This is the second last thing I have to say to you, Beloved Internet, as a professional tarot blogger. I’d like to share what I’ve learned from my experiences, successes, and mistakes in this field for the next generation of tarot bloggers, authors, and designers. Headings for the skimmers again. There’s some stuff here for bloggers, writers, tarot readers, deck designers, and aspiring artists in any field.
As we’re wrapping up here, I’ve finally wrapped up the Spirit Vertigo Major Arcana as a print series. I didn’t like some of my original drawings, so I’d redrawn a handful last year, and replaced the last couple stragglers with art from the blog. There will be no printed deck, but the print and poster series is finally complete! It’s lovely, and it’s enough. There's a new page here showcasing the story behind all three decks now that the journey's complete.
As we’re wrapping up here, I’ve finally wrapped up the Spirit Vertigo Major Arcana as a print series. I didn’t like some of my original drawings, so I’d redrawn a handful last year, and replaced the last couple stragglers with art from the blog. There will be no printed deck, but the print and poster series is finally complete! It’s lovely, and it’s enough. There's a new page here showcasing the story behind all three decks now that the journey's complete.
I’ve also made my class on Spread Craft available for $20, to teach exactly how I designed my spreads in the hopes that some of you will take up this craft, keep these techniques alive, keep innovating, and beat me at my own game. Spread craft is still under-explored, and could become every bit as innovative and artistic as deck design. And it’s cheap, fast, and low-risk AF as deck production gets less accessible to diverse, human artists.
I’d like to think I carried something in my tarot work that wasn’t solely me or mine, and I’d like to pass that spark on to one or more of you, if you’re game. She’s pepped and ready to jump ship.
Alright! Ten Years of Tarot Blogging Down & DONE. So Here’s the Score:
Alright! Ten Years of Tarot Blogging Down & DONE. So Here’s the Score:
The State of The Field
I would only recommend tarot deck creation, blogging, or occult publishing if it’s a soul calling you adore, or a part-time hobby with no goals that you enjoy for its own sake. If so, then of course it’s worthwhile, but you’ll need to be crafty, adaptive, and look sharp.
You could make a lot of friends, you could make a lot of money, and you could redirect the course of your entire career in this field, but that’s a lottery. You will not have full control of your work or what happens to it.
👏 Do 👏 Not 👏 Quit 👏 Your 👏 Day 👏 Job 👏 if you are lucky enough to have one! Professional occult work is usually a side hustle, a devotion, a public service, or a hobby job. Post-AI, I would say don’t get into visual art, tarot, or public occult writing at all if you would need it to pay your bills. Some people make it full time here, sure, but those are quite rare cases statistically. Most of the pros have other jobs, or breadwinning partners, or independent means. Occult work RARELY supports workers full time as a career on its own. Do NOT take out loans or go into debt for this field. It’s a high risk business.
Every creative and professional field out there right now is abusive to its workers, so don’t let the harsh stuff stop you from pursuing your passions. Understand your field and market to work adaptively around the bullshit you’ll encounter. Tarot work is no more forgiving than any other pathway in the professional arts. If it is a passion, a calling, or a gift you care about, then go ahead and jump in, and make your practice worth your while, but give yourself exit routes as you go.
Tarot authorship and design do pose risks to the rest of your career that you should consider seriously. This field attracts a lot of bootlegging, plagiarism, AI creeps, and scammers, comes with a stigma, and pays little for the time that goes into it for most of us. You have to love the work for its own sake alone. This field has changed a lot since I jumped in the pool ten years ago as a public-facing blogger. Present conditions are rough AF for human artists and authors, especially emerging artists. There will continue to be a place for full-time authors, creators, and readers in tarot, but it’s not for everyone, and that’s okay. You may do better to keep it temporary or project-based, and see how it goes. And you may wish to use a pen name or artist’s name in this political climate.
You will have beautiful, fun, and worthwhile experiences in this field if you choose to step down this Fool’s Road. Most of the community is thoughtful, welcoming, and full of collaborative creatives who want to see other artists, readers, and writers thrive! I’ve always loved this craft, and I’d love to see it continue to iterate, grow, and thrive. Tarot is a beautiful container for crowdsourced wisdom and inter-generational care. I stayed in this field years longer than I’d expected to, and created far more than I’d planned to here because of the good eggs.
My personal burnout as a content creator in this tarot was complex, and some of it derives from my own interests and limits. Yes, I ran into bullshit that made this unsustainable even part time, but I’d never set out to do this forever. I had many other demands on my time as I ran this blog. In the early years, I did research and test out the path of client readings and full time tarot blogging, and noped out for a number of reasons. My lyrical abilities redirected here, through a phase when my strongest passions had all become flashback triggers. Tarot helped me heal from that, but it had never been an area of natural hyper-focus for me. I’m equally fascinated by but deeply uncomfortable with spirituality, so a lot of this work swam upstream. Everyone has different strengths and challenges, and some of you may be better suited to this field than I was.
You could make a lot of friends, you could make a lot of money, and you could redirect the course of your entire career in this field, but that’s a lottery. You will not have full control of your work or what happens to it.
