book, ここにひとつの□がある | L30??, in a bingo □ 
.
So, in any case, here is the new card I ended up generating, and then my results are underneath:
Hilariously, I did not in fact manage to finish the nonfiction novel I had originally expected to use for this bingo, and instead finished a much, much more ambitious book for my first proper book in Japanese .
Here are more details about each of the books (warning: long):
1 volume in a single day | 俺様ヤクザとヘタレ社畜の仁義なき溺愛 | L26??
This is a cheesy BL manga about a salaryman who falls in love with a yakuza. I’m not sure what exactly drew me to it, haha. My last bingo square that was still unaccounted for was “1 vol. In a single day”, so I wanted something fairly easy and brainless, and I guess I saw a tweet for this series at the right time, so I impulse-purchased it and read it in one day lol.
As someone who is often a BL hater, it ended up kind of surprising me? The romance wasn’t really that special (though it defied BL tropes by having the yakuza character actually be extremely respectful of the salaryman’s bodily autonomy, which I think was part of the joke (that the yakuza guy was a better person than your average BL seme lol), but there was surprisingly a LOT of commentary on exploitative labor conditions, and that was really the driving force of the whole story. Like, the moral of the story, so to speak, is that working a low-wage office job under capitalism is more exploitative and abusive than working for the yakuza.
Would I recommend it? …Eh, I don’t know . If you like cheesy BL manga, you’ll probably enjoy it. If you don’t like cheesy BL manga, you probably won’t. I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected because the main “obstacle” so to speak was the ブラック企業 working conditions that the main character had to endure.
I found out shortly after finishing this manga that there’s apparently a live action drama adaptation that came out literally just a couple months ago. HOWEVER, big caveat: it’s one of those short episode gimmick shows, so there are 10 episodes, but they’re only 3 minutes each… As someone who has suffered through similar formats when watching Chinese GL shows, I know the pain very well 
. I did end up watching it, though.
My thoughts on the drama are… well, mostly not super positive. It’s alright, I guess? I thought the manga was much more fleshed out and the relationship made more sense. Some of the same themes about workplace exploitation remain in the drama, but they aren’t the main driving force of the story like they are in the manga, so overall I found it much less compelling. There were some changes to the story in the drama that I thought were fine, but others were just strictly a worse story. I think 30 minutes was way too short for the story they wanted to tell, and it would be better as a proper drama or at least a full-length movie.
added to Natively by you | 世界が広がる 推し活英語 | L20??
This is a book designed to teach English fandom language to Japanese fans, but I bought it because I read a review where someone used it in the opposite direction to learn some Japanese fandom language.
I used this book a few times when producing Japanese, including the one time this year when I had to email Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling, lol. I was also charmed by the fact that some of the same people who were involved in making it were also involved with the 推し短歌入門 I read right after it (more on that one later).
new to you author | ハクメイとミコチ 1巻 | L29
This was a recommendation from a friend who enjoyed this manga in Harta. I bought it because it seemed like my jam and also because I have a bunch of Harta volumes now that I eventually want to read, and I want to be caught up on a few series, first.
I like Hakumei and Mikochi because the art is very nice, the worldbuilding has some fun details, and it’s easy to view Hakumei and Mikochi as being in a lesbian relationship lol.
for free | ダンジョン飯 1巻 | L30
Another Harta series that my friend really likes, and which lots of other folks I know really like. I sort of knew I’d probably love this one if I gave it a shot, and so far that is definitely the case!
Dungeon Meshi comes the closest to capturing the feeling of an old school D&D campaign in all the media that I have personally experienced, with all of the weirdness and the brutality of the dungeons that comes along with that. The Japanese is also remarkably straightforward, albeit chock full of unfamiliar vocab.
My plan with this one (same with Hakumei and Mikochi) is to catch up on the volumes I own and then read the rest chapter by chapter from Harta volume 75 onward.
debut work | これが恋だと教えてくれよ | L24??
This is a BL manga that I found out about after とおる, the 女装してめんどくさい事になってるネクラとヤンキーの両片想い, retweeted a thread about it (apparently the two mangaka are friends). I saw the thread when I was lying in bed and got most of it without any lookup tools at all, so I ended up buying the book because I was wanting to read something easier after ここにひとつの□がある.
