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Since I'm clearly not getting anything else done today
Who wants a cartomancy reading? Pick a deck, I'll do a basic four card draw, we can all interpret it together. Offer good until Monday night. Offer closed, but will be finishing up the requested readings soon!
Choice of decks:
1. Audubon's Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America
2. Modern Art
3. Iraqi War Criminals c. 2003
4. Computer House of Cards
5. 1982 Chippendales
6. Iraqi and Afghan Heritage Resource Preservation
7. The Game of Authors
8. Forgotten English Insults
9. Sesame Street: You're a Grouch
10. Radacad Radioactive Materials Security Training
11. Geology Knowledge Cards
12. Women Who Dare
13. Random
Choice of decks:
1. Audubon's Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America
2. Modern Art
3. Iraqi War Criminals c. 2003
4. Computer House of Cards
5. 1982 Chippendales
6. Iraqi and Afghan Heritage Resource Preservation
7. The Game of Authors
8. Forgotten English Insults
9. Sesame Street: You're a Grouch
10. Radacad Radioactive Materials Security Training
11. Geology Knowledge Cards
12. Women Who Dare
13. Random
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this narrows it down so much doesn't it
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Where you've been: Ursus maritimus, Polar Bear
Perhaps you had been hibernating from the cold, but now the ice is melting and you have had to change to survive? Or maybe it's just a combination of ferocity and cuddliness.
Where you are now: Antilope americana, Prong-horned antelope.
Pronghorns are fast and acrobatic and limber, and have the freedom to play on the range, but they are also a prey and hunting species. Maybe right now you are feeling a bit skittish and unmoored, or maybe your situation is more precarious than you think it is, or perhaps you are just happy and playful and feeling free right now!
Where you are going: Ovibos moschatus, Musk ox.
The contrast between pronghorn and musk ox is pretty obvious! It looks like somewhere in your life you are going from a place of flexibility and freedom toward a place of strength and stability. Maybe resources will be scarcer, but the greater safety will make up for it.
What you should be doing: Lynx rufus, Common American wild cat (bobcat)
Be fierce, but also floof. Always.
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Where you've been: 6 of Spades: Medical Isotopes. One out of every thousand people will emit radiation from medical isotope procedures.
Via the cartomancy book I also bought today, the 6 of Spades is about perseverence, overcoming obstacles, success after failure. Via this deck's face meanings: Perhaps you or someone you love has had medical issues in the past that were difficult to get through? Alternatively, it may refer to something about you or your life that you think of as unusual and "radioactive" but is not as rare as you think and is healing as much as damaging.
Where you are now: King of Diamonds. Warning Signs & Labels. The "trefoil" symbol is sued to identify radioactive sources.
The King of Diamonds can refer to a dangerous or competitive rival, or a powerful person in your life, says the cartomancy book. The face meaning of the card is the trefoil symbol, which is about warning people away from danger, but is also about putting a lot of effort into clear and universal communication. Is there someone or something in your life now that is powerful and you feel like you need a warning about, or that you need to work on communication with?
Where you are going: 4 of Clubs: Measure of Radioactivity: US Manifests once used Curies. International manifests use Becquerels.
Book meaning: A danger card about failure or betrayal. Face meaning: this seems to connect back to the communcation and symbolism meaning in the previous card, and warn you to keep paying attention to clear communication, and look out for misunderstandings or people talking past each other. (Alternatively: you will get a Very Good Dog. :P)
What you should be doing: 7 of Spades: Sources in Commerce: Moisture/Density Gauges used in construction (some emit neurons.)
Book meaning: Sorrow and quarrels revealed; avoid miscommunication. Face meaning: Another card about communication and clear measurement, with a warning about how things can be taken the wrong way. Keep working on that clear communication, I guess? But it's also a construction tool, so with care you will build something strong and good.
It's a pretty low-key spread, though, so I'd say nothing in this spread is urgent or huge - your life isn't full of big drama right now. No hearts cards, though, so romance probably isn't much on your mind.