👏 Do 👏 Not 👏 Quit 👏 Your 👏 Day 👏 Job 👏 if you are lucky enough to have one! Professional occult work is usually a side hustle, a devotion, a public service, or a hobby job. Post-AI, I would say don’t get into visual art, tarot, or public occult writing at all if you would need it to pay your bills. Some people make it full time here, sure, but those are quite rare cases statistically. Most of the pros have other jobs, or breadwinning partners, or independent means. Occult work RARELY supports workers full time as a career on its own. Do NOT take out loans or go into debt for this field. It’s a high risk business.
Every creative and professional field out there right now is abusive to its workers, so don’t let the harsh stuff stop you from pursuing your passions. Understand your field and market to work adaptively around the bullshit you’ll encounter. Tarot work is no more forgiving than any other pathway in the professional arts. If it is a passion, a calling, or a gift you care about, then go ahead and jump in, and make your practice worth your while, but give yourself exit routes as you go.
Tarot authorship and design do pose risks to the rest of your career that you should consider seriously. This field attracts a lot of bootlegging, plagiarism, AI creeps, and scammers, comes with a stigma, and pays little for the time that goes into it for most of us. You have to love the work for its own sake alone. This field has changed a lot since I jumped in the pool ten years ago as a public-facing blogger. Present conditions are rough AF for human artists and authors, especially emerging artists. There will continue to be a place for full-time authors, creators, and readers in tarot, but it’s not for everyone, and that’s okay. You may do better to keep it temporary or project-based, and see how it goes. And you may wish to use a pen name or artist’s name in this political climate.
You will have beautiful, fun, and worthwhile experiences in this field if you choose to step down this Fool’s Road. Most of the community is thoughtful, welcoming, and full of collaborative creatives who want to see other artists, readers, and writers thrive! I’ve always loved this craft, and I’d love to see it continue to iterate, grow, and thrive. Tarot is a beautiful container for crowdsourced wisdom and inter-generational care. I stayed in this field years longer than I’d expected to, and created far more than I’d planned to here because of the good eggs.
My personal burnout as a content creator in this tarot was complex, and some of it derives from my own interests and limits. Yes, I ran into bullshit that made this unsustainable even part time, but I’d never set out to do this forever. I had many other demands on my time as I ran this blog. In the early years, I did research and test out the path of client readings and full time tarot blogging, and noped out for a number of reasons. My lyrical abilities redirected here, through a phase when my strongest passions had all become flashback triggers. Tarot helped me heal from that, but it had never been an area of natural hyper-focus for me. I’m equally fascinated by but deeply uncomfortable with spirituality, so a lot of this work swam upstream. Everyone has different strengths and challenges, and some of you may be better suited to this field than I was.
Metamorphoses
Having spoken to quite a few other readers, deck designers, and bloggers over the years, I believe that if you sign up to become either an author or a human deck designer in this field, there are as many ways to do that as there are people, but this can turn into a much more intensive artistic and occult experience than reading cards for yourself or your friends. It’s a significant undertaking to see through from start to finish. Tarot likes to change and transform the artists with the BALLS to reshape and reinterpret HER in quite interesting ways sometimes. I’d been reading cards casually for fourteen years before I began blogging. As soon as I began engaging here as a public-facing artist, tarot took me for a ride. This work did stuff to me and for me that I’m still figuring out and never saw coming.
Tarot is a conversational networker. She indexes and calls up many symbols, myths, and systems outside and beyond cartomancy, and bridges the pop-cultural and occult worlds by nature. That makes tarot incredibly beautiful, powerful, fun, and CONNECTIVE as both a spiritual guide and a storytelling art form. Because of the popular and casual elements, pockets of tarot craft (most especially the young and femme lookin’ pockets) may be undervalued or dismissed by Serious Occultsville, even while much of the broader culture continues to look on with fear and suspicion.
What does this make tarot? HaHA—abysmal as a Serious Person business, but fucking LIMINAL as shit! (And a great place for actually deep shit to go lurking in plain sight, if that’s a thing you like to do for any reason…)
Tarot is a conversational networker. She indexes and calls up many symbols, myths, and systems outside and beyond cartomancy, and bridges the pop-cultural and occult worlds by nature. That makes tarot incredibly beautiful, powerful, fun, and CONNECTIVE as both a spiritual guide and a storytelling art form. Because of the popular and casual elements, pockets of tarot craft (most especially the young and femme lookin’ pockets) may be undervalued or dismissed by Serious Occultsville, even while much of the broader culture continues to look on with fear and suspicion.
What does this make tarot? HaHA—abysmal as a Serious Person business, but fucking LIMINAL as shit! (And a great place for actually deep shit to go lurking in plain sight, if that’s a thing you like to do for any reason…)
Going Pro As a Reader, Author, or Teacher
For some people this is a super fun job that helps other people—that can be great! It’s also an unregulated job in the intersection of 😱the arts, spiritual counseling, and the service industry😱 that attracts a lot of charlatans and micro-gurus.
Consider boundaries with your craft as a part of your business plan before you hang your shingle, and work out in advance what you are and are not here to: witness & hold for others, bare for public gaze, and teach. This can change over time, and that’s fine, but do think about it. Know that some of the things we teach, we give away, and then they stop being ours for us. We do this for reasons when it goes down like that. Choose what you give this way wisely. Make it worth it.
