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vitaminseetarot · 9 months

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PAC Pick a Song - What About You Currently Shines Brightest?

Sup y'all, I'm back in time for the start of Leo season with another pick a card reading! The full moon is coming right up and I will likely do a reading for that as well very shortly, but I already had this done the other day and wanted to get it finally posted after much delay!

Below here are three cards to choose from belonging to the now-obsolete board game DropMix. It was a game connected to an app now unfortunately no longer in service, but it allowed the game to play by having chips in the cards activate a code that would send to a phone app to tally points as well as play music. You could pile the different cards together on a jockey board based on color and basically create your own remixes. You could play or make freestyle music. My basic pack has as many cards as the minor arcana + 4, so I thought these would be fun to bring out and work with for the partygoing Leo energy that's budding this late summer.

1, 2, 3

Pile 1. The Weeknd - Can't Feel My Face

Cards: Baroness (Fire, Leo); "I am in touch with my purpose and passion in life"; 7 of Swords, XIX Sun, XVIII Moon

(Okay just a quick note I just gotta let u know that I eventually plan to paint over the Sun card for my only RWS-esque deck because the smiley face creeps me out lol so I put a tiny candle over its haunting face. The Sun is supposed to be a positive card dangit!)

Anyway back to your reading! Right off the bat I feel like you're gonna be shining bright this season no matter how you personally feel about summer, get in the mood and live it up! Light that bonfire. Jump in the pile of autumn leaves. Tap into your senses in the most innocent and playful way. I feel like you shine brightly when you get excited about literally anything in your life, it could be a new brand of coffee or new pair of jeans or something but people like how you react to things. Reminds me of Youtubers who have these funny but authentic personalities as they review random products or whatever.

I feel like you can get so in love with something that you kinda, as the song suggests, "go numb" and let everything else fizzle away from your focus. But the thing to remember is that all those other things are still there even if they don't light you up. It's all about learning to find the sweet spot between really enjoying the moment and being in flow with the best of things while also attending to the gritty details. It doesn't mean you should "go numb" in the other direction by only focusing on practical things. When I see Sun and Moon in the same three card reading I am reminded of Temperance because you're trying to balance two different energies together that are ultimately meant to work together. Manifestation+work, joy+catharsis, reason+instinct, yeah? It's a lot to seesaw back and forth every day but 7 of swords tells me that you find ingenious ways to pull it off. Don't let the shyness snuff the light out, and don't let the egoic sense of duty override your needs.

If you feel like sometimes you have to sneak away to find time to enjoy what makes you shine from the inside, I'm getting guidance for the collective to simply learn how to share a little bit of what you're doing while balancing it with the part of you that wants to protect your creative ideas and work on them. Again, there's a message here about balance. You don't have to spill everything about your life to the first person who asks, but at the same time there will be people who benefit from your fiery energy. Your interests and talents deserve to take up some space, pile 1. I think this pile just shines in general even if you're not always aware of it, even if it's incredibly subtle. It's in the little things.

⊱ ──── {.⋅ ♫ ⋅.} ─── ⊰⊱ ──── {.⋅ ♫ ⋅.} ─── ⊰⊱ ──── {.⋅ ♫ ⋅.} ─── ⊰

Pile 2. Evanescence - Bring Me to Life

Shield (Fire, Sagittarius); "I attract relationship in harmony with my authentic self"; 5 of Cups, 10 of Pentacles, 9 of Pentacles

This pile could be going through some awakening period right now. I know, I know, it may sound cliché with "wake me up inside" as the lyrics, but it occurred to me that the Shield in your card is like this old energy that has been barricading you from material experiences. Like this is a pile who's really already been in the thick of the brambles and is wanting to come out. The Sagittarius arrow sign is in my mind like a flare set off from deep in the woods as if to say, "hey! I'm over here, come find me!" It's being let off in the sky in the hopes of rekindling some sort of lost connection to something, could be a person or to a certain goal. You currently shine brightest when it comes to relating to others, and seeking out positive relationships.

It could be that you've gone through some disrupting experiences that have encouraged you to wall off to self heal. This may have taken a long period of time to work through. I feel that you're moving into a part of the thicket where more light is pouring in from the outside, that you're near the end of a long isolating tunnel. You're entering a phase of your life where you're ready to have connections that feel more solid and real, rather than fairweather friendships. You're looking for sustainability, for people to have some sense of loyalty with. People with whom you can truly enjoy the abundance of life. The main issue is that grief and isolation can becomes habits that we may need to temper with in order to allow the new. Forgive yourself when you still feel the need to retreat even as you begin to stand out more. Depending on how long it's been, it can be quite an adjustment.

