Today’s deck is the Pastoral Tarot.
It’s super interesting because the cards are meant to be used horizontally, they also sell the package further by including a small tote bag and the box being pulled from the package like a drawer.
For today’s reading, the Upright Wheel of Fortune speaks of new upcoming cycles, cycles that will be facilitated by not doubting my intuition.
The Page of Cups like all Pages is about learning, and like all Cups is about emotions. The inward-looking emotions rather than the outward-looking ones. So it stands to reason that Reversed, that knowledge is either lacking or in doubt. The card goes shockingly well with The High Priestess which represents the inner spiritual world.
I woke up today with the Uma Musume artbook waiting for me… and wait it did because I had other plans starting the day.
Today was the doll meetup. The Volks shop in Nipponbashi does them every month (save from when it coincides with Dollpa, the Volks doll convention) where you bring a doll or two following a specific theme.
The theme this time around (I think I mentioned it before) was “homecoming”. Volks has a service where you can make a custom doll with the set parts they have on stock, so the idea was that this time it would be limited to just dolls made through that service.
I brought Yuzu, the first one I got through that service, and Ruri, a DDP I got in Tokyo a couple of months ago (Volks Akiba has a couple of exclusive body options) that I had yet to take out.
I… arrived too early. Normally the event goes from 2 to 3 in prep, then 3 to 4 sorting everyone, sometimes extending to near 5 depending on the amount of people. But this time they pushed it one hour ahead which IS more comfortable but I forgot.
The shop staff recognized Yuzu. She actually won staff choice at a contest in that same shop in 2022. I actually went the day of the contest this time around…….. not knowing that the event was that day.
That was actually the last meetup I went to before this in a way. It’s been busy ever since and I couldn’t manage to find the time to participate, always busy or traveling.
Jumping a bit ahead, the next one is gonna be on December 15th, so I’ll hopefully be able to participate in the Christmas one.
The amount of people participating was kinda thin, but they kinda expected that. The main thing is that the theme put aside dolls with custom heads made by third parties and out-of-box Volks products like their more prefab dolls or the custom ones. That last bit is important because a big contingent of participants tends to be people carrying the Miku Dollfies.
The small amount of people made it breezy though. We even had a Cat Corner, it kinda reminded me of the Dragon Corner we had at the start of the year
These events energize me. I like people-watching and Doll Watching feels like a proxy way of doing that. Sometimes even more telling I’d argue.
I wish my Japanese was less stiff so I could strike more conversations though. I already do chat a shocking amount but that gap is still a bit too much sometimes.
By the way, I was the only one with tanned dollfies. For context: You can only get them from… April I wanna say? to August at the shop, it’s a color they don’t sell blank heads for.
I went straight back home afterwards, and after a quick stop for food, I sat down and went page by page on the Uma Musume Artbook.
Wrote a whole thing about it. Sitting back to finish the batch of posts I’ve been working on for that blog is another thing in the queue I want to get back into.
Outside of that? Uh… I discovered Jetpack (WordPress plugin thing) has a subscriber thing so I updated the Uma Musume blog to have that one and I added one to this blog too.
I’m not gonna be a YouTuber and tell you to SUBSCRIBE TO MY INSANE NONSENSE, it’s just there as a convenience if any of you wants it.
I do this shit to escape the need to make monetizable content after all. And I count my blessings every day that I can brag about keeping up all these websites completely ad and clutter-free as a flex.
Oh, I also got the Vampire Survivors Castlevania DLC and I look forward to doing runs while eating for at least the next week.