It’s not really that sophisticated of a manga, so I don’t know if there’s much to say about it . It’s relatively unproblematic, as far as high school BLs go.
non-human protagonist | ごんぎつね (おはなし名作絵本 1) | L20
As a seasoned DDT Pro Wrestling watcher, I have known about Gon The Fox for a long time!! I’ve seen many Antonio Honda matches! Obviously it’s a story about a fox, and the whole thing naturally builds up to a dick joke—Wait, you’re telling me that I have been mislead by a pro wrestler?
I own it in picture book form with really nice illustrations. I read my print copy of it, but referenced the aozora text for easy Yomitan lookups.
Funnily enough, I read the original ごんぎつね story sandwiched between a DDT show that included a DDT vs TJPW match involving Honda and then a TJPW show wherein Honda was a participant in their princess rumble match. So I heard an Antonio Honda ごんぎつね story, read the original ごんぎつね story, then heard another Antonio Honda ごんぎつね story the next day.
My thoughts on the actual ごんぎつね story? I thought it was alright! It’s an interesting story because there isn’t really a clear moral to it. In a sense, I think having the association with Honda’s ごんぎつね stories helped make the ending a little easier to bear because it feels like Gon is alive and well, still doing mischief out there somewhere. But at the same time, the jokes do kind of take away from the seriousness of anything that happens in the story, huh…
finish a series | 女装してめんどくさい事になってるネクラとヤンキーの両片想い 12巻 | L25
I had kind of a funny experience with this series where the year before, I had gotten halfway through volume 3 already, so I thought why not just read the rest of it so that I can move it out of my currently reading section? So I started reading it again and abruptly realized that I didn’t super remember a lot of the details in the story. At the time when I had started reading it, volumes 1 & 2 had been translated into English, but 3 hadn’t been translated yet, hence why I had picked it up in Japanese. Fortunately for me, though, the English translation had gotten a lot further!
So what I did was speed-read up to the chapter I left off in English, then I finished the volume in Japanese. Hooray! I could remove it from my currently reading section!! 
Except… after finishing volume 3, I wanted to know what happened next, so I just kept reading (in English) and quickly finished volume 4, then 5, 6, 7…
(You can probably guess where this is going.)
I reached the end of volume 7 and was like “aw man, I want to know what happens next, but I’m not sure if I care enough about this series to take the time to read it in Japanese… I’d rather just wait and read the English translation of this one and spend my energy on things like Dungeon Meshi instead.”
But I have spectacularly poor impulse control when it comes to this sort of thing, so just like what compelled me to buy volume 3 in the first place, of course I ended up caving immediately and buying volume 8 in Japanese, and I ended up back in the exact situation I had tried to resolve in the first place, with the series still technically on my currently reading list… 
Thankfully, my Japanese was a lot better than it was the year before and I can read manga way faster now, so I ended up sort of, uh, inhaling the series, or at least reading it about as fast as it was humanly possible for me to read it.
I was on a bit of a deadline because I’m trying to stay super caught up on the TJPW translations to the best of my ability, so I had a narrow window between finishing the previous translation and getting started on the next one.
I had roughly a 5-ish day window with essentially no translation workload. In total, I think I finished volumes 8-12 in about four days. Then I found the series on pixiv and read what was available there.
…And the huge reveal that I’ve been waiting for the entire series, which is the main reason why I felt compelled to read on, still hasn’t happened . Never start reading a slowburn romance when the story is still in progress… 
Obviously, this series is not actually done (and there is in fact a 13th volume out now, though I read that one entirely via chapters on pixiv and haven’t looked at the official release yet), but it was my first time ever getting caught up with a manga’s Japanese release and then experiencing what it was like to follow a manga chapter by chapter as it comes out, so I feel like it counts for the spirit of this prompt.
non-fiction | 推し短歌入門 | L30??
This is an introduction to tanka through writing tanka about your 推し. I bought it with the intent of learning how to write tanka so that I could write one for Hyper Misao’s produce show last April, and ended up really liking it more than I expected to!
This was my first proper book that I finished in Japanese. It was way harder than literally everything else I had read up until that point. I was able to understand I think all of the fundamental things the book was trying to teach me, but many of the tanka examples were still too hard for me to understand. I relied pretty heavily on the explanations the book gave to understand many of the poems, and even with that support, quite a few were still beyond me.
