Today’s deck is the Under The Oak Tarot.
It’s neat! Not much else to point out though, aside from the fact that it’s part of the deja vu pile of “wait, did I use this one before?” decks.
Today’s reading is pointing out that a drive to realign myself and what will make me thrive will come suddenly. Which is definitely something that happened today as you’ll see.
Last post I closed off talking about being able to torrent things again, so let me explain what the fuck I meant in case you’re just tuning in (in which case: welcome).
Last year due to some mixup that’s not important here, I forgot to pay one of my internet bills. Specifically it was a scenario kinda like I paid September, November, and December but never paid October for whatever reason and cut to the end of May they go “hey we have one unpaid bill from 6 months ago we’re terminating your contract”.
I used to have Flets Hikari (the same one I have in my office) and after The Incident I switched to BigGlobe or however you spell their name.
The new ISP specifically blocks torrenting. If you use Qtorrent it just never connects to any server basically.
It’s not been the worst thing ever. For example I was only missing the Uma Musume Movies as digital files but I have the bluray. But it’s just more convenient to have it digitally since it’s less delay while reading the disc and whatnot.
“why don’t you burn the disc onto your PC?” you overestimate the level of effort I’m willing to put into some things.
…maybe if I was being pettier by doing it, though. THEN I would put an unnecessary amount of energy into it.
But anyway, I wanted to celebrate today about the bank stuff moving along, and Evil opened tonight so my plan was very simply to take a leisurely stroll there to grind DQ Walk and if it wasn’t open, stop by Believe x Believe first.
This Dungeon Chill video on Yuuyami Doori Tankentai accompanied me the whole way and I heavily, sincerely recommend it (and the channel as a whole, really).
There not many channels in english I trust to talk about Japanese media because they always fall into one of three trappings: 1) OMG JAPAN SO WEIIIIIIRD it’s not like the US has caves full of cheese or something 2) OMG THIS GAME IS FOR PERVERRRRRTS (either derogatorily or “please stop drooling all over me, sir”) or 3) Applying the “the US is the only perspective on this matter that has ever existed and I will not even acknowledge the fact I might have a bias”. If you’re really lucky you’ll get the funny 4th category where if you forget the topic for a split second you’d swear you were talking with a Silent Hill 2 fan.
I will not elaborate on the last one, if you know you know.
Mah girl and yours Amelie Doree and Secret Galaxy are others that come to mind. They’re not the only ones obviously but they ARE they ones in mind due to recency bias as I write this.
The video made me think about this idea I’ve had for forever. Just a short game where you explore one of the cool spots I travel to and instead of an OST the soundscape is all sounds taken straight from the area.
The idea came back to me in full force yesterday because with the bank stuff on process of being solved I suddenly had SOME bandwith to think what I wanted to do, and on top of that the fact that I haven’t travelled in a hot minute made me think about any excuse to drag my ass out of the house for a couple of days.
And now that video exacerbated the itch so when I made it to Umeda I got a new toy.
This is a Zoom H5 Recorder, and I’m gonna start recording random ambient noises with it.
Getting it out of the box (this photo is after the fact) and stuff was a tad cumbersome so I just kept walking.
I’m so close to having a second set of classes at LVL70 man, I’m so close to my first Tier 3 jobs…
Some more walking later and one bad choice to try and walk around Dotonbori later I made it to the bar.
Fun time was had, apparently someone actually recognized the Jill figure on the shelf on a day I wasn’t there which is wild.
Like, even if the stats are just “2 people in half a year” that’s still waaaaaaaaaay more than I’d expect from “random mix bar in the middle of Osaka”.
…then again, I know for a fact my fellow queers just look up “mix bar” and the venn diagram of nerdy foreigner gays in Osaka isn’t that hard to think about especially near The Other Like A Dragon Area.
“Mix bar”, not “Mixer bar”. The first just means “We’re a gay bar primarily but everyone else is also welcome”, the later is where you go hoping to meet with someone and stuff.
A interesting topic that came up in conversation was that element of “foreigners know more about Japan than the locals”. Speicifically, there was another foreigner talking about going to Ookunoshima, Hiroshima’s “rabbit island” and the bartender not knowing about it while I pointed out that at least for foreigners if you look up places to go in Japan you always see that sort of place listed there.
Though even beyond that, she also didn’t know of Saruranomiya, one of my favorite spots, and how the station there plays Sakuranbo as the tune when the trains leave.
I should point out that I know Sakuranbo because of this video.
But I feel like that’s normal. A local for example, might see trains as just a way to go from point A to point B, being there all their life. But I come from a place without trains so ever since I first came to Japan the idea of just picking a random station and getting off there or tracing the path of the train by foot… or the fact I can walk until I find highway entrances has always been super appealing.
As a contrast (by which I mean, the principle applying to me) there’s Venezuela’s Salto Angel.
Highest uninterrupted waterfall in the world in the middle of a lush forest. As tall as Tokyo Tower. And I’ve never gone there.
Back in Venezuela I didn’t have the means, motivation, or safety to be adventurous, so travel was limited to the beach two hours by car. Out of 25 states (23 plus the capital and all the islands under the country’s jurisdiction) I’ve only really ever traveled consistently to like… 7. Been at least once to like 12, and none of them are the one with the waterfall.
To be honest, there’s also a certain… resentment I have to things like Salto Angel. Over the years as the country declined more and more people started clinging harder and harder to all the “natural beauty”-type places.
Like sure inflation might be so bad that we’ve lost count of how many zeroes we’ve added to the currency, the youth keeps dying in droves, there’s no medicine so pray you don’t get sick, and because everyone’s leaving the country you don’t have any friends around anymore… but at least we have a pretty waterfall somewhere in the country, right?
It’s hard to be proud of natural beauty when it’s hard to be proud of the country to begin with.
No, this wasn’t how the conversation went in the bar, this is just my own internal ramblings on the matter. Really old grievances too.
Back to the earlier point, though. Growing up I knew people that never even left my own hometown and it’s not even like my hometown is that big at all.
I returned early and slightly tired so the recorder will have to wait.