I almost missed it, so I thought some people might appreciate being reminded/told that the first experimental two week round of the Read More or Die contest started yesterday. It's surprisingly motivating, and completely beginner friendly, so I'd recommend everyone give it a try.

http://readmod.wordpress.com/

I'm really pleased to see how much reading speed has improved in just the two months since the last contest. That alone was worth joining for.

Thanks for that link! I've just signed up.

This is really great timing since I have the next three days off and the weather is just perfect for sitting outside with something to read.

My goal is simply not to finish last I'm still at beginner level and I have to look up quite a few things to make sense of anything but this is great motivation to put all my English and German books aside for two weeks and focus on reading something in Japanese instead.

Great! And welcome to the site!

You'll have no trouble not finishing last. I think someone read half page in the month long round. XD I like to focus on moving up a place and then holding on to it.

Any chance you can alert us here when the next round starts? I'm too busy the next few weeks to challenge myself to much reading but I'd love to try it later.
Thanks!

If I notice it i will, but I would have missed this one if Icecream hadn't mentioned it in another thread so don't rely on me.

at the bottom of the page on the blog, there's a "follow" thing. You can get every new post direct to your email, which is really helpful!!! That way you can't miss it, and since the only new posts are about the 多読 contest anyway, it's not annoying, either...

Thanks, IceCream. I don't know how I didn't notice that.

Will I could enter but 2 busy >< Hope there is another 2 week one soon. The month long contest is pretty long!

I signed up! I have some time at work in the next couple of weeks so maybe I can get some reading done. Actually, I want to finish ノルウェイの森 by the end of the month so this will motivate me to do so.

Also, I was surprised to find that I used to do twitter a bit. Apparently I wrote maybe 40 or so tweets back in the day? Why don't I remember this at all? I'm also following a buncha people.

Has anybody died yet?

This sounds really fun to try
Where can you sign up? (I tried looking for it on the blog...but..I can't seem to find it)

And, if you read visual novels... can you add that as well? (I guess you'd have to count the number of sentences since there's no option for VNs?)

To sign up, you just tweet "@tadokubot #register". You can add a target with #target as well.

About the visual novels, well, tweet @lordsilent, he's the one who runs it, or @tadokubot, and you should be able to get an answer. Sometimes he has clever ways of measuring stuff all worked out, like for news or web pages, you copy & paste into word and then divide the character count by 400 to get the number of pages - i don't think those instructions are on the post either, but it seems pretty accurate.

socks Wrote:This sounds really fun to try
Where can you sign up? (I tried looking for it on the blog...but..I can't seem to find it)

And, if you read visual novels... can you add that as well? (I guess you'd have to count the number of sentences since there's no option for VNs?)

I've never actually seen a VN, so I might be wrong, but isn't it pretty much just a game? On the rules page

http://readmod.wordpress.com/category/rules/

it says that 6 screens in a full screen game or 11 in a regular game count as one page. My imagined impression of VNs was that they're full screen games.

Some VNs have text over the whole screen, but often they just have a picture that takes up the whole screen and a text box at the bottom.

juniperpansy Wrote:Has anybody died yet?

Mostly the casualties are pretty light until the second week, which is when LordSilent culls the weaker members from the pack.

Thanks everyone
Thanks for pointing out the rules page, I completely missed that part! But 11 screens seems about fair, for the smaller textboxes.

Well, I made a twitter account So I'm going to try my hand at this registering thing...
And then I'll try to figure out whether you're supposed to send a weekly update or daily.
I have a lot of catching up to do though re: reading, as I'm already 4 days behind ><

IceCream, thanks for the tip

Tzadeck Wrote:

socks Wrote:This sounds really fun to try
Where can you sign up? (I tried looking for it on the blog...but..I can't seem to find it)

And, if you read visual novels... can you add that as well? (I guess you'd have to count the number of sentences since there's no option for VNs?)

I've never actually seen a VN, so I might be wrong, but isn't it pretty much just a game? On the rules page

http://readmod.wordpress.com/category/rules/

it says that 6 screens in a full screen game or 11 in a regular game count as one page. My imagined impression of VNs was that they're full screen games.

Most of the ones I've played online are full screen text games, but I've seen lots of others which aren't full screen text too. I guess it depends on the preferences of the VN maker.

socks Wrote:Thanks everyone
Thanks for pointing out the rules page, I completely missed that part! But 11 screens seems about fair, for the smaller textboxes.

Well, I made a twitter account So I'm going to try my hand at this registering thing...
And then I'll try to figure out whether you're supposed to send a weekly update or daily.
I have a lot of catching up to do though re: reading, as I'm already 4 days behind ><

IceCream, thanks for the tip

np you can send updates hourly if you feel like it, it doesn't matter how often in general.
I'd avoid doing them weekly though, since a.) your entry will be cancelled at some point in the contest if you don't appear to have read anything, and b.) it's simply harder to keep track of what you've read that way.

socks Wrote:Thanks everyone
...But 11 screens seems about fair, for the smaller textboxes.

Just wanted to chime in and say games value was changed before this year's contests started. The new game value is 20 screens per page.

lordsilent Wrote:

socks Wrote:Thanks everyone
...But 11 screens seems about fair, for the smaller textboxes.

Just wanted to chime in and say games value was changed before this year's contests started. The new game value is 20 screens per page.

Great. I seem to remember it was really unbalanced last time.

P.s. Thanks for organizing this great contest.