If you sign up to be a professional reader for other people, that is a serious form of service work that will demand from you very high levels of: patience, humor, compassion, diplomacy, BOUNDARIES, ethics, and kitchen-table wisdom. Practice and seek honest feedback before hanging your shingle. Take an honest inventory of your gifts and limits. Think about when and how to refer people to other supports when they seek advice or help from you beyond what you can safely or ethically give.
Spirituality attracts a lot of hucksters and a lot of hungry and vulnerable seekers. Not all, but some of the clients who want readings have messy boundaries and questionable etiquette, and will show up to ask you things you are NOT qualified to advise or decide for them. Tarot is not the same as trained counseling, but it is emotionally intensive and sensitive work that comes with SERIOUS responsibilities if you’re authentic and in it for the right reasons. Some people really do turn to it as a replacement for therapy or pro counseling when they’d be better served by other supports, and some people turn to psychic readings for help making high-stakes decisions. Do your legal homework, especially if you are thinking about offering readings. Tarot reading is regulated or illegal in some states, and it’s riskier in some locations than others.
I’ve been keeping one eye on the New Age and occult publishing industries since the nineties, and seen a number of spiritual authors and teachers who seemed compelling, sincere, and talented in their early works devolve into flaming obvious quacks, pyramid schemers, and pseudo-psychic cold-readers as they scaled up and platformed beyond the scope of their authentic abilities. That’s a significantrisk for spiritual authors, on-demand psychics, and spiritual counselors, even those starting from an authentic and caring place. Reflect on your lane on a rolling basis, keep developing with integrity, and think about when to change or fold gracefully. Be cautious about platforming or entering publishing deals unless you have the passion, ethics, constitution, foundations, and quality material for a long-haul game. It’s okay to go in for one or two projects without making this your whole life’s work.
If you do have something professional to offer in this field, pay attention to your accounting, and think about what you need in exchange for your time and skills. Remember that your prices need to cover the time you spend creating free content and running admin and office tasks too. It’s easier to lower your prices than it is to raise them after a you set them way too fucking low to begin with like a bleeding-heart DORK. Time block your paid projects and your free projects wisely, and be careful with your sliding scales. Appreciate the fuck out of your supporters, but understand that this is not a reciprocal *culture* on the whole, and if you comport yourself as though it will be, you will get eaten alive.
Entitlement is common everywhere, but it can get pretty gross in fields that attract high percentages of people who believe they’re more “spiritual” than the next guy! 😆🤦🏻 You will offend or scare off a number of people whenever you set and hold boundaries, charge prices, or make changes. Do it anyway! Put on life vests for you!
Lead with the thing you care about MOST. You never know which part of your work might take off! That’s not your call. SO—make shit you LIKE that entertains you too! For me, on this project, it was the WTF?! Tarot Spread, which does make me a bit of a one-hit-wonder in this field… but I stand by it. 😆 If that’s the ONLY thing I’m ever known for personally in this lifetime, that’s hilarious. I’d had it on my bucket list to contribute at least one stupid meme to ✨The Fucking Internet✨ before I kicked it, and I totally thought it was gonna be Tetris Waffles. (That’s exactly what it sounds like—playing Tetris with the syrup in your toaster waffle squares until 100% of the squares fill up.) Tetris Waffles did not catch on, alas. Anyway, this was better. More folks may notice Fortune’s Inkwell and reversal theory later. 😉 Create work you can stand by. Do things that interest you very much while the interest is good. Watermark everything.
Consider boundaries with your craft as a part of your business plan before you hang your shingle, and work out in advance what you are and are not here to: witness & hold for others, bare for public gaze, and teach. This can change over time, and that’s fine, but do think about it. Know that some of the things we teach, we give away, and then they stop being ours for us. We do this for reasons when it goes down like that. Choose what you give this way wisely. Make it worth it.
If you sign up to be a professional reader for other people, that is a serious form of service work that will demand from you very high levels of: patience, humor, compassion, diplomacy, BOUNDARIES, ethics, and kitchen-table wisdom. Practice and seek honest feedback before hanging your shingle. Take an honest inventory of your gifts and limits. Think about when and how to refer people to other supports when they seek advice or help from you beyond what you can safely or ethically give.
Spirituality attracts a lot of hucksters and a lot of hungry and vulnerable seekers. Not all, but some of the clients who want readings have messy boundaries and questionable etiquette, and will show up to ask you things you are NOT qualified to advise or decide for them. Tarot is not the same as trained counseling, but it is emotionally intensive and sensitive work that comes with SERIOUS responsibilities if you’re authentic and in it for the right reasons. Some people really do turn to it as a replacement for therapy or pro counseling when they’d be better served by other supports, and some people turn to psychic readings for help making high-stakes decisions. Do your legal homework, especially if you are thinking about offering readings. Tarot reading is regulated or illegal in some states, and it’s riskier in some locations than others.
