Behold! The most cursed deck I have: Funko Pop Nightmare Before Christmas Tarot.
The sad thing is that it’s still better in quality and execution than the vanilla Nightmare Before Christmas one I checked a couple of months ago.
Today’s reading advises to temper the romantic spirit with intuition and emotional balance.
If I sound laconic it’s because I don’t want to give this damn thing more time than strictly necessary.
I slept well… suspiciously well, I might’ve actually forgotten my meds yesterday. I had this weird moment where I tried to wake up but it felt like I couldn’t open my eyes kinda like when you get flashed by bright light, but in complete darkness.
When I finally woke up apparently there was some mess where itch.io, the indie games platform where we started and still publish things in from time to time, went offline because Funko of Funko Pop fame had some AI service they hired flag itch.io directly. Yes, the choice of today’s deck was for that.
It’s all back online thankfully but what a thing to wake up to.
In the comments of the announcement there was someone posting the same message about how “this is probably karma because they allowed AI stuff in their platform”, like, if not the same message copied, at the very least writing similar messages over a bunch of replies.
And I’m not here to defend platforms, the point I wanna make is that if you go on spamming everyone’s replies with messages so similar they feel like they come from a bot, you’re shooting your point and yourself in the foot no matter how right you are. There’s better ways to drive your point home if you’re interested in doing that.
Another sign that I might’ve forgotten my meds is that things felt actually easier today, like, in general.
Compared to yesterday where I had to drag myself to even pick up things that I wanted to pick up, today I was able to answer emails, work, and even get paperwork done in a single go.
I do remember yesterday I had a small bout of sleepiness that might’ve been a sign though.
To celebrate, I went out to take a quick hike with Amane. I chose Nunobiki falls for that. That’s a waterfall and mountain right behind Shin Kobe Station. There weren’t that many people around, though there WAS one group of old people going down as I was going up and Shin Kobe station was FULL of students, like, easily three classes or more.
It’s actually not the first time I’ve been to Nunobiki Falls. The first time was actually in February 2022 in my first outing with Luna.
And then again in late September 2022 with an impromptu idol unito of Haru, Sumire, and Yuzu.
Back to today, N was so right about Amane needing a cap oh my God.
All the while taking the hike I actually started The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche by H L Mencken. It’s a good book because it presents Nietzsche’s core ideas summed up and with context, workout pushing for any specific reading of it all.
I actually read Nietzsche as a teen, mainly because one copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra was roughly one fourth or less the price of any YA novel in any other shelf.
While teenage Fer found the prose too poetic to parse properly and current adult Fer finds Nietzsche insufferable, both Fers have found the core of questioning things like the basis for our moral systems to be fascinating, especially because I’ve always been someone that loves perspectives where the mundane becomes alien.
One funny moment (as I got back home incidentally) was some quote about how man is from the earth (to basically explain that to deny the earthly matters is to deny our own nature) and I had to stop walking for a couple of seconds. I’ve often described my own philosophy in life as “from the earth I come and to the earth I return so in the earthly I thrive” and I gotta wonder if some of the stuff I read as a teen stayed inside my head somehow despite me not parsing what happened that well.
By the way, on the way back I finally managed to catch how Shin Kobe plays Galaxy Express 999 when the trains depart.
I got back kinda early and finished some pending paperwork stuff.
I wanna go back to Kobe tomorrow, but go instead to a botanical garden that’s kinda close to where I was.
I’ll make sure to get stuff done earlier in the day so it’s a treat from me to me.