Today’s deck is the Jojo Tarot.
I have a different Jojo deck but it was just physical replicas of the cards from part 3. This one is a regular deck with some Jojo characters used in the imagery. Super cool.
Today’s reading is basically the card representation of that thing where I’m unmedicated and end up walking in circles for a while.
The anniversary celebrations popped off with the merch announcements but LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE RABBIT HOLE I FELL IN TODAY.
I’ve mentioned a few times here that one of my most formative experiences when it comes to Japanese media was a magazine called Loading.
The way the story goes is that I was like 7 or something like that and during a trip to the beach we stopped by a gas station and they had this Games magazine with a disc on it.
Now, I was able to read fluently by then (there’s a story where I started stuttering when reading and my mom realized I was just reading how everyone else in the class read) but there’s not much one can do reading when the words feel alien.
The magazine was in Spanish, mind you, it was just dense. But it had things that stuck with me that I’ll get to in a bit. The disc had a more direct impact though.
I might have been able to parse the articles but I was able to enjoy the pretty pictures of Tokimemo 1 merch, Twin Bee RPG’s opening as a crusty video file, Dancing Blade, and so on.
Relevantly, the magazine came to mind because I decided to flashbang a friend with the TwinBee lore. So I went looking for the magazine online.
It turned out to be a very short-lived magazine that went on from 1999 to 2000 and shockingly someone uploaded all the volumes to the internet archive.
So I decided to look at each one.
I get to the volume with a TwinBee cover and I’m like “I suspect this is the one”.
It was.
Let me tell you the exact moment I realized it was.
This page.
Like I said, my eyes glazed over the small print, but I remember spending minutes at a time just looking at the portraits and imagining what each character might be like.
From there, like something rote memorized, the next few pages flooded back to me. “Biohazard Gun Survivor”, “Super Robot Taisen”, “Rakugaki Showtime”, the Neo Geo page, Majora’s Mask still being called Mask of Mujula, some pikachu game, a bunch of pages with konami stuff, the pages with a bunch of cool megaman manga that’s seared into my brain, fucking Double Cast, Vampire Hunter D…
I cannot stress how formative this singular magazine was for me, it’s a fucking nexus point of who I am right now. For years to come the names of all those things would return to me and lead me through rabbit holes that shaped my tastes.
I was legitimately dizzy after going through it, I got a headache from so much information coming back to me at once.
I did check the rest of the volumes of the magazine and I gotta say that the whole thing feels extra fortuitous because while I wouldn’t be caught saying the magazine was bad (it was what it was and it was of its time), the way that THAT specific volume is so laser focused on a single topic made it feel more impactful, I guess.
There’s two extra anecdotes about the magazine that come to mind.
The first is that while most of my magazine collection back in Venezuela was in relatively fine state (if severely dog-eared)m this specific magazine was used by my grandpa to cover the top of the cage of one of his birds.
Loved my grandpa, loved his birds, but this detail always made a me a bit sad years later.
The other vague memory was that the magazine didn’t have a cover after a while. This wasn’t unheard of because y’know, dumb kid and all that…
…but also the back cover had Cloud x Tifa smut right there so maybe my parents tore it off, dunno, not gonna ask.