Today’s deck is the Fallout Tarot… though like with the Diablo one being more of a Diablo 4 Tarot, this one is more of a Fallout 4 Tarot.
I… don’t really have a problem with this deck, actually. Not saying it’s the best, in fact the backs are symmetrical but then they had the brilliant idea of adding the rust effect and now they’re not. My lack of a problem is that by the time Fallout 4 was a thing I had tuned out of Bethesda stuff because I was still playing Skyrim and testing out mods.
My hot take about Fallout is that I don’t actually like New Vegas that much. I’m not saying New Vegas is bad, on the contrary, but it’s just not my type of game.
The thing that grinds me about it and many RPGs of its kind is the fact that they’re touted as being more immersive because of all the choices, and to be fair there’s nothing I love more than reactivity in games. But I personally find it exhausting when fucking everything escalates into a morality question by the end. It’s fine when you’re put in a position to decide what to do with the nuclear codes, but if simple requests result eventually in you needing to make some big resonant choice, that can get tiring.
It also breaks my own suspension of disbelief because oh this problem and all of this emotional baggage needs to be handled by the weird stranger that just walked into town.
However, as the tone hopefully conveys, this is a purely personal preference. I have this curse I call “I’m a writer, I don’t need to ‘make my own narrative’ within a game, I play games to NOT do the thing I otherwise do for a living”. What it means is that I love games with stories but the moment the game is like “craft your own story” that part of my brain that makes it so hard to even think about fanfics because “might as well do my own thing” kicks in.
For today’s reading… yes, Eight of Swords again. You ever shuffle different decks four days in a row in four different ways and end up with the same card showing up four times in a row?
The reading is actually a shockingly simple one: “Things will get better, your anxieties were limiting you”.
To be fair, these cards all can have more… pessimistic meanings and I’m not really avoiding those, they just feel like things that need more direct context to be relevant. For example Ten of Swords can also mean you’re being hurt or backstabbed, but short of me actually suspecting that, it’s a meaning that feels more relevant if you asked “how’s work going” instead of my more general “what advice do you have for me today? What’s today’s vibe?” for these posts.
Woke up feeling like my mouth was filled with cotton, that’s my cue to pop out the humidifier. My humidifier actually hasn’t moved from where it was last year and I forgot it was there because I kept stacking things on top of it.
Today’s also the day where I finally had to turn on the heating. While this year has definitely remained hotter until way later, part of it was mainly that even without that my apartment has shockingly good insulation.
Japan’s weird. In summer you want all the humidity away, and then on winter you want it back.
Had Japanese lesson, then went to get sushi and thankfully Genroku Sushi wasn’t closed forever like I feared.
There was a Shugo Chara x Sanrio thingy on Loft and man that took me back.
I did the first of what I hope is the daily page of drawings. This time I tried drawing stuff I had on my desk and the bottle of my acid reflux medicine was way too hard apparently but the box cutter was super easy.
Shockingly, the biggest difference I noticed was that my hand wasn’t tense squeezing the pen like I was trying to break it.
The thing is that… I don’t know when or how or why I learned this because the only other drawing I’ve made recently was a doodle on the way to Aomori.
L suggests that the dexterity from woodcarving might’ve translated into it.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but my drawing skill was basically frozen at the point where I left off at the start of college over 10 years ago. Though considering The Death Grip seems to be fixed, there’s officially an improvement.
I also sorted a bunch of books. I got these Comic Party comic anthologies ages ago and I finally sorted them in a single place only to notice a couple of missing volumes.
What else happened today…? Oh yeah I got a very specific craving for a plate of green beans, except the plate became a bowl. My body was lacking SOMETHING and demanding it, apparently.
Writing about the Fallout stuff above actually reminded me of a story I always tell to explain myself as a creative (as in: explain what makes my brain tick and click).
Back in school, they’d sometimes ask us to make “plays” to do in front of the class in a group. One time… I can’t remember what one group’s play was about but at the start they played as if they were a family waking up at the start of the day. Then they asked the rest of the class if anyone had any feedback for them.
I raise my hand and go “at the start when they’re waking up they get out of bed too fast, nobody gets out of bed that fast waking up”, which of course resulted in a speechless teacher and weirded out stares.
I’ve always been like this, is my point.