2025-07-11. godot workshop
i have about three hours to teach people godot. i decided on a more specific angle, which is... "making little worlds in godot."
the questions i asked, whose function is to
  a. determine how i will judge myself whether the workshop is good or not, and
  b. actively resist relying on or folding to outside judgement! seven of wands my own motivations and feelings
these are the questions and the cards i drew:
  what do i like about making little worlds? NINE OF CUPS (note! an example of what i was talking about in this post in tally's thread - this card sort of popped out while shuffling before i had formed my question. so i shoved it back in, but, it came back out again in the reading?? in this case i think it's worth noting because i tend to put a little more emphasis on a card that does something special like that)
  what will other people like about making little worlds? THE STAR
  how can i make sure i keep myself on track in terms of what i like? ACE OF SWORDS

oh ha ha ha i forgot i hate planning and expectations! next time i will remember to do this afterwards rather than before, i think.

2025-07-10. "soundtrack"
i lied!!! i'll start with day 0. i spent about 3 1/2 hours yesterday finishing up & releasing the soundtrack for The End of Gameplay and posting it on bluesky, and then i sort of had a mental "aaahhh" moment where i was paying altogether too much attention to social media response. and then i deleted all the bleets and thought i should start up this specific tarot practice, basically!

i did draw two cards for the soundtrack afterwards, but im not sure it was a very useful draw. i asked

what did i do right? KING OF SWORDS
what did i do wrong? THE DEVIL

... i think that the activity i did was not a very creative activity, it was mostly finishing something that i knew had to get finished at some point. i'm proud of it, but not extremely creatively satisfied? the king of swords tells me i wasn't objectively wrong, haha. but maybe i was wrong in feeling. it's a sort of validation, sort of not. anyway, the devil is obviously about posting on bluesky afterwards. social media. addiction to that machine attention, baybeeee.

result: the soundtrack is here: https://droqen.bandcamp.com/album/the-end-of-gameplay-full-moon-ost
there's also a hidden track where i read "thanks world" in an echoey stairwell lol
i like that recording. it's really awful, quality-wise, though.

dear tally ive felt really inspired seeing tally's daily readings so i thought i would start too! a little scary!

specifically im trying to get back in touch with my own judgement of my own creativity and i think doing tarot is a good way to do that. ill be asking myself questions each day probably before and after i do my 4-ish hours of Creatively Satisfying Stuff which is a part of my day im trying to carve out rather than just hoping it happens or letting it happen to me. it's important for me... anyway here goes. day 1, comin up

i really love your journal-tucking practice, where you end up carrying the card with you for a while before looking at it... that sounds really nice, kinda magical! and super appropriate to the context of work, i think, because you have to go away from home regularly, so it's nice to take something with you of home, of yourself, a little capsule.

i think my card-drawing is pretty normal, except, i do a really intentionally loose overhand shuffle, and if a single card flops out after i have a question in mind then i will usually include it in the reading somehow. two cards is borderline, if three or more flop out then i definitely just put them back in though hehe.

anyway i'll shuffle and then sometimes deal out the top x cards (especially for larger readings) or sometimes split (or ask The Querent to split) the deck into a number of piles. oh, i forgot, though, when i'm dealing out cards and i have a querent, i always ask them to split the deck into three piles -- if i'm going to deal the cards out one at a time from the top, i still do this, i just ask them to put the three piles back together afterwards, which usually ends up not the same as when they started, but i don't explicitly request this. i started doing this because the person i learned tarot from (tanya!!!) did it. i don't know why.

i've mostly stopped doing in my personal readings though! i wonder why. maybe i should start again...

