Today’s deck is Pegacon Illustration Tarot Card Loving or Destroing.
The illustrations are lovely. They do seem to be more focused on showing hot people than conveying the card-specific meaning but I respect wanting to show hot people.
Today’s reading is a pat on the back related to my eternal, perennial social anxieties. They’re nothing new, but they do flare up from time to time.
Weather today is Ass.
It will supposedly get better later but Holy Fuck. And I had to go to Japanese lesson Like That no less. But that I did, it was a nice session as usual. Whenever I have to be more chatty because I’m being an ad-hoc translator it makes me appreciate the lessons more than usual.
After returning the weather actually cleared up so we were able to move along with our original assuming-weather-stops-being-ass plan of taking pics by Tenmabashi.
In a nice turn of events, the usual festival that happens in the area was in full force. However, it only took a few steps for us to go like “yeah we should partake in The Food”.
Festival/Beach Yakisoba is its own kind of special and never gets old.
We went all the way until the other bashi in Tenmabashi and crossed to the other side of the river where the volume of people was less.
While taking in the sights I brought up how tricky it is to get an angle where Osaka Castle shows up, and that planted the seed in my mind in such a way that when were on the other side I saw the potential on a spot by the bridge.
Dahlia came first. E suggested using an LED light for accent color. I was VERY skeptical of the idea because my last experience with that sort of thing wasn’t good… but in this case it’s adding color instead of making the one and only source of light. And they really added to things very nicely.
This was the experiment that made me skeptic back in 2024 by the way.
Anyway, we continued and it’s worth noting that the trees in this area were more populated than in the festival area, so it’s safe to assume the others were being shaken for the sake of taking pics with a shower of petals.
It wasn’t long before we found a spot for Poppy and it was real good because if the experiment with the Sakura in the background didn’t pan out, I could just shift to the right and she’d have the festival across the river as a backdrop. But as you can tell the experiment worked.
We returned early and satisfied, so we decided to make a couple of prints… and little did we expect that the next TWO HOURS would go in trying to solve why the prints were weird.
For starters they were tilted. E’s prints moreso than mine. Turns out the amount of tilting was related to the fact that E sent the prints on standard quality, which meant the inkjets moved faster, which meant it reached the specific wobbling point where it became a problem.
But after realizing this, not only did the tilting remain, but now there was some odd banding near the bottom of the prints. Very consistent banding too, always at about the same area, with some prints outright smudging.
I ran every single maintenence function the printer had and after God Knows How Many Attempts an idea pops up.
…what if it’s the paper?
So I crack open a new pack of photo paper and oh would you look at that no banding, no smudging, no tilting, perfect prints it was the paper fuck me it’s been two hours.
Printers have this magic quality where even if you win against one it doesn’t feel like victory…