Getting cozy here in the blog and blowing off social media for a few days, Not exactly meatspace, but a sabbatical just the same.
I like cyberpunk novels from the 80’s: William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, Snow Crash…you get the idea.
Gibson (in Neuromancer, I think) coined the term “meat puppet” which referred to the physical body as ‘meat’. So when people talk about “meat space” they mean the physical realm, in other words NOT cyberspace (another term coined by Gibson as I remember it)
I need to unplug from social media for a few days, yet I have some of that ridiculous anxiety that a few days away can provoke. I don’t want to show up here Monday and do a Choose your Card Tarot reading for an empty cyber-room.
That worry is proof in itself that a little time in meat space is needed. But only by half. I still want to do a little polishing on the website (not as done as I thought I was) and work on some other writing. So I’m basically visiting old familiar blog-only cyberspace. It feels like going home to be in this corner of cyberspace without pandering to social media. It feels like putting the toddlers to sleep and pouring myself a nice glass of wine and putting my feet up in front of a fireplace with a good book. Pull up a chair and glass of whatever you want to sip, and let’s do some old school blogging.
Speaking of homecoming, here’s a lightly edited Q&A from the archives:
Q: Nothing you said came true. Why not?
A: I. Don’t. Make. Predictions.
I’ve said it a thousand times. Tarot doesn’t predict the future. That is the dark ages, flat-earth way of using Tarot.
It doesn’t matter if predictions are “true” or not. I could sit here and make perfect, on-target, 100% accurate predictions all day long, but then you could go out five minutes later and do something that changes everything. (See: Predicting the Future and a Big Cube of Jell-O)
Remember Yoda from Star Wars? The future really is fluid and always changing. Life is cause and effect. If you drop an apple, it will fall down. If you strike a match, it will catch on fire. If you pour water on something it will get wet.
Cause and effect is the way Nature works. It is science. Your future is created by what you choose and do. Tarot is a way to look at options, then choose the flow of energy that is best for you. It is a chance to choose the things that will help cause the effect you want. Tarot helps you to choose the path most likely to take you where you want to go in the long run…not describe every inch of dirt along the way.
Tarot doesn’t tell you what will happen in life, Tarot helps you figure out what to do when life happens.
The only real oracle is human intuition. We made the machines that make the art.
public domain image via creative commons
I’m as cyberpunk as the next Tarot reader.
Probably way more so. There are reasons why I thrive doing email readings. They are my best work, tbh.
But there are also reasons why I love using the Lofi Girl / Lofi Chill aesthetic to describe my Tarot style. I can be all synthwave and cyberspace but still keep the lo-fi human touch which is the whole point of Tarot in the first place.
78 cards raised to the power of near infinite combinations of any one shuffle raised to the power of layout position times the different layout possibilities – is a bigger number than I can calculate. Neil Degrasse Tyson has a great explainer on TikTok about the shuffle thing.
Tarot excels at dealing with human thoughts and emotions but there are some things about the human condition and external environment that early Tarot readers could never imagine.
Imagine what will come to be that is off the far front of OUR radar.
If I were to create a brand new Tarot card, it’d be technology of some sort. Maybe a cyberpunk looking radio telescope. I think some oracle decks already have cards like that.
Artificial Intelligence and machine made art is one thing early Tarot readers probably never envisioned If they imagined it, I’m guessing it would have been understood in a different context. I’m reminded of Arthur Clarke’s famous quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Their magic is our AI.
We made the machines that make the art. I wonder if anyone has made a Tarot deck with ChatGPT yet. If not, it’s only a matter of time, I’m sure.
Regardless of who or what or how the cards are generated, the one, the only, the true oracle is pure human intuition. Cards are just tools no matter what tools humans use to create the cards.
As far as I know, you can’t mimic intuition with a bot.
All I know is that I don’t use any of it.
Email is as technical as it gets with my readings. The readings will always be me, a keyboard and a photo of your unique real-world actual physical cards in a real world, actual, physical card layout – no AI at all.
The problem with AI right now is not so much the technology as the copyright. I actually like the AI generated aesthetic that is everywhere on social media these days. I’d love to have book covers look like that – but I’d feel terrible taking a REAL artist’s creation for a book cover without their knowledge or consent. So I haven’t even played with AI for fun yet.
I know the amount of work it takes to write something and write it well. I respect copyrights and intellectual property and expect the same in return. While the posts on Sage Sips blog are non-derivative noncommercial attribution share alike creative commons 4.0 licensed. That means you can quote and share all you like so long as you give me credit for writing it, don’t change it and don’t charge money for it. Fair enough, right? Especially considering everything here is my own creation, my own hard work – no AI help at all.