I’ve been keeping one eye on the New Age and occult publishing industries since the nineties, and seen a number of spiritual authors and teachers who seemed compelling, sincere, and talented in their early works devolve into flaming obvious quacks, pyramid schemers, and pseudo-psychic cold-readers as they scaled up and platformed beyond the scope of their authentic abilities. That’s a significantrisk for spiritual authors, on-demand psychics, and spiritual counselors, even those starting from an authentic and caring place. Reflect on your lane on a rolling basis, keep developing with integrity, and think about when to change or fold gracefully. Be cautious about platforming or entering publishing deals unless you have the passion, ethics, constitution, foundations, and quality material for a long-haul game. It’s okay to go in for one or two projects without making this your whole life’s work.
If you do have something professional to offer in this field, pay attention to your accounting, and think about what you need in exchange for your time and skills. Remember that your prices need to cover the time you spend creating free content and running admin and office tasks too. It’s easier to lower your prices than it is to raise them after a you set them way too fucking low to begin with like a bleeding-heart DORK. Time block your paid projects and your free projects wisely, and be careful with your sliding scales. Appreciate the fuck out of your supporters, but understand that this is not a reciprocal *culture* on the whole, and if you comport yourself as though it will be, you will get eaten alive.
Entitlement is common everywhere, but it can get pretty gross in fields that attract high percentages of people who believe they’re more “spiritual” than the next guy! 😆🤦🏻 You will offend or scare off a number of people whenever you set and hold boundaries, charge prices, or make changes. Do it anyway! Put on life vests for you!
Lead with the thing you care about MOST. You never know which part of your work might take off! That’s not your call. SO—make shit you LIKE that entertains you too! For me, on this project, it was the WTF?! Tarot Spread, which does make me a bit of a one-hit-wonder in this field… but I stand by it. 😆 If that’s the ONLY thing I’m ever known for personally in this lifetime, that’s hilarious. I’d had it on my bucket list to contribute at least one stupid meme to ✨The Fucking Internet✨ before I kicked it, and I totally thought it was gonna be Tetris Waffles. (That’s exactly what it sounds like—playing Tetris with the syrup in your toaster waffle squares until 100% of the squares fill up.) Tetris Waffles did not catch on, alas. Anyway, this was better. More folks may notice Fortune’s Inkwell and reversal theory later. 😉 Create work you can stand by. Do things that interest you very much while the interest is good. Watermark everything.
Deck Designing
Go take Benebell Wen’s deck design class if it's available and you want to design and print a deck. She will tell you right up front not to do it, and she is right! She has great business tips for aspiring tarot pros throughout her collected works.
I would honestly recommend that aspiring tarot artists explore alternatives to deck design in this market and climate, between social media app rot, AI, and supply chain instability.
Supply chains are extremely unstable today. If you, a human, start a human-drawn deck in 2025, it may not be printable by you by completion. That doesn’t mean don’t do it. It’s means get fucking crafty and design a backup plan for what to do with your images if international printing & shipping supply chains should break down or become unaffordable between the start and end of your project. This can happen rapidly! Production costs can shoot up any time in the two months is takes to run your Kickstarter and process payments.
Designing a tarot deck can be a wonderful and profitable experience, but it’s a high risk gamble that comes with a lot of bullshit. Even in a good market (which this isn't) designers can easily end up in debt by the end of production if they’re not very careful with accounting and budgeting.
You’ll need buzz and interest to kick off a deck or book, but these days, I would recommend building that buzz in some other pocket of the art world, including offline networking. Anything you share here will be a red hot target for bootleggers, phishing scammers, storefront psychics, micro-gurus, AI bot-lords, Etsy randoms, “spiritual” bloggers, and social media witches to rip…. and they are relentless. Going viral doesn’t mean getting recognized, and getting seen doesn’t mean getting paid. This niche can be a serious liability to the rest of your career if you’re a professional artist—handle it like a hazard.
It is very difficult to recoup minimum wage on any project that takes years to complete as a baseline, even if you get a lot of attention and wildly succeed, because the costs are very very high and the hours are *fucking absurd.* Most book authors, and probably most working deck designers too, don’t see minimum wage on our hours for these projects, unless they get enough demand to issue multiple print runs. But lol, indie tarot decks routinely get cited as poster children for “commercialism” in witchcraft. 🤦🏻 Tarot decks are books, babes. It takes a very long time to create and format a cohesive collection of 80 illustrations that present a fresh take on a stock tale, while doubling as ritual tools and handheld emotional supports. There’s no such thing as too many decks, and most tarot artists are NOT in this for the money. The deck designers who do succeed financially deserve every penny for their time, skills, and teachings.
If you're prepping to launch a deck, Kickstarter can help you generate buzz and urgency, but they take a heavy cut in fees, and then you’re on the hook to your backers. Funding out of pocket or through shop pre-orders can cut down on your risks and costs, but you need a LOT of your own buzz to move a print run that way, and social views on legacy apps are abysmal right now. Print on demand margins and turn arounds are not good today, so I’d only go POD for a hobby deck going out to a small community or personal friends.
Budget risks into your crowdfunding campaign or your preorder margins! I would recommend budgeting enough revenue to print your deck twice over, in case of either rapid inflation or production errors. Consult an accountant during your launch planning if you can afford one, or do your homework very carefully if not.
The world could change untenably before your deck is done. But this is true in all fields, and with everything worth doing.