Maybe abundance is coming a little slow here, as the green color here is blocky. But it's rich like emerald, so once it's found, things will transform in your life radically. It's saying that even if you identify as an introvert, there is still "treasure" to be found in building new relationships. It could be totally virtual. But you shine from making the most out of the opportunities that your current or as of yet undiscovered relationships have to offer. You have a lot to offer others as well. I do get a strong teaching role from this pile. Maybe you've thought about going into teaching. I think your students would see you as sensitive and resourceful.

⊱ ──── {.⋅ ♫ ⋅.} ─── ⊰⊱ ──── {.⋅ ♫ ⋅.} ─── ⊰⊱ ──── {.⋅ ♫ ⋅.} ─── ⊰

Pile 3. LMFAO - Sexy and I Know It

Marigold (Water, Scorpio); "I am wise and wonderful"; 6 of Pentacles, 2 of Pentacles, 10 of Cups

Your reading is so clear to me, you shine brightest when you are fully present in the moment and loving what you're doing and who you're being. I don't think this pile likes to waste any time lol. I think you've had some hard experiences that have taught you how to value the time and resources you have, especially when you give this energy way generously. And I get the sense that you're learning how to manage both the philanthropy side of things with the personal fulfillment side. You're learning that one does not necessarily require the sacrifice of another. Compromise, maybe, but not at a net loss. You can give without overextending the hand, you can seek out bliss in life without taking it away from others.

This is not a common trait to shine in, pile 3. It's a mature place to shine, but not always easy to develop. It's required a lot from you right from the beginning. There were probably some things you had to let go to make it all work before. But it doesn't always have to be that way. Your ability to rise above the situation, brush the dust off your coat and move forward is what makes you shine. Although I'll say this: even if it looks like all is going well, you're still allowed to feel whatever grief is stored up inside you. It's part of moving past it in order to make the most out of the present.

Some of these experiences may have had something to do with your sense of confidence, your body image, how your present yourself to others, self-expression, and I'm also getting pretty privilege as a topic. Self worth over buying the right kind of things too… I think you're letting your hair down finally. You're letting some outdated ideas about your image go, you shine when you declare yourself to be beautiful and sexy "just because". Why does there need to be a reason? Some people might tell you that you, in particular, aren't "allowed" to feel good in your own skin and clothes. Some may get threatened by your confidence. But it's because that's where you shine and it's up to them to adjust their vision. Tell em to make an optometrist appointment if they can't handle seeing your presentation.

⊱ ──── {.⋅ ♫ ⋅.} ─── ⊰⊱ ──── {.⋅ ♫ ⋅.} ─── ⊰⊱ ──── {.⋅ ♫ ⋅.} ─── ⊰

This reading has not been evaluated by the FDA to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any disease or infection. Please ask your physician before going online.

2023, Vitaminsee Tarot ™

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ducktastic · 3 years

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2020 Gameological Awards

Over on the Gameological Discord, we have an annual tradition of writing up our games of the year not as a ranked list but rather as answers to a series of prompts. Here are my personal choices for the year that was 2020.

Favorite Game of the Year

I didn’t know what to expect when I walked into Paradise Killer. I knew that I liked the vaporwave resort aesthetic from the game’s trailer and figured I was in for a Danganronpa-style murder mystery visual novel with an open-ended murder mystery at its core. Those assumptions were… half-right? The game definitely plays out like the exploration bits of Danganronpa set on the island from Myst but with far simpler puzzles. What I didn’t expect was to fall so deeply in love with the environment—its nooks and crannies, its millennia of lore, its brutalist overlap of idol worship, consumerism, and mass slaughter. It makes sense that the world of Paradise Killer is its strongest feature, since the cast of NPCs don’t really move around, leaving you alone with the world for the overwhelming majority of your experience as you bounce back and forth between digging around for clues and interrogating potential witnesses. And despite what the promo materials indicated, there IS a definitive solution to the crimes you’re brought in to investigate, the game just lets you make judgment based on whatever evidence you have at the time you’re ready to call it a day, so if you’re missing crucial evidence you might just make a compelling enough case for the wrong person and condemn them to eternal nonexistence. Am I happy with the truth at the end of the day? No, and neither is anybody else I’ve spoken to who completed the game, but we all were also completely enthralled the entire time and our dissatisfaction has less to do with the game and more to do with the ugly reality of humanity. I’ve always been of the mindset that “spoilers” are absolute garbage and that a story should be just as good whether you know the twist or not and any story that relies on surprising the audience with an unexpected reveal is not actually that good a story, but Paradise Killer is a game about piecing together your own version of events so I feel that it’s vital to the gameplay experience that people go in knowing as little as possible and gush all about it afterwards. Just trust me, if the game looks even remotely intriguing to you, go for it. I’ve had just as much fun talking about the game after I finished it with friends just getting started as I did actually solving its mysteries myself.

