The first thing that struck me when I looked at the illustration of the nineteenth syllable in one of my Iroha Karuta decks was its similarity to the Seven of Pentacles in the Rider Waite Tarot.Well, okay there are some obvious differences as well. The farmer in the Seven of Pentacles, who I suppose is Italian, is leaning on a hoe and contemplating the progress of his vines while the Japanese farmer is cultivating some kind of root vegetable (white radish perhaps?) with a mattock, which he has propped against himself so that he can wipe the sweat from his neck.

For the first time this year, I played three blitz games on Gameknot's Live Chess portal. I left the colour setting on random although I was hoping to get the black pieces so I could practice the "Sniper" as advocated by one of my chess pals, Charlie Storey. I read his book on the Sniper a few years ago, but did not properly absorb the lessons. I picked it up again this year and am going through it more thoroughly.

May was a good month for Bitcoin, with a new all time high of $111,970 being achieved on 22nd and a six figure Bitcoin price as "the new normal" at least for now.Coincidentally, I would describe my own progress on the Hive front in May as "good" as well, with a new "all time high" for the number of tokens that I managed to accumulate in that auspicious month. My combination of blogging and delegation rewards was augmented firstly by a business sale that was paid for in Hive, and secondly by the successful swapping of some spare Litecoin for Hive. The latter transaction came home only after a worrying delay that I blogged about here:

A few weeks ago I noticed I'd accumulated some unclaimed commissions on a "safelist" site called TheCryptoMailer so I sent in a withdrawal request for payment in Bitcoin (as that is one of the options provided). However, the response was that they'd prefer to payout in Litecoin.

Last Saturday evening I joined three other boardgamers and played a newly published game (2025) called "New Cold War."New Cold War is a board game for one to four players that simulates global power struggles over three decades from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019. Each of the four players takes on the role of a superpower engaged in a struggle for regional or global domination. The four superpowers are:

A few weeks ago, Freebitco.in experienced a significant outage. The site was down, and communication from the team was minimal. Understandably, this led to concerns among users, with some fearing they'd pulled the rug...Even I began to assume the worst although I have consistently said that they have a profitable business model based on the gambling side of their website, so a rug-pull might net them a huge amount of one-off stolen bitcoin, but it would also cut off their residual gambling profits...