Next up is the three card Energy Path reading for the week that will post on Monday, but for now it’s time for my lo-fi human self to go get another cup of coffee.
This isn’t an IBM ad. I’m talking about that thing you do with your brain.
Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.
I’m glad I listened to pure impulse and picked up my Steampunk Tarot today. If you search the blog, you can see all the old posts about the Judgement card. I don’t know how much sense any of it makes. Some people have a significator card, a card they feel represents their essence. Or at least most of us have a card or two or a few that we resonate with more than the others. The judgement card, on the other hand, is my nemesis card. It pushes my buttons and pokes at old scars in ways that aren’t always helpful.
I love the steampunk deck’s version of Judgement though. It is the only Judgement card that doesn’t send me into a puddle of spiraling, evangelical induced post-traumatic babble like other versions the judgement and hierophant (aka pope) cards typically do.
The judgement card, like the rest of the major arcana, has at least two major threads of meaning woven into it.
One is the judgement day, face the music kind of judgement, not unlike how we might say a court judgement or a lawsuit judgement. The legal judgement also connects to the second thread…the decision making process itself. The word “reckoning” works here too. An older meaning for reckoning is to settle a debt or account. But it also means calculation or deciding, like “navigation by dead reckoning.” The biggest problem with judgement card is how easily it can slip into petty judgmentalism.
My least favorite representation of the Judgement card is, as you might expect, is the Waite Smith Tarot. Pamela Smith’s art is saturated with christian symbolism with angels, trumpets, dead looking naked people standing in graves. That whole rapture-ish resurrection second coming thing always gives me that nervous eye tick feeling. Past experience shows the slip to judgmentalism is very short with that kind of symbolism around.
Let’s just say if that kind of religion is your jam, go for it. For me it’s a jar jammed full of glowing green radioactive toxicity. In fact, in the back of my mind, I have always low key hoped that my Tarot work would help others who disliked and rejected by the American evangelicals as much as it has helped me to recover from a childhood in that subculture.
But today, thankfully, all of that is beside the point because the card is pointing to the other connotation, the “use your head” and “use good judgement” part of the card.
The Steampunk deck is good for steering intuition away from the Smith artwork. In fact, this artwork has the opposite effect. It could easily have a “face the music” connotation, but in her guidebook for the deck Aly Fell interprets it as “heeding a call.” That is a card meaning I can resonate with. Not so much a judgement in the traditional sense, not so much answering a “calling” in the religious sense, but rather a actively thinking about our life path and thinking about the meaning we infuse into what we do.
The image also calls to mind some of my favorite D.J. and E.D.M. music like Mystery Skulls and Daft Punk. It taps into my cyberpunk side as much as the Steampunk aesthetic for some reason.
It all takes me to a happy place of thinking and reason perfectly blended with abstract ideas and creativity.
It’s a personality thing that works for some people more than others. It also brings to mind Myers-Briggs personality categories. Today’s card is a comfort zone for all the thinkers, all the people with a T as the third of their four letter category. This is one for my fellow geeks.
For feelings people, those with the “F” in their code, it might be more challenging. It might be harder for them to let their head rule their heart for whatever challenges life might pose for them.
Challenge or comfort zone, the call the Judgment card is asking us to heed is a simple one: Think.
Thank you all for reading and listening!
While no appointment needed email Tarot readings by the author are available to order on the blog website, the blog itself and the podcast are not monetized. Your Tarot message comes first, not an advertiser’s. Please visit the TaoCraft Tarot page on ko-fi where the shop, memberships and virtual coffees all support the creation of this (almost) daily Tarot content.
This is why the podcast is going cyberpunk. Put so much time into doing a self-narrated podcast that I need to skip this week’s Sunday Tarot Turnover.
Instead, I give you….Confession #9, Sipping the Right Stuff.
Transcript:
I’m a clairvoyant and I have a confession: my stuff ain’t right
Hi everyone. My name is Ronda. I read tarot, write stuff and make things.
The idea of “pushing the envelope” was made popular by Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff and the movie by the same name back in the 80s. It’s still part of the American vernacular. We’ve all heard of pushing the envelope, although it has come to mean challenging ourselves and stepping outside of our individual comfort zone rather than putting lives on the line to test the physical limits of a new aircraft.
In the movie Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper talks about the pilots still “out there somewhere…pushing back the outside of that envelope and hauling it back in.”
Everybody loves to talk about pushing the envelope. Nobody ever seems to talk about hauling it back in.
That’s an important part too. As I understand it a SUCCESSFUL test program is one that ends with a live pilot, an intact airplane and usable data, not a hollywood style fireball.
Which in a way, begs the question of how you define success? Success isn’t always expansive. Sometimes quality really is more important than quantity.
