Today’s tarot is the Essential Tarot.
It’s super minimalist and pretty, it’s officially now on my rotation which means it has its own case rather than its cardboard box. Though I will point out that I appreciate the bottom of the box is more the cross-shaped one than a lid, so putting them back in the box is easy.
Yesterday N commented how the Blooming Cat Tarot’s problem wouldn’t be fixed with sleeves because even if they cover the back you’d still see the slid at the top, and it made me realize that THAT’S why you don’t sleeve tarot cards, really. Unless you don’t do reverse cards that is.
Which you know, if you do, valid.
I’m also gonna shake things up with different mats for the cards whenever I feel like it.
As I was shuffling, an Ace of Wands violently flew out so I’m taking it as a sign of it being the main card of the read. So with that in mind…
Ace of Wands (birth of new ideas), Reversed Emperor (lack of discipline, excessiveness), The Empress (Nurturing, Abundance), and Seven Of Swords (Me, absolutely twisted, coming home with a lot of swords).
Here’s the thing, though. When you’re non-binary like me, Reversed Emperor right besides Upright Empress feels different. So here’s the way I read it:
“For the sake of nurturing your creativity, strategically indulge on your feminine side, rather than your masculine side.”
If only I had heeded the warning earlier…
By the way, I was using the Biddy Tarot website to refresh my readings so I decided to see if it had a book and turns out not only they do BUT I ALREADY HAD IT.
Thank you past me…
I had an interesting dream today where I was in Venezuela in my family home (which already makes me wake up agitated like I just had a nightmare) and bad things just kept happening, making me want to go back to Japan while my family insists that it’s fine, I’m stressing too much.
Said “bad things” include my dad getting shrapnel in his back (knocking on wood so that never ever comes close to happening) and a tornado literally targetting my bedroom.
There’s actually a precedent for that attitude of “don’t fret about the bad thing that just happened near you” in my family. First example that comes to mind was this one time we were in a traffic congestion going to the beach and a kid from a house complex close to the road stole SOMETHING out of a nearby pickup’s back and the pickup driver gave chase until the kid got back into the housing complex.
Of course I got anxious and insisted to deaf ears that I wanted to go back. While I do feel like ultimately my family’s “be more positive” attitude rubbed onto me (even if I still feel like I’m the least positive out of all of us), I don’t think I was wrong in getting super anxious in the aftermath.
The real lesson was probably how to roll with life’s punches, I guess.
Today I was too tired for that beach trip I’ve been wanting to do, and besides, I’m gonna go to Tokyo to meet up with E and K one last time before they leave, so I’ll save my energy for that.
I’m actually debating whether or not to bring one of the girls with me. On one hand I’m gonna spend so much time with E and K that I don’t know if I’ll even have the chance… but on the other, there’s a precedent that the one day I don’t bring dolls is when I find neat photo spots, so…
I started the day trying out a bit of woodcarving so here’s a quick rundown of all the knife brands I’ve quickly accumulated when it comes to chipping away wood:
Victorinox: The classic multitool DOES work nicely though the blade doesn’t out of the box. Their form factor is tried and true for a reason.
BeaverCraft: I take back the bad things I said before, but they get superceded by…
Morakniv: Strong first impression, not gonna lie.
Leatherman: Also a strong first impression.
Opinel: Not bad for something French…
I was carving a piece with the method from Eddie from The Dark Tower of “just start and see what comes out” and a heart was taking shape… then the knife jabbed my thumb kinda deep.
Through the day I kept getting worried that every time I took off the band-daid, the bleeding continued profusely… then I eventually realized that I was ripping the band-aid so hard I kept reopening the wound. It eventually closed proper though.
That heart is staying as-is, I love the tale the splatter tells on it.
I also carved a Magatama attempt yesterday.
I love the way that you need to negotiate with the wood grain, because if you try to cut along the grain you end up just peeling off a whole layer so you gotta figure what angle to cut from.
I went out for a walk and ate at one of my ol’ reliables, Kasuga Tei Abura Soba. While in Nipponbashi I took a peek at the Volks shop (nothing interesting) and looked around for playmats now that I have that extra conviction.
There’s simultaneously more and less than I expected.
I then went back home, I’ve been worried that I keep getting kinda tired by 4pm until I remember that I’ve been waking up at like 4am.
While I was sorting my things for the trip (and just sorting in general) I kept hearing a bell of some kind. It just kept going and going, I thought it was something in the video I had on the background but no…
Turns out, the fire extinguisher case right outside of my apartment was opened up. It’s a small metal frame with a door that closes with a magnet and someone probably stumbled onto it.
At least I know now how THAT works.
There’s this new-ish manga called Yome ga Kiss. It’s really fun so far, it’s just a pervy love comedy, but I’ve been cleaning up my bookshelves to sell off books I’m no longer interested in to Mandarake and those boxes are being filled with SO MANY pervy romcoms, it’s actually making ruminate on how or why some stick with me and some don’t even if on paper they have the same ingredients.
With Yome ga Kiss, one element is definitely the art style. But I didn’t bring it up for that alone. Turns out the artist, Akitokage, worked on a DLsite game.
It’s FINE but it’s one of those where it’s more like the programmer comissions an artist. Which isn’t a bad thing at all, but it often means a very specific flavor because of course the commissioner doesn’t have infitie money so the amount of illustrations is more limited.
Oh yeah, so about that sex topic of the past couple of days… I think I figured it out.
It’s definitely a fear, not the vague “oh what if someone mocks me” type, but a very tangible reactive sort of fear.
In the process I was able to pinpoint it back to a certain ex-friend that was at once the first one to make me open up about that topic (by being the one to talk about it first) AND someone that then used everything I talked about (most of it not even bad stuff necessarily) against me.
Noticing it doesn’t necessarily fix everything, but at least it doesn’t feel as abstract anymore. Not to mention that it wasn’t even something NEW, just something I didn’t make the connection between.
On that note, I was looking for other playmats online and decided to look for Prisma Illya ones. For one of them, the “costumers also bought” section had DVDs by Momoka Kobayashi and Rumi Ishino.
It was very interesting to browse playmat of dubious legitimacy (read: no clue if the artist actually licensed their fanart, artists do sell playmats at events but I doubt it was the case here) of Illya getting railed yet still seeing a gravure DVD of a really young-looking model and going “nah I’m good”.
I mean, I was perfectly aware before not only that this specific preference doesn’t translate at all to real stuff, but that Prisma Illya is a huge outlier in that front where my attachment to the characters supercedes everything else. But you don’t get in-situ contrasts this blunt too often.
I hope I can get back to writing other things. This blog has helped me keep sane by giving me SOMETHING I can write daily, but I’ve got other writings to do and can’t seem to find the time for it.