Today’s deck is the Gilded Tarot Royale and oh my God it’s so small.
That’s not a gimmick of the deck mind you, when I saw “Mini” I thought it was like how there’s Tarot-sized cards and then there’s playing card-sized ones. Mini is like a step below that.
Made me look for a Waite one of that size for the dolls. Sol is supposed to like fortune telling after all.
Today was another day with two cards of the same number and lemme tell you, one of these day’s I’ll get all three and I’ll screech like when McDonald’s gave me a ticket with the number 420.
I didn’t literally screech, I barely utter a word in my daily life because I live alone, but you get the point.
Seven of Swords is, as I’ve explained in the past “Me, absolutely twisted, coming home with a load of swords” and the joke is on point because the card IS about getting away with things.
To that we add a Reversed Seven of Wands (the madlad standing his high ground) meaning you’re failing to stand your ground and one I haven’t gotten yet, the Eight of Swords. That one normally has a tied, blindfolded woman surrounded by swords, meaning to convey feeling limited, your hands literally tied.
Small sidenote, I read ages ago that apparently in older times that imagery of being blindfolded represented recklessness (literally doesn’t see what their actions lead to), so “Blind Justice” would mean “Reckless Justice”. That’s why Cupid was blindfolded in some representations, to convey that idea that Love doesn’t choose who it hits or why.
I could try to decipher what today’s reading was about, but when I saw it something immediately jumped at me. So let’s talk about that since that’s the goal of these readings after all.
In the past few days, my posts have included comments about being able to afford the luxury of not monetizing blogs and whatnot, and part of me is worried that I’m bragging too much, flaunting too much.
And sure, humility is important, but there’s been moments in the past where I’ve denied myself from sharing the joys of life, big or small, out of fear that it would be out of line for me to do so when someone else is going through a rough spot.
Except that, you know, that would assume I’m surrounded by jealous people rather than people that find as much joy in me being happy as I do them being happy.
Anyway, something about today’s reading made that whole topic pounce.
Day started off to an interesting start because the sauna of my shower room threw an error.
So to explain: My house is one of those where you have the toilet in its own small room, and then the shower is a separate one (rather than having a singular big bathroom with everything in, basically). Because of this, the bathroom has a “sauna” that you can use from the inside to well… use as a sauna (or in my case to warm up the room when it gets cold in winter) or from the outside to dry it up after you shower (or dry up clothes when it rains).
I used it to warm up the room a bit while I showered and at around five minutes in it throws an error. The weird thing is that it’s only on the inside, if I use the outside panel I can still dry up the shower room no problem.
It made me realize that this is no longer a new apartment with a bunch of fresh new purchases, I’ve been living here for four years. This is my home sweet home where things are going to inevitably break down.
It’s easy to forget with the stress that the visa causes every year, but this is my life, I’ve made my life here… there’s something surreal about that for some reason.
Big thing today was getting a checkup for the hair transplant I got back in May.
Aside from a couple of super small spots where fluid just bubbled up and bursted (long story, I’ll probably tell about that surgery down the line), they told me it’s healing well and that there’s still new hair growing (in fact, they told me at the start that the hair doesn’t start to regrow proper until after that six months mark). One of the staff also started pulling hairs that was… basically stuck there instead of growing like the rest.
They showed me comparison pics of my first visit vs today and I was at first like “wait, they look kinda similar?” until I remembered that before I had hair that I had been goriwng for like year and a half or so and in today’s my hair’s been growing for like 5 months or less.
I also gotta remember that I’ve always had thin hair, even as a kid.
There is a notable difference mind you, I no longer feel the dread of age overcome me when an elevator has a camera showing things from the back.
Me and my hair stuff are a tale for another day though.
After that and grabbing late lunch/early dinner I started prowling the city for photo spots for Ruri and as you can tell by the block above, I was successful, but I actually found interesting spots in the process.
The first photo of that block was on the roof plaza of a building near Osaka Station and I couldn’t believe I was able to actually see the Tempozan ferris wheel from all the way here.
I mean, it makes sense because it’s in the direction of Universal Studios, and the wheel is on the other side of that river but something about the trains I usually need to ride to get close to Tempozan paint a different mental map for me.
Osaka Station itself also has a cool terrace, but for Dolls it can be tricky to get a good angle. Not impossible, but tricky.
But while metaphorically jumping from roof to roof I saw a whole chunk of the city I hadn’t seen before.
Okay, that’s only half true. Basically there was this whole section of Umeda that was under construction ever since I moved in. I think the Kinoshita Circus performed there in 2018? But otherwise it was closed barred while they built stuff. In fact it was so barred for so long that I literally memory holed it all, I didn’t notice when they opened up apparently in September because I was like “yeah there’s nothing there, why even get near?”
Super cool, super pretty. The “rocks” from the secon set of pics of Ruri are also soft? I thought they were like similar “sitting rocks” that they have near Shin Osaka station but these ones has cushioning of some sort, we’ll see how long it lasts.
Sidenote, I’ve seen this dude in so many pics promoting his book on the train and now my curiosity is satiated. I was like “this looks like cult nonsense”.
For legal reasons I am not claiming this man is involved with cults, honestly, I’m not even sure what he does outside of “businessman and religious leader”. My point is that the prevalence of this specific photo on so many trains always reminded me of… you get the point.
While I was taking photos elsewhere, I kept hearing a very specific type of off-tune, low-quality audio that made me think “either there’s idols in Yodobashi, or small bands near Osaka Station”.
It was the former. This sounds mean but I’m gonna be honest, there’s so many idol groups, even at a pro level that’s don’t put enough emphasis on the vocals.
I’m aware of how idol performances don’t just encompass vocals, the whole point is that they’re vocals, visuals, dance, and even some character work thrown in… but also that means that unless you’re invested in the character or the visual there’s not much for you to hold onto.
…….actually, you know what? Here’s the thing: There’s many styles of singing, some people have more rhythm than melody so they go for things that are more verse-focused, there’s others that are so melody-based that they prefer to sing without even enunciating lyrics.
And amateur idol groups ALWAYS pick songs that push their voices to point where they’re clearly not well-practiced yet.
I wanna like these sorts of amateur idol performances because it feels like a me thing, but also I grew up in a house full of musicians where chorus and theater groups would go record, my tolerance for something being off tone is low.
This criticism is not meant to take away from any of them though. I WISH I had a fraction of a fraction of the stage presence and energy of a single one of those girls.
My point is more that phenomenon where You only like After School Navigators if you’re into Love Live but you don’t need to know what a Nico Nico Nii is to know that Snow Halation is one hell of a song.
On the way back I paid my gym subscription. If you haven’t seen me talk about the gym that’s because it’s one of those things I really need to get back to.
While I was walking around, the silliest thought ocurred to me.
Sometimes I need to transfer pics from one phone to another so I post them onto an empty discord server… and I remembered that transferring things via bluetooth is still a thing.
…yeah, dunno why “that thing the boys used in high school to share porn videos of a chick from another nearby high school with each other” still being a thing blew my mind, but here we are.