Today’s deck is Notoria: Tarot in Light.
This is the ACTUAL counterpart to the Goetia tarot from a couple of days ago, in the sense that it has the same artist and all that. It’s based, as you might expect, on the Ars Notoria which is the Goetia for angels as it were. It also proves my point about the other one in the sense that the art is stunning when you can actually SEE IT.
As for the reading: Reversed Six of Wands. That’s a card that I don’t see often. The Six of Wands is traditionally a young man on parade, it’s meant to represent achievements and goals.
Now, The World also represents that in a broader sense, but The World is about that goal unto itself while the Six of Wands is about the person that achieves it.
Inverted we can see it as either having an internal parade instead of an external one as it were, or alternatively as feeling like your achievements aren’t being acknowledged.
The second one is me every day, but I’m aware that that’s mostly not the case and it’s a leftover from my abysmal self esteem from a few years ago. I actually feel like the first reading is the more apt though, I’ve been feeling… oddly satisfied lately. And I know I’m satisfied mentally because whenever I am my brain thinks there’s something wrong that I’m forgetting OR that I’m going to die because something has to spoil the good mood.
The interesting thing is that even in this state, if I try to fill in one of those mindfulness apps that asks you how you feel, I never feel like I can say I’m feeling the best. It’s always a few notches above “neutral”.
And I can’t help but wonder sometimes, what does it take for me to go above that or if maybe there’s something blocking me in a more active way.
Regardless, from the card come down Temperance and The Chariot, reassuring me that even if I feel like there’s something that’s gonna go wrong, everything’s where it should and I can push ahead calmly.
I’m gonna be honest, today was a lazy day. I did wake up at like 11AM to see what preorders were up for Warhammer (it was the Lord Solar Leontis novel) and then worked a little bit until around… 2PM I wanna say? I went to get lunch and took the long way back to catch some sun before it goes down early.
I actually took the chance to buy a new lightbulb. A while back a lightbulb died (I use the LED ones and it’s wild to see them burnt when the plastic around them goes yellow and cracks) and I actually got a replacement but it was… it has a proximity sensor built in, impressive stuff.
Also kinda annoying where it is so I had to get regular ones.
I mentioned Kodomo no Jikan yesterday and I decided to revisit it when I got back. I had forgotten just how hard to stomach that manga can be.
“Well of course it’s hard to stomach, it’s lolicon”. No no no, you have to remember that I’m desentized to that and yet Kodomo no Jikan is still one of those reads that unironically are like Berserk to me in that I don’t read them for fun, only digging it up every 10 years to nod solemnly and store it away again.
Kodomo no Jikan specifically has this… messiness about itself. It’s a story that doesn’t shy away from how messy growing up can be. It’s focus is mainly in how it is for young girls to even start puberty and no longer be in that innocence of childhood, but it also extends it to the adults and how messy things can be even at that stage.
I grew up with many teachers in my family and a lot of what happens mirrors what they’ve had to deal with.
It’s ugly, not in the Aku no Hana “rotoscoped so it’s less flattering visually” way, but in the “life is just like this sometimes” way. And sure you can make arguments about the author’s preferences but the text conveys something else entirely.
Since I was already going through manga I decided to give Ririsa of the 2.5 Dimension a try and uh… couple of hours later I wrote a whole thing about it. It’s good, don’t let the surface level stuff deter you from giving it a try.
There’s two things I didn’t mention in that post to not derail it too hard. The first is that I appreciate how the anatomy between the students and the adults is different and how there’s not a single “girl with big boobs” template as it were. When they add a crossdressing boy, the art goes out of its way to depict the sort of thin boy that can easily pass for a girl without just drawing a girl and calling it a boy.
I’m far from the stage to start thinking about it, but if I ever get to a good point drawing, my goal is to be able to balance that variety of anatomy with expressiveness.
The other thing is that Chloe from Prisma Illya is basically my Ririel. I like Prisma Illya for too many reasons to simplify here, but Chloe is special to me specifically.
The short of it is that Prillya takes place after an alternate version of Fate/Zero where the war ended differently and in the process what little there was of Illya, the Illya that was a Grail conduit got sealed and she was basically born again. It’s the reason why Illya in Prillya is an actual kid instead of an adult with stunted growth like in Fate/Stay Night.
(Yes I’m giving you the short of it).
Chloe is that Illya that got sealed, she had to live seeing someone else live her life while she felt like nobody wanted her, when she’s released she antagonizes everyone until they accept her as an individual.
And I don’t have the time in the foreseeable future to do justice why “something inside you growing resentful as you live life unaware it exists” still chokes me up to this day.
Also, Persona 4 specifically got me through a tough spot after graduating High School and starting college where I felt like I had no friends, but the problem with that one is that I’m sour on the whole Persona series while I still love Prisma Illya and insist it’s the best piece of TYPE-MOON media to ever exist, no hyperbole, I’m serious.
Speaking of numbers, E (who you might remember from my posts in September) was telling about her TTRPG campaign and the phrase “Insert Disc 2 Moment” was used and I’ve legit haven’t stopped thinking about it for days.
By the way, if you’re curious about the title, I finished A Preface to Paradise Lost and near the end, in talking about those that consume media in ways that aren’t ideal to proper criticism, C.S. Lewis just drops something along the lines of “To live in Merry Middle Earth is to have Merry Middling things”.
However much you might think you hate Tokien’s work, you’ll never reach the levels of Hater of C.S. Lewis.