漫画レビュー：「この彼女はフィクションです」４巻 (Complete)

Our hero, Hamura Yuuri, has spent 10 years filling notebooks with the design of Michiru, his 'ideal' girlfriend.  However, once he met Kuzumi Fuuko, his senpai in the Literature club and a novelist prodigy, he fell in love and abandoned his secret hobby.  He took the collection of notebooks and drawings up to the local shrine to burn them, only to find Fuuko-senpai there, worrying over her writer's block.  When Yuuri attempts to show her what he's written, he finds that the notebooks have disappeared, and a naked Michiru has taken their place.

So begins one of the strangest manga I've ever read.  Yes, it sounds like the setup for a terrible ecchi comedy.  Instead, it's a romantic drama with flashes of brilliance.  There are a number of times when the plot verges on being too over-the-top, and slipping into melodrama and silliness.  (The entire final arc is a prime example.)  However, on occasion the author poses deep, unique questions, like what responsibilities a writer has to their characters.

On the other hand, the art is stunning, and consistently so throughout the series.  A lot of thought clearly went into each character's design.  For example, Michiru is drawn in a more modern moe style with rounded curves and big eyes, emphasizing her origin from Yuuri's notebooks, while Fuuko has sharper, more realistic features.  Backgrounds are drawn with care, and mesh nicely with the character art.

I cannot, objectively, call this a *good* manga.  It's clear that the author could have benefited greatly from a more involved editor.  However, its approach is unique, enthusiastic, and so damn entertaining that I was unable to stop reading once I began.  If nothing else, that alone makes it worth a few hours.

Score:

Art 9/10
Plot 6/10
Characters 8/10
Overall 7.5/10

"Student Development" or Fuck yo' boundaries!

As part of going back to college, I am retaking the classes I failed, including SDV100 -- "Student Development".  Essentially an orientation to college, it is largely worthless but is a transfer/graduation requirement.

Today's class time was spent attending the first of a series of "Making Connections" seminars.  A team-building/icebreaker exercise, for the most part.  Graded for participation.

Before I get into why this got to me today, two points:

- I am an introvert.  This does not mean I hate people; it does not mean I hate being social.  What it *does* mean is that I find being in a group of other people to be stressful.  After a certain period of time (depending on various factors such as the size of the group, my relationship with each member, etc.) I have to go spend some time alone or there are serious consequences for my temperament.

- I am not touch-adverse.  However, I *do* expect to be able to choose when, where, and by who I am touched.  (Within reason; I'm not going to flip out on someone who brushes past me on the bus.)

This meeting involved several classes, for a total of around 100 people.  Simply being in a group this large is enough to put me on edge.

To open the session, the speaker told us that we were to respect each other's boundaries.  Good.  (And to the credit of my fellow students, they *did*.)  This was followed by an exercise in non-verbal communication.  Then the funky chicken (what). Then bizarre "handshakes" (borderline).

Then standing toe-to-toe, elbow-to-elbow, knee-to-knee, head-to-head and various combinations thereof.  Direct contact.  Explicitly with someone we *haven't* met.  This continued, with new and larger groups each time.

This is beyond what I'm willing to do.  Is it intimate contact?  No.  But it's a violation of my personal space.  More importantly, I am not initiating it.  Not even my "partner".  It was personal touch initiated by a third-party.  Unacceptable.

So, I backed off, and did not participate.  A teacher walked by, and asked me to join a group that was short on members.  I refused.  She insisted.  I refused again, and she gave up.  *Another* teacher decided to come over and be my partner (because obviously I don't mind an authority figure in my space, right? Right?).  The exercise had moved away from the full-body-contact to essentially holding hands, so I went along with her.

In the end, did any wrong come of it?  Other than pissing me off and ruining my mood for the day, no.  But I should not have had to refuse participation twice, or even once.  The exercise itself is far out of bounds.  I should not feel compelled, for a grade, to touch or be touched by other people, people I do not know.

As a contrast, later exercises (team-building stuff, for example lowering a stick to the ground while everyone keeps contact with it) did involve contact with other people, but to an incidental degree, and as part of another activity.  There is a difference, and it is important.

The solution is not "tell everyone else to respect each others boundaries."  The solution is for you to respect my boundaries and not make physical contact part of the exercise to begin with!  Which should be obvious.

多読２０１２年３月

こんばんは・・・

Of the goals I set out for this Tadoku, I only met my overall pages goal. I barely touched アイアン・サンライズ, and only read one novel. However, I still landed 5th place, with over 1200 pages read in 2 weeks. The majority of which come from playing リトルバスターズ, which I finally completed up through Refrain (after the contest ended, otherwise I may well have won this round.)

Overall, what I read this round:

- 涼宮ハルヒの消失 (Complete)
- とらドラ (Barely scratched the surface)
- リトルバスターズEX (鈴's route + the first half of Refrain)
- とある科学の超電磁砲 ２－５ (Complete)

Not exactly satisfied, but what can you do.

またなぁ

新しい本と次の多読

こんにちは、ブライアンです。

The next round of Tadoku (an "experimental" 2-week sprint) starts this coming Sunday. And since someone upstairs has a good notion of dramatic timing, I opened the mailbox to find a (larger than usual) package this morning.

New books!

- とある科学の超電磁砲 2-5
- とらドラ！ 1&2
- 狼と香辛料
- アイアン・サンライズ (J-translation of Charles Stross' "Iron Sunrise")

アイアン・サンライズ is a monster of a novel, 650 pages (with very thin margins.) The original English book is among my favorite books ever (the temptation to start reading it when I had the translation on order was unbearable) but nonetheless it's kind of intimidating.