But I can wholeheartedly recommend 推し短歌入門 as an introduction to tanka if you’re at all interested in the format! I think it does a fantastic job giving you a whole bunch of tools and also teaching you how to approach other people’s poems, and it’s very gentle with the reader and is accessible at all levels of experience. It’s written for an audience who might know nothing at all about tanka, and/or who may have no confidence at all in their ability to write one.
I think it’s also a neat book if you’re at all interested in fandom or 推し活! I think it straddles its two worlds very well. It’s quite unpretentious but is also very grounded.
It’s also LGBTQ-inclusive, which was a very nice bonus!
If you want to read my extended thoughts on this book, I posted about it in-depth on the WaniKani forum already (click the post that that post is a reply to if you want to see my earlier thoughts on the book)!
workplace setting | 明けても暮れても (YURI HUB) | L24??
I was buying something on BookWalker, and I needed something cheap to meet the minimum needed to activate a coinback deal, so I decided to browse the yuri tag and see if I could find something that looked interesting.
I stumbled across this manga in there, and it sounded cute and, most importantly, was cheap and also short (so I could probably finish it in time to include it in the bingo). It also had the josei tag, which usually means I’m more likely to actually like a yuri lol.
I liked it alright! I don’t know if there’s much to really say, because the story is pretty uncomplicated, but it was cute and fun to read. I have a hard time with oneshots of this length because I feel like it’s so little time to tell a story that feels complete and also fully realized. So I’d rate this one basically as: I liked reading it, but I probably won’t feel a need to revisit it.
no reviews/gradings/ratings | ひとりみです【第2話】: 60歳レズビアンのシングル生活 akicocotto | L22??
These “volumes” are really just single chapter length, so the story is sadly pretty short, but I really liked the first chapter of this story (it’s about an elderly lesbian who is single and lives alone), so I was excited to check out the second, and I liked it even better than the first!
This work is so short, I won’t say much about it so that I don’t spoil it, but the story is really sweet and does a lot with the space afforded to it, and there’s a fun twist in this chapter.
I’m really looking forward to reading the third chapter, though I decided to wait on it because it looks like it’s only available on Amazon currently, and I’m trying to avoid using Amazon as much as possible right now.
longest on TBR pile | ヨコハマ買い出し紀行 1 | L23
Another recommendation from my friend! It’s a really gentle post-apocalypse slice of life story about a robot at a cafe in the countryside.
I picked it up on BookWalker literally forever ago (it was the first book in my library, so I believe I initially created my BookWalker account to grab it while it was temporarily free) and read it on literally the very first day of 2024, and enjoyed it well enough, but didn’t feel a burning need to know what happened next in the story, so I haven’t read any of the other volumes yet, though I do intend to get around to them eventually.
from your TBR using a qualifier | https://learnnatively.com/book/ec98c0404c
I decided to use Flying Witch as one of the TBR squares because I’ve owned it on BookWalker since also literally forever (I got it for free from the freebies thread very early on. It was the second manga I got there, after ヨコハマ買い出し紀行). This one gets recommended to beginners a lot, so I had been aware of it for quite some time.
I liked it… okay. I got about 60 pages in and was sort of stalling out on it (I’d just finished 明けても暮れても right before it, so I’d been reading for a bit already), so I decided to put it aside and finish it the next day, and picked up the yakuza BL manga instead, and then I ended up reading 200+ pages of THAT one straight through in one evening, so it obviously wasn’t my reading fatigue that was my problem with Flying Witch .
Not that Flying Witch is bad! I thought the art and the writing and such were fine, but the series didn’t really compel me like I hoped it would. I guess maybe the problem was it had a lot in common with series like Yotsuba and maybe even a bit of Hakumei and Mikochi, so I kept comparing it to those and didn’t click with it as much as I had with those others…
It was pretty easy to read, which was nice, and I can see why it gets recommended to beginners.
participate in a book club | フェイクドキュメンタリーQ | L28
This is the Fake Documentary Q book! I read it along with the friend who had got me into the youtube series, which I definitely recommend watching if you like horror. There are no jumpscares or gore, and it’s free to watch (with both Japanese and English subtitles available).
