Today’s deck is the Vikings Tarot.
What stood out to me is the fact that it’s hardcore viking stuff instead of just the easy ones. What I mean is that it’s not just vikings drinking beer and stuff but there’s an effort to depict culture and beliefs.
For today’s reading… oh my God, the queen with the black cat! Not in this deck, but like, traditionally.
As I’ve mentioned before, the Queen of Wands is corageous and strong, she’s the kind of woman that can and will beat the shit out of you with a big stick. Reversed, that energy is projected inwards into self-confidence.
Between that, the King of Cups and a Reversed Knight of Wands, the message it’s trying to send is kinda clear: “Your path to self-confidence is going well, just remember to keep your emotions in check and keep an eye on your pent up energy”.
That last bit is a reminder that came at the right time. Today was one of those days where I want to stay home but also go out at the same time so I need to make sure my impetus isn’t stronger than my body.
Sidenote, I love it when the boxes do this. The problem is that if they use the regular kind of flap, then you slide the cards in there’s always a couple that get pushed upwards with it.
Small detail, but the devil is in them after all.
So today I woke up with a song stuck in my head. I spent like two hours trying to remember any detail in the song that reminded me what it was at all and eventually I realized what I was thinking about.
In case the video embed breaks for whatever reason, I was thinking of the opening for Go-Q-Chōji Ikkiman.
Looking up this anime was a rabbit hole and a half. For starters it was a short anime made in order to capitalize on the sudden popularity boom of baseball in Japan after the Hanshin Tigers won the nationals in 1985.
The Hanshin Tigers didn’t win another national tournament until last year and many think the team was jinxed when fans threw a statue of Colonel Sanders from the Dotonbori KFC into the river.
Sidenote, there’s stories like those and when KFC made a game it was a cheap dating sim with Colonel Sanders. Absolutely lazy.
This anime, by the way, is from 1986 and you can definitely tell from how Ikki is the quintessential 80s anime boy.
Now, I was looking to see if there were any video releases of it (there’s youtube uploads but that’s it) and I found this post from 2013 confirming there’s none.
There is, however, an after-the-fact manga adaptation illustrated by KAZUKI TAKAHASHI.
AS IN YUGIOH CREATOR KAZUKI TAKAHASHI.
It was apparently his debut too? you can TELL it’s him from this panel alone honestly.
As for the song, according to that post it was composed by the same person that made Kinnikuman Go Fight! and you can also TELL it’s him.
As a friend put it, “it’s a JAM Project song from before JAM Project”.
Satisfied with this hole I fell into, I went out to send back the mysterious package I mentioned a couple of days ago… and that’s when I found out that today was a holiday. Culture Day to be precise.
Actually, to be MORE precise, Culture Day was on the 3rd but in Japan if holidays fall on a Sunday they’re pushed to the following Monday.
In hindsight I should’ve known, because when long weekends happen the official Super Sentai account on twitter posts this:
In case you don’t get the joke, it’s the ICONIC (and funky) intro to Dairanger. Just replace TENSHIN DAAAA with RENKYUU DAAAA.
Yeah I could only find a bass cover. Honestly, the fact the Ikkiman opening is actually still online as of this writing shows how small of a production that was.
I took the chance on the way back to make a chiropractor appointment after God knows how long. About time too, since I’ve been feeling the edge of my left foot near the pinky in pain which means there’s something weird again with how I balance my weight.
…I haven’t gotten my insurance card ever since getting my Visa now that I think about it, I might need to go solve that this week… again.
Anyway, I decided to leave the box back home and I bought some pretzels on the way back. For context, I live a couple of blocks away from this big import shop for alcohol and they predictably have some import snacks too, including Boehli pretzels.
I went back out afterwards to grab some chahan and on the way I saw a guy park his car and then take out a basket to wash his clothes on a nearby coin laundry.
I don’t know why, but the idea of a guy with a car but no washing machine was very curious to me. There’s obviously plenty of reasons it would happen but it’s just not the way I would approach priorities.
