I’m so ready, I’ve lived my whole life to prepare for this singular moment
@Athakaspen I assume you’ve already seen, but verifying
maybe a game club when it releases? 
6 Likes
YES YES YES YES 
I WAS AT WORK BUT I JUST SAW THE NEWS
I promise this is the last time I’ll make this joke, but I’m now fully convinced we are one and the same person. I think I finally understand the meaning of 生き甲斐 today.
I would be totally down to participate in a game club when it releases, though I’ll definitely end up rushing ahead of any schedule we set 
5 Likes
Got some fun lil stats and a graph to share today!
In Dec 2023 I took the N2 exam and failed because I missed the minimum listening requirement by a single question, and after getting those results back I really wanted to work hard to get my listening ability up. So, this year sorta became my year of listening, and while I was doing that, I also decided to include some runescape on the side.
If you aren’t too familiar with the game, it’s in kind of a unique spot for mmos because it is a game that has both extremely active and extremely inactive methods of play. It’s not uncommon for people who play the game a lot to play it actively for an hour or two, and then just kinda stick it on the second monitor to play while editing videos, or eating dinner, or watching netflix. These low intensity periods are called “afk training” and generally involve almost zero focus and maybe doing 3-4 clicks per minute on regular intervals doing the same cycle of actions.
Playing runescape in this afk manner while doing other things that are more mentally engaging is not a new thing for me either: pretty much the whole time I was in zoom lectures during covid, I was playing runescape like this in the background. When I listened through most of the Revolutions podcast, I was doing this with my hands, and even for japanese! When I read through 四月は君の噓 in april a few years ago, I was reading while doing a particularly low intensity thing in the background that only took one click every 4-5 minutes.
That’s all to say, when I play runescape, I am almost always doing something else. It’s a background low focus activity for me while I do other things.
(actual tracked listening stats here are kinda wonky in order to not double count and not overcount certain activities)
This year, I played almost 1000 hours of runescape, and during that time my primary other activity was doing japanese listening, and you can actually see this relationship happen between my total xp in runescape and the months that I have tracked listening data for!
In February, I joined a listening challenge on wanikani with the goal of doing 100 tracked hours in a month, and you can see a huge 20 million xp jump on my runescape total xp graph in february.
Then, for the next few months, my listening tapered off a little bit, but I still was getting in a few big listening days here and there, and playing a tiny bit of runescape while doing that. Can see this very shallow slope in the green area on the graph.
At the end of june, hololive streamer Nerissa Ravencroft started playing osrs, and all the hololive fans who also play runescape came out of the woodwork to help her out. Within a few weeks, they’d established a clan and a clan discord and started running competitions and events and that kinda stuff. I joined in june, and you can see in that month both my total play xp and listening time shot way back up. Some of that play time did involve a lot of active play where I wasn’t doing listening on the side, but especially because I was playing the game with other people who were hololive fans, a lot of that time was still spent doing listening. Especially in the timeslot that I was playing, many of the other members in the clan chat would be other people also watching jp live with me! Few mio fans, some suisei fans, okayu, kanade, it was a really good time getting to watch live and be able to chat about it with other people!
In october I decided to take a break from runescape and then focused my game time efforts more on playing okami, so the relationship kinda breaks there. I did continue doing listening there, but not to the extent that I did in february or over the summer.
Because those runescape and tracked stats hours don’t count the listening I was doing before bed (I almost always watch my japanese account for at least 20-30 minutes before sleeping), and they don’t count any of the listening I was doing without playing runescape in oct/nov/dec, I think I can confidently say I broke 1000 hours of listening this year!
This is not a strategy I can really recommend to people, you have to have a very particular kind of brain to enjoy playing runescape, but for me this ended up being almost a perfect match! My listening has improved leaps and bounds this year, and I credit almost all of it to simply doing a lot of it, and having runescape to occupy my hands was a thing that helped me do a lot of listening 
More than anything else this helped me to increase my listening stamina. Before starting that challenge, I did a stress test to see how much I could listen to in a day before my brain melted, and I managed about 3 hours of watching mio build legos before I had to completely tap out.
But a few days ago this week, I kinda popped open runescape on a whim and just bounced around an old mio minecraft vod, fubuki opening card packs, a collab stream playing a chaotic railroad puzzle game, and before I’d even realized it 5 hours had passed Obviously my comprehension went up a lot doing this as well, but having the stamina to be listening to anything in japanese for that long was definitely not something I was doing at this time last year.
my preferred ~60/40 split of youtube window and runescape
10 Likes
