Today’s deck is the Tarot For The Great Outdoors.
I love hiking a normal amount, unironically a normal amount. I feel like if you put me with someone that’s actually crazy about it my wanderlust doesn’t compare to whatever they have going on.
I feel the same way about music. I love music, I love singing, seeing people sing makes me wanna sing because it’s just that fun, and yet I feel like my taste in music is way too normal, every hardcore music enthusiast I know listens to weird humming that lasts for 30 minutes where it’s all vibes-based while I won’t listen to anything that doesn’t have a hook in the first 10 seconds.
The deck? The deck’s neat!
Today’s reading seems to continue the trend of just picking random stuff bouncing in my head, speaking about how being provider for others can be a lonesome affair.
E told me yesterday to play Helldivers, but I had to wake up straight into doing some adulting outside, sadly. I did treat myself to some sushi in the aftermath, though.
I had a bit of tuna roll, and I realized something interesting: I have an aversion to nori that I cannot quite put into words just yet.
For those that don’t know: Nori is the dried seaweed used in sushi and a bunch of other things.
I like the taste of Nori, I don’t even mind its texture, but when I have something with Nori on it, my brain finds it repelling on a dimension away from the taste itself.
My current theory is that there’s a negative association I haven’t pinpointed yet. Considering how much Nori there is in conbini meals (which is to say: present, especially in certain onigiri but not in EVERYTHING necessarily), I suspect something related to The Stress Blur (basically anything between 2017 and 2021) made me dislike it by association.
It’s kinda like how to this day I can’t eat scrambled eggs, because the development of VA-11 Hall-A was mostly fueled by bread filled with scrambled eggs while I watched cooking shows where they were having better meals than mine.
I come from the sort of background where the fact that my parents always had three meals in our table is something to brag about, but respect to what we did have doesn’t mean I’m not gonna resent what I didn’t.
Aside from that, lately I’ve been really into Twin Bee, and I need to go back a bit to explain why.
So TwinBee is a really old Cute ’em Up (a shmup with cutesy aesthetics) by Konami, but my first exposure to the franchise was with TwinBee: Rainbow Bell Adventures which is instead a platformer.
For those that keep up with the blog, I played it in the same “MISTERWIL” CD with a ZSNES emulator in it, though the ROM was kinda corrupted so I couldn’t play all of it.
The game always stuck with me because it has that gameplay idea of charging your attack and jump changing what they become. So you go from melee attack to a ball of energy, and from jumping to boosting in any direction.
The video doesn’t go there, but I distinctly remember as a dumb 8-9 year old I was like “I wonder what happens if you just keep going up” on the first level and there’s basically a thing that infinitely spawns power ups up in space, super cool.
So cut to I Don’t Know When and I’m going on a beach trip with my family and we stop by some gas station where they get me a magazine called Loading, and that magazine is easily one those nexus points of my life.
Loading wasn’t a super fancy magazine, it was more like one of those fanzines that got a bit of regular circulation and I guess the owner of that stop got one because why not.
That magazine introduced baby Fer to: Summon Night, Tokimeki Memorial, Dancing Blade: Katteni Momotenshi, Garou Densetsu, The fucking MSX and God knows what else. I actually remember they were covering some galge whose name escapes me but I’m sure I’ll see one day and go “ah son of a bitch it’s that one” and there was a snide comment about the main character being a “dark-haired guy with his eyes covered” that completely flew over my head.
The magazine came with a CD. The CD had a shitton of jpgs of merch from a bunch of games, it also had the editor going on a long winded rebuttal of an email they got.
Back to the main topic (if there’s such a thing) it also had a video of Twin Bee RPG’s opening (link because it won’t embed for some reason).
So like… there he is, little Fer, browsing this disc with his little sister in the one computer in the house and being blasted by a 3D anime opening for the fun game with the ships that fly if you hold the jump button. Except it had all these other faces, and some girls in a fire, and you go into the TV and…
I am glad to report that the mysterious magic didn’t vanish after being able to look up what the hell it was all about because as an adult all I saw about TwinBee was the shmups and acknowledgement that yes, those are the pilots, but also there’s the blonde with twintails that was also in the Twin Bee RPG opening and whatnot.
You see, Twin Bee is one of those things where it’s thrived a lot more in its extended universe affairs than in the main releases. This isn’t “the dude from Megaman Zero 2 is cool if you listen to the radio drama where he has actual screentime”, this is “there’s more in the ancillary material than in the main one”.
It’s a whole thing where Konami had a label with King Record and they decided to make a radio drama for TwinBee called TwinBee Paradise that got insanely popular. And this is where you learn details like the fact that Light (the main boy) is the son of the pilot of TwinBee in the OG game, that Pastel is his cousin. Then they go to school and there’s a whole cast there, and then Dr Warumon (the Dr Wily of the franchise) makes two androids to parallel and oppose Light and Pastel but they develop their own morals and turns out to understand this single shot from the Opening of RPG you gotta go through a whole season of the radio dramas.
You see, the redhead is called Seeds, he was made to oppose Light and there’s a whole arc where he goes to an island and helps the locals and that’s when he has the Android Boy “is this what being nice is like” moment.
So I want you to put yourself in my shoes for a moment: This Mysterious Game that has vexxed you and fascinated you for effectively your whole life is now in your hands, you have access to its mysteries… and turns out it remains vexxing because to fully understand it you gotta be aware of three seasons of an audio drama at minimum.
Not only that but then you look up said Audio Drama and are met with covers like these:
I am thriving, moisturized, unbothered, in my element.