All the while walking around I started this book called Braving Britannia, a book about player stories from Ultima Online. I started it sliiiiiiiiightly wary because one of those things I’m allergic to is MMO purists that look down upon things like dungeon queues and such and a book about that game feels like it might be prone to that.
I love virtual worlds, but I love them the way I love the real world, as a place where I watch people be, and do things at my own pace. And there’s a certain breed of Guy that looks down upon solo players like me insisting on MMOs needing to be social experiences.
The irony is that what they want is tantamount to a theme park where everyone is expected to participate in the rides while also deriding “theme park-style MMOs”.
Inconsequential opinions about MMOs aside though, I’ve been really pleased so far to see that the book uses its framing of player stories to paint a picture of what’s a very pivotal MMO. In fact, it’s giving me information that I don’t think I would’ve gotten otherwise.
The most interesting bit so far is also the most obvious. Ultima Online was BIG in Japan. And I say it’s obvious because Ultima is huge in this country, look no further than the Ultima 3 ad with Richard Garriot himself.
Man, when people say they hate ads what they mean is that they hate whatever spam ads litter the internet nowadays. Who isn’t gonna hate the idea of advertising when their frame of reference is YouTubers improvising 2 minute infomercials instead of short 15-30 second jingles that stick with you?
I’m awfully opinionated today… ANYWAY…
Why do I bring up the Ultima Online being popular thing? Because with that context and hearing about everything players could do in the game, the one thing I kept remembering was Sword Art Online.
My experience with SAO is limited to watching the first season out of curiosity and reading the first volume of the novel beforehand. And the way the game in the novel is described has all the tells of Ultima’s brand of MMO rather than anything that came after.
For context: Even though SAO exploded in popularity in the early 2010s, it actually started as a self-published novel by Reki Kawahara in 2002.
You know what else came out in 2002? The .hack// games.
Ultima Online released in Europe, Japan, and South Korea in 1999. The timeline of it being so popular and causing two stories about being trapped in an MMO that’s effectively a different dimension in the aftermath lines up all too well.
I don’t have definitive proof, but it’s also like how I don’t have definitive proof that TYPE-MOON from Kara no Kyoukai onwards is just Kinoko Nasu’s homebrew campaign of Mage: The Ascension and yet there’s too much circumstantial evidence that it might be the case.
Back to the book, and further alleviating my concerns that the book is just a long nostalgia trip for the aforementioned Type Of Guy, one of the stories is actually about someone that was about to quit the game because on release it was PVP-enabled by default and he hated he couldn’t explore wherever he wanted.
(Free-for-all PVP is one of those things that really gets the aforementioned Breed of Guy salivating)
My only complaint so far is that whoever is reading the audiobook decided to give a weird accent to a tale by a French player. It’s extra annoying because the tale is of how she created a Carmelite nun convent inside the game because she couldn’t become a nun after having a child. And all I can think is “WHY NOW OF ALL TIMES TO PUT ON AN ACCENT?????”
Ultima is one of those weird cases where the series is so important for whole genres plural and yet the literature and content talking about it is so scant.
I would sacrifice 500 videos about Mario for 10 pages of proper Ultima documentation. And then repeat until I have a satisfactory 300 page volume. Even then there would still be way too many Mario Galaxy and TTYD essays around afterwards.
…okay no, seriously, why am I so opinionated today? Though it IS my natural state of being so maybe it’s a sign of healing…
Anyway, while all of this is happening I was walking around paying bills and buying soap. I also bought a pack of Q-tips because the one I had just… exploded and got all over the ground.
Calling back to today’s reading I ended up packing more books into containers to burn off some excess energy. I was initially worried because of the usual AHDH object permanence worries, but I can, for example, look up and see that a container has all the Sukeban Deka volumes, or 20th Century Boys. And that frees space up for allthe artbooks I need to find a place for.
I also might’ve gotten a camera as a side body on a whim, but that’s a story for when I’m more awake.