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Where you've been: magnetic tape drive
Tape drives are about data storage, and in particular really *good* data storage, archival and adaptable and fast and dense and cheap, the only downside being that it's, you know, on tape. So this reading is focusing on what you've learned, what you remember from the past - what is in your backup memory and how you access it.
Where you are now: magnetic file control switches
I don't know what these are and Google has nothing! Even in the really old user manuals I came up with, the "file control switches" are software. Let's say they have to do with how you make use of and rework and pass on the memories from the first card? So maybe right now you're in the process of thinking about what you're going to do with the knowledge or past or stories you have, and making choices around that.
Where you are going: load button
Google continues to not help. Maybe I should take these to the electronics museum and say I'll donate them if they'll tell me what they all are. Anyway, Mom says in her day on the IBM mainframe you had to press a physical button to start to read and execute your punchcard code, so let's assume that's what this is. Presumably this is about taking whatever decisions you made with the file control switches and actually putting them into practice. Make sure your code is right! Punchcards are hell to debug. :D
What you should be doing: optical reader keyboard
IBM optical readers were scanners - they even had really early OCR, including reading handwritten digits, though I'm not sure which model the card is of. So I guess this is about taking information that's in one format and moving it to another, going from paper to digital, digital to paper - maybe you should be thinking about how you want things that are important to you to be read and stored and accessed over time?
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Where you've been: Here Follows Some Verses Upon The Burning Of Our House, Anne Bradstreet, 5 of Diamonds reversed
The suit meaning is prosperity; reversed it's the opposite of prosperity. The face meaning tells me that you have faced some kind of great loss or disaster, but you handled it with grace!
Where you are now: Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens, 2 of Diamonds reversed.
2 of Diamonds is a serious love affair, or a love affair that interferes with a marriage; reversed, it's either a lack of love, a non-serious love, or a love affair going bad, or a stable marriage. But Oliver Twist says you are coming out of the disaster in the first card with cheerfulness and good fortune, though you may be facing many travails and, even, twists of fate along the way.
Where you are going: To a Snail, Marianne Moore, 2 of Spades
You will come out of what is going on with all the self-possession and self-sufficiency of a snail - but you may still be a bit twisty! It is your occipital horn that leads the way. Possibly, you will turn into a snail.
What You Should Be Doing: Henry Esmond, William Makepease Thakeray, 3 of Clubs
Okay I will confess I have read no Thakeray! And I am not sure what to make of this just from the Wikipedia article, except that things happen to him, a lot, and very historically. The three of clubs indicates "A long engagement to one person followed by a marriage to somebody else" which does sort of seem to be how Henry's love life goes, with the significant complication that he married his love's mother.
So my advice is don't do that.
...There's a lot of love stuff going on in this one. But it might be about a non-human kind of love, too - about a object you're attached to, or a dream or plan or activity you love.
Alternatively: I read it all wrong. :P
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Where you've been: The elevation at the South Pole is only 9,450 feet, but scientists often experience altitude sickness as if they were at 13000 feet. Why is this?
Was there a time or times in your past when you were in an environment where it seemed like everything should be okay but you couldn't get enough oxygen and your brain was messed up and you couldn't thrive? I think this is about that - could be literal, metaphorical, or both.
Where you are: If you buy a house that experienced a hundred-year flood twenty-five years ago, does that mean you can assume you're safe from similar floods for the next seventy-five years?
Are you currently worried about looming disaster, even if there's no obvious reason to think it would happen? The definition of hundred-year flood reminds us that terrible things happen, but even if we think we know the odds, whether they happen or not on any give day still can't be determined in advance. A hundred-year event may happen twice in five, or never in five hundred. Plan ahead for disaster, but don't live like you expect it every day.
Where are you going: Is the tsunami from the movie The Poseidon Adventure geologically plausible?
This card says that terrible things do happen, but the dramatic catastrophes we imagine overturning everything in our lives don't have to be as terrible as we imagine them. And the massive tsunami of the disaster movie might just feel like a little ripple in the waves, if we're sailing on clear ocean when it happens.