I would honestly recommend that aspiring tarot artists explore alternatives to deck design in this market and climate, between social media app rot, AI, and supply chain instability.
Supply chains are extremely unstable today. If you, a human, start a human-drawn deck in 2025, it may not be printable by you by completion. That doesn’t mean don’t do it. It’s means get fucking crafty and design a backup plan for what to do with your images if international printing & shipping supply chains should break down or become unaffordable between the start and end of your project. This can happen rapidly! Production costs can shoot up any time in the two months is takes to run your Kickstarter and process payments.
Designing a tarot deck can be a wonderful and profitable experience, but it’s a high risk gamble that comes with a lot of bullshit. Even in a good market (which this isn't) designers can easily end up in debt by the end of production if they’re not very careful with accounting and budgeting.
You’ll need buzz and interest to kick off a deck or book, but these days, I would recommend building that buzz in some other pocket of the art world, including offline networking. Anything you share here will be a red hot target for bootleggers, phishing scammers, storefront psychics, micro-gurus, AI bot-lords, Etsy randoms, “spiritual” bloggers, and social media witches to rip…. and they are relentless. Going viral doesn’t mean getting recognized, and getting seen doesn’t mean getting paid. This niche can be a serious liability to the rest of your career if you’re a professional artist—handle it like a hazard.
It is very difficult to recoup minimum wage on any project that takes years to complete as a baseline, even if you get a lot of attention and wildly succeed, because the costs are very very high and the hours are *fucking absurd.* Most book authors, and probably most working deck designers too, don’t see minimum wage on our hours for these projects, unless they get enough demand to issue multiple print runs. But lol, indie tarot decks routinely get cited as poster children for “commercialism” in witchcraft. 🤦🏻 Tarot decks are books, babes. It takes a very long time to create and format a cohesive collection of 80 illustrations that present a fresh take on a stock tale, while doubling as ritual tools and handheld emotional supports. There’s no such thing as too many decks, and most tarot artists are NOT in this for the money. The deck designers who do succeed financially deserve every penny for their time, skills, and teachings.
If you're prepping to launch a deck, Kickstarter can help you generate buzz and urgency, but they take a heavy cut in fees, and then you’re on the hook to your backers. Funding out of pocket or through shop pre-orders can cut down on your risks and costs, but you need a LOT of your own buzz to move a print run that way, and social views on legacy apps are abysmal right now. Print on demand margins and turn arounds are not good today, so I’d only go POD for a hobby deck going out to a small community or personal friends.
Budget risks into your crowdfunding campaign or your preorder margins! I would recommend budgeting enough revenue to print your deck twice over, in case of either rapid inflation or production errors. Consult an accountant during your launch planning if you can afford one, or do your homework very carefully if not.
The world could change untenably before your deck is done. But this is true in all fields, and with everything worth doing.
Alternatives to Deck Design For Indie Tarot Artists
Many of us enter deck design today because we have prior design skills and a passion for tarot both at once. There’s a lot of other fun, cool shit you can make and do with those interests that may treat you better than deck design under these market conditions.
I myself was neither able nor willing to complete the Spirit Vertigo Tarot in deck form because of market instability, algorithm burial, rising costs, and low pay, etc. But I did complete a series of prints, posters, and tees with the Major Arcana. And I may use the illustrations in a lyrical book or chapbook someday.
Here are some ideas for deck design alternatives and backup plans for your artwork in case of supply chain disruptions:
I myself was neither able nor willing to complete the Spirit Vertigo Tarot in deck form because of market instability, algorithm burial, rising costs, and low pay, etc. But I did complete a series of prints, posters, and tees with the Major Arcana. And I may use the illustrations in a lyrical book or chapbook someday.
Here are some ideas for deck design alternatives and backup plans for your artwork in case of supply chain disruptions:
- Tarot spread craft
- Prints & posters
- Tee shirts & apparel
- DIY silk screens
- Print on demand products
- Planners, calendars, stationery, stickers, & workbooks
- Poetry chapbooks, spell-books, zines, and other print illustrations
- Music posters and album art
- Tattoo designs, permanent or temporary
- Fine art for galleries, shows, or your indie website
- Digital deck apps and ebooks
- Murals & home decor
- Private altar artwork, devotional art, or sketchbooks
Bot-Lords & Scam-Lords Fuck Off
The tarot market is presently flooded with AI decks that keep rolling out at staggering rates that we, who take years to draw collections of 78 pictures, cannot compete against. Kickstarter and Etsy are overrun with bootlegs and AI. It takes years for a human to hand-draw a deck that means something, and hours for a sloppy FRAUD with no moral fiber to collate a bot deck or steal a real artist’s screenshots. The deck market was over-saturated even before AI. Political instability means fewer people are shopping with tighter budgets, and Meta’s algorithm shifts and other app rot decimated views for human artists. The slice of the pie left for any given human artist now is unsustainable for our community. If we do not shop carefully and prioritize our human artists, we will lose them.
