Expectations, Exhilaration, and Exotic Particles (Tadoku 2011, Round 2 Postmortem)

Another round of the 2011 Tadoku contest has come to its close (almost half a month ago…), and–once again–looking back at the pile of ash my poor eyes became, I’m wondering just how far off my predictions will be next round.

Before the contest started, I said I would be happy earning a similar rank as I did in the first round (fourth place) or about the same number of pages (3000-ish). The idea was, since the second round happened to fall on my last month of undergraduate studies, I’d be swamped with work and busy as all hell.

Well, I got that much right.

The last month of classes was even crazier than I imagined, culminating in a 5.5 hour presentation-athon worth 15% of my grade in a class I wish I never took.

But that’s as far as I was able to meet my expectations. The problems started cropping up around the eighth of the month, when I had my first of eight Steins;Gate marathons, netting me between 200 and 500 pages each. I finished Steins;Gate on April 22, having put in just over 100 hours. I also blew past my Round 1 score of 3042 that day, jumping from 2933 to 3236 pages. First expectation shattered.

Near the middle of my Steins;Gate spree, when the pages were rolling in fast and easy (950 pages in three days: 180, 504, and 267), I was hanging around in first/second place–something I hadn’t done since the original contest. Second expectation shattered.

Unfortunately, school did catch up with me, and I slowed down significantly the week after I finished Steins;Gate, pulling in an average of 37 pages per day and falling back down into fourth place–where I finished. I ended the contest with a bang, as I like to, with 327 pages, mostly from 逆転検事２, my first Ace Attorney game in Japanese.

All in all, I read a surprising 3827.9527 pages, just shy of my adjusted mid-contest goal of 4000.

And here’s a quick summary of what I read (red are things I hoped for and didn’t get to):

Games
- Steins;Gate (PC)
- 逆転検事２ (NDS)
- コープスパーティ (PSP)
Manga
- 涼風 (v. 6)
- 涼風 (v. 7-9)
- ソウルイーター (v. 16-19)
- Liar Game (v. 9-10)
- Deadman Wonderland (v. 1-2)
- バクマン。 (Weekly)
- One Piece (Weekly)
- エニグマ (Weekly)
- 悪の華
Light Novels
- クビツリハイスクール
- 文学少女 (Didn’t even touch these.)
Anime

Last Exile (eps. 5-12)

And then there were the miscellaneous websites and other silliness bantered about Twitter by the other contestants.

All in all, I had a hell of a good time. I did way more than I expected, and I made better use of my time in April than I have since May stopped by. I think I’ll quit droning here, with just a couple more comments:

Read Steins;Gate. Seriously. It’s outstanding–one of the most interesting, most detailed, best written science fiction stories I’ve read, ever.
I’m still working on Mangle! I’ve got a half-dozen ideas written down to make converting manga for e-readers even more efficient.
Time for some Deadman Wonderland.