I use apps that aren't available in my region for language study, so this could end up being a real problem for me.
Yeah, those videos are part of what made me want to read the manga. So far everything that Geoff has said about it has been completely true. Hard to say if I can say the same for Garnt, but that's likely just because he spent more time talking about the magic system and I'm only 7 chapters in.
Regarding the page turn button, if yours is anything like mine, it’s just a volume rocker to Android
It actually is configurable on the Boox page! You can set it to be a volume rocker, turn page buttons, or for scrolling. I guess I haven't tried setting it to scrolling to switch pages, but I doubt that would work either.
Would be nice to see a more advanced configuration utility like the steam deck has; there's no reason I shouldn't be able to push the button to simulate a swipe!
- DanDaDan - Decided to give this a try since the anime releases soon. Wow! That was some wild stuff. Lots of really beautiful double-page spreads, and good art in general. I really look forward to seeing this get animated.
- Blue Box - This is another one with an upcoming anime adaptation. It's an okay romance, but I think Kaguya-sama: Love is War and Skip and Loafer spoiled me. I put a bit of thought into what sets those apart, and I think the biggest part is seeing the perspectives of both sides of the relationship. I also like the art in those two just a little more. Blue Box has some serious same-face-syndrome between the two biggest female characters. I can only tell them apart by their hair! Overall it's pretty good though, and I'm only about 60 chapters in so maybe it improves.
- Witch Hat Atolier - Wow. The art in this one is incredible. I'm only 7 chapters in, and it's slow-going since I'm reading it in Japanese, but this is easily one of the most beautiful manga I've ever seen. I think it's even better-looking than DanDaDan.
- Boox Page - This one isn't a manga, but this week I picked up an e-reader. Wow. It's a huuuuge improvement over reading on my phone! The good: it runs Android, so I can install apps like Manga Plus to read manga conveniently, legally, and for free. I was also able to install some big Japanese manga apps like コミックDAYS using a VPN + the Aurora store. The 7" screen doesn't sound that much bigger than my 6" phone screen, but since it's almost precisely the same aspect ratio as a manga the difference is actually much much larger. Battery life is great of course, since it uses an e-paper display. Speaking of the e-paper display, it looks great, most of the time. It's a bit of a downer not having colored chapter covers but it maps the color to grayscale fairly well, even though it doesn't support a ton of different gray levels. The bad: it's stuck on Android 11, so I had to spoof another device to get my favorite offline Japanese-English dictionary (Yomiwa) installed. Fortunately none of the other apps I tried had any issues. Speaking of apps I tried, I installed 7 different manga reading apps developed by various US and JPN publishers. None of them supported the page turns buttons, and none of them had a setting to disable animations. E-paper displays do not like animations, and turning pages feels clunky as a result. I also tried one community-made manga app, Mihon. It supports my page turn buttons just fine and also allows me to disable animations. Very frustrating that once again buying media from the official source gives a worse experience than piracy would. The ugly: thankfully there isn't anything that falls into this category. Overall it's been a pretty good experience!
Yotsubato
Glad to see this one getting some attention! Lots of people (myself included) got into it because it's often recommended as a first manga for Japanese learners, but then I discovered that it's genuinely really funny! It really felt like the mangaka understood the chaos small children bring to the table.
Nan Hao & Shang Feng
Those sponsored segments were truly bizarre! I totally agree though, when those jokes hit they really hit. Lots of great visual gags.
The use of color is really gonna help with the same-face-syndrome this series suffers from. I can't tell Chinatsu and Hina apart at all without looking at their hair in the manga!
Normally horror manga doesn't translate super well to anime. There have even been some unfortunate instances of this with Junji Ito's work in the past. The art in this trailer looks really good though, so I've got some hope that this'll actually do the manga justice.
Redline proved to me that you don't necessarily need a good story to have an excellent movie. You just need a story that isn't bad, and then if you make everything cool as hell it'll work out.
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure - characters look way more adult than they are
One of my favorite moments was in part 5 when
JJBA Part 5
a character asks Giornio if he has a driver's license and he goes, "Nope! I'm 15!"
My favorites have been :
- Bang Brave Bang Bravern - Big dumb gay robots
- Mobile Fighter G Gundam - Big dumb straight robots
- Redline - Just some fun racing action. Some of the best animation I've ever seen.
- Wotakoi - Love story between nerdy office workers
- Legend of the Galactic Heroes - The best space opera
- One Punch Man - depressed superhero
Their support sucks though. I had one of their controllers die on me after only 8 months of moderate use and after a way-too-long back and forth they demanded $15 to send me a new controller. Eventually we settled on $5, which is still $5 more than it should have been.
Very cute! This monthly pacing is killing me, but I'm sure it'll be lots of fun to re-read this all at once someday when it's complete.
It refers to the Jappanese Language Proficiency Test, or JLPT. The easiest version of the test is N5, and the hardest is N1.
Oh! Well then, I guess I should be more specific; earlier I left off the end of the manga's name. It's actually よつばと!. Here's a good write-up about what makes it a great first manga for a Japanese learner.
In my experience it was a bit easier getting started with Manga than going straight to VNs, though admittedly I've only played through one VN so maybe others are easier than the one I've tried. If you find VNs overwhelming I definitely recommend giving something like Yotsuba a go. I know a lot of people recommend it so maybe you're tired of hearing about it, but that's only because it's both funny and (relatively) easy.
Every friend I still keep in contact with is someone I met in college, so this makes a lot of sense to me.
And that's assuming that all 17 million mormons the LDS church claims to have actually exist. It's kind of annoying to get deleted from their rolls, so a lot of people who leave don't bother. Also, many of those 17 million live in much poorer nations than the US.
You want hardware manufacturers to provide shitty screens in perpetuity just so Linux devs can avoid implementing proper scaling? Yeah, no.