Which brings me back to the stuff I’m putting into this podcast. I’m not so sure it has been the right stuff.
It’s been a stretch. Starting a podcast at all was way outside of my comfort envelope. A rambling pirate radio persona like the movie Pump Up The Volume was more fun in theory than in practice. It pushed the envelope to give Clairvoyant Confessional a try. But it is time to haul the envelope back in. I’m not pulling the plug on the podcast, but I am making a change in style and aesthetics.
One thing I’ve learned from this test flight is that podcasts are valuable and fun BUT it really is about the conversation and chemistry like we had on Menage a Tarot, which, btw, is still available on itunes if you’d like to give it a listen.
I still want to offer something to the podcasting environment for anyone who is interested in Tarot and Tarot readings. BUT I also learned that vocal performance is not my strong suit. So here is the deal: the pirates and test pilots are going cyberpunk.
Thanks to the brilliant text to speech conversion available through wordpress and anchor fm for better or worse I’m letting technology take over the narration.
Clairvoyant Confessional is now the TaoCraft Tarot podcast and serves as the audio edition of the TaoCraft Tarot blog.
By letting Siri’s second cousin Remy take over the speaking part, I can put my energy into the writing part so I can give all of you the best of me and my actual clairvoyance.
Thank you for listening to Clairvoyant Confessional and its new incarnation as TaoCraft Tarot podcast. I hope you’ll stay tuned for the short sip nano-episodes that give you Tarot guidance for your day in the time it takes to sip from your morning coffee as well as the slightly longer episodes like the YouChoose Interactive readings.
As always, thank you for any likes, subs, shares, or follows that you can spare. As always, helpful links are in the episode description.
Also a special thank you to dinosoul for giving permission to use their song dimension as an outro for the past several confessional episodes.
Thanks again for listening. I’ll see you on the print side and see you at the next sip.
I’m a clairvoyant and I have a confession: my stuff ain’t right
Scratch oniep
Hi everyone. My name is Ronda. I read tarot, write stuff and make things.
The idea of “pushing the envelope” was made popular by Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff and the movie by the same name back in the 80s. It’s still part of the American vernacular. We’ve all heard of pushing the envelope, although it has come to mean challenging ourselves and stepping outside of our individual comfort zone rather than putting lives on the line to test the physical limits of a new aircraft.
In the movie Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper talks about the pilots still “out there somewhere…pushing back the outside of that envelope and hauling it back in.”
Everybody loves to talk about pushing the envelope. Nobody ever seems to talk about hauling it back in.
That’s an important part too. As I understand it a SUCCESSFUL test program is one that ends with a live pilot, an intact airplane and usable data, not a hollywood style fireball.
Which in a way, begs the question of how you define success? Success isn’t always expansive. Sometimes quality really is more important than quantity.
Which brings me back to the stuff I’m putting into this podcast. I’m not so sure it has been the right stuff.
It’s been a stretch. Starting a podcast at all was way outside of my comfort envelope. A rambling pirate radio persona like the movie Pump Up The Volume was more fun in theory than in practice. It pushed the envelope to give Clairvoyant Confessional a try. But it is time to haul the envelope back in. I’m not pulling the plug on the podcast, but I am making a change in style and aesthetics.
One thing I’ve learned from this test flight is that podcasts are valuable and fun BUT it really is about the conversation and chemistry like we had on Menage a Tarot, which, btw, is still available on itunes if you’d like to give it a listen.
I still want to offer something to the podcasting environment for anyone who is interested in Tarot and Tarot readings. BUT I also learned that vocal performance is not my strong suit. So here is the deal: the pirates and test pilots are going cyberpunk.
scratch
Thanks to the brilliant text to speech conversion available through wordpress and anchor fm for better or worse I’m letting technology take over the narration.
Clairvoyant Confessional is now the TaoCraft Tarot podcast and serves as the audio edition of the TaoCraft Tarot blog.
By letting Siri’s second cousin Remy take over the speaking part, I can put my energy into the writing part so I can give all of you the best of me and my actual clairvoyance.
Short dimension
Thank you for listening to Clairvoyant Confessional and its new incarnation as TaoCraft Tarot podcast. I hope you’ll stay tuned for the short sip nano-episodes that give you Tarot guidance for your day in the time it takes to sip from your morning coffee as well as the slightly longer episodes like the YouChoose Interactive readings.
As always, thank you for any likes, subs, shares, or follows that you can spare. As always, helpful links are in the episode description.
Also a special thank you to dinosoul for giving permission to use their song dimension as an outro for the past several confessional episodes.
Thanks again for listening. I’ll see you on the print side and see you at the next sip.
Thank you to everyone who supported the Clairvoyant Confessional incarnation of the podcast.
