ばか！バカ！　馬鹿ー月！

ShadowZeroHeart wrote:That is moe style, SE that is... The female characters are all loli-looking(kinda) and some interactions are clearly unrealistic, though i still like to read it.

Doraneko wrote:

ShadowZeroHeart wrote:That is moe style, SE that is... The female characters are all loli-looking(kinda) and some interactions are clearly unrealistic, though i still like to read it.

Ugh if you need to be that precise, I think we can as well exclude most light novels from the recent 10 years .

At least I don't see comedy moments between young working adults of opposite sexes that are at-times unrealistic, like those in SE, as distinctively moe or in any way different from those that I see everyday in American soap dramas.

Of course the safest way is to stick to hardcore SF that are 100% free of light-hearted moments and have no illustrations at all (whether it is still a light novel is another question), but that still beats the no fantasy requirement too if we take everything so literally.

Maybe it goes back to my original point that

So any good suggestion from you?

And BOT, how do you think of my views towards the blog in my previous post?

YoakeNoHikari wrote:I liked reading the blog updates, thank you!

Title: You can be one! Systems Engineer
Subtitle: In Two Weeks, Understood? SE Introduction

Living an ordinary life is hard.

Sakurazaka Kouhei was told that from the day he was born, to where he hated hearing it.

He understood. He really did.

Even if you aren’t aiming to be a rock star, nor a formula one racer, nor to push on down the road to be a top athlete.

Ordinary life is very painful, even torture.

High school entrance exams were a nightmare.

College entrance exams were hell.

In the complicated world of human relations in school, even to maintain one’s position required great effort. You had to be stronger even than iron.

It was the same even after he luckily succeeded in getting into his first choice of college. Starting to live alone in Tokyo, the stormy seas of society unforgivingly advanced on him.

Knowing the heaviness of money from a part-time job at a convenience store, catching a glimpse of the layers of society in the club’s pecking order, and being taught lessons about the greatness of his mother by his failures in the kitchen. Rent, energy, water, anything and everything about living cost, and it was worrisome.

Living an ordinary life is hard---

Kouhei understood that reality in his bones.

And yet.

And yet however.


Finding, ordinary, employment, though, he never thought it would be so hard.


February of his third college year, when he had been rejected by his first employment interview, Kouhei thought “That wasn’t too different from my interview for a part-time job”, and shrugged it off casually.

As March rolled around, the number of rejections had passed ten, and for the first time he started thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to come up with a backup plan.

As April came in, and the final stage of getting his first job approached, he began to get scared of being out of cell-phone range. A recruiter might try to call in that moment he was in a place with no signal. Because his phone didn’t connect, he would be removed from a list of people to be interviewed. ---So he thought, and he couldn’t feel safe without checking his cell-phone every few minutes.

May.

The time for completion of the first phase of obtaining employment with major companies.

Kouhei’s count of tentative offers, of course, was still zero.

The recession, cutbacks in hiring, adjustments of employment. Well, even if his own college said he’d done fairly well attending there, in the end, he said “I’ll manage somehow or other” negligently, in conceit. Whether because of club activities or something else, he was a little delayed in starting his job hunt, compared to the rest.

There were probably several reasons. Perhaps if organized himself, he might be able to deal with the problems one by one. ---And yet from a faltering start, Kouhei’s heart became impatient, and gradually he strayed from his hunt for a job.

Not having much practical knowledge of the business world, he depended on urban legends about sure-fire ways to win in interviews, and in clumsiest ways tried to discover what it was the interviewers wanted to hear.

But, bluffing that way could not be expected to turn out well, and when June arrived, Kouhei’s count of tentative job offers was still zero.

Being unable to become a salaryman, feeling this desperate, was unexpected. He felt as if his entire humanity was being negated, his so-called existence entirely rejected.

One step ahead of him, possessing job offers, his fellow college students were enjoying what time in school remained to them. Kouhei lost his cool, and could not understand what in the world was different between himself and them. Still not understanding, like a zombie almost, he kept waiting for his cell-phone to ring.

July---

The rainy season starting, the time of summer heat slowly came in.

Calling from home, his parents got ahold of him.

Since job hunting didn’t look good--- if there weren’t any job openings in Tokyo, then come back home, they said.

There was just room in Kouhei’s home, a well established small business, for him to work. Watched over by his strict father, working steadily, the son would probably not be allowed to do such things as repeat a year’s studies.

Either find a job, or return home to take over the family business.

Being pushed to where he had to make a choice, he trusted in his last resort. He accessed the fall employment section of a job search site.

And then, the day came when July, too, was running out.

He found a job offer.

Suruga Systems Corporation.

He’d never heard of the place. It was in the system development business, data processing. With about thirty employees, it was a small company established some years ago.

larethian wrote:Authors of blog posts, please check the comments to your post entries. I've found several spam and trash posts. I've 'deleted' those replies to my post, but I can't do that for the rest.