Indeed, thanks for the insights Fillanzea.

wccrawford Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:thanks for the book recommendations.

Aye. That 'All You Need Is Kill', I just ordered the English version because I doubt I can stand to wait until I can read the Japanese well enough. Hehe. It should make it easier to understand the Japanese one when I read it, anyhow, so that'll be nice.

Irony, thy name is wccrawford.

BTW, I'll probably think of an obvious solution and feel silly later, but any tips for when one has a hypothetical batch of .txts with a certain encoding, and wishes to make of the texts a searchable database, esp. when their default OS explorer doesn't search them properly?

nest0r Wrote:BTW, I'll probably think of an obvious solution and feel silly later, but any tips for when one has a hypothetical batch of .txts with a certain encoding, and wishes to make of the texts a searchable database, esp. when their default OS explorer doesn't search them properly?

2 things come to mind... Use Linux instead, or... Write some kind of PHP (or other language) script that gives you a nice index of them and let your browser help you with the searching.

Edit: lol and that's not irony I've always said that I'm learning JP to read the books that don't get translated. After I read it in English, I'll mainly read it in Japanese for practice more than anything. (Same as Harry Potter.)

wccrawford Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:BTW, I'll probably think of an obvious solution and feel silly later, but any tips for when one has a hypothetical batch of .txts with a certain encoding, and wishes to make of the texts a searchable database, esp. when their default OS explorer doesn't search them properly?

2 things come to mind... Use Linux instead, or... Write some kind of PHP (or other language) script that gives you a nice index of them and let your browser help you with the searching.

Edit: lol and that's not irony I've always said that I'm learning JP to read the books that don't get translated. After I read it in English, I'll mainly read it in Japanese for practice more than anything. (Same as Harry Potter.)

Too much trouble. I'll figure something out. Feels like the answer's just out of reach, something simple. Wonder if Adobe Catalog works for .txt/Japanese... or perhaps there's something like Devonthink for Windows...

EDIT: Guess I can make do with searching via MS Word (File-->Search), even though I then must click the results to open in Word and Find the search terms in question. Good enough for now.

Fillanzea Wrote:Kirino Natsuo is not overly hard. I think she writes in a relatively conversational style. But although I haven't read more than a few pages of any of her books, I feel like mystery and suspense can be hard to read, as they tend to use some more specialized vocabulary.

On the other hand if you're reading a mystery then a level of comprehension sufficient to understand the plot is still an enjoyable read: the main point of the book is the plot, not the author's use of language. (I've recommended 赤川次郎 before for that kind of thing.)

Quote:If you want to read a light novel, I suggest staying away from historical, fantasy, and science fiction, just because they tend to have a lot of words that aren't connected to everyday life. And you get more of the culture in a book that takes place in modern Japan than one that takes place in medieval-Europe-with-magic, too. "Maria-sama ga miteru" is fairly easy. "Suzumiya Haruhi" has some surprisingly hard vocabulary in it, and the narrative voice feels a little odd to me.

I'd agree with all that (and have just picked up Maria-sama for a reread, coincidentally). I think the grammar in _Haruhi_ is also a little harder (more longwinded sentence structure, mostly).

Quote:Light novels aside, I think the easiest book I've read is "Kitchen" by Yoshimoto Banana, which is very short in addition to being easy to read.

Yep. That's where I started...

nest0r Wrote:Feels like the answer's just out of reach, something simple.

Put them all on a website and wait for google to find them :-)

For those interested in reading the Kino no Tabi light novels, if you try to google something like "kino no tabi raw light novels", you MIGHT find something interesting...... ;-)

Pfft, get with the program chamcham, between raseru's 'my study method' thread and this one, I think we got it covered. ;p

Updated the random string of letters and numbers from my first post, as they didn't seem random enough. So, I tried another totally innocent combination that you definitely shouldn't be suspicious of: http://snipurl.com/0HGQZSRO - Do not attempt to look closely at this link by reading the second paragraph of the initial post.

Fillanzea Wrote:Nanakamado hates boys, except for her childhood best friend Yukikaze.
Everyone says that they look alike. Everyone suspects that Nanakamado's promiscuous mother slept with Yukikaze's father.

Am I the only one that thinks this doesn't make any sense?

danieldesu Wrote:

Fillanzea Wrote:Nanakamado hates boys, except for her childhood best friend Yukikaze.
Everyone says that they look alike. Everyone suspects that Nanakamado's promiscuous mother slept with Yukikaze's father.

Am I the only one that thinks this doesn't make any sense?

To hopefully get it to make more sense: Nanakamado's mother slept around a LOT, and then got pregnant with Nanakamado. Because she slept around a lot, she doesn't know who Nanakamado's biological father is, but there's a strong possibility that Yukikaze's father is also Nanakamado's father. (And no one talks about this.)

Just letting you know that there was a virus detected in a hypothetical third batch of "things".