I’m old enough to remember when people wrote letters on actual paper and had actual conversations on landline telephones, so I still appreciate the technology that lets this blog and podcast happen. It warms my Gen X cyberpunk loving heart. I’m also self aware enough to know I’ve got work to do as a media speaker. Dammit Jim, I’m a writer and this automatic thing is going to make a better, more articulate, more entertaining podcast, right?
Right?
I’m not so sure.
Basically, I’m thrilled to bits if anyone reads or listens to any of this. I’ll be doing a full on happy dance if anyone decides to get a reading because of anything in the blog or podcast. But it bothers me that the automated audio doesn’t sound the same as the words sounded in my brain when I wrote them.
My narration may not be Webby worthy – yet – but at least it has more emotional tone and verbal context than the electronic version. It is, after all, human. Humanity is what intuition, clairvoyance, psychology, Tarot and personal development are all about. This tech part is fun as heck and only going to get better as time goes on. But it is what it is, and so is the human side of it all.
I propose a hybrid. When you see “Confession” in the title, you’ll know that’s me recording the episode. If you see “Today’s Tarot” or some other title, you’ll know to expect the cyber side of the podcast.
True to the renegade pirate radio motif, nothing about Clairvoyant Confessional is set in stone. It is naturally evolving to be short, little jelly bean sized episodes. There is no sense holding something like that to a regular release schedule. Text to speech will let me drop content more often, as the inspiration hits. The “confession” episodes will happen less often, BUT they will also be longer and take a deeper dive into the humanity of clairvoyance, psychics, intuition and Tarot. Q&A episodes will always be recorded and never automated.
Did you hear that sound? That was the loud thud of a hint being dropped. If you want to submit a question to be answered in the podcast, possibly in the form of a Tarot reading, just visit the Clairvoyant Confessional podcast page on TaoCraftTarot.com. There is a link in the episode description if you are listening to the podcast. The page is in the top menu for those of you reading the blog.
Thank you all for reading and listening. I really do appreciate any follows, subscriptions, likes, or shares that you can spare. And please, for the love of your own ears, send some feedback or some questions. I can’t read for a question until you ask it.
Thanks again, and I’ll talk to you all when the next jelly bean drops.
Cyberpunk is probably my favorite book and movie genre, despite the fact I am currently on a huge Dune kick. I’m re-reading the whole enchilada, both the original series and all of the Brian Herbert & Kevin Anderson books. So far, I’m only up to “Sisterhood” but if you want to dive into the deep end before the new Dune movie hits theaters in December, check out the book list in the authors suggested order on Tor Forge. Perfect timing for the coming (pumpkin) spice season.
Being gen X, I am also a huge William Gibson fan. The idea of working all online feels like native territory, perhaps more than my actual native state. Distance Tarot comes as easy as breathing (especially the email written ones.) As much as I love the energy of a conversation and electricity of interaction that can only come from a live reading, part of my brain is putting on sunglasses, swallowing the red pill and donning my old duster at the prospect of working 100% online.
I’ve been watching the local covid case numbers. I’ve read about the weird blood clots they’ve been seeing with the virus (I have a genetic blot clot thing to begin with, so that part caught my attention big time) Much as I hate to admit it, face to face readings are just too big of a medical risk. Even though we may be “open” and “green” I’m putting in-person readings and party readings on hold until further notice. Further notice meaning until I have a trustworthy vaccine in my arm. I’m shifting the time that otherwise would have been set aside for individual and party sessions to phone readings and creating extra, upgraded blog content.
I’m pleased to announce the new subscription TaoCraft Tarot extended blog. The basic blog won’t change, and it will remain FREE to follow and read. It will still contain one “Today’s Tarot” card reading each week, the basic version of the weekly “YouChoose Interactive Tarot” Reiki, Meditation and all of the behind the scenes, how-to, “my side of the table” content that it has now.
I’ll be adding extra subscription-only content to the blog during the rest of 2020, perhaps permanently. Subscriptions are only $5 per month and gives you access to Digital mini InkMagic readings by email (1 per subscription per month) at no extra charge. These readings alone are a $5 value if purchased separately in the TaoCraft Tarot Shop. In addition, subscribers will be able to access extra “Today’s Tarot” blog posts each week, the expanded version of the “YouChoose Interactive” weekly Tarot Readings, and subscriber only special offers and giveaways. To subscribe, please visit the Subscriber Benefits page and follow the prompts to access the members only portion of the page.
This is a new feature, and I’m learning how it works right along with you. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me. I appreciate your patience while I’m on one of life’s little learning curves.
Thank you all so much! I appreciate each and every one of you, no matter which subscription you choose!
Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot 
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