I do not blame you, the well-meaning consumers, for getting swindled by these skill-less asshats, enshittifying this beloved craft for all of us. If you are deck shopping, look for proof of humanity, an independent artist’s web presence, a human story behind the symbols and themes, and process shots or videos as signs of an authentic creator. A real artist competing in a bot market will show their face on screen, in multiple photos and videos. They’ll give talks or share their story, post process images or blogs, and share what their images mean and how they came up with them. An AI deck designer might well make false claims, share fake or stock artist photos, and blurb their product with AI generated text, but they’re less likely to fake an authentic, human web presence with process work, education, and personalized storytelling because AI “artists” are LAZY, ENTITLED SCAM-LORDS directly profiteering off stolen labor and artist suppression.
If you are a human artist, showcase your humanity, your story, and your process work in photographs, writings, audio, and video. Look into tools like nightshade and glaze. Think about how much of your finished work you want to post on the open internet. You can show process shots, crops, and studio shots on social media, and publish your finished works behind paywalls or in print projects. Build a holistic, personalized web presence, and develop an idiosyncratic voice true to your nature.
Personally, I wouldn’t even want to use an AI deck for casual readings, because they’re cursed. Why is AI art cursed, you ask?
For starters, today’s AI art tech was built and sourced directly off the uncredited, stolen labor of thousands to millions of human artists who actively hate it with a seething passion. Those images spring from a well of exploitation and rage. For seconds, AI art and text are controlled by Silicon Valley robber barons who’re flooding out and silencing diverse and marginalized human artists, authors, scholars, and dissidents with an avalanche of thoughtless CRAP during a fucking non-coincidental f4sc1st Renaissance, you (adorable) dingbats (whomst I care about). For thirds, AI art and text has a strong record of telling dangerous lies and driving its most engaged users insane, which serves them right. 🤣🥳 For fourths, AI art and text produces feedback loops that perpetuate and exaggerate toxic stereotypes, tropes, and biases at exponential rates. Above all things, when you design any ritual or spiritual tool with the instant gratification of AI tech soaked in bad blood, you bypass all the thought, effort, meaning, focus, and intention that makes a ritual took or creative metamorphosis work. And lastly, AI aesthetics are like the Thomas Kinkade paintings of digital mark-making. Super gross.
You would get more out of designing a deck of stick figure art or minimalist, abstract paint textures that you made up yourself and drew with your own hands. (I can say this with confidence having basically done that in my mini deck lol. Those funky little glyphs have multi-layered meanings!) Unskilled and outsider human art done with thought and feeling means far more than plagiaristic, hyper-realist bot vomit. If you have really great ideas for ✨text prompts,✨ be a meme-lord or a writer. That’s your lane. Stay in it, or learn how to draw, bestie.
In writing, character, humor, originality, and oddities are all antidotes to bot trash. When I began this blog, I edited the life out of my prose to make it as accessible and clear as possible. This was well intended, but no fun for me brain-wise—big oops. POINT IS—I did a little fishing after some of our Wayward Misfits on Discord asked about Chat GPT plagiarism, and found a couple of my earlier articles seeding bot summaries on niche questions. I noticed that the more personalized, lyrical, and offbeat prose, as I let more and more of my voice into my work here, didn’t get trawled at all. If you play to the common denominator, your voice will be indistinguishable from the bot summaries that rip your text and replace you. Write with clarity, yes, but also humanity. Get creative and weird, personal and funny or beautiful or haunting. Your potential readers' laziness will win out, and the bot summaries of YOUR articles will win all YOUR rightful views unless you are actively FUN to read.
I do not blame you, the well-meaning consumers, for getting swindled by these skill-less asshats, enshittifying this beloved craft for all of us. If you are deck shopping, look for proof of humanity, an independent artist’s web presence, a human story behind the symbols and themes, and process shots or videos as signs of an authentic creator. A real artist competing in a bot market will show their face on screen, in multiple photos and videos. They’ll give talks or share their story, post process images or blogs, and share what their images mean and how they came up with them. An AI deck designer might well make false claims, share fake or stock artist photos, and blurb their product with AI generated text, but they’re less likely to fake an authentic, human web presence with process work, education, and personalized storytelling because AI “artists” are LAZY, ENTITLED SCAM-LORDS directly profiteering off stolen labor and artist suppression.
If you are a human artist, showcase your humanity, your story, and your process work in photographs, writings, audio, and video. Look into tools like nightshade and glaze. Think about how much of your finished work you want to post on the open internet. You can show process shots, crops, and studio shots on social media, and publish your finished works behind paywalls or in print projects. Build a holistic, personalized web presence, and develop an idiosyncratic voice true to your nature.
Personally, I wouldn’t even want to use an AI deck for casual readings, because they’re cursed. Why is AI art cursed, you ask?
For starters, today’s AI art tech was built and sourced directly off the uncredited, stolen labor of thousands to millions of human artists who actively hate it with a seething passion. Those images spring from a well of exploitation and rage. For seconds, AI art and text are controlled by Silicon Valley robber barons who’re flooding out and silencing diverse and marginalized human artists, authors, scholars, and dissidents with an avalanche of thoughtless CRAP during a fucking non-coincidental f4sc1st Renaissance, you (adorable) dingbats (whomst I care about). For thirds, AI art and text has a strong record of telling dangerous lies and driving its most engaged users insane, which serves them right. 🤣🥳 For fourths, AI art and text produces feedback loops that perpetuate and exaggerate toxic stereotypes, tropes, and biases at exponential rates. Above all things, when you design any ritual or spiritual tool with the instant gratification of AI tech soaked in bad blood, you bypass all the thought, effort, meaning, focus, and intention that makes a ritual took or creative metamorphosis work. And lastly, AI aesthetics are like the Thomas Kinkade paintings of digital mark-making. Super gross.
