Today’s deck is Anne Stokes’ Gothic Tarot.
Who’s Anne Stokes? Dunno, but her illustrations are neat, I also confused her briefly with “The chick that wrote The Vampire Chronicles” (Wrong Anne).
Today’s reading warns about a disaster arising from indecision with isolation, and considering how I’ve spent most of the month at home for a change, it’s probably telling me that it’s fine to rest my wings for a while, that if I start doubting myself on the matter I’m not going to actually rest.
Extra points because the Five of Pentacles is that one card with the woman and child out in the cold, and I’ve been in hermit mode because Fuck The Cold (or rather, fuck all the layers of clothing I need to wear in order to even go to a conbini).
I keep almost saying “encuartelado” but “barracked” doesn’t sound right…
There was actually a doll photo meetup today, but between the mood being more of the stay inside variety and my sleep schedule still being weird I opted not to go.
A good friend of mine talked about a racing game for the PS1 that had a different opening in Japanese, and that made me think of all the Megaman openings we didn’t get.
I always bring up the fact that I grew up with a Japanese copy of Megaman X5 (that I lent to a friend and didn’t get back for like 2 years by the way) so I was SHOCKED, APALLED even when I learned that the english version didn’t have Monkey as an opening song (there’s the title, believe it or not).
The inverse situation to that would be not learning about Electrical Communication earlier. Though at least Megaman 8 had the decency to make an original piece instead of just using the title screen music in the NTSC version.
If I had to personally rank them: Monkey has a special place in my heart, Electrical Communication is easier to find, but my favorite is without a doubt Makenai Ai ga Kitto Aru (Megaman X4’s opening). It’s just so… mid-90s. It’s like hearing Suara’s Akai Ito and feeling the late 2000s in your veins.
The thing that I find wild is that it’s not just America that doesn’t have Monkey. Both Megaman X4 and X5’s openings in Japanese are shockingly absent from every streaming platform or digital storefront I can find. The fact that you can find Makenai Ai ga Kitto Aru in SOME karaoke parlors is nothing short of a miracle, and I wonder why, what licensing stuff is going on there.
It’s extra wild because Showtaro Morikubo is X’s Japanese VA.
Also, I remember someone once mentioning that in the last shot of X4’s opening, X and Zero are the only ones to still be alive by the end of the game and I haven’t been the same since.
There’s no porn game to talk about today, but I forgot to mention that I’ve been playing Dungeon Clawler lately as my Play While Eating game, and I gotta say, I really love the claw mechanic. I was worried that it would be too much dexterity required, but I was pleasantly surprised at how lenient it is while still giving the process just enough tension to go with it.
The way the claw machine has a physicality to itself is also cool, you can have stuff stuck on the edge that you tip over next turn, or even have stuff blow into the drop area because of explosions and other effects.
Mad fun even being in early access, fully recommend.
There IS one leftover thought from yesterday that I forgot in the shuffle, though.
All the talk about plot in porn makes me think of the meme/argument about plot being irrelevant in porn, and yet, in the context of Japanese media, for example, there’s enough examples of porn that sticks with people precisely as much for its plot as for the erotica in it.
ShindoL’s Metamorphosis is one example, but there’s also Bible Black. Kuroinu in particular is interesting to me because if the argument was that more than plot it’s animation quality that sticks with people, Pink Pineapple has arguably one of the best animations in the porn field short of Kaneko Hiraku being involved in a project, and yet you see Kuroinu and even specific animation moments be referenced more in the wild than Real Eroge Situation.
Kyonyuu Fantasy hasn’t endured as hard as it has and as long as it has just because of Shamsiel’s design, just saying.