What you should be doing: If you're looking at a roadcut and you see dramatic tectonic faulting in the sedimentary layer, but there's an undisturbed layer above with trilobite fossils in it, should you be worried about earthquakes in the area?
This is pretty clearly reminding you not to let events the distant past determine what you expect in the present, or the future - the past is the past, and even the most dramatic overturnings get smoothed out with time (and then have trilobites living in them! :D )
...you know for a deck that makes a serious effort to make even geology extremely boring, that made for a remarkable coherent reading!
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Where you've been: Blowmaunger: Used by the Exmoorians to denote a fat, blown-cheek'd person, as if blown up with fat by full feeding and juncketing; or perhaps it may be applied to one who puffs and blows while he is eating. Perhaps from the French blankmanger, a kind of flummery - Frederick Elworthy's Devonshire Glossary, 1879
Have you been overindulgent in the past - not necessarily around food, but it could be?
Where you are now: Zounderkite: Usually applied to one whose stupid conduct results in awkward mistakes. - C. Clough Robinson's Dialect of Mid-Yorkshire, 1876
Is there something you've done lately that you feel like is a stupid mistake, or you are afraid could be? Alternatively, maybe you've made a stupid mistake and haven't realized it yet. Maybe related to what was in the first card?
Where you are going: Shooler: One who intrudes upon his neighbour, and forces an invitation to dinner, &c. - Pishey Thompson's History and Antiquities of Boston, 1856. From shoole, to go skulking about - Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1811
I am going to run positive here and say that the cards are suggesting that the fix for your mistake it to let other people help you where you need it (though not, of course, to excess.)
What you should do: Gump: A foolish person; a dolt. - John Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms, 1849
And while you're working on that, don't make any more foolish mistakes - but also don't be afraid to let yourself be a brave fool, if you need to.
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These are wonderful and I'm spoiled for choice
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Also you get summaries because these also have really long text.
Where you've been: Chien-Shiung Wu (American, b. China 1912). A nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan project, and is best known for disproving parity conservation in the weak interaction, an experiment that won two of her male colleagues a Nobel prize in 1957.
Where you are now: Josephine Baker (American, 1906-1975). Dancer, entertainer, activist and French resistance spy.
The thing that I always think about with Josephine Baker is that, the minute she realized she could live someplace that didn't hate her and hurt her the way the US did, she noped right out of here and made her life in Paris instead - but that never stopped her for continuing to fight for freedom and safety for everyone, and died in her old age after a massively successful career and life of activism.
So there are much worse cards to get for "Where you are now"!
Where you are going: Isak Dinesen, (The Baroness Blixen, Danish, 1885-1962). A wildly successful aristocratic writer best known for the book Out of Africa, about her life in Kenya.
I am honestly not sure how to read this one - Blixen is a person with a mixed life story (wealthy family, wildly successful writing career, lifetime health problems, messed-up personal life) and legacy (wrote a lot of very good books, many of them are notably racist and colonialist.) So perhaps you're looking at a mixed future, too - good things and bad things coming together.
What you should do: Mary Wollstonecraft (English, 1759-1797). Writer, radical feminist and republican revolutionary.
Mary Wollstonecraft calls out to you to be loud and eloquent about what you believe and what you deserve. Also, if your daughter takes up with a Romantic poet, don't worry, it'll work out better than you have any right to expect.
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Here is Sesame Street! I am ashamed, I had to look up several of these in the wiki.
Where you've been: the Twiddlebugs
The Twiddlebugs often find themselves facing very difficult situations (even if they are things that might seem simple to other people) but through perseverance and cooperation, they always make it through!
Where you are now: Warren Wolf
Warren Wolf was apparently supposed to become a new recurring character, but only appeared in one segment ever and a small amount of merch (including this deck of cards). Are you feeling unliked and unappreciated right now, maybe? Remember that even if you get written out of the show, there will always be someone who is still treasuring the one piece of merch you appeared in, forty years later.
