Today’s deck is Luna’s Light Angel Tarot.
See? They’re a set. As such my criticisms from last time are about the same here: Too many boys.
Today’s reading says “being yourself is the key to stop feeling left out”.. It’s an interesting reading because I remember growing up I had this sense of “I’d give up being ‘smart’ or whatever if it means connecting better with others”. I’ve gotten better about it but that kid is still somewhere in there.
Anyway, it’s bookshelf day! But first I gotta go buy some trash bags. I haven’t ran out of them but it’d be nice to have surplus stock.
So I went to the supermarket, then I went to the hardware store and bought some bubblewrap, finally I decided to go to McDonald’s since by my estimates I was about to get hungry (remember that I’m on ADHD meds so apetite suppression means hunger only happens when I’m famished).
So I’m back at my place, I went through the daily routine and I started unpacking the bookshelf. That’s honestly the most cumbersome step for me because of all the packing stuff you8 gotta deal with, you end up with two trash bags full of styrofoam and paper before you even build anything.
…wait, trash bags?
I couldn’t find my screwdrivers and I wasn’t really in the mood to turn the house upside down just for that so I went to Family Mart and got a screwdriver set there.
Yes, that’s something you can do, go out at 1AM and buy scredrivers. I love it.
I’ve built quite a few types of bookshelf in my time here, varieties too: Simple one-column ones, simple two-column ones, one-columns of fixed tiers, display showcases for figures, the kind where you have a sliding column in front, the kind that ROTATES…
Compared to all of those, this one was an easy but long build. A single bookshelf can take me half an hour after the parts are out of the box (in no small part because I’ve built enough that I don’t have to check the instructions… or rather I do and go “ah one of these, gotcha”) but thise one took me easily over two hours. The caveat is that I didn’t feel completely exhausted afterwards because there’s no lifting of half a shelf to the top another one.
Then again, those are cases where the box says “use to people to build this” AND I’VE PROVED THEM WRONG EVERY SINGLE TIME.
Please use two people, I’m a shockingly reckless dumbass that doesn’t think things through so I’m not to be taken as an example.
So anyway! It’s built and the form factor is about what I expected from the calculations I pulled (thinking things through has good results! shocking…). BAsically there’s two narrow columns and one big column. The narrow one can house manga up to…
Actually, let me go on a quick tangent.
These are the book sizes you’re gonna encounter in Japan 99% of the time.
From left to right we have:
A6: Also known as Bunko (文庫), it’s the size that novels and Light Novel paperbacks come in. It’s also the size used for certain fancier rereleases of completed Manga, I have a full set of Saint Seiya in this size for example.
小B6: Literally “small B6”, I call it “small manga”, it’s the size that Shonen Jump and weekly magazines use for their compiled volumes.
B6: What I call “Medium Manga”, you see this mainly in monthly manga.
A5: This one I call “Big Manga” and tends to be more… premium manga, I guess you could say? Manga Time Kirara releases things in this format for example. Some rereleases are in this one (I have a DNAngel and Sailor Moon reprint in this size). You see this size most often with porn manga compilations (particularly those by specific authors) and some general interest books like game guides and travel guides. SOME doujinshi comics come in this size.
B5: I call it “Small Doujin” by sheer volume, but believe it or not this is also the size for things like Shonen Jump’s weekly magazine (as opposed to the compiled volumes). I’d argue this is gonna be the second-most common size in your bookshelf if you collect manga.
A4: Finally we have what I call “Big doujin”. Plenty of artbooks come in this size and it’s my personal metric for the minimum of how big a bookshelf’s space should be. It always feels bigger than the A4 paper I gotta use every day for some reason.
By the way, did you know that the sizes are called that based on how many times you gotta fold a 0 in half to get to it? So A4 paper is what you get when you fold an A0 paper in half 4 times. It’s funny that you don’t have A7 since you can only fold something in half effectively up to 7 times.
So anyways, back to the main topic and with the context in mind…
The small columns can house upt to B6 comfortably and then A5 with a little bit of paper coming off the border, but that’s not as much of a problem given that the columns don’t seal tightly (by necessity if nothing else). Meanwhile the big column can house A4 no problem and by extension things like TTRPG sourcebooks and Warhammer codices.
There’s gonna be a few outliers, like for example Black Library hardbacks and special editions are too big for the small ones and too small for the big ones. But I suspect I can put all the outliers in a different format.
Anwyay, here’s a quick lightning round of the manga I sorted through today.
Winvurga is going into the sale box. I really like this manga on the principle of creativity because to be honest you don’t see its brand of sex and violence and sexual violence nowadays in regular manga but it’s not really something I can stomach.
Okusan isn’t going into the sales box but it’s going into a container because it ended and I like having it around but there’s less need to have it on had.
Yeah, Okusan ended, after 15 years.
Mieruko-chan is going into the sales box. I like ghost and supernatural stories but to be honest this one quickly fell into the territory of “there is one joke” and not even adding much in the process.
Honestly the anime might’ve just soured me on it.
This one is about a guy getting help from a succubus and doing naughty things. I liked one girl in volume 2 and not much else.
This one is an Oneeshota fantasy manga, it didn’t do much for me though it’s not BAD. Funnily enough they made an end-of-volume chapter with the genders reversed and I thought “I would read this one though”.
Isekai Red has an anime so there’s less to explain. I like it but I don’t “take space in my bookshelf” like, more “I’ll get it digitally” like.
It’s funny that I talk about the oneeshota fantasy not doing it for me when I have quite a bit of the Maiddragon spin offs.
This one is another “I like it but not enough to take space in my bookshelf”.
Rozen Garten Saga is one I’d put in the same category as Winvurga in the sense that you don’t see that level of sex and violence in manga that often, but this one is more comedic in tone.
I’m sure you’ve all seen this doctor’s face at least once. This is the all-ages version which is FINE but I’ll stick with the no-ages version.
Those were the highlights I felt worth pointing out. There’s things like all the Shaman King spin-offs, thematic compilations, the volumes of Nichijou, Sleepy Barmaid, but those are more in the “yeah I like them” territory where I either don’t have much to say or need dedicated time to talk about them.
The fight will continue tomorrow.