Today’s deck is the Traditional Manga Tarot.
Now, last time I checked “Traditional Manga” would be more like… Tezuka, Nagai, Yokoyama, something like that. Weird name aside, I reallly like this deck, enough even to put it in my pile of “decks to rotate through when I inevitably run out of new decks to try out”.
Today’s reading features all cards that fell off while shuffling by the way.
“Seething on past regrets regarding teamwork will only hold you back” they say today.
Sidenote, a funny thing about the Hanshin Tigers is that I come from Aragua in Venezuela and the team there is Los Tigres de Aragua (The Araguan Tigers) so even if I don’t really like baseball that much, that connection makes me giddy.
So the first thing I did today was take out the EIGHT ottomans I had on my balcony for the trash collection.
If you’re wondering why eight, it’s because when I first moved in, the idea of “chair that’s also storage” was so mind-blowing to me that I wanted them everywhere…. and like many things I eventually found better storage methods leading to the ottomans to lay folded doing nothing in my balcony since I don’t use it that much anyways.
The next thing to throw out is going to be a bunch of plastic storage containers I used in an effort to clear space inside. I gotta take out all the small doodads first though.
Right as I went back inside after lugging the eight pieces I see that apparently Miho Nakayama died at age 54. She’s an idol from the 80s that had a Famicom game about wooing a girl that would turn out to be Miho Nakayama by the end. That game is basically one of the pillars of dating sims and everything that poured out from them. RIP to a legend.
By the way, this is one of those moments where me living on the ground floor proves to be a feature instead of a detriment. Mind you, being on the ground floor is one of those things that made me enamored with this place to begin with.
Right afterwards I managed to write a new Forsaken Gaia chapter. It made me realize one interesting upside to having this sort of relaxed creative outlet: Warm up. There’s another job I need to complete and to finish it I wanted to first warm up with something else to get back into the pace of writing.
I also finished the Sid Meier biography and it was good. There’s plenty of reasons it’s good, but in the end if I had to point to a single one, it would be that Sid sounds like an interesting person, or if nothing else, an adult.
I have this personal imaginary nemesis in my head I call “SupernintendoSteve69”, which is the conglomeration of every basic bitch YouTube essay about TTYD, Mario Galaxy, Chrono Trigger, the Console Wars and so on and so forth.
In game development there’s two kinds of Super Nintendo Steves. The early 2010s indie boom from before the “indiepocalypse” (the supposed first out of what’s probably like 15 by now), and the Gen X american dudes that grew up with an Apple 2. And just like with Mario Galaxy the problem isn’t the subject unto itself but that said subject seems to take up so much space and air.
I’ve read at least three books by now about game developers that made it big in the 90s right around Columbine that decide to sped their first paycheck on a Ferrari. It’s always a fucking Ferrari.
The most that Sid meekly admits to splurging on is golf clubs and even then in a very “man of a million hobbies” way. Instead he saw more fitting to point out that with his first big paycheck he decided to buy a condo for his family.
This also informs the tone in many ways. The other books I can think of about gamedevs reek of that toxic hypermasculine dudebro stench of the 90s in some way.
Or maybe Sid had the good brain to hire a co-writer instead of trying to write it himself like Cliffy B or get an atrocious hack like David Kushner.
Stay Awhile and Listen I’m only putting on blast for the Blizzard part though, David L Craddock is one hell of a writer and the second book improved massively over the first one.
Let me sum it up this way: Going from Stay Awhile and Listen to the Sid Meier biography gave me the same feeling as when I went from the Cliffy B biography to the Elvira Mistress of the Dark biography at the start of this year.
Speaking of Craddock, my next read will probably be his book about Nethack and those games. I’d say I’m on a gamedev binge but it’s more like I haven’t found new youtube channels to binge so I do what’s basically an equivalent.
I was about to head out and find a place to take pics at but decided (wisely in hindsight) that I’ve been awake for like 12 hour by then, it would be smarter to take it easy and go back instead of nodding off on some random park somewhere.