Best Single Player Game

I honestly missed out on the buzz for In Other Waters at launch, so I’m happy I had friends online talking it up as Black Friday sales were coming along. The minimal aesthetic of his underwater exploration game allows the focus to shift more naturally to the game’s stellar writing as a lone scientist goes off in search of her mentor and the secrets they were hiding on an alien world. It only took a few hours for me to become completely absorbed in this narrative and keep pushing forward into increasingly dangerous waters. In Other Waters might just be the best sci-fi story I experienced all year and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys sci-fi novels, regardless of their experience with video games.

Best Multiplayer Game

Look, we all know this year sucked. 2020 will absolutely be chronicled in history books as a fascinating and deeply depressing time in modern history where we all stayed inside by ourselves and missed our friends and family. It was lonely and it was bleak. Which is why it made my heart glow so much more warmly every time I got a letter from an honest-to-goodness real-life friend in Animal Crossing New Horizons. Knowing that they were playing the same game I was and hearing about their experiences and sending each other wacky hats or furniture, it lightened the days and made us feel that little bit more connected. Sure, when the game first launched we would actually take the time to visit one another’s islands, hang out, chat in real-time, and exchange gifts, but we all eventually got busy with Zoom calls, sourdough starters, and watching Birds of Prey twenty-two times. Still, sending letters was enough. It was and still is a touching little way to show that we’re here for one another, if not at the exact same time.

Favorite Ongoing Game

Zach Gage is one of my favorite game designers right now, and when I heard he was releasing a game called Good Sudoku I was sold sight unseen. The game as released was… fine. It’s sudoku and it’s pleasant, but it was also buggy and overheated my phone in a way I hadn’t seen since Ridiculous Fishing (also by Zach Gage) seven years ago. Thankfully, the most glaring bugs have been fixed and I can now enjoy popping in every day for some quick logic puzzle goodness. Daily ranked leaderboards keep me coming back again and again, the steady ramp of difficulty in the arcade and eternal modes means I can always chase the next dopamine rush of solving increasingly complex puzzles. It’s not a traditional “ongoing” game the way, say, Fortnite and Destiny are, but I’m happy to come back every day for sudoku goodness.

Didn't Click For Me

With Fortnite progressively losing me over the course of 2020, finalizing with my wholesale “never again” stance after Epic boss Tim Sweeney compared Fortnite demanding more money from Apple to the American Civil Rights movement (no, absolutely not), I dipped my toe into a number of new “battle pass”-style online arena types of games, and while Genshin Impact eventually got its hooks into me, Spellbreak absolutely did not. With graphics straight out of The Dragon Prince and the promise of a wide variety of magic combat skills to make your character your own, the game seemed awfully tempting, but my first few experiences were aimless and joyless, with no moment of clarity to make me understand why I should keep coming back. Maybe they’ll finesse the game some more in 2021, or a bunch of my friends will get hooked and lure me back, but for now I am a-okay deleting this waste of space on my Switch and PC.

"Oh Yeah, I Did Play That Didn't I?"

I remember being really excited for Murder By Numbers. Ace Attorney-style crime scene investigation visual novel with Picross puzzles for the evidence, art by the creators of Hatoful Boyfriend, and music by the composer of Ace Attorney itself?! Sounds like a dream come true. But the pixel-hunt nature of the crime scene investigations was more frustrating than fun, the picross puzzles were not particularly great, and the game came out literally a week before the entire world went into lockdown which makes it feel more like seven years ago than just earlier this year. I remember being marginally charmed by the game once it was in my hands, but as soon as my mind shifted to long-term self care, Murder By Numbers went from hot topic to cold case.

Most Unexpected Joy

I was looking forward to Fuser all year. As a dyed-in-the-wool DropMix stan, the prospect of a spiritual sequel to DropMix on all major digital platforms without any of the analogue components was tremendously exciting, and I knew I’d have a lot of fun making mixes by myself and posting them online for the world to hear. What I didn’t expect, however, was the online co-op mode to be such a blast! Up to four players take turns making 32 bars of mashups, starting with whatever the player before handed them and adding their own fingerprints on top. It sounds like it should just be a mess of cacophony, but every session I’ve played so far has been just the best dance party I’ve had all year, and everyone not currently in control of the decks (including an audience of spectators) can make special requests for what the DJ should spin and tap along with the beat to great super-sized emoji to show how much they’re enjoying the mix. Literally the only times my Apple Watch has ever warned me of my heightened heart rate have been the times I was positively bouncing in place rocking out to co-op freestyle play in Fuser.

