#1.2.6

Another update is here! Bandai has released Tamagotchi Uni version 1.2.6 via an over-the-air software update. This update, like previous updates, increases the Tamagotchi Uni fun by introducing a new Tamaverse feature, updated death screen, and the next Tama Arena event, Bunny Jump!

First, 1.2.6 will bring a new referesh button when selecting the Tamaverse button on the main menu of the Tamagotchi Uni. Under No, you will see a refresh icon which will allow you to refresh Tamagotchi characters in the Tamaverse once per day. Please note the if auto updates are on, or if you are participating in an event at the Tama Arena, you will not be able to refresh characters manually.

Second, there's an updated death screen on the Tamagotchi Uni. On death screen you will not only see the ghost, but you'll also see arrows point down to the "A" and "C" buttons guiding you to hold them down together to hatch a new egg instead of using the reset button. The guide has been added to help everyone understand the above operation.

Third is Bunny Jump is the next event that will be hosted at the Tama Arena in the Tamaverse for the month of September. You’ll be able to complete with other Tamagotchi Uni characters around the world to win prizes, just like the Tama Racing event back in August.

In Bunny Jump, you’ll choose between either team peach, or team grape, and complete to see who can jump tot eh highest place. Similar to Tama Racing, you’ll have the opportunity to play once per day, but also practice as many times as needed prior!

Once the game starts, your Tamagotchi character will begin jumping. Jump to the left by pushing he “A” button, and jump to the right by pushing the “B” button.

There are different types of platforms you can land on, so be careful not to fall! This includes a normal platform, arrow, small platform, UFOs, and lastly bubbles. The object will disappear once you jump from it.

A countdown will show up for the last 10 seconds, and the game is over when it reaches 0 seconds remaining. How many Tama-feet can you jump?

The event starts on Tuesday, September 12th at 14:00 JST through Tuesday, September 19th, 2023 13:59 JST. The results will be calculated from Tuesday, September 19th, 2023 14:00 JST through Thursday, September 21st, 13:59 JST. Rewards will be distributed at the Tama Arena from Thursday, September 21st, 2023 14:00 JST through Friday, September 29th, 13:59 JST.

Rewards are all about how many days you play for, and if you’re on the winning team. The bunny brown is reward you’ll earn if you play for all 7 days, the Tsukimi dumplings is the reward you’ll earn for playing 5 to 6 days, and Tamaverse water is the reward you’ll earn for playing 1 to 4 days. It is important to note you’ll only earn one reward based on how many days you’ve played, not all rewards collectively.

Lastly, the winning team will get 5,000 Gotchi points! Wishing you the best of luck!

The update also includes miscellaneous bug fixes.

Okay, you know what? The past two times I’ve read Les Mis, I’ve always laughed at the sentence about Valjean waking up and then the next paragraph immediately digressing into his life story, but thinking about it, I actually really like it. Since Valjean has entered, he’s kind of been treated like a stranger; we don’t get his internality, and everything about him is narrated to us as if Hugo doesn’t really know anything about him either. And then he wakes up, and with his waking, we are finally able to learn about his past and also, in the next chapters, access his internal thoughts. From 1.1.1 to 1.2.5, we have been existing in Bishop Myriel’s point of view. The whole house goes to sleep in 1.2.5, and when Valjean awakens in 1.2.6, we have left Myriel and are now in Valjean’s point of view.

Somebody else pointed it out already, but I truly love that Jean Valjean’s father was called Jean and his mother was Jeanne. I hope his sister was also Jeanne and at least one of her children was Jean or Jeanne. No wonder there were all those “every Amis’ first name is Jean” memes back in the day. Hugo wasted all his creativity on last names and chapter titles.

So I looked up milkfever, and as far as I can tell, it’s mastitis, which is an infection of the breast tissue. Mastitis most often occurs in women who are breastfeeding. Which would mean that Valjean would have been extremely young when his mother died, possibly still an infant? So his sister raised him from what seems a very, very young age. It’s interesting, then, that he seems more sentimental about her children rather than her?