You would get more out of designing a deck of stick figure art or minimalist, abstract paint textures that you made up yourself and drew with your own hands. (I can say this with confidence having basically done that in my mini deck lol. Those funky little glyphs have multi-layered meanings!) Unskilled and outsider human art done with thought and feeling means far more than plagiaristic, hyper-realist bot vomit. If you have really great ideas for ✨text prompts,✨ be a meme-lord or a writer. That’s your lane. Stay in it, or learn how to draw, bestie.
In writing, character, humor, originality, and oddities are all antidotes to bot trash. When I began this blog, I edited the life out of my prose to make it as accessible and clear as possible. This was well intended, but no fun for me brain-wise—big oops. POINT IS—I did a little fishing after some of our Wayward Misfits on Discord asked about Chat GPT plagiarism, and found a couple of my earlier articles seeding bot summaries on niche questions. I noticed that the more personalized, lyrical, and offbeat prose, as I let more and more of my voice into my work here, didn’t get trawled at all. If you play to the common denominator, your voice will be indistinguishable from the bot summaries that rip your text and replace you. Write with clarity, yes, but also humanity. Get creative and weird, personal and funny or beautiful or haunting. Your potential readers' laziness will win out, and the bot summaries of YOUR articles will win all YOUR rightful views unless you are actively FUN to read.
Blogging, Social Media, & Workflow
A lot of us are hardcore app fatigued and some of the scene is moving to long-form conversations on forums and chat spaces, newsletters, classes or study groups, and live networking. That’s worth embracing.
If you want to compete on bot-market forums or apps like Instagram, you’ll have to churn content out fast and constantly, which makes it challenging to go deep. Meta and the mainstream social apps are sinking ships. Better out than in there, even if you have to take a hit and rebuild somewhere else! The Naz1fication is not a drill!!
If you’re here to go deep, but you try to play to the grid on the side, the audience you attract may be interested primarily in your grid offerings: jokes, memes, WIP photos, daily sketches, spreads, printouts, teaching videos, or 101 stuff. These can be wonderful, artful, and worthwhile crafts in themselves, so don’t dismiss them. Just know that they can take hours to create and they are not valued at living wages. Try to carefully balance and time block for both your depth work and grid work, and seek creative ways interweave these, to prevent your memes from eclipsing your books.
This was one of my biggest mistakes. I did want to share some tarot teachings, but I didn’t want to fall into the trap of selling my spirituality. So my business plan to keep this work sustainable was to share tarot teaching for free on the blog, use the deck designing process as a portfolio builder in illustration, get eyes on my skills as a boondocks artist no one had heard of, and sell artwork, freelance graphics & illustrations, tee shirts, and decks. My free tarot content attracted an audience who wanted… drumroll please… free tarot content, and most were here for spreads and spreads alone. Then my portfolio building plans got massively interrupted by strain injuries in my hands. By the time my decks and books were finally finished, the audience I’d built here couldn’t see my posts anymore because of algorithm shifts, so it all fell apart on the finish line. I excelled as a tarot blogger and flopped as a business.
^^This kind of business plan^^ might have worked in the golden days of long-form blogging and RSS feeds, but it does not work at all on hyper-niched grid-based media channels. Your content marketing has to match exactly the thing you are selling!!! LOL. Your day job has to be more practical, viable, and easier to break into than your passion project. And your business plan has to match the world and market you live in NOW.
Do NOT write a business plan based off what seems to have worked well for your favorite artists or bloggers one generation up. Tech landscapes and markets shift rapidly, and individual pathways to success are usually not repeatable. And a lot of people who *look* successful online aren’t actually making full time incomes off their blogs and art hustles.
If you don’t want to sell your spirituality, then don’t share it on the internet! 💫 OR share it through a pen-name on a low-key, non-commercial microblog, OR weave it into the subtext and themes of some other art form. Be an artist, not a micro-guru. If you want to be a full time teacher in a spiritual field because that’s how you want to spend your time, and that’s what you have to offer the collective, then you’ll need to make your peace with routing through academia, licensed counseling, or a Big-3 priesthood, OR selling classes, readings, and subscriptions at living wages for you, and marketing them effectively. Unpaid teachers can’t keep working for anyone. But it is incredibly challenging to do this with integrity in Spirituality Land over the course of years without exhausting your natural gifts and selling filler or flim-flam.
On social media, all four of: quantity, quality, consistency, and constancy will be expected of your output, and your reach and engagements will drop if you can’t deliver. Of these, quality is the least important for driving engagement. That can be a freeing, punk-rock kinda thing if you embrace the shitpost culture, but it can also be artistically and spiritually depressing lol.
