I’ve become a bit overwhelmed by technology recently and gone analogue as much as possible. Of course, it’s not very possible.
One advantage of being analogue is that I had to search through my cards and games to find ways to amuse myself without a computer, which led me to my long lost Barbara Walker tarot deck. To celebrate, I thought I’d take a photo of some of the cards and post it here. Unfortunately my desk was a bit cluttered with an analogue game I’ve been playing and I couldn’t find a suitable place to lay them out. Well, actually, the tarot cards were mixed up with this game in the first place, which is why I couldn’t find them. So I thought, why not photograph them together?
As you can see, I’m not a very good photographer, which is why most of the pix and photos on this blog have been stolen from elsewhere.
The game, by the way, is called Legend of the Five Rings (or L5R in digital forums).
Even in the analogue world there is innovation fatigue and this game is an example of something that induces it. I stopped playing this game in 2007 because the publishers of the cards kept bringing out new sets. Every new set brought new things to learn and forced you to forget things that were no longer allowed. Every so often they would even change the backs of the cards so you couldn’t mix in some of your favourite old cards with the new ones. Bastards!
In spite of them, here is Hida Sukune and Mirumoto Taki mixed in with Baal and Kali.
Barbara Walker chose Baal for the King of Pentacles and Kali for the Queen of Swords. For some people this kind of mish-mash is sacrilege. But the tarot was never pure and probably never holy. It is constantly being reinvented, just like L5R, wordpress, word, and windows bloody 8.
It was windows bloody 8 that drove me towards analogue. But it was Barbara Walker who brought me back to digital. Perhaps there is a kind of poetry in that.
Joseph Grinton 