so what's a single girl with a cold to do on a saturday night? go to barnes & noble

and buy a new tarot deck from an artist she saw at dragon*con. her watercolor is incredible. and if you know anything about watercolor, i think you may agree with me when i say watercolor is much more impressive than oil or acrylic, since if you fuck up watercolor, you can't just paint over it. it's done. it requires a lot of patience, a lot of waiting around for things to dry before you can continue, a lot of failing and learning from your mistakes.


basically, jesus, buddha, and ghandi - along with mother theresa - probably do watercolor in heaven. because they're all just that bad-ass.

but i'm moving away from the subject. whoops.

it was the only box of it they had at b&n. i'd thought of buying it at d*con but hadn't wanted to actually buy it. but it was the only one.

it was a sign.

that looked like this:

and it comes with a book. which is awesome, since the pictures on the cards are really artsy-fartsy. and yes, i really did just use that.

the book has some thickness to it, much more than the flimsy pamphlet the other deck came with. this paperback looks like it has some actual info in it, which is great since the depictions on the cards are so not what i'm used to... oh look, and the book is published by llewellyn, which is pretty much the god of new age/pagan publishing. oops, so's the whole damn deck. figures. in "that" section of the bookstore, they're actually pretty big players.

but the best part!? the cards are super flexible, which means shuffling should be a bit less awkward compared to the tarot of the dead pack. they're smaller, which is great since my hands are the size of your average nine year old boy's, and now i can no longer tell which position a card will be in when i flip it. let's review this:

one of these cards is reversed, while the other isn't. can you tell which is which?

didn't fucking think so, y'all.

the one on the left. maybe.

however, with ye olde decke, you can totally tell.

i'll give you a hint: blue-up in the upper left corner means the card will be reversed.

i always hated knowing, because if you're having a bad day and want to hear something in particular, you might skip said card. knowing will make you much more biased, in my opinion. now, i'll have no damn clue. so hopefully less bias.


my only complaint: it doesn't come with a damn bag. a lot of times they come with even some cheap, flimsy thing to keep it in. but not this one! fortunately, i have one bag that'll work for now, but if i didn't i'd be keeping this awkwardly-shaped box around for a while, and that's a huge pain in the ass.

so there you have it, guys. you have all witnessed the beginning of the tarot reader's end for me: collecting tarot packs. this brings me up to 2.5.

my first one, my original one, i lost #14 for, temperance. how the hell do you lose a tarot card, tear the room apart for what turned out to be move-out fail, and still never ever find it? beats the hell out of me.