Today’s deck is the Neon Tarot.
It’s by the same people as the Lost Soul Tarot from a couple of days ago and this one gave me less random grounds to suspect it was AI-generated by having faces (again, I hate the fact that it’s a paranoia I have to keep in mind). It’s super pretty but the backs aren’t symmetrical.
Today’s reading features entrepeneurial spirit, independence, and childhood innocence. There’s plenty of ways this could be read, but the meaning that jumped out to me was “Become the you that kid you would be jealous of”.
I had a deadline today for singing lesson. There’s going to be a recital next month and I needed to send the MP3 of what I wanna sing for it.
The pressure is that, me being me, the songs I wanna try out never have a melody sheet that the teacher can use to help along in the lesson. So the process is always like…
“What about this song?” No sheet, “Okay, what about this one?” No sheet, “Let’s try this one” Only guitar tabs, “Okay-…”
Rinse and repeat.
The problem is that, having executive dysfunction like I do, that sort of thing is enough to fry my brain. Eventually I was able to send the song I want but that left me drained when it came to going to the lesson, which left me frustrated.
However, it kinda worked out in the end because turned out today they were checking the smoke detectors in the building and by being here instead of at the lesson I was able to get the guy to check them.
While this is happening, I came across this illustration and I was shocked to see it was made in Custom Order Maid 3D 2.
I had an embarrassing amount of hours logged into the first Custom Maid back in like 2015. Even if the gameplay isn’t super deep, giving you a context to work within makes things not only more addicting but also hotter.
I kinda fell off the wagon when they released Custom Order Maid 3D (which is the third one). But I decided to try COM3D2 because I don’t know if the illustration I talked about is actual 3D or 3D retouched, or it used external mods, but the itch was set and I figured I might as well lose my weekend to that.
Then I started remembering bit by bit all the stuff that made me fall off the KISS/Custom Maid bandwagon ages ago. Or rather, why I didn’t get back onto it.
The first is confusion. Unless you download one of those “all up to date” torrents, figuring out which is the right download can be… hard. The reason is that KISS has a model where they sell the game and beefy periodic DLC that includes more personality types and even more scenarios to play through. This is fine, but when you have 5 different pages like “base game” “base game plus these DLC” “base game plus a new character editor that’s DLC”… it’s not hard in the end but it makes your eyes glaze over and your brain leak off your ears a very specific way.
The second is file size. The Custom Maid series isn’t just a sandbox like Illusion games, there’s more scenarios, voiced lines and whatnot at play. I actually remember when I first played Honey Select in 2016 I was disappointed because compared to Custom Maid or other Illusion games of the time, it was just a means to jump directly to sex with no context and it felt like something was lost in the process.
Didn’t stop me from spending way too many hours on it, but I digress.
But the file size conundrum isn’t that one. To get the game you have to download it, unpack it, and then install it. In a very simple example (with less variants and factors like compression rate for the sake of argument) you have a 20GB file, you unpack it and it’s 40 so now there’s 60GB, and then you install it and what that does is basically copy and verify files to a different folder so congrats! In the process of installing a 40GB game you’ve used 100GB of disk space!
And that’s just the base game not counting any of the extra plugins.
By the way, the first download I did was corrupted so I had to go back to the “download 32gb” first step.
Why not get one of those torrents I mentioned? After all, I got the game, I’m just getting the data a different way. The main reason is that my current ISP (I believe I’ve talked before about how I lost my last ISP from a single weird payment that was missing) blocks torrents and the extra effort of looking for a VPN just for this has me like blegh.
I left the files decompressing and headed out to Japanese lessons, I want to at least have ONE appointment not cancelled today.
The lesson went well thankfully, I also stopped by Ikinari Steak for food on the way back. They’re having a flank steak promotion and the Yuzu sauce they give you for it is to die for.
After I got back into the installation stuff, a new layer of confusion went on top of the earlier ones. As I replayed it, I realized that it was… weird how the Pixiv user was able to get the boobs look that specific way.
Turns out there’s a Custom Order Maid 2.5, basically a graphical update to the game that also allows for extra customizations vectors.
And props to them, cumbersome as it might be they’ve kept updating both branches for what I assume is the fact that COM2 runs on more machines than COM2.5.
Doesn’t make the experience any less Installing Skyrim-esque but kudos where they’re due.
Eventually I figure out that I got 2.5 when I got one of the packs… ok yeah, the difference in how you can customize is stark. This seems more like what I saw on Pixiv.
My only complaint so far (and I might be missing something, mind you) is the lack of a futanari option when customizing male characters.
By the way, if you notice a conspicuous lack of images for that, I ended up uninstalling things because there was some out of order stuff I did by accident and… yeah the Skyrim allegations aren’t being beaten.
Also, you need 2 installed for 2.5 to run… I guess that’s why it’s 2.5 instead of 3 but I’m not really any less miffed by the disk space juggling.
Sadly I was falling asleep at this point, but hey, I have the whole weekend ahead, right?
…right?