I enjoyed the book overall! I think it’s a fun read if you’ve already seen the show and are interested in the deeper lore behind the episodes. I’m not sure how well it would hold up on its own if you’re coming into it cold, though.
It certainly gives you a lot to think about, and it gave me a reason to revisit the episodes and try watching with Japanese subtitles, which was fun! The book was actually a great way to sort of pre-learn a lot of vocab before watching the episodes, which made it a lot smoother to watch them fully in Japanese.
It was the right balance of incentive/reward to struggle, at least where my investment in Q is at and where my general Japanese ability level is at. It was fun to feel like I was uncovering secrets I otherwise wouldn’t have access to.
bad cover | 不可解なぼくのすべてを (1) | L22
This was the first book I added to my Natively wishlist, and was one of the first books recommended to me on my Japanese study log on the WaniKani forum.
The friend who recommended it to me described it as: “An agender/gender-questioning teen finds a welcoming safe haven at a maid cafe. Features a lot of well-handled LGBTQ characters with a surprisingly sweet and nice tone (everyone I’ve seen read it is a bit off-put by the covers but enjoys the interior).”
I thought it was cute! It reminded me a lot of 女装してめんどくさい事になってるネクラとヤンキーの両片想い, as well as しまなみ誰そ彼. I’ll probably continue it at some point this year.
higher Natively level | ここにひとつの□がある | L30??
OKAY so a few months ago, I got really into a weird collaborative horror project in Japan called 行方不明展 (which was a real life exhibition about fake missing people), which I’ve talked about extensively on my WaniKani study log and giffed and emailed one of the directors of and wrote a whole 17k word fic adaptation of. The main creative brain behind the whole 行方不明展 project is a young horror writer named 梨, whose horror background is similar to mine lol (he was heavily influenced by internet creepypasta, SCP in particular).
This book is a brand new one of Nashi’s that came out in November! Like most of his work, it’s a collection of short stories. I read it because I wanted to see what he was up to after 行方不明展.
It ended up being extremely difficult . Easily the most difficult work I’ve read in Japanese so far (many native speakers had trouble with it, even…). I wrote a longer review on Natively.
Overall, I think it was a bit of a mixed bag. I really, really liked the two puzzle chapters (one was designed like a math test, and the other was a crossword puzzle), and had an absolute blast working through those with a friend of mine, but the more straightforward prose chapters weren’t as interesting to me.
However, I did very much need to put the box book in a bingo box, hahaha. I felt like it was meant 2 be. So I did rearrange my entire plan for this bingo just so that I could include this book.
award winner | https://learnnatively.com/book/64ed1d3e89/
Most of you are probably already quite familiar with Yotsuba (I think it’s probably the most read series that currently exists on Natively?)! I’ve actually read a bunch of the volumes in English, though it was quite some years ago. I own the whole series in Japanese in print (and will be getting the new volume when I can), which is pretty unusual for me (I prefer getting Japanese books digitally whenever possible), but I knew that I loved this series already, so I just went ahead and bought it.
I started reading them at the end of 2023, then continued into 2024, before stalling out it because I got distracted with other manga. But I’m fully planning on returning to the series and ideally finishing it by the end of 2025.
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I would like a badge 
. The one for the blackout is fine. Unless I’m not eligible anymore for not getting my post in here updated in time. I didn’t think the badges were going to be actual real forum badges, haha.
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Do we have the same person recommending us stuff? I also got recommended Hakumei and Mikochi after I finished dungeon meshi, which was also their recommendation.
I knooooooow. It’s so frustrating.
You are not missing much by not reading the published version, just the cosplay side story.
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If your person is rodan, then yes . Though I got recommended Hakumei and Mikochi totally separately from Dungeon Meshi, more as just general Harta highlights haha. I think I actually had it on my list to read before I put Dungeon Meshi on there, though I didn’t actually give it a shot until after I’d started reading Dungeon Meshi.
I wrote a whole fanfic for it after finishing volume 12 because I decided screw it, if the series won’t resolve it, then I’ll do it on my own 
, haha. I published it fully expecting it to get no readers because it was largely based on untranslated material, but a bunch of people read it anyway, which surprised me.
I’m hopeful for maybe the next volume, though, whenever that is able to happen 
.
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