Today’s deck is the Grace Tarot.
No idea who Grace is, but I really like the painted-like quality of this one.
Today’s reading is a welcome reassurance that I’ve got what it takes to keep myself in check.
One more pharmacy run and officially I should give up on my meds for the time being. I’ll make an appointment in a month and hope that the situation has normalized by then.
Problem is that now I’m scared. While logically I know I can handle the lack of meds as needed, I’ve got plenty of trauma related to both the period before I got medicated and the few moments where I ran out of meds and had to make do without them for a few days.
It’s interesting in the sense that it’s not a physiological withdrawal (lord knows I need like 3 layers of reminders to not forget to take the pills) but a psychological one, and even then more of an “I don’t trust myself in these circumstances” sort of thing.
Then I come back and I notice that the stuff in one of the shelves on one of the rooms toppled over. There was nothing too sensitive and doesn’t look like it hit anything fragile but now that’s a mess I gotta clear up and also the shelf is cracked and I couldn’t help but look at the cieling and go “you’re testing me, aren’t you?”.
Well, I won’t be found wanting. Kicking? Sure. Screaming? Definitely. Wanting? Not a chance.
I’m just being dramatic though, but gotta admit that if this all happened exactly two weeks ago while the bank stuff was still in the air I could’ve definitely blue-screened.
I had Japanese lesson and spent the rest of the day clearing stuff up. While I was at it I had Mandalore’s Banban streams playing to have background noise and there’s two thoughts that kept crossing my mind.
The first is the constant mentions of whether the games are grifts or not. I couldn’t really tell you, especially considering that my only exposure to those games or any related capital D Discourse is literally those streams and nothing else, but something that I don’t see people mentioning (in general, not just related to this specifically) is that many elements that might come off as part of a grift are actually related to people emulating what bigger creators do.
Like, let’s say Big Franchise A does a thing where they sell a character story as overpriced DLC as a deliberate grift for extra pennies and it somehow sticks around. Come stage left Small Developer B who is just emulating the things that gave Big Franchise A its prestige and they do the same DLC tactic, not because they’re deliberately fleecing for extra pennies, but because the big one did it they must have done it for a reason, right?
Dunno, a lot of the choices I saw in those games felt like stuff I would’ve done starting out, like if the stuff I made when I was like 19 was what took off proper instead of having some rougher times that led to VA-11 Hall-A (and then the growing pains that happened mid-development).
The other thing, and this one I noticed between stream VODs, is actually what gives this post its title.
If I understand right, there’s a lot of gap in between each of their releases, and so much of the story feels incomprehensible unless you assume a fandom barrage of STUFF between each release. There’s a lot of gaps in how invested it assumes you are in a character for example.
Which reminded me of Sasuke in Naruto. Now, Naruto wasn’t my poison of choice back in the day (it was Bleach, as I’ve mentioned plenty in the past) but I tangentially kept up with it until Shippuden.
Quick sidenote, I still remember the day Shippuden released, the anime sites I checked back in high school imploded.
Anyway, even back then the whole plot of OMG WE GOTTA RESCUE SASUKE made zero sense to me. On the plot level of things Sasuke was always an antagonistic piece of shit that made everything worse for everyone and clearly hated everyone else’s guts. The main cast wanting to “save” him as much as they did only made sense if you assumed that they reflected the average viewer’s investment in Sasuke’s existence just for existing and being just like me frfr.
To be fair, though, that’s a problem that even veteran creators go through, I feel. It’s a bit of a side effect of the fact that your creations live in your head with bigger inner worlds than what you show and one of the main skills a writer has to keep in mind is being able to introduce them to other people that haven’t had the character bouncing in their head for decades.
There’s no bigger point, just a half-formed thought while I cleaned up a mess.