Where you are going: Telly Monster
Telly Monster is most distinction for a) being anxious, obsessive, and tending toward hyperfixation; b) being friends with Oscar the Grouch; and c) being baby melannen's very favorite monster (not counting Oscar and Snuffy and the Count, who weren't exactly monsters.)
Telly Monster wants you to know that you have friends and a fan club! Even if you do feel like a grouch or a monster some days.
What you should do: The Amazing Mumford!
You can do magic! Okay maybe you can't always do exactly the magic you were expecting to do, but it's still magical!
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So let's do the Modern Art one instead (I don't know the actual name of this deck/cardset, I pulled it loose out of a thrift store bin. And also I've never heard of any of the artists and I'm not very good at reading modern art the same way other people do, so we're going by what's on the card backs.)
Where you've been: Ruth Root, 'Untitled', 2001. Abstract shapes and bold planes of color dominate Ruth Root's paintings on color, which frequently feature a humorous inclusion of tiny smoking cigarettes and shifting pairs of eyes.
Sort of a building? Warm nurturing colors, but not as many windows as it should have, and sort of disassembled into component shapes.
Where you are now: The Bruce High Quality Foundation, 'Sometimes I Want To Kill The President', 2008. The Bruce High Quality Foundation was founed as an art collective in 2001 to "foster and alternative to everything". The Brooklyn-based collective works primarily in the public realm and often reacts to existing art through their work.
... I feel like I can let this one speak for itself maybe.
Where you are going: Kiki Smith, 'Before', 1998. The work of Kiki Smith addresses the vulnurability (sic) of the human body, touching on a multitude of subjects such as AIDS, sexuality, and gender stereotypes.
So perhaps you are moving from the roiling frustration of the previous card into a place where you can be vulnerable, expressive, and live in your body more? But the feelings in the image are still kind of equivocal, I think.
What you should be doing: Jerry Kearns, 'James', 1998. The work of Jerry Kearns blends a pop sensibility with social realism in politically charged paintings that confront social injustice and identity politcs.
...So even if you do reach out a bit more, don't forget that, you know, a lot of men are creeps, I guess?
Or maybe something completely different. It's modern art, read your own meaning in it!
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Where you've been: Felis onca, Jaguar (Panthera onca). Jaguars are fierce and effective hunters, once worshipped as avatars of Tezcatlipoca. But they're also solitary stalkers, quiet and elusive, dragging their prey to hiding places.
I think maybe this is saying that you have been fierce and daring in your writing or your writing goals, but maybe also feeling, or actually being, isolated - keeping your writing close to your chest when you should be sharing it, or maybe feeling like when you did share it you didn't always get the response you'd like, or maybe you've just been in a phase in your writing where you're simultaneously quiet and daring?
Where you are now: Antelope americana, Prong-horned antelope (Antilocapra americana, pronghorn)
Pronghorns are fast, energetic prey animals that form large herds - especially in winter. They're agile and playful but can also be twitchy. So I think this is saying that as we come into winter, you are moving from feeling like the lonely hunter to feeling more like being one of a group - and you will be writing fast and having fun; just don't let anxiety get the better of you.
Where you're going: Cervus canadensis, American elk, or wapiti deer (Cervus elaphus, Elk, red deer, or wapiti deer.)
Elk are great! They are large, but not, like, monster large the way moose are. They are a lot like pronghorn, but far more majestic, and a lot harder to hurt.
What you should do: Lepus americanus, Northern hare (Snowshoe rabbit)
The snowshoe hare is known for being one of the animals that changes its coat color to white to match the winter snow, and also for being able to move quickly and effective in terrains other animals can't. (It's also one of the animals that's super-adapted to snowy winters and not doing so well turning white as winters get less white.) So I'd say, one of your strengths this winter is being able to adapt how you write into whatever you need it to be to match where you are - but be careful you don't change more than you need to.
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Where you've been: Gulo luscus, wolverine (Gulo gulo).