-

did you get the lazy river experience out of life yesterday? :0

something that i struggle with a lot is relying on outside feedback (on that note thank u tally <3 im happy to hear that that one was good for you!!)

yesterday i put a bunch of work into a finished soundtrack release for my videogame and then rather than giving myself time to think about how i felt about it, i posted about it on bluesky -- and then i paid too-close attention to, are people responding? are people listening? are people "liking" my announcement-bleet? i walked it back because i didn't like how i had relied upon that rather than my internal judgement.

i think one of the very primary functions of drawing tarot for me is to ask myself how i'm feeling, and to draw my own conclusions rather than relying on an outside force -- which is sort of funny, because of tarot's relationship to a large force outside of myself (perhaps The Universe, perhaps Simple Randomness, whatever i believe on a given day (usually Simple Randomness, which is a shame)), so maybe it would be better to describe this as "not asking other people for their ideas of what is right and wrong."

for the most part people can't tell you what they really feel, they tell you what they think, they use analytical and explanatory power to construct a Prison Of Sense. so, along with artmaking, drawing tarot is a way to get at feeling rather than thinking.

it has always been the best inside joke that the swords suit in tarot is both the suit of thinking and of suffering.

2025-07-10
knight of cups

how do you draw your cards? for my daily single card draws, i'm in the habit of tucking one into my journal the night before to bring with me to work the next day. i did that yesterday before opening my journal and realizing today is the full moon, so i'd like to do a full moon reading tonight as well. i started asking the deck "what do I need today?" as my question. I like to cut the deck, hitting it with my hand and spilling it over, hovering my hand and pulling a card (facedown) before tucking it away in my journal for the next day.

Quote from: droqen on Jul 10, 2025, 04:36 AMsomeone said they draw an extra card to deal with the complication presented by reversed cards, like as additional information or clarification? i designed the "ask" prompts originally to kinds work that way actually but im not sure it comes through or is useful... because on the phone, you can only do one card at once, my idea was that you could "chain/combo" your cards, drawing a second one to sorta answer the question posed by the first.

another bit of tarot advice, it's useful to propose a course of action and ask the tarot how it will go, i like to experimentally ask "what will i gain" and "what will it cost", im workshopping thesebut the idea is to gain information on an action rather than only a situation, i think it will mostly just describe the situation back to you, but not necessarily show you the way out

P.S. ty for the explicit invitation to comment i hope this long comment was ok 😅

yes np, I appreciate it! this is interesting. the ask as a question for the next card definitely didn't land for me without that clarification. I am also usually pulling a single card to take with me (asking "what do I need today?") so I don't always have the rest of the deck with me. perhaps I do need to be carrying more.... hmm....

someone said they draw an extra card to deal with the complication presented by reversed cards, like as additional information or clarification? i designed the "ask" prompts originally to kinds work that way actually but im not sure it comes through or is useful... because on the phone, you can only do one card at once, my idea was that you could "chain/combo" your cards, drawing a second one to sorta answer the question posed by the first.

another bit of tarot advice, it's useful to propose a course of action and ask the tarot how it will go, i like to experimentally ask "what will i gain" and "what will it cost", im workshopping thesebut the idea is to gain information on an action rather than only a situation, i think it will mostly just describe the situation back to you, but not necessarily show you the way out

P.S. ty for the explicit invitation to comment i hope this long comment was ok 😅

Quote from: droqen on Jul 09, 2025, 10:54 PMthis book isn't a rigid set of prescriptive rules which you must follow or else play the game wrong; neither is it a full accounting of my practice of tarot, my "house rules," which i use my copy of these cards for. more than half of what i know is bound up in intuition, in habit, in personality, in brain chemistry, in something like the soul.

when you practice tarot with the people around you, you will develop your own way of playing the game, and if you're lucky you'll meet people who will share their ways with you, as i have been lucky to receive.

you can read a hundred books, but nothing prepared me like meeting the right person.

reading this felt very liberating for me

dear reader, if you feel inclined to reply to this thread to comment, feel free!

2025-07-09
3 of coins

ask.. how can i celebrate my individual strength?
you're productively working with others who see things differently.

i drew this card reversed. I think it represents some of my sentiments about my day job. so I'm not necessarily productively working with others...

lack of cohesion, lack of teamwork, apathy, poor motivation, conflict, ego, competition

I like to look at both meanings but try to look up reversed meanings when they come up for me. sometimes I wish more guidebooks had this as an option. not all of mine do.

I suppose this card has told me some things I already know, but not what needs to be done. or perhaps looking at my individual strength is the answer. I have done too much of that at work, it feels like. Maybe instead I focus on other individual strengths, like my hobbies.