@thekonfuzed

Not on my computer. I think you must have had a false positive, though I'm not sure how, given it's all basically txt/jpg, kind of hard to screw that up. ^_^ Theoretically speaking of course, about imaginary files that I don't know what you're talking about, and wouldn't have on my PC even if I did.

Fillanzea Wrote:

danieldesu Wrote:

Fillanzea Wrote:Nanakamado hates boys, except for her childhood best friend Yukikaze.
Everyone says that they look alike. Everyone suspects that Nanakamado's promiscuous mother slept with Yukikaze's father.

Am I the only one that thinks this doesn't make any sense?

To hopefully get it to make more sense: Nanakamado's mother slept around a LOT, and then got pregnant with Nanakamado. Because she slept around a lot, she doesn't know who Nanakamado's biological father is, but there's a strong possibility that Yukikaze's father is also Nanakamado's father. (And no one talks about this.)

So does everyone know that they have the same mother? That's kinda hard to hide. Not knowing who the father is would only make it a problem of whether they are half or full siblings.

yukamina Wrote:

Fillanzea Wrote:

danieldesu Wrote:Am I the only one that thinks this doesn't make any sense?

To hopefully get it to make more sense: Nanakamado's mother slept around a LOT, and then got pregnant with Nanakamado. Because she slept around a lot, she doesn't know who Nanakamado's biological father is, but there's a strong possibility that Yukikaze's father is also Nanakamado's father. (And no one talks about this.)

So does everyone know that they have the same mother? That's kinda hard to hide. Not knowing who the father is would only make it a problem of whether they are half or full siblings.

No, they have different mothers.

So it's a problem of whether they're unrelated or half siblings.

Fillanzea Wrote:

yukamina Wrote:So does everyone know that they have the same mother? That's kinda hard to hide. Not knowing who the father is would only make it a problem of whether they are half or full siblings.

No, they have different mothers.

So it's a problem of whether they're unrelated or half siblings.

Oh I get it now! I was thinking along the lines of the scene from "Mafia" when Christina Applegate sees her son for the first time and says "I'm a mother!?!"

Oh and something that just occurred to me because I'm slow is that one can check the fidelity of many of the novel scans with amazon.co.jp's 'search inside' or perhaps Google Books (but I don't think there's much on the .jp version). I haven't seen any light novels with Amazon previews though. Then again, there's plenty of image scans elsewhere... I'm 99% sure 99% of the books are 99% accurate, however.

I mean, the novel scans that are artifacts in this alternate reality game I'm playing where you're trying to stop pirates but you have to prove the books are scans first. I'm not even really playing it, I'm theorizing that I'm playing it. Also, I don't know what you're talking about.

thekonfuzed Wrote:Just letting you know that there was a virus detected in a hypothetical third batch of "things".

Funny, I had a dream last night where that exact same thing happened. Three times. Apparently, a villain named Otsuichi was to blame. He rode in on a wooden horse from ancient myth. My friend McAfee was the one who discovered him. As a result, my other friend Winny Reginald Arfland (aka WinRAR) was not able to open the gates. Unfortunately,
I woke up just as said issue was being resolved. Now, I can't for the life of me figure out the solution.

Ahha! Thanks for the added detail. It's smoopy.exe isn't it? I don't think that's a trojan, that's some kind of reader or something. You can Google for more about it. I meant to delete it from the archive because .exes creep me out.

AVG is what I use, it doesn't give false positives like that. (Actually it recently told me Combofix was a trojan or something, rather annoying.)

http://site-clue.statice.jp/software/help/smoopy/

Here's the results from Jotti's online scan: http://virusscan.jotti.org/en-gb/scanres...f3ced394e4

Yep, looks like that's the cause then. I guess McAfee's a little overzealous, but better safe than sorry I guess. Shouldn't be too hard to work around now that I know it's not a virus. Thanks a lot for looking into it.

whitefox Wrote:Yep, looks like that's the cause then. I guess McAfee's a little overzealous, but better safe than sorry I guess. Shouldn't be too hard to work around now that I know it's not a virus. Thanks a lot for looking into it.

http://snipurl.com/0qev2aow (same deal as previous innocent links ;p)

Awesome, thanks

Oh and something I should mention, one of my favourite novels is Kaori Ekuni's 'Twinkle Twinkle': http://www.vertical-inc.com/books/twinkle.html ... I've never read it in Japanese, but it's quite popular: http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%81%8D%E3%82%...4101339112

ruiner Wrote:Oh and something I should mention, one of my favourite novels is Kaori Ekuni's 'Twinkle Twinkle': http://www.vertical-inc.com/books/twinkle.html ... I've never read it in Japanese, but it's quite popular: http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%81%8D%E3%82%...4101339112

Oh cool, thanks for the book recommendation, I'll definitely check it out.

Yeah, Vertical Inc. was my first introduction to contemporary Japanese lit, earlier in the decade (or last decade, whatever). They were life-savers at the time, but since then of course, many things have changed.