Jenn Dolari

Veor and Serafina The Warrior Princess and the Barbaric King, ch.12 p.13

I’ve been using the Kodansha manga app on my iPad to read K-9: Public Security Bureau, Division 9, which is not available in print in North America. Kodansha makes an English translation version available only in their app – and they trickle release one chapter a week. It could be that this “simulpub” is actually showing the latest releases as they happen.

This is not a cheap thing, as each chapter costs $1 to “buy.” Sometimes chapters are released for free – six out of the 53 chapters were free – even so, I’ve sunk a fair amount of change into this series. I guess I don’t really mind too much. Anime/manga are my primary vice – and is maybe a little cheaper than smoking, drugs, or gambling. A little.

I don’t completely understand the Kodansha app. They give readers something called a Premium Ticket – I guess based on one’s purchases or time in the app. A Premium Ticket allows you to “rent” a chapter for three days. (UPDATE: It seems I get a random number of Premium Tickets given to me every time I “log in.” Thursday morning upon opening the app I got 15 Premium Tickets which expire May 1.)

Yesterday, randomly I happened to see that I had an accumulation of around 30 Premium Tickets – half of which would expire today (Wednesday) and half would expire tomorrow. I hadn’t been paying attention, so I have no idea how or when I made this accumulation – nor how many tickets I might have earned and then let expire. But I thought I should try to use them. They were free and going away soon, so why not?

The thing is, I’d want to use them on a series that would be interesting – but not so good that it’s something I want permanently in my library. This is a tricky tightrope. After looking around, I settled on The Warrior Princess and the Barbaric King. It’s an anime series that I’m currently watching, and it’s just the right amount of fluffy fun, romance, fantasy world-building, and battles. Mostly Harmless.

There is an obvious undeclared “surprise” regarding male protagonist Veor’s mom, and I was wondering how long it was going to take for the anime to make the reveal. I had two days (today and tomorrow) to zip through the manga and find out. I did a binge read, consuming 30+ tickets plus three free chapters – and getting all the way through chapter 20. Because there are 48 pages in a chapter, Kodansha broke the chapters in half and charged a ticket (or $1) for half-chapters.

There currently are 61 chapters published, so I could be doing this for a long time. Seven Seas Entertainment has published 7 of the 11 tankoubon in North America, but I’m not so smitten with the series that I need the printed volumes in my library. I’m just going to continue to read this series for free.

Even though I had a bunch of tasks on my to do list today, I blew off the big ones and took a big timeout to read the manga. I do allow myself to goof off once in a while in my retirement. That’s the advantage of being one’s own boss.

For the duration of the Library Project, Shizu has been exiled to the driveway, while the garage served as staging / storage area for inbound and outbound stuff. Even as the library was completed, things that used to be in the dining room, living room, home office, and family room ended up in the garage as there was no longer a place for them in the house. I had to do a major reorganization / cleanup of the garage to restore the space needed to bring Shizu back.

( The Garage )

Quite unusual... I haven’t posted for 10 days – and in the not-quite-24 years this blog has been in existence, I’ve averaged more than one blog post a day.

In conjunction, I haven’t taken any photos, either, so there aren’t any photography posts. Mainly, I’ve had my head down, working on sorting and organizing stuff in the garage – and also tending to issues in the rest of the house. There have been some setbacks, and I’m not sure I’ll hit my target goal of having the house fully operational by the end of the month. Seems like every day I get sidetracked onto something else to fix.

We’ve had some sunny days here in Oregon – ideal for opening the garage door and working in the garage. Rain came back for a couple of days, but the forecast is for sunny (or non-rainy) weather for the next seven days, with high temperatures in the mid-to-upper 60’s °F. Perfect. I am hoping to get Shizu back into the garage next week. She’s been in exile for more than seven months.

Anyway, I’m still here – just very focused on the house. I’ll have a better update at the end of the month – or whenever the final piece falls into place. I really need to get things wrapped up in April, as May is going to be a busy month.