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Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Parchment and Wolf volume 9 read:

It took a while for this book to appear at nyaa.si for free download.  After that it took a while longer to read, because it wasn't a particularly engrossing volume.  Basically Col learns of an imposter pretending to be him in a southern city and goes to stop him.  The situation becomes murky and difficult because it would be hard to prove the truth and Col doesn't want anyone who was innocently fooled by the imposter hurt, but he still wants their fraud shut down.  Ultimately a crazy solution is found where Myuri engineers a flood attack on the enemy city which is strong enough to scare them into submission but not strong enough to hurt anyone.  Everyone lived happily ever after.

It's sad that an entire book can be summed up so easily, but this is what happens when the density of your content is too low.  Nobody's emotions or feelings were ever perturbed all book long.  Nothing was risked and nothing was gained.  Nothing changed in the wider scope of things.  Nothing actually mattered.

I feel like people felt things more strenuously and eventfully in single sentences of '100 Waifus' than this entire book.  That more happens, in terms of what matters to the characters themselves that it happened, in a single sentence of '100 Waifus' than this whole book.

I would say this book was better than the previous one, in that Myuri didn't suddenly turn evil and help kidnap Col like last time.  But that's a low bar to pass.

I read this book as a brief break from my 46th reread of '100 Waifus,' which is very draining due to the endless edits and endless lists of names I have to properly remember, but even this draining mode of '100 Waifus' is better than the break I got from it.  I'm making edits practically every page in my attempt to word things better and reduce the number of 'justs' in the text.  Sometimes I have to rewrite whole sentences in order to get at one 'just.'  The content hasn't changed, but the method of delivery has.  I'm up to Chapter 36 of my 46th reread now.  Hopefully once I reach Chapter 38 and Cute arrives it will all be downhill from there.

I still have plenty of time to reread '100 Waifus' because the new Red Wheel book, after being delayed for Kindle release multiple times, ended up 'not being available for release in this country'.  So now I've ordered the hard cover version of the book, which I should have done from the beginning, but will take another week or two to arrive.  I guess it's fine because I should be concentrating on my work right now.  The amount of edits I've had to make reflects a real ability to improve the story, which is always my highest priority.  Conversely if I read through the book and saw no edits to make, that would actually have been a waste of time.

I dropped 'The story of girls who couldn't become magicians.'  The art style is great, but the plot and characters are blah, the story refused to explain any of its mysteries, so I gave up.  Art can only take you so far.

The wolves of miboru anime was also worthless.  Another story that can't hold a candle to Rurouni Kenshin which covers the same era.  So in the end the fall season maxes out at 23 watchable shows -- which should still be big enough for anyone.

My music hall of fame overhaul proceeds apace.  I'm up to 5100/5500 songs listened through.  However, the last 400 songs are the longest, so it will still take forever.  After that I've downloaded the ost to Ragnarok Odyssey by Nobuo Uematsu, so I expect to have enough replacements for all the songs I want to drop from my 1-star tier that I can stay at a nice even 5500.  Once I'm through with this round of edits my music hall of fame as well as my book should be perfect.

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