📝 First snow of the season

Hi hello, let's not talk about how I haven't updated this site in the past however many months, and just get into it. I can't remember all of the things I did and read and played since my last journal update, so let's just wipe the slate clean and start fresh.

It's snowing here for the first time this season. It's supposed to keep going until tomorrow evening, which is kind of a bummer because it means I can't go out and run all the errands I wanted to get done this week. But it kind of works out since I also have a lot of desk work to get done. Speaking of which...

Stuff I'm working on

• Daikon released 300年祭 for the リブートジャム // Reboot Jam. It's a short and linear narrative game. I need to translate the script into English, hopefully sometime this week.
• Speaking of the Reboot Jam, I also need to gather all the submissions together and write the wrap-up page for that. We're planning to stream them all on this week's Happy Hour!
• Indie Tsushin is back starting this month! I've already got two interviews in that I need to translate and I'm waiting on another two to come in. I've also got a bunch of games I need to write about.
• The Switch release for Nice Disc is approaching, and Daikon and I thought it would be really cute to make a digital manual for it. We're probably going to release it on Steam and itch as well.
• I'm planning to make a little mini zine for i miss the sea of japan. I also kind of want to restart my bitsy journal entries... it's sure been a while, eh.

Stuff I'm reading

I'm trying to get back into using media trackers. I'm using The StoryGraph for books and manga volumes, and Anilist for individual manga chapters I'm reading through various apps. Reading manga on apps is the new tachiyomi... Anyway, here's what I'm reading this week:

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology

I'm reading this for a book club. The stories are pretty hit-or-miss for me, honestly. Which is a bummer because the premise is great, the foreword makes it sound amazing, and that cover is GORGEOUS. I think I would have preferred a single author anthology, maybe.

I was hoping it'd be more like folklore horror, existential dread, historical fiction with darker themes, maybe dark comedy with supernatural elements, stuff along those lines. But instead, most of these are like the equivalent of summer teen slasher flicks. I was just hoping for something a little less... adolescent, I guess. I went in hoping for Cursed Bunny and got Goosebumps with Lots Of Body Horror. Like, it's fine! It's fine. I like silly teen slasher stories, too. I just need to readjust my expectations to finish this.

There are definitely some gems in here, though. I loved the surreal and dystopian Quantum by Nick Medina. Tick Talk by Cherie Dimaline is the stuff of literal nightmares; after reading this, I had to take a bath and scrub down every inch of my skin. The Heart-Shaped Clock by Kelli Jo Ford tells such a rich story in so few pages. I don't regret picking up this anthology because it gave me some good writers to look up and check out their other works.

Manga

• 税金で買った本 Vol. 4: Still slowly making my way through this series. Hoping to finish this volume this week, I've set this aside for way too long.
• おじさまと猫: I've been wanting to check out manga apps so that I can try out series before committing to buying whole volumes. I downloaded the Gan Gan app and made a beeline for this, and it's a good series to start out. It's ridiculously cute, chapters are short, and there's furigana on everything.
• 月刊少女野崎くん: We finished watching the 12-episode series of this and fell in love with everything about it. This was also on Gan Gan, so I'm going through this as well, though I'm only using the daily ticket (i.e. only one new chapter per day) and saving my coins for Ojisama to Neko. I need more 4-koma in my life...

I was going to write more but then I got distracted looking up some more series to download and add to my reading list. Manga is good, actually?!

I will try to update again soon! Maybe!! No promises!!