Today’s deck is the Diablo Tarot and What The Actual Fuck.
Here I was complaining about how yesterday’s was too big and this one is literally the size of the box.
I have long fingers as you might’ve surmised from the pics I take and this one had ME needing to maneuver a lot just to shuffle it.
That’s why I used one of the more generic cloths instead of an anime playmat today, because whatever pic the mat has would’ve been covered no matter what spread I used.
Outside of the size, the illustrations are great, though the color palette made me think more Darkest Dungeon than Diablo 4.
Yeah it’s for Diablo 4, the box says the deck released on 2023.
I’m gonna be honest, I’m not that familiar with Diablo. I played a bit of 1, tried out 4 at the start of the year, but the closest is my Werewolf Moments once a year where I feel the urge to play Path of Exile.
I’m a bit allergic to Blizzard, not gonna lie. Not even from its ActiBlizz bullshit, just in general beforehand.
As for today’s reading… the Ten of Cups again, huh…
So the Seven of Swords is a tricky card for me. At face value it implies deception, getting away with something, it’s basically “A ROUNDABOUT! I’LL STEAL IT AND NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW!!” in card form.
And I’m gonna be honest, I get defensive at the implication taht I’m hiding something or not saying something at any given time. The reason being that it’s the total opposite, if anything, I feel sometimes like my life would be easier if I WAS able to lie, if I WAS able to keep something to myself. Many times I’ve felt like being sincere to a fault is a curse, something that I HAVE to do even if it means stirring up a beehive.
And fun fact: I’m actually allergic to bees, and ants. Did you know that they’re both basically part of the same insect group or something like that?
I ain’t stopping being the way I am by the way, be it out of spite, out of the fact that it’s been the best for me in the long run, or the fact that I literally don’t know how else to be. But I do still get defensive because fuck me why wouldn’t I be.
Not to derail things too hard, but the ex-friend I’ve brought up a couple of times made me feel quite a few times like they thought I was lying or keeping something to myself and in panic I ended up having even less filter than usual, spouting whatever half-formed thoughts I had because in my brain I was like “I’m physically unable to be more sincere than I already am, what do I do????”.
Back to the cards. Whenever a card doesn’t speak to me, I try to think about things on a more… high concept level, taking the components of the card and looking for something in there.
So let’s take the idea of someone trying to pull the wool over someone’s eyes. You’re not being blunt and mugging them, you want to bamboozle them, play them like a damn fiddle.
That requires cleverness, that requires knowing when to cash in your chips.
The card is asking me to be strategic, like I’m trying to pull a fast one on someone, The Chariot is adding that I shouldn’t get cocky and then the Ten of Cups… that’s where it loses me a bit.
Ah well. The Seven of Swords was an interesting exercise if nothing else.
As for today, it started… interestingly.
First I wake up from a nightmare, it was like I was inside a videogame. I had the ability to jump to different bodies and there was a guy with one of those handheld long grasscutters chising me trying to kill me. Not even the bladed kind but the kind that has a bit of nylon spinning really fast. Like my brain wanted to give him a chainsaw and misplaced the gardening tool. Whenever he approached me I would jump to a new body but after like the third time it stopped working and that’s when I wake up.
As I’m trying to go back to sleep, my brain goes “Hey, you remember Houzuki-san chi no Aneki?”. So of course I grab my phone and look up how expensive the volumes are and… I was able to find used volumes for literally 1 yen, it’s not quite 1 yen because the shipping is like 100 yen but sometimes you find those oddly specific niche titles. The oddly specific niche that isn’t in demand at least.
In the process I find out that not only it had a sequel, but it had a friggin Amazon Prime live action show in 2014.
I remember the manga fondly because even though it starts off as a siscon romcom, it quickly turns when the main character gets punched by his friend at school (a girl no less) and they have a fistfight after some weird tensions build up.
But that’s not the biggest thing, as it were.
By pulling this up, I also ended up pulling memories of another manga from that period (it was when I frequented 4chan and they would be thrown around every so often as the small manga deserving adaptation and stuff), Onani Master Kurosawa.
That one was about a guy that jacked off in the school’s bathroom and one time tried to help a girl that was being bullied by cumming on the clothes of the girls that bullied her, she finds out and starts using him as a tool to get comeuppance on the girls that annoy her.
It’s SHOCKINGLY heartfelt, you soon get the impression that Kurosawa is just a kid with a good heart but DUMB, as seen with how he confesses and takes a beating and being treated as a pariah for his actions, deciding to help the bullied girl that blackmailed him by the end.
By the way, for both manga I’m working purely off memory here, I’m avoiding looking up too much to convey how I was digging through my brain in that half asleep state.
So I look up if there’s any manga volumes for it and I come up with a series of wild discoveries. In order of wildness:
First: There aren’t volumes, but it’s free online.
Second: HOWEVER, it was originally a novel (super verbose manga tends to be, now that I think about it) and that novel was released as CATCHER IN THE TOILET
YES, LIKE CATCHER IN THE RYE.
4chan used to nickname the manga “Fap Note” because the execution was comically close to Death Note, but Catcher in the Toilet is such a clever name that it makes me angry.
And third: The duo that made this, is also the one currently making “Destroy all humans, they can’t be regenerated”.
“Subesore” for short, its title is a play on the effect of the Magic: The Gathering card Wrath of God… because this is a licensed MtG manga. More specifically a light romcom about schoolkids playing MtG in Japan in 1998.
I’ve been following that manga for a while, the fact that it’s the same people that made Onani Master Kurosawa has me floored.
It’s the same feeling as finding out that an artist I really like right now was also the same as an artist I followed since roughly high school but I found them again after years of improving their artstyle.
Both of these are very “Kodomo no Jikan”-esque now that I think about it. In how when you go past the initial shock they use the chance to tackle things that might feel more shocking otherwise. Kinda like “well, we already crossed the line, what’s another one”.
Honestly though, that brain blast is the main thing that happened today. The rest was me going to Japanese lessons, having late lunch and then coming back home. The weather is geting colder all of a sudden though, and more than the cold it brings up my mortal enemy: Static electricity.
To not leave it so short on that front (I say as this entry is already over 1000 words long), I mentioned the other day that there was a period where I had no internet.
So what happened was that at some point my internet company started sending a different bill on top of the NTT Docomo one that I always got.
Here in Japan you sometimes get what I call “bill previews” where they send you a slip letting you know “Hey, this is how much you gotta pay this month”. So I always assumed it was that and rarely paid attention.
Eventually this mistake comes to bite me and my contract gets cancelled. Thankfully it was in a period where entering into the Problem Solving Trance wouldn’t leave me burned the fuck out, so I calmly headed out and fill up the forms for that.
They told me two weeks, two weeks without internet… but thankfully it turned out to be less.
It was two weeks for the technician to arrive with the new modem and stuff, but as it turns out I was able to use my old modem no problem, so when they sent me the login info I had internet back.
I try to not feel like much of a failure of an adult when those slip ups happen and remind myself that I learned something.
The hard way, but I learned.
Flare was actually named to commemorate the ocassion. The company that canned my contract was Flets Hikari. When I was going out to cheer myself up after the stumble I had her in line for a debut so I gave her a name that would remind me of it but make me smile.
Also, if you were curious where the title comes from, it’s what I almost shout every time I see Ryosuke Miura in a poster.