Today’s deck is the Dungeons and Dragons Tarot.
Not to be confused with the Raveloft Tarokka deck. I’m sure that has caused zero confusion with customers ever.
This one annoys me in a super specific way. Notice how the cards don’t have any indicator of what they are supposed to represent. You have to open the booklet and see which is which.
That’s where you learn that the minor arcana are now Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma (like the character stats).
So that Wizard guy? That’s the Ace of Intelligence which is basically the Ace of Swords. I guess you can assume that because a Wizard’s main stat is Intelligence, fair enough.
But then how do you know that the other card is the Three of Wisdom? I know it’s the Three of Cups because it uses the imagery of the three women celebrating, but how am I supposed to tell that the three women are Wisdom and not, say… Charisma?
Moreover, the booklet is so scant and vague, the tone is basically “yeah and also you can do reverse readings, just take the meaning we tell you and reverse it”.
I’m no expert but that pattern of “ehhhhhh the player/user will come up with it” does seem to be in line with the problems that people talk about with 5e D&D.
Is this for people already familiar with Tarot? Because The booklet sure doesn’t explain anything. Or is it for players to get introduced into Tarot? My guess is that it wants to be both but ends up as neither.
By the way, I chose that mat today specifically not just because of having Dungeons and Dragons plus “I don’t wanna become a dragon girl”, but also because Duel Masters and DnD (and by extension MtG) are both by WotC and I find that infinitely amusing for some reason.
Anyway, after we decipher which card is which, today’s reading basically says to celebrate those secret, inner breakthroughs. I can think of quite a few of those but none feel like it’s on focus for today’s reading.
By the way, at some point this year I got it in my head that the pillars in The High Priestess were the pillars in which Seth wrote down all of the stuff Adam told him had happened in Eden in Gnostic tradition.
I got it mixed up. The pillars in the card are Boaz and Jachin (this detail I remembered), which were pillars on the porch of Solomon’s temple (this detail I forgot).
So after 2 days (maybe not who even knows anymore) of sleeping only 4 hours I ended up sleeping 10. Go figure.
It’s already 25th so I have a bunch of end-of-month bills to pay. But while I waited for things to open I decided to start running inventory of all the Tarot decks I’ve used so far and the ones I’ve yet to use, as well as the play mats.
I’m still running the numbers because I gotta sort things around (part of the point of it is putting it all in a single place) but needless to say I’ll be running the daily routine until the end of the year at the very least.
You might be wondering what happens if I run out of decks and the answer is that I’m doing this is no small part to find the decks I like the most so by the end I’ll have exactly that one way or another.
I went to pay rent and my landlady was asking me to help her by printing some tickets with an anime girl in them because another one of her tenants just opened up a restaurant and wanted to give free meal tickets as promotion.
Afterwards I went to Japanese lesson and I remembered I forgot to go to the pharmacy to get my meds. Thankfully it was empty so I was able to get them (almost) immediately.
in the middle of everything I was looking up the weird flash error my camera kept getting.
Turns out the flash problem I was having was a firmware thing and the latest update addressed it. Makes sense because I needed to update the firmware to use the flash since it has a different hotshoe bit (it’s flat instead of having a bunch of sensors).
The problem is that my camera has been a bit annoying trying to get it updated, I tried using the utility software for that but it literally tells me “you cannot downgrade” while still showing me that I’m going from 1.5.0 to 1.6.0.
Apparently the solution is to put the firmware into the SD card, but because of how the writeability of the camera works I need to transfer it with a card reader, because via USB it doesn’t let me transfer INTO the camera.
So many things man…