“His youth was spent in rough and poorly paid labor; he was never known to have a sweetheart; he had no time to be in love.” This line feels really important. It establishes how alone Valjean has been all his life, and that he’s never really had an ambition towards that kind of non-familial human connection. It sort of sets everything up for why he’s able to function so well on his own. At the same time, just in the next paragraph, we’re told that he lets his sister take the best of his meal for her children, and that he quietly paid for the milk that his sister’s children stole; this establishes a sort of quiet, almost instinctual kindness. He’s sullen, he grumbles, he barely speaks, but he cares enough to pay for the milk and not get the children in trouble with either Marie Claude or his sister.

This also establishes the difference between Valjean pre-prison and Valjean post-prison. Despite his reticence and grumpiness, pre-prison Valjean is kind and thoughtful and willing to sacrifice both badly needed money and food for the sake of the comfort of his sister’s children. Post-prison Valjean is equally quiet but has much rougher instincts: his reaction to Myriel’s kindness is a weird semi-threat, his instinct to steal the silver seems much different from his reasoning for stealing bread, he scares Petit Gervais away rather than giving him back the coin.

Hugo’s comparison between poachers/smugglers of nature vs the city is interesting. Men who are fierce to survive on their own in the forest or the sea are savage, but still human. The brutal inhumanity of city-based poverty destroys that. I think I see what Hugo is getting at here: Circumstances make the man. Men who survive in nature are impoverished due to their natural surroundings. You’re going to have to fight to survive if you’re all alone (or in a very small community) in the middle of nowhere in a forest/mountain or on the coast, because resources are scarce and nature is intense. But you retain your humanity because you are fighting against the ruthlessness of nature, not of other people (and perhaps because some of the time, you are working with a community to survive). On the other hand, men who have to survive in the city aren’t fighting nature. They’re fighting the total lack of sympathy from politicians, or employers, or anyone in a more privileged position, and the dog-eat-dog, every man for himself nature of surviving in such a place. They’re fighting against a lack of access to food/goods/money/etc not because those resources are naturally physically scarce, like in the forest, but because they’re socially scarce; in the city scarcity is man-made. It’s you and maybe you’re family against the world, and other people aren’t necessarily going to go out of their way to help you. The more you have to do hard labor to get almost no money and therefore almost no food or other essentials, the more your humanity is sucked away. Capitalism, woo! Again, Hugo being painfully relevant to modern day.

“In our society there are fearful times when the criminal law wrecks a man. How mournful the moment when society draws back and permits the irreparable loss of a sentient being.” Woof. I feel like I don’t even have anything to say about this line because it speaks for itself so goddamn loudly.

(It’s painfully strange to be reading this in the US in the 21st century and have so many modern day injustices come to mind.)

I don’t know enough about French history to understand why Hugo establishes Napoleon’s victory at Montenotte alongside Valjean’s attachment to the chain gang. I wish I did.

Jean Valjean is taken to Toulon and is “erased” at the same time as his sister and her children. In the same paragraph that Valjean’s past is erased and he is given the number 24,601, Hugo also tells us that, now that we are in Valjean’s point of view, his family have pretty much completely vanished as well, sucked into the blackness of poverty in the city. He completely forgets about them; aside from the retention of his plant-based knowledge for later in the book, it seems as though this is the moment where all of Valjean’s past is sucked away from him, and he pretty much never mentions anything about his pre-prison life again, except for the fact that he was a pruner at Faverolles.

Valjean attempts and fails to escape prison four times. I feel like this parallels with his major escapes later in the book, which are successful: his escape from the Orion, his escape into Petit Picpus, his escape from the clutches of Thenardier, and perhaps his escape either into the sewers or his “escape” from Javert when Javert lets him go.

And then a moment in which Hugo becomes self-referential. Claude Gueux is a short story Hugo wrote in 1834. (Also, I’ve just now read it, and Hugo references blowing the candle out with one’s nostril here, too. Only he calls it a boyhood trick.) It’s very obviously the scaffolding for Valjean later on, and a little for Javert. The very skeleton of a summary is this: it’s about a poor but noble-hearted man who is put in prison for stealing bread for his family; he is abused by a guard in a number of ways and kills that guard for his needless cruelty. At his trial he raises questions about what makes a man steal or kill, and how society is to blame.

