I’ll check it out, thanks!
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Going up late since I didn’t get on my computer until late, but day 9 of Advent is the SF manga 彼方のアストラ
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Day 10 of Advent is the music BL manga ギヴン
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Day 11 of Advent is the youkai manga 夏目友人帳! (one of my absolute faves)
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Didn’t read from my Advent pick yesterday and almost didn’t post today because…
life stuff. (could be worrying and/or triggering, talk of suicide, I’m currently okay though)
I flirted with a 23-hr stint with suiciding by dehydration because while my dentist merely suggested that I try to reduce sugar intake (mainly sugary drinks) and/or try to brush more often (I do try, I just haven’t found a way to reliably get myself to do it more than once a day about half the week—but effort doesn’t matter if it doesn’t 100% pay off, does it?) and/or at least swish with water after drinking something sugary, but my dad wants me to cut sugar out entirely.
Thing is, though, I have sensory issues. Incredibly picky eater. Almost certainly autistic (and definitely ADHD, but I think that might have less bearing on this? Not entirely sure tho). Everything that I’m physically capable of drinking has sugar in it—even milk, which I was sort of surprised about but does make sense. Cows do, after all, have sugar in their diet from the plants they eat.
Water is foul. I absolutely cannot get it down, no matter what, unless it comes straight from a drinking fountain, for some reason. Can’t even put water fountain water in a cup or bottle, and I can’t drink tap water either, even though it’s all the same thing. If I haven’t been able to drink it at all for these last 27 years and change, I’m not going to suddenly start being able to. And fake sugar is foul. It might start out tolerable or even fine, but as I eat/drink more (even with breaks in between—even with long breaks in between), it just gets worse and worse until I can’t stomach it. It’s nauseating. And then black coffee and tea? Well, for one, I’m pretty sure coffee’s acidic which isn’t any better, and for two, bitter stuff makes me wanna puke. So that’s out too.
So the only option left to me was to die. Except I actually don’t want to die right now. For once, I haven’t been particularly suicidal lately. (I mean, the ideation has been there in the background, but I’ve been depressed for more than half my life now, it’s probably always gonna be lurking there in the background.) I have so many things I’m looking forward to reading! And even writing, and maybe drawing, plus origami is fun! But yeah, mostly reading.
No Book, No Life.
I’ll stop eating candy (had already reduced the amount), and sugary snacks and breakfast foods, and I won’t drink any more hot chocolate and iced lattes and whatever, and I’ll cut down (some more) on sodas—though I can’t cut them out completely because I reuse the bottles to make lemonade in (from a powder) because the water bottles we buy have caps that are way too flimsy and I have an undue amount of trouble closing them properly. It’s bad enough when all that’s in there is water, but when I’m trying to make lemonade? I can’t guarantee cutting down on lemonade and fruit juice though except by drinking less, which I can probably do. (Obviously the health of your teeth is more important than your overall health. Who cares if your mental health’s shit or you’re mildly dehydrated and under-nourished? At least your teeth are still pristine! /sarcasm Your teeth are like the least 丈夫 part of your body anyway since human lifespans have increased a lot, and incredibly recently too on the scale of evolution, so our teeth haven’t had nearly enough time to catch up. Hell, we still have wisdom teeth even after our jaws shrank after the advent of cooking, and our backs are still f-cked up after getting off our forelegs since we still haven’t fully transitioned to bipedalism yet! Even if you do everything perfectly, your teeth still ain’t gonna last, so I don’t get this overemphasis. Yeah, oral health is definitely important, but not to the detriment of everything else. Live people can make do without teeth [literally what dentures are for], but dead people have no need for theirs.)
Anyways, if my dad’s unhappy about me merely reducing my sugar intake (again) rather than cutting it out entirely, well, he can stay mad about it. Especially since he won’t lend me his gun (which he doesn’t even need in the first place, but he’s turned into a freaking Republican). (Also, he’s presumably on a diet but he may as well not be because he keeps taking frequent cheat days and also conveniently “forgets” that such and such food has such and such other thing in it. He has zero room to judge.)
(I tossed in the towel when the nausea set in at 23 hrs. The weakness is somewhat unpleasant, but I was used to it from the few times I all but stopped eating [because I “eat too much.” My mother’s words. Even though I’m underweight and actually should probably be eating more, and we’re firmly enough in middle class that it’s not like we can’t afford it, so. -shrugs- It’s probably for the best anyway though with the continuously increasing costs of living but utterly stagnant wages], but the nausea. That was worse than nausea from being ill or motion sick. Not in intensity or degree, it’s like a different type.)
