Today’s deck is the Tarot of Tales and Legends.
This is one of those where it’s the works of an existing artist assigned to specific cards. In this case the work of Henry Justice Ford (what a name).
My only complaint is that the images feel very low resolution. I don’t if they ARE but they sure FEEL that way.
Today’s reading feels like it’s saying “the pain has stopped, wake up and get out there.”, which is SUPER appropiate considering the main theme of today.
You see, I woke up today wanting to write smut.
“Fer there’s nothing new there” oh but there is, actually. Before it was more of a vague intent, an “I’m open to the idea of writing smut in the future” but I didn’t push the matter. If it happens, it happens when it happens.
And so, the difference is that today I woke up thinking “I should do this” in the same way that some days I wake up with an itch to write a new Forsaken Gaia.
It definitely helped that I already had the seed (HAH) of an idea bouncing in my head, but the funny thing is that in the middle of the day I had a different idea, one that made me EXCITED, I went from itch to mighty creative need. The sort of thing where you go from “I feel like flexing some muscles” to “I NEED TO LEAVE MY MARK IN THE WORLD WITH THIS”.
So expect going “hello here’s my porn story, hope you enjoy” by… roughly the weekend probably?
This, of course brings up a different question though… why now? What changed?
Well, there’s a number of factors I can point to.
A funny one was when I tried out one of those AI GF thingies a while back and I was so annoyed at the result that I went “I could do better on my own why am I wasting time with this?”.
Speaking of spite, another one is DEFINITELY trying out a couple of western porn games and being apalled by the quality to, again “I could do better on my own why am I wasting time with this?” levels.
An unexpected one is the fact that I started RTing porn on Twitter. Before I always held back to not flashbang the people that followed me with explicit anime tiddy… but the people I would care to not bother have moved to BlueSky where I freely share all the anime tiddy I wanted since, if you see it that’s literally on you and your settings. Ever since I started doing that I’ve gotten at least two DMs telling me that they love what I pick to share and how it exposed them to artists they wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
This is compounded with how I’ve started to come out of my shell more (in a “is it safe to come out now????” sort of way), a bunch of random realizations of how unfounded my fears had become and just the fact that getting over that sort of thing is one of my goals for this year.
If you’re wondering why I had this fear to begin with, here’s the thing: In case you somehow don’t know (and based on the stats for the blog the chance is somehow non-zero) I’m the writer for VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action. A game that has been often rightfully described as horny, which is on purpose.
That horniness is part of its identity, but was also a source of criticism. Now, some of the criticism I do get in spirit, though I disagree with its presence being questionable, I feel like it could’ve been handled better but only insofar as “I was still very green when writing it” sort of way. If remade today it would still be horny, arguably it’d be even hornier, but I would be able to handle it better.
But the point remains, whether from thinking their life experiences are the only way reality can be, from misguided puritanism or from my own clumsiness, that horniness was a source of dissent, which affected me very personally.
It didn’t help that there was also a very vocal sector trying to paint me (never attacking me directly but saying things like “this game’s writer”) as an actual pedophile because of Dorothy. This easily created a feeling of “am I safe in expressing myself?”, “what will they call me if I dare talk about this or that?” and remember: this was while still thinking only about non explicit things.
Enter stage left that one ex-friend I always bring up (I told you it wouldn’t be long before they cropped up again). I kinda talked about it last time, but basically they were the first ones to broach the topic of porn preferences and whatnot, so eventually I felt safe in opening up about that myself and it was great because, as a sidenote, that sort of thing has always been important for me.
It’s a source of joy, a window into the most personal side of creator and consumer. Seeing an artist that draws exactly what gets you going in a way that gets you going real good is like a truncated version of consuming a bigger piece of media that resonates. And I write and read to connect with other people, so how is this any different?
SO OF COURSE, in due time, the aforementioned ex-friend turned all of the stuff I volunteered and shared (not just porn-related, literally anything) into ammunition to throw against me (I mentioned in the past when I confided about something recurrent in my dreams and they threw that into my face repeatedly afterwards).
It’s kinda wild how much impact and then how much mess a person can cause you in roughly two years…
So needless to say, if once bitten twice shy, this was basically 10 times bitten 1024 times shy.
In the last year or so I’ve managed to shake this off, something you can see in real time in this blog, actually. But one big thing was this one time N pointed out how despite my worries, I’ve talked with her about those sort of things plenty and often no problem.
And like… yeah, whenever I’ve brought up the topic people are shocked I have any reservations at all. Though it’s less “reservation” and more “fear that I push through”.
I already push through anxieties on a daily basis, what’s one more?
Aaaaanyway, let’s see if anything comes out of this all.
As for how my day went, I had to do bank stuff. Imagine me blowing a raspberry for like two minutes and a half and that’s my answer of how my day was.
OH, also I remembered I had a metal recycling plant thingy nearby so I dropped some old metal clothing racks there. It’s fine, people leave old batteries and other pipes and things by the outside all the time.