“Valjean entered the galleys sobbing and trembling; he left hardened. He entered in despair; he left sullen.” Hugo reiterating what he said already with the line about a scar being left on Valjean’s heart. The only way for him to survive all those layers of pain and trauma is to let everything scar over and harden for protection.

So Jeanne Mathieu married Jean Valjean and named her daughter Jeanne Valjean and her son Jean Valjean. Jeanne had seven children and was a widow, so Jean Valjean helped take care of her as she had taken care of him after Jeanne and Jean died.

They ran out of bread. Valjean broke a window and stole a loaf of bread, but the shopkeeper heard him and caught him. Valjean was “something of a poacher,” and that counted against him in court. He was sentenced to five years in the galleys. He was taken to the prison in Toulon.

“Everything about his life was erased, right down to his name; he was no longer even Jean Valjean, he was number 24601. What became of his sister? What became of the seven children? Who was going to worry about that? What becomes of the handful of leaves from the yellow tree sawn off at its base?”

At the end of the fourth year of his imprisonment, Valjean escaped, aided by his fellow prisoners, but only for two days, which added three years to his sentence. During his sixth year, he tried to escape again but was unsuccessful, adding five more years. He tried again the tenth year, adding three more years to his sentence. Then in his thirteenth year, he escaped for four hours and added three more years to his sentence for a grand total of nineteen years.

Valjean’s everything continues to be just so sad. And a weirdly un-Romantic kind of sad. He’s not the victim of horribly monstrous people, or driven into destitution by the wickedness of men, he’s just the victim of the kind of ordinary misfortune that happens so regularly. I expect there are people in Myriel’s own dioceses with quasi-identical life stories: grew up poor, parents died when they were young, other breadwinner died early, had to make do for themself and their dependents. It’s the kind of backstory that, in novels, so often leads to Plucky Hero(ine) Goes To The City And Makes Something Of Themself. But that’s not Valjean’s story. Valjean’s life isn’t something out of a novel. (I mean, it is, but it doesn’t follow narrative conventions.)

And it’s not like Hugo doesn’t know this conventions. Even in this book alone, we’ve got someone like Fantine, whose story follows them to a T. He’s deliberately upending things here, because he’s not writing about fictional tragedy, he’s writing about everyday tragedy. The kind of tragedy where you don’t run into your family by chance on a street-corner ten years down the road, where you just lose track of them and know that they’re probably dead, and where you can’t even really mourn because you have to stay alive yourself. It’s not narratively satisfying, because reality so rarely is.

Anyway, so Jean Valjean becomes the primary breadwinner of his household at 25. I can’t help but think that it’s not just that he’s too busy for love, but that he recognizes that he can’t support the dependents he has, much less afford to create new ones. He’s quiet and gruffly fond of the kids and of his sister, works hard and does his best. If they could have held out just long enough for the youngest children to be old enough to be left under the supervision of the oldest ones so that Jeanne could work, they might have made it.

I’m trying to remember how 24 sous a day stacks up with other incomes we’re given. Feuilly makes 3 francs a day, Fantine makes 12 sous a day after being fired. 24 a day seems like it would be enough to support a couple people, but definitely not 9. And it sounds like the 24 was at peak income time. No wonder they were starving. And it doesn’t sound as though the switch from king to republic did anything for them at all. They seem to have been completely untouched by the effects of the revolution, too focused on survival to worry about the philosophic changes and not touched by policy change enough to notice the governmental ones. I’m sure they were vaguely aware that it had happened, but it doesn’t sound like they cared. (Although I wonder if they contributed to the carnets sent to the King. Did they ask the King for better wages and more bread?)

I love the bit about him escaping, not out of some longing for freedom, but because it was his turn. It fits well with how he’s been characterized thus far, as someone who doesn’t really bother to take much agency in his life, who just goes along with things and does what he’s told. He escapes because that’s how it goes. Hugo doesn’t go into it, but I’d be curious to know if there were any sanctions placed on those who didn’t take their turn when it came up. If you don’t take your turn, what do your comrades think of you? Do they understand, or are you seen as thinking you’re somehow better than the rest of them?