Best known for being short, Canadian, and having a healing factor and adamantine clawsThe wolverine has historically been feared and hated, but it can defend itself even against much larger and fiercer animals like bears and cougars, and frankly they don't care how you feel about them, because they are great. Are you, or have you ever been, a member of Canadian secret services?Where you are now: Arvicola richardsonii, Richardson's meadow mouse. (Microtus richardsoni, American water vole.)
This is the largest vole in North America, up to ten inches long. They are great swimmers and build burrows on stream banks, where they nest and store food, and are active and breeding year-round, not letting winter snow slow them down.
So I think this is saying that as northern-hemisphere winter comes in, you are not slowing down, you are staying busy and on top of things.
Where you're going: Ursus maritimus, Polar bear.
Polar bears are also great in ice and snow, but they hibernate through the hardest part of the winter. So perhaps your energy will slow down a bit coming up - but don't worry too much about it, because while you are moving slowly you will be growing the beginning of something great. Also, beware of global warming.
What you should do: Canis lupus, Black American wolf (Gray wolf)
Gray wolves usually hunt in family packs, but they can also travel long distances alone or in small groups, and they are moving back into parts of their range they have long been absent from, and they are the animal that was domesticated into dogs. Embrace your inner wolf! Be daring and wild, but also caring and loyal.
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Where you've been: Hystrix dorsata, Canada porcupine (Erezithizon dorsatum, North American porcupine.)
American porpupines are best known for climbing trees a lot, but not being very good at it, and also falling out of trees a lot. Also, they make adorable noises. Have you spent some time recently feeling short-sighted and prickly and clumsy, when you, like a porcupine, were actually a sweet darling all along?
Where you are now: Pteromys origonensis, Oregon flying squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus Northern flying squirrel.)
Also a great animal! You are in a place now, whether you know it or not, where you can climb out as far on a limb as you want and, unlike the porcupine, know that you can spread your wings and glide rather than falling.
Where you are going: Cervus alces, Moose deer (Alces alces, moose)
You will become a terrifying megafauna out of the palaeolithic past. You will do what you want and go where you want, because who, after all, is going to stop you?
What you should do: Procyon lotor, Raccoon
Embrace you inner trash panda.
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Anyway you clearly do need some life advice from the archaeology deck!
Where you've been: Jack of Clubs: Suit meaning: a generous and sincere friend. Face meaning: Ancient cultural artifacts and objects of art are heritage resources that must be protected.
Perhaps this refers to friendship networks from the past that are worth preserving and protecting, even if it gets more difficult?
Where you are now: 10 of clubs: Suit meaning: good luck, fortune, happiness, long journeys. Face meaning: a mound or small hill in an otherwise flat landscape could be a sign of ancient human occupation. Proceed with caution (Tell Rimah, Iraq)
Pretty sure this is your research, which you should probably be working on right now? "Mounds or small hills in a flat landscape", yeah. So everything is going well, but still be cautious.
Where you are going: 2 of clubs: Suit meaning: Direct opposition, lack of support, the need to be able to stand on your own. Face meaning: Ancient Iraqi heritage is part of your heritage. It is believed that Jonah of the bible is buried here. (Nabi Yunis Mosque in Mosul, Iraq)
Not a great card. Even better, the mosque in the picture has since been destroyed by Isis. D:
What you should be diong: 5 of diamonds: Suit meaning: long-term prosperity in business and personal matters; happy ever after. Face meaning: Looters leave destructive holes and tunnels throughout archaeological sites. Report all observed war damage and looting.
...I think this says if you persevere and apply for ALL the jobs, you will make it eventually. Either that or there's a secret tunnel under the cottage.
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I once did a reading from some Sesame Street flashcards, because my roommate's mom was too intimidated by the "real" deck. The reading was "stop" (a crosswalk monitor), "don't walk" (an automatic crosswalk sign) and "up" (an escalator).
I interpreted this as: Stuck in life, and it was personal; Still stuck or in a holding pattern, but impersonal; Finally getting to move forward and up.
Turns out the topic was a relative's divorce in progress from an obstructionist husband, and she was now away from him but still in a holding pattern while the paperwork finished.