Interesting, are you using a JP Apple ID?
UK Apple ID. I just switched the region to japan in the audible app, and attempted to subscribe. At first it didn’t work, so that’s when I tried setting my VPN to japan, and now it bills through my usual apple payment details.
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Very interesting. Might try sometime the only problem is switching continuously accounts. Also to be safe I’ll probably create an account dedicated to audible in case they end up banning
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You can open up the player through a web browser too, that’ll save you from having to switch accounts all the time.
One account logged in on the app, and the other logged in on chrome or whatever
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Does the audible subscription fee show in local currency? I’m scared to sign up for my country’s terrible membership
Yes, it showed in £’s for me., not yen.
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Finished reading 星空の下、君の声だけを抱きしめる | L23 yesterday before bed; went in with little to no expectations and I have to say I really enjoyed it! I called the big plot twist at around halfway through the book, and the latter half felt condensed, but the execution was still pretty good overall.
Picked up この素晴らしい世界に祝福を! | L30 this morning during my commute + lunch break and have been getting through it with very little issue, only a few run-on sentences of dialogue have tripped me up. I thought it would be more difficult than this for an L30 considering how close it is to an L32 I just finished last week.
our of curiosity, does audible JPs unlimited membership actually have all of the currently released volumes of Slayers? The wording on the site made it seem like it was limited to only the first volume and that you had to buy the rest
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Yes. They all show
Audible会員プラン聴き放題対象
Very few titles on audible are not 聴き放題.
Can confirm, this happens to me too, and I signed up normally on the website without VPN. So it’s not a VPN or not VPN issue it’s just an audible issue. Going through either the audible or amazon site let’s you add it without issue, though.
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Tangentially, Audible JP is driving me nuts with region stuff lately… Even with a VPN, I can never figure out when it’s going to let me get stuff or not… I guess next time it lets me, I’ll just download anything I could potentially read someday
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Technically, almost all the audiobooks from outside of Japan that I tried were not part of it. I guess it’s not really relevant here, but still 
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I finished the first chapter, and yes, it definitely is a wild ride. Or descent into madness. I’m loving it.
Soon after what I described above, it took quite a turn: He returns home only to find the mother of the stolen phone’s owner waiting for him inside, and treating him as her son. It very much looks like he literally stole the guy’s identity, even in the mother’s consciousness? Then at the end of the chapter it gets even crazier, but I’m not revealing anything more. 
I wanted to say I’m getting Luigi Pirandello vibes (One, No One and One Hundred Thousand), but to be honest I have no idea where it’s going. 
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ささこい latest volume… It’s one of my favorite yuri series, and also on the easier side! The anime is coming out in April as well!
(If you buy it digitally, there’s a separate 第44.5話 bonus story that’s really sweet and adorable as well: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B0CXX2R8FK/)
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I finally finished all 56 vols of 犬夜叉 | L23!!! That’s my longest series so far. Started 恋より青く 1 | L20 vol 2 (not on the site yet) and おとなになっても 1 | L27 (coincidentally same author as 青い花 and 放浪息子).
I’m gonna start back on 弱キャラ友崎くん Lv.2 | L28 tonight (with the audiobook), and then NHKにようこそ! | L32’s book club is right around the corner. I also might read 七海みなみは輝きたい 弱キャラ友崎くん外伝 | L26 which is 3 volume manga spinoff for Tomozaki-kun, since I have a lot of feelings about how S2 of the anime played out (it relates to the second half).
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I shamefully admit that I am very fine with only getting the basics of the tech babble. 
So as long as I know what’s going on with the plot and the crime - and I think he writes clearly enough usually - I don’t go for full understanding of the technical details.
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I don’t know that I’ll read this, but… For any ホリミヤ fans, the original webcomic has a book form too: 堀さんと宮村くん | L25. The first volume is free to keep on Bookwalker until April 18.