Silent (Tadoku's 管理者) says this round's score doesn't count on the overall total, so I'm going to concern myself less with my pages goal (set at 700, just under half of what I got in the full month of January) and more with getting through some books. I *still* have not finished a novel since January's Tadoku -- whereas if I'd kept up the pace I set there I would have another 4-5 read by this point. Not sure what I need to do to fix this... perhaps log my reading on a daily basis regardless of Tadoku.

In any case, my goals for this Tadoku:
- 700+ pages read
- 200+ pages minimum in アイアン・サンライズ
- Top 5 for novel pages read
- Stay on top of Anki reps throughout

Looks reasonable to me.

Before all that I need to finish 涼宮ハルヒの退屈, however.

そのわけで、読みます。またねぇ。

多読２０１２年１月

久しぶりです・・・本当に６ヶ月になりましたか？

Still progressing with Japanese, and participated in the 多読 contest last month. (For those who don't know, 多読 is a foreign-language reading contest.) To put some things in perspective, I finished RTK1 in February 2011; I've been reading Japanese (for various values of "reading) for almost a year now. However, it wasn't until December that I finally finished reading a complete novel in Japanese. Now, after a month of 多読, I'm a few dozen pages short of finishing my sixth novel.

I set myself what I thought was an ambitious goal -- 1500 pages. But while I only just reached it, submitting my last pages with 30 minutes to spare, I *could* have done a lot more. (Blame falls squarely on Battlefield 3 being so goddamned addicting.)

So, here's what I read this month:

Novels:
俺の妹がこんなに可愛いわけがない。③ (Complete)
涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 (Complete; already started prior to 多読)
涼宮ハルヒの溜息　(241/275 read)
あの日見た花の名前を僕達はまだ知らない（上） (Complete)
隙間女（幅広） (Complete)
ギフテッド (80/347 read)

Manga:
とある科学の超電磁砲　第１巻 (Complete)
Various 同人誌 and other assorted manga.

In the end, I landed 10th place on the overall ranking. (7th for Japanese.) Near as I can tell, I was in the top 5 for novel pages read. (Which strikes me as pretty incredible for my first time.)

More importantly, I gained a much better feel for Japanese. Large blocks of text are becoming less and less intimidating; I'm able to push on through now without looking up every word, and still grasp the overall meaning. My reading speed is ridiculously faster now -- what took me a full day of reading to do before now takes a few hours. I have not reached the point that I could increase my vocabulary simply by reading, but I haven't fallen behind on vocab despite having ignored Anki all month. Simply put, I feel far more comfortable with Japanese now.

And isn't that the goal anyway?

以上。

アップデート

久しぶりな・・・ブライアンです。

ロックバンドに入ったよ。リードギターを弾いています（ちょっと下手のに・・・本当にいいんかな？）明日・・・いいえ、今日は初めてのセッションです。今は僕と歌手だけ・・・ベースとドラムを探しています。後でライブをやります。毎日ギターを練習します。すごく楽しいですよ。

えーと・・・他には色々あったからお姉ちゃんと子供たちは僕んちに住んでいます。混んでいますよ。いっぱい家事があります。

ああ！日本語の映画を買った：ハリーポッター３－６とＢＥＣＫ。ハリーポッターは全然面白くない（ハーマイオニーの声優が好きですけど）。でもＢＥＣＫはすごく面白い。最高の映画ですよ。（もちろん、バンドの物語・・・いい音楽ですよ。）真帆は可愛いな・・・

５時ですから今すぐ寝ます。

おやすみなさ～い！

日本語 Progress Report 4

My first novels have arrived! I've gotten surprisingly far (read: 20 pages) into 俺妹１ in the past week. It's amazing how much kanji help comprehension, even if I only know a few dozen readings at this point.

Still haven't bought any anime; Amazon sucks and does not accept PayPal (but they'd be perfectly happy to have my bank details themselves... yeah right) and of course none of the big box stores stock anything I want. (In any case, I just blew all my money on a POD HD, so I don't have the cash to buy any right now anyway.)

My sentence SRS deck is growing steadily, currently sitting at 270 cards. (All from Naoko Chino's All About Particles -- I'm going to do the whole book before moving on to other sources.) So far I've noticed a few things:

- I have to physically write out a kanji compound a few times to remember it. Reading is no problem in most cases, but being able to produce the correct kanji by hand is difficult. (Since I do all the data entry by typing (obviously) I guess I don't fully acknowledge the component characters?) Hopefully this is a short term thing and more exposure will make this easier.

- Kana are hard to write neatly. All of the odd curves are very different from the limited strokes of writing kanji. か and て give me particular trouble. (Oddly, though, み is one of the easiest for me to write...)

- Khatz (AJATT) is right about "don't bother studying grammar" -- I can already pick out the basic gist of some sentences after 3 weeks.

I've also spent time getting my immersion environment up for real. I revived my twitter account and follow a bunch of Japanese people. (NHK news, ニコニコ guitarists, character twitters, etc.) This has produced some interesting material that I plan to SRS (once I figure out the necessary readings and such -- they'll sit in a .txt file until then.) I've also started using Khatz's URL shuffler, which is all kinds of awesome -- one click and I get either a Japanese webpage or a YouTube music video. (Unfortunately, I don't see a means of separating the two so that I could chose whether I want reading material or listening material.) As an aside, Dengeki's web site is more of a time-sink than Wikipedia. Hours have been wasted...

じゃ・・・またなぁ。