Today’s deck is the Celestial Tarot.
It assigns each card a specific constellation and then makes an illustration out of it. Wouldn’t recomment is to beginners but I would recommend to anyone who likes astrology.
Today’s reading speaks of indecision between What Must Be Done and self-care. Now, does it refer to needing to go to Tokyo itself? Or maybe shifting priorities even with a deadline in overtime?
We’ll see.
As I’ve said before today was the day to go to Tokyo for a bit. I always say I hate Tokyo but it’s more like “Tokyo is a cumbersome place to be unless I have very good reason to be in, of which hanging out with friends is a very valid one”, but you know, that’s not as snappy.
Packing this time around had two variations compared to other travels. The first one is that, because I was meeting up with people, I packed extra clothes and even an extra pair of shoes. And also I had gifts for them which was a bit of extra weight.
For reference, my normal travel prep tends to be more underwear than either shirts or pants and a bunch of photography and doll stuff.
This time around I’m staying in Shiba, not Chiba, Shiba. That’s the area that’s close to the Tokyo Tower.
There wasn’t anything too eventful on the way. The Shinkansen did have at least three foreigner cyclists boarding the trains, which was curious. One of them was sitting besides me but he was polite, no gaijin stereotype at play.
I’ve been going through David L Craddock’s book about Mortal Kombat’s development and it’s interesting because, just like how his book about Roguelikes is a window into computers and internet in the 70s and early 80s, this one is a window not just into arcades but also into things like violence in videogames.
That last point was super interesting because where other books tackling the subject only go “yeah there were hearings about videogame violence and Nintendo and Sega had a bitch fight”, this one goes even further back, pinpointing how the discussion had been ongoping since the 70s, including flash forwards to arguments made as early as 2019.
It’s also funny that after I complained so much about the stereotype of “dev makes it big immediately gets a Ferrari”, this book includes a quote that’s like “I did go to a dealer but held back because I didn’t want to be the asshole riding in the neighborhood with a luxury car”.
That said, Patrician TV did release his second video on World of Warcraft so it’s halted for a day or two while I finish that one.
Back to the trip, I got to the hotel at 5 and the meetup was at 7. So I went out to Akihabara and killed time at the Big Echo karaoke.
It was awful, the speakers had a thing where they would start vibrating at a certain volume, and also for some reason the console was really slow to reflect changes in volume. I would raise the volume a lot because I didn’t see any changes, wait half a second in bafflement, and then be blasted with Too Much Volume afterwards.
Also if you tried to change the key of the song you had to do it BEFORE selecting it. If the default for the song was two notes lower than the original one and you queued it up without noticing, tough luck, no changes allowed while the song is playing.
After about hour and a half fighting with the Karaoke Machine, it was time so I went down and met up with people. The group included someone I hadn’t seen since 2019 and someone that I was supposed to see back in 2019.
When I first proposed meeting up I had this one bar called Sekirei in mind, but it was closed today so we shifted plans to Alchemist, a bar with a DJ that plays a lot of anime songs.
Afterwards we went to Kowloon Cyber Tokyo, a videogame bar where apparently the owner is a fan of VA-11 Hall-A, they even have it on loop in a screen near one of the counters.
All in all it was a great night out, the sort of night where you don’t notice until you’re slushed that you’ve spent like six hours with the same group of people.
Works keep looming over me, but I need to remind myself that it’s not like I have the whole appointment unfinished. I’ll be fine.