Best Music

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Only one video game this year had tunes that were so bumpable they were upgraded to my general “2020 jams” playlist alongside Jeff Rosenstock, Run the Jewels, and Phoebe Bridgers, and that game was Paradise Killer. 70% lo-fi chill beats to study/interrogate demons to, 20% gothic atmospheric bangers, 10% high-energy pop jazz, this soundtrack was just an absolute joy to swim around in both in and out of gameplay.

Favorite Game Encounter

It’s wild that in a landscape where games let me live out my wildest fantasies, the single moment that lit me up in a way that stood out to me more than any other was serving Neil the right drink in Coffee Talk. Over the course of the game, you serve a variety of hot drinks to humans, werewolves, vampires, orcs, and more, all while chatting with your customers and learning more about their lives and relationships. The most mysterious customer, though, is an alien life form who adopts the name Neil. They do not know what they want to drink and claim it doesn’t make a difference because they cannot taste it. Everybody else wants *something*. Neil is just ordering for the sake of fitting in and exploring the Earth experience. It’s only in the second playthrough that attentive baristas will figure out what to serve Neil, unlocking the “true” ending in the process. Seeing the typically stoic Neil actually emote when they tasted their special order drink? What an absolute treat that was.

Best Free DLC of the Year

It’s still only a couple of days old at the time I’m writing this, but Marvel’s Avengers just added Kate Bishop, aka Hawkeye, and THANK GOODNESS. Almost every character in the game at launch just smashed the endless waves of robot baddies with their fists and that looks exhausting and uncomfortable. Hawkeye (the game calls her Kate Bishop, but come on, she’s been Hawkeye in the comics for over 14 years, let’s show her some respect) uses A SWORD. FINALLY! Aside from that, I’m just having a blast shooting arrows all over the place. She and Ms Marvel are the most likable characters in the game so far, so I hope they keep adding more of the Young Avengers and Champions to the game, and if the recently announced slate of Marvel movies and tv shows are any indication (with America Chavez, Cassie Lang, and Riri Williams all coming soon to the MCU), that seems to be what Marvel is pushing for across all media

Most Accessible Game

Nintendo is, first and foremost, a toy company. They got their start in toys and cards long before video games was a thing, and they still do more tests to ensure their video game hardware is childproof than anybody else in the industry (remember how they made Switch cartridges “taste bad” so kids wouldn’t eat them?). This year, Nintendo got to rekindle some of their throwback, simplistic, toys-and-cards energy with Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics, a Switch collection of timeless family-friendly games like Chess, Mancala, and Backgammon, along with “toy” versions of sports like baseball, boxing, and tennis for a virtual parlor room of pleasant time-wasters. The games were all presented with charming li’l explainers from anthropomorphic board game figurines, and the ability to play quick sessions of Spider Solitaire on the touch screen while I binged The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix made Clubhouse Games one of my most-played titles of the year. Plus, local play during socially-distant friend hangs was an excellent way to make us feel like we were much closer than we were physically allowed to be as friends knocked each other’s block off in the “toy boxing” version of Rock’em Sock’em Robots.

"Waiting for Game-dot"

I get that everyone loves Disco Elysium. I saw it on everyone’s year-end lists last year. I finally bought it with an Epic Games Store coupon this year. This year was a long enough slog of depressing post-apocalyptic drudgery, I didn’t want to explore a whole nother one in my leisure time. I’ll get to it… someday.

Game That Made Me Think

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Holovista was an iPhone game I played over the course of two or three days based on the recommendation of some trusted colleagues on Twitter and oh my goodness was I glad that I played it. What starts as a chill vaporwave photography game steadily progresses into an exploration of psychological trauma, relationships with friends and family, and the baggage we carry with us from our pasts. In this exceptionally hard year, I badly needed this story about spending time alone with your personal demons and finding your way back to the people who love and support you. Just like with Journey and Gone Home, I walked away from Holovista feeling a rekindled appreciation for the people in my life.

#video games #holovista #paradise killer #animal crossing #animal crossing new horizons #spellbreak #good sudoku #fuser #dropmix #in other waters #marvel's avengers #avengers #clubhouse games #coffee talk #2020

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