Today’s deck is the Every Little Thing You Do Is Magic Tarot.
It’s good! The booklet also has a “vibes” section with music for each card. The fact that one of the authors’ last name is Little is amusing to no end to me. Only shame is that it’s the wider type of card.
Today’s reading feels like a reflection of how I’ve been feeling yesterday and today, guilty that I “pushed aside” a couple of tasks despite the fact that I did so for my own sake in the short term.
I woke up today thinking two things.
1) “Holy shit I overslept through singing lesson, that sucks.”
and 2) “I just realized that the main cast of Codename Kids Next Door hides their eyes in their designs…”
It’s the first time in like… 15 years at the very least that I’ve thought about KND I don’t know why I remembered it today of all days.
I didn’t sleep through Japanese lesson at least, and man, you can tell today’s a cold day because the fountain I always see on my way to the lesson was FROZEN.
I was having a harder time than usual in the lesson and I didn’t realize until after finishing that I hadn’t taken my ADHD meds, oops.
After the lesson it started snowing, though snow in Kansai isn’t that exciting. It doesn’t really pile up because it cannot reach the ground without melting, so snowing is more like… uh… rain where sometimes you might see a snowflake or two.
Some manga that I had preordered a while back arrived today, notably Yome ga Kiss volume 3 which I was shocked is the last one.
The shock wasn’t because it ended suddenly because it did not, if anything, it ends at the right point because the story ramped up so fast that one more volume would’ve been unnecessary… or commit the cardinal sin of most romcoms of adding a love rival right as everything seems solved just to extend the time COUGHKomi-sanCOUGH.
No, it was shocking because I’m not used to manga being so open to just… ending when it has to.
It was neat though. It’s not really a prolonged or dramatic ending, the sexual tension just explodes and oh would you look at that they work for each other how neat.
I saw that the artist, Akitokage, was intending on continuing on some game project they’d been working and paused, and honestly you could kinda tell by the end of volume 3 that their brain was leaning more into an ensemble of girls while being already committed to one.
It’s good though, things ending are good. I understand the wish to get more of an artist you want, but things tend to shine best when you have a beginning and an end that you can look back into.
Mind you, not that “endless” stories like newspaper comics and the like don’t have their place, but it’s refreshing to have a series in your shelf that you know is done and can peruse at your own leisure.
I do want to see more from Akitokage, I’ll fully admit. Their style is in that very specific sweet spot of simple but effective that I find very pleasant even before we take into account all the porn. But it can be Yome Ga Kiss or even just them making illustrations.
I feel sometimes like people are so entrenched in faceless IPs that they demand the IP continue in perpetuity rather than supporting the people that make said IP possible and letting them explore other venues if they wished.
There’s so many creatives out there COUGHDanAbnettCOUGH where you can just feel like they’d rather do any number of other things but they’re stuck in a very specific frame/franchise so they gotta add all of those original ideas that could probably see better use in their own thing but they don’t have the space for said own thing.
Another manga that arrived that I was really looking forward to is Gakumasu Gold Rush.
I love the whole Gakumasu cast, notably, being someone that’s followed Idolmaster in some way since the OG 765 days, the way that the cast plays with the established archetypes (rather than rejecting them as much as possible like in Shinymasu) is a delight.
That said, while I love Saki being literally ripped the fuck out because fighting against the Clumsy Pink Lead Destiny is that hard, or Temari being openly what every Blue Lead tends to be internally, I’m so glad that they picked Kotone as the main lead for the manga.
Kotone follows the history of Yellow Leads being the cheerful ones, except she’s also taking cues from Yayoi in being poor and wanting to provide for her family so she needs smile through bullshit AND through needing to babysit Temari and Saki.
The manga hasn’t gotten to that point yet though, at most you see China near the end of the volume.
The funniest thing about the manga to me, however, is how gay it is. Gakumasu the game has a very uneven gayness where the moment the Producer is in the scene (who, as usual, is meant to be gender neutral) the story becomes very… straight. Then the player gets out of the scene and if becomes Raging Lesbian Fest again.
So come the manga and not only is the producer here a woman, it’s a ladykiller type woman that’s on a first name basis with Asari-sensei.
In a broader sense, focusing on Kotone as the POV makes the narrative very different from other idolmaster ancillary media so far in the sense that Kotone isn’t unskilled because she’s clumsy, she’s just exhausted most of the time from working like five extra jobs.
Also, I really like the twist at the end of the first volume where it’s revealed that for all the hype that the producer had at the start, it’s revealed then that Kotone is her first producee.
I fully recommend it even if you’ve never played the game or even been into Idolmaster before.
What else…? Oh yeah, Noah Caldwell-Gervais released a video on Dragon Age and honestly just watch his whole channel.
I also finished another girl profile, this time for Yuzu. That said, I gotta update Dolphin Wave on my phone for the first time in forever to show what outfit inspired the 2023 shoot.
I’ve gotta go to the ENT tomorrow for a follow-up and then I’ll probably spend the weekend packing up for Hokkaido.
Could really use the brief escape, plane or not.