In any case, Day 12 of Advent is the cooking/child-raising (BL vibes but not actually BL) manga, パパと親父のうちご飯
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feel free to ignore
I don’t intend to overstep, so if I am feel free to call me out or anything! I’m glad you’re doing alright and taking care of yourself again. Overall health >>>>> other people’s idea of how you should live your life anytime.
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If all goes according to plan (haha it never does, but let’s ignore this for the moment 
) I’d be ready to start reading 天気の子 from the start of the new year! Let’s say Jan 2nd or so for a proper start maybe. What do you think? Does this match your plans?
Also, I assume we’re reading this informally without a fixed schedule? I was thinking about reading at least 100 pages per week, i.e. roundabout 3 weeks in total, but if I happen to have a lot of free time (or if the book happens to be very easy for me), I could potentially read it faster. Do you have any idea about your envisioned reading speed?
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Jan 2nd works for me! I’m still planning on trying to read all of KnB that month, but that won’t take up all my time or energy since that’s only one volume a day, and I can often manage 10-20 pages of a (L28~30) novel even on a less-good day, so 100 pages a week sounds good too.
Did you want me set up the thread now, or closer to when we’re starting?
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I couldn’t decide on what to read, but at least I’d already determined I’d read Uramichi on his birthday, so here I am over a week later with Day 21 of Advent, the comedy manga うらみちお兄さん! No guarantees about the last three days, either.
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OK great, so let’s roll with this plan!
Please feel free to set up the thread whenever it suits you best - it sounds like we already discussed everything we need to know beforehand, so there is no real urgency to it, I guess. Except that it might attract some fellow readers 
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I got the thread up!
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I got a Nintendo e-Shop gc for xmas, plus I still had the one from my bday that I’d ended up not spending, so I bought several games on sale and have been spending more time playing viddy games than reading books. Two out of the three I’ve played so far are in Japanese though, so. (Aka I’m p sure is available in JP, I just left it in EN. The other two are ファンタジーヒーロー -unsigned legacy- which regular price was I think less than $10 but I like it so far, and インフィニティ ストラッシュ ドラゴンクエスト ダイの大冒険)
I’ve only finished the first two chapters of Infinity Strash (they’re short), and so far it seems like it’s mostly just narration over stills from the anime or else bits of the story animated with the game’s 3D models with a little bit of battling thrown in, which I wasn’t expecting. I still like it, but it definitely doesn’t feel like it’s worth the 60, 70 bucks or whatever it is full price. I’m especially glad now I got it on sale.
Actually, I didn’t even realize until later that it’s odd that the NA release has JP text. XI and Heroes have the JP voices, but not text. I was fully prepared to have to buy a physical copy off CDJapan. I wonder if that game with Erik and whatever that little b*tch of a younger sister’s name was has JP text too. But I despise her, so I don’t care about the game, no matter how much I love Erik. (Oh yeah, I never did finish XI, either in EN or JP…)
So yeah I probably won’t wrap up all the manga volumes I have started before the new year like originally planned, especially since I’ve ended up reading the last two consecutive volumes of GSNK I own (I can’t only read 2 chapters a week. I need more horikashi…), but oh well.
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Okay, I’ve started playing Neverwinter Nights, and since it’s on my Switch now, this means I can play it pretty much whenever I want. This is too much power. Will I ever do anything else? (It has been wayyy too long since I’ve played this game. I’ve missed it.)
Well, I can’t play while I’m eating, so I can still read then. And when my Switch is charging, since neither of the nearest outlets are located conveniently where I can lie comfortably in bed and still play while it’s charging.
I suppose we’ll learn how hopeless I am soon enough.
(Also wow am I glad my eyes aren’t that bad despite being a geezer at 27, the font’s just a liiittle bit too small to be clear on the little Switch screen.)
(And I already had a first name in mind for my character, and the game gave me a good last name, so now I wanna turn him into an OC… What the hell would I write about with him, though.)
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I’ve been feeling something similar with Final Fantasy XIV these last few weeks. I finally have some free time to play it, so that’s where all my time’s been going, haha. It’s good to take a break from the usual grind, at least.
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I didn’t even realize bookmeter did yearly summaries until I saw someone I follow post the link to theirs. I had to replace their ID number with mine in the link to get to my summary since it didn’t have a link at the top like with the monthly ones. Anyway, I read 60 more books in Japanese this year than I did last year! I wonder how many I’ll be able to read in 2024… (and how many series I’ll get to strike off my 積読 list)
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When you go to the まとめ page, it has two very invisible buttons in the top right corner where you can switch from “last month” to “last year”:
But no worries, I have to discover this anew each year 
I know it’s somewhere but I never remember where exactly.
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Invisible, indeed. Thanks! Hopefully I’ll remember that next year lol
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(Apparently posts need to be at least 10 characters long…)
No
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