It’s a very different vibe - lots of colors and all handwriting (no furigana). If anyone has read both formats, I’d be curious to hear your impressions / if there’s any relevant differences (I don’t mind tagged spoilers). Looking at the preview, it’s a much nicer presentation than reading it on the website
Update: I started reading it. While the plot seems to be identical so far, the manga adaptation really fills a lot out, but also leaves out and/or re-orders some things out (or might be reordering them)… otoh, I appreciate seeing some of the humor in the original 4-koma format. This version is a lot harder to read, and probably good practice for someone who knows their kanji, and wants to get better at reading the more handwriting/cursive style text. The rougher and sparser art style also requires much more attention to detail to follow what’s going on
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Finished 星へ行く船シリーズ3カレンダー・ガール | L30 - got a bit bored towards the end, but still a decently likeable series (that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend).
Starting 後宮の烏 2 | L35 - so far so good. Hopefully I absorbed some of the vocabulary from the last one…
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Finished 堀さんと宮村くん 2 | L26. Really enjoying it (with the usual reservations), though the handwriting is inscrutable at times!
Started ソードアート・オンライン ユナイタル・リング (1)) | L24?? manga, since I came across it in 少年エース | L25 magazine, and really enjoying it! It’s the latest (and my favorite) SAO arc. It doesn’t have an anime adaptation yet, so it’s nice to see it illustrated! If you’re interested in reading the LNs, it’s a good stepping stone, since you can pick up a lot of the in-game/other world vocab.
Finished 恋より青く 2 | L20 - latest volume of a cute high school yuri. MCs are a bookworm, and a girl looking for something to do with her life.
ささやくように恋を唄う: 9 | L21 - my favorite yuri series. Love the way the arc concluded. Counting down the days till the anime as well!!
トモちゃんは女の子! 1 | L21 - I can’t get into the anime for some reason, but I’m enjoying it as a 4コマ
半熟女子: 1 | L25 - a rather quirky yuri that has both unrealistic and well-done elements (this review on MAL covers it pretty well (with some general spoilers)
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I finished TRPGプレイヤーが異世界で最強ビルドを目指す 9 上 ~ヘンダーソン氏の福音を~ | L40 which I planned to use for my “finish a series” bingo (as the last published volume of a series) but the next volume came out 10 days ago… So I just started reading it.
Overall, I think this volume is my favorite in the series.
The series itself is still enjoyable, in an uneven way. There are parts I really like and parts I really hate, rather than everything being uniformly bland. For instance, I like that the main character is actually enjoyable, rather than being an incel stand-in. On the other hand, the world building is really poor. It feels like the author read the wikipedia page of the HRE and slapped elves and vampires on top.
Despite his best effort, the author is also not very good at making believable female characters (e.g., one character getting her hand pierced through by a dulled blade and shrugging it off saying that getting your hymen broken is more painful; now, I never got my hand stabbed through, regardless of the quality of the blade, but I’m still going to call “doubt” on this one; at least, she does say that a close female friend, not in public) BUT they are still much better than whatever it is you get in your average 男性向け light novel.
I think the most frustrating is the way the illustrator depicts the girls/love interests:
The author: “Character is able to gender swap but looks kinda androgynous”
The illustrator: “BOOBIES GO BOIN’!”
The author:
The illustrator: “BOOBIES GO BOIN’! also she has somewhat round shoulders I guess”
The author: “Character is a hard drug addict, while there are remnants of her past beauty, she looks like a cadaver, just skin and bones”
The illustrator: “BOOBIES GO BOIN’! also she has a visible collarbone, that’s what ‘just skin and bones’ means right?”
And so on.
(I guess it just feels silly rather than annoying at this point)
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Hey, at least it kind of passes the Bechdel test!
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Hmm, kinda, but there’s still a man implicitly mentioned in this conversation.
It’s okay, though, the series still passes the test (although barely). The best pass is a spoiler, so I won’t give details, but it involves one character telling the other she should get a promotion. There’s another scene after a fight between two female warriors. Ah, and two female characters have a game of the in-world equivalent of chess and discuss it afterwards (although only one line is actually “spoken” outside of narration).
There may be more that I forgot about, but still, not great considering how much text I went through (about 4500 pages so far).
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