Today’s deck is the Lord of the Rings Tarot.
I’m gonna be honest, LOTR feels like a more heated topic than religion sometimes with creative types so I’ll save my opinions on it. I will say however, that even if I don’t particularly enjoy the books (and God knows I’ve tried), I’e found the odd Tolkien quote here and there really agreeable. His quote on applicability vs allegory is a favorite of mine.
Today’s reading seems to say “congratulations on making it the whole year with all its stresses and responsabilities, now treat yourself.”
I wanted to add both a retrospective on this year and then my goals for the next year. The problem is that with the way I publish these posts they would go online on the first and second of January. So I will be summarizing the 30th in the spirit of posting it on the 31st and then I’ll summarize the 31st in the spirit of it going online on the 1st of the year.
In short I’m just accounting for the fact that what I did on new years eve will be up in new year’s.
But anyways. For starters today I went to Comiket, Comiket 105 to be specific.
That event baffles the mind. You’d think after so many years and Japan’s initial Akiba-kei-fueled geek chic period it would have less attendance but instead it’s gotten so much attendance they’ve added extra days to it.
I had two goals in mind: visit Kiririn in his booth and drop by Kurutenge‘s booth and hopefully be able to greet her in person.
The reasons why I follow her work should be self evident if you click that link above, but there’s one extra detail. Ages ago (I think it was early 2022, memory is kinda blurry but it was definitely in January after she sold her Comiket offerings in Fantia) The photobook I got came with a simple message in the inner cover thanking me for the purchase.
Not only was this unexpected and just nice to see, but it happened in a crucial moment where I was still rebuilding my sense of self and I had a moment where I went “this cosplayer I follow has been nicer to me with this gesture than the people I consider my emotional support network, what the fuck”.
Sadly, I got lost for like an hour (would’ve probably been like half an hour if I hadn’t lost time in crowds) and she was gone to the cosplay area and I was kinda exhausted mentally but at least I got her latest photo CD. I stopped by Kiririn’s booth to say hi and went back to my hotel.
There I finished my Game Of The Year list, AKA, 42 Dlsite games worth mentioning with due respect to the many others I didn’t mention. And I’ll actually get back to this in a bit but for now the rest of the day.
Later in the night I had a very specific craving for Diver City’s Carl’s Jr. I decided to walk there and got lost when I thought the Livedoor Sports Park’s lights were the Odaiba bridge’s lights.
I assume this park is related to THAT Livedoor but I can’t find anything conclusive.
Anyway, I made it right before last order and went back. On the way there was this guy across from me on the train whose breath stank SO HARD I kept smelling it every time he breathed. The whole wagon was basically cleared because of him.
It’s the second time this happened this year, nickels and all that. The first time was going back from a quick beach trip, but at least in that one the breath was from a guy passed out drunk smelling like something dead crawled into his throat. This one just smelled like gaijin that didn’t brush his teeth for like a week at the very least.
So that’s when I got back to prep to leave and sleep. Let’s talk retrospection.
While thinking how to tackle the topic, I actually ran into a great summation of the progress I made personally in a year thanks to my GOTY writeup.
Compare this from this year, to last year’s.
Even outside of the smaller minutia of writing experience and learning more bits about WordPress editing, notice how much less self-conscious this year’s writeup was. Not only on the lack of an attempt at justification, but also in delving more into the actual fetishes that form the games’ core.
And that’s how I’d describe 2024 in a nutshell for me, a year of… not so much self-actualization as self-affirmation. I already know who I am and that it is someone worth going to bat for, now’s the time where I let myself go out of my shell, not because things are safer (God knows in the end they aren’t) but because if something happens there’ll be enough people backing me up… and if nobody’s got me, at least I’ve got myself.
Early in the year I had a really bad fight with a friend. Said friend was grieving but in the grieving process they overstepped a couple of very specific lines I’d rather nobody ever even touch, and even then I tried to overlook it because I was aware of the grieving… but when it compounded with past trauma and other existing grievances, trying to keep quiet led me to being so angry so constantly that I got almost run over by a car in that distraction and I let them know how I felt.
That friendship is still ongoing by the way, if anything, the fact that the situation was mended helped fight off an existing fear of “all it takes is one mistake and all of the good will is gone”.
That and other moments through the year fed into my fear of letting my guard down or relying on others, but that’s an existing condition, not something prompted by this.
Later in the year I couldn’t sleep after getting a hair transplant surgery so I decided to bring up some general matters nagging at me to a different friend. Without getting into details (because otherwise what’s the point of keeping things vague) it became a situation where I bring up a topic, said friend thought this was me using it as an excuse to insult them indirectly (despite being aware that if I had grievances I would spell them out directly), pointing out how they turned the situation about them, then needing to appease them about it… all the while sleep deprived and having my head compressed really tight by a bunch of bandages while I felt a million needles prickling me.
I’m gonna be honest, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to stand for myself like I did in those situations one calendar year earlier, let alone two, and forget about three or earlier.
I’m not gonna air more laundry because that’s not the point, the point is to illustrate the idea that this was the year where, unplanned as it was, I decided I was someone worth going to bat for.
Creatively, this is the year where, after having so many ideas wither away for any number of external factors, I took a gamble launching Forsaken Gaia. And while the fact that the one project of mine that has advanced the most is the non-game that I’m deliberately keeping as a purely me project is not helping with the “I can’t rely on others” complexes, having that sort of outlet is liberating like you have no idea.
And that’s before I started this blog, which was something I kept wanting to do for years, and tried on and off. In the end what pushed me was realizing how feeble Social Media can be for this sort of thing.
I also accomplished my goal of seeling a photobook, and it says a lot that participating in an event where I only sold two books left me like “YES LET’S DO IT AGAIN”. Same sort of reckless “tasted blood in the water” that pushed me into making videogames.
To this day I cannot convey into words the feeling of earning those first five bucks in 2014.
This is the year that I started taking a monthly trip to de-stress myself and it has done wonders not just for stress management, but for photography too.
I didn’t write that much for the Uma Musume Blog because of all the work taking away the brainpower I usually have for research, but the 14 or so articles I made in the lead up to the anniversary are some of my best yet.
Professionally, We had a Cyberpunk RED module for April Fool’s and the biggest surprise afterwards was them contacting me to be a guest writer in their next core rulebook.
It was a BUSY year in terms of paperwork too, actually. And there’s still leftovers pending as I write this.
All in all, if 2020 was an earthquake followed by a tsunami, then 2024 was a tropical storm. Still very testing but the lessons learned last time made weathering things easier this time around.
So what’s next? That’s a topic for next year.
See you all then.