Today’s deck is the Mythos Tarot.
Stunning deck, but it’s from this specific kind of deck where the cards are all portraits and while the portraits ARE cool, Tarot is all about evocative imagery and I feel like only using portraits misses some of that.
Today’s reading indicates it’s a good time to develop coping mechanisms in moments where everything feels hopeless and… yeah that’s ONE way to mentally frame the bullshit I’ve been facing.
The other way to frame it is that it’s bullshit.
So the nonsense with my bank not only hasn’t stopped, but it’s worse if you can believe it.
On Friday I finally managed to finish the process that had me held up, some digital signature whatever.
Today I get an email at around 4PM, an email in French talking about how the PDF they got with the digital seignature or whatever was corrupted, they could see the thumbnail but not open it.
I contact the bank asking if they needed something from me and that’s when I learn that I shouldn’t have gotten that email, that it was internal correspondence in the bank.
By the time this happened I was trying to call directly every half an hour or so. Then I had to wait because I was getting my ADHD prescription and when trying to call then I realize… I’m being ignored, my calls are being ignored and that’s when I got angry.
Anyone that has ever met me can attest that I might be miffed, my patience might run dry, but for me to be ANGRY takes a lot, like A LOT. But consider the circumstances: My finances have been unstable since May when I had the nonsense with my debit cards, the process should’ve ended but the bank insisted that I get into their database thing and when I wasn’t able to (not from lacking paperwork but from their system being made out of wet toilet paper) my account gets blocked, my life becomes more stressful than it needs to be FOR MONTHS because their IT stuff is useless. And now today the problem persists BECAUSE THEIR BULLSHIT SYSTEM COULDN’T SAVE A FUCKING PDF PROPERLY.
I can barely eat nowadays not from not having the money but from a combination of how this situation persists and the fact that if I hadn’t sent money for an unrelated matter that’s now delayed because I gotta use that money until they get their shit together, I might not have funds to pay company bills and staff.
All of that being perpetuated because their system couldn’t save a fucking PDF file properly.
And my bank representative didn’t even have the decency to take the heat in a phone call. I wasn’t even heated at the start, things started squarely in “hey man, can you give me an answer? is there anything I can do to help? do we need to repeat the process?” but now this is war.
So I had an hour to spare and anger to vent so I figured, if I’m gonna be ignored in the calls then I’m gonna make it hard for anyone else to call and just give the psychological warfare of repeated calls.
It probably worked because one angry email later I was getting answers. Did the matter get solved? No and I’m going to bed angry but I choose to believe I pressured them into at the very least having the decency to answer to me.
I was already miffed at how my life is out of whatever relative normalcy I’ve managed and my mental and physical health has taken a hit and by the time this is all solved the bank will neither apologize nor compensate me for all the distress that this interruption has caused.
Thank God I got a professional to handle my visa request or who knows where I’d be mentally right now.
Also, like the title says, I saw Marinka post that she apparently checked VA-11 Hall-A beyond just knowing is a thing where she lent her voice and that knowledge alone has been the perfect counterbalance to keep me sane today.
Let’s end this post with a couple of other highlights of the day though.
As I mentioned yesterday I got to sorting a bunch of doujinshi and I always keep the ones nearer and dearer to me near the top, a bunch of them are ones I found online as a teen that I then got physically when I moved to Japan. One of the ones that I clearly remember is Fullmetal Madness’ SRW Endless Frontier one because there was a teaser and it was basically the first one I was looking forward to the release of.
Another one is this FF4 one.
FF4 is my first Final Fantasy which means it has all the related emotional attachments. I actually remember I played it on a ZSNES emulator on a CD labeled “MISTERWIL” and because it never ocurred to me to copy the files from the CD, for the longest time I basically speedran FF4, seeing how far I could get in a single session, and I always made it right until the Antlion section so seeing the part where Cecil becomes a paladin really rewired my brain the first time it happened.
So with that kind of story, finding out Rydia porn and a whole comic while at it was a very formative experience.
So imagine my surprise, my SHOCK when I’m checking Fanbox while having breakfast and one of the first things I see is that the original author is thinking about remaking it!
It’s not just the shock of the coincidental timing, but the realization that I ended up following them while being completely unaware that they made that specific comic.
I think this is how people feel when they realize that Uma Musume blog they keep seeing was made by VA-11 Hall-A’s writer.
Other highlights!
Ojou no Yokushitsu, love their work, love how inspiring it is that they’re basically the face and vanguard of a whole subgenre, said subgenre being “current IP but with Hokuto no Ken”. Their output is so insane that more than once I’ve seen the shock of people realizing all of those Hokuto no Ken parodies come from a single source.
This one isn’t just one of the very few D-frag pieces of fanworks out there but it’s actually made by Himura Kiseki of Tawawa on Monday fame.
Another one I read a lot when I was a teen, another one I got later, another one I realized later I ended up following the artist without realizing the connection.
I was in college when I found this one, but it’s still a highlight to this day.
I paid irresponsible amounts of money for this one, the amount goes with me to the grave and it ws worth every single yen.
If I had a nickel for every TRY doujinshi that’s rewired my brain and I’m featuring in this post I’d have two nickels.
While sorting books I’ve also been looking for reference material for the next photobook, and I really like this idea for profile pages.
And lastly…
This is the “jam it in” one.