People will get most woefully confused and bail on social if you are not extremely fucking consistent in your work, aesthetics, posting routines, and self-presentation. And if you stop playing to the grid to focus on long form works in progress, your audience will be gone by the time the deep shit is done. That’s one of the biggest reasons I’m leaving tarot for music. I couldn’t do both the getting-of-the-work-done and the feeding-of-the-beast-done AT ALL in this medium, to the point that it’s just the wrong medium for my mind to nest in.
Think about efficient, actionable, and fun ways to tackle both your long-form work and your serial posts and content marketing right up front, during your workshopping and business planning stages. The more fun and interesting your work is for you, the more stamina you’ll have for the marathon.
If you want to compete on bot-market forums or apps like Instagram, you’ll have to churn content out fast and constantly, which makes it challenging to go deep. Meta and the mainstream social apps are sinking ships. Better out than in there, even if you have to take a hit and rebuild somewhere else! The Naz1fication is not a drill!!
If you’re here to go deep, but you try to play to the grid on the side, the audience you attract may be interested primarily in your grid offerings: jokes, memes, WIP photos, daily sketches, spreads, printouts, teaching videos, or 101 stuff. These can be wonderful, artful, and worthwhile crafts in themselves, so don’t dismiss them. Just know that they can take hours to create and they are not valued at living wages. Try to carefully balance and time block for both your depth work and grid work, and seek creative ways interweave these, to prevent your memes from eclipsing your books.
This was one of my biggest mistakes. I did want to share some tarot teachings, but I didn’t want to fall into the trap of selling my spirituality. So my business plan to keep this work sustainable was to share tarot teaching for free on the blog, use the deck designing process as a portfolio builder in illustration, get eyes on my skills as a boondocks artist no one had heard of, and sell artwork, freelance graphics & illustrations, tee shirts, and decks. My free tarot content attracted an audience who wanted… drumroll please… free tarot content, and most were here for spreads and spreads alone. Then my portfolio building plans got massively interrupted by strain injuries in my hands. By the time my decks and books were finally finished, the audience I’d built here couldn’t see my posts anymore because of algorithm shifts, so it all fell apart on the finish line. I excelled as a tarot blogger and flopped as a business.
^^This kind of business plan^^ might have worked in the golden days of long-form blogging and RSS feeds, but it does not work at all on hyper-niched grid-based media channels. Your content marketing has to match exactly the thing you are selling!!! LOL. Your day job has to be more practical, viable, and easier to break into than your passion project. And your business plan has to match the world and market you live in NOW.
Do NOT write a business plan based off what seems to have worked well for your favorite artists or bloggers one generation up. Tech landscapes and markets shift rapidly, and individual pathways to success are usually not repeatable. And a lot of people who *look* successful online aren’t actually making full time incomes off their blogs and art hustles.
If you don’t want to sell your spirituality, then don’t share it on the internet! 💫 OR share it through a pen-name on a low-key, non-commercial microblog, OR weave it into the subtext and themes of some other art form. Be an artist, not a micro-guru. If you want to be a full time teacher in a spiritual field because that’s how you want to spend your time, and that’s what you have to offer the collective, then you’ll need to make your peace with routing through academia, licensed counseling, or a Big-3 priesthood, OR selling classes, readings, and subscriptions at living wages for you, and marketing them effectively. Unpaid teachers can’t keep working for anyone. But it is incredibly challenging to do this with integrity in Spirituality Land over the course of years without exhausting your natural gifts and selling filler or flim-flam.
On social media, all four of: quantity, quality, consistency, and constancy will be expected of your output, and your reach and engagements will drop if you can’t deliver. Of these, quality is the least important for driving engagement. That can be a freeing, punk-rock kinda thing if you embrace the shitpost culture, but it can also be artistically and spiritually depressing lol.
People will get most woefully confused and bail on social if you are not extremely fucking consistent in your work, aesthetics, posting routines, and self-presentation. And if you stop playing to the grid to focus on long form works in progress, your audience will be gone by the time the deep shit is done. That’s one of the biggest reasons I’m leaving tarot for music. I couldn’t do both the getting-of-the-work-done and the feeding-of-the-beast-done AT ALL in this medium, to the point that it’s just the wrong medium for my mind to nest in.
Think about efficient, actionable, and fun ways to tackle both your long-form work and your serial posts and content marketing right up front, during your workshopping and business planning stages. The more fun and interesting your work is for you, the more stamina you’ll have for the marathon.
Staying An Artist For The Long Haul
On ANY professional artistic path: You will very likely run into exploitation, overwork, crappy pay, and lousy working conditions. You will sometimes be insulted, demeaned, and dismissed for what you give from the heart, mind, and soul. You and your work will both be mistreated. Customer service will be fun some days, mostly fine, and occasionally suck nuggets. You will not always be recognized, seen, or understood. You will likely get infantilized. If you’re a visual or performance artist, people will presume it’s because you’re not very smart and couldn’t pay attention to anything else. (Which might be true, oh well. 🤷🏻) You will be questioned for staying an artist as an adult by people who see it all as a waste, and you will be told that you get what you deserve when you are exploited. What else did you expect? That’s art. If you get miffed when your work gets stolen, you will be criticized for *not sharing.* You will have to curate, present, and occasionally defend your work. You may see your own work perform rather better for others than it does for you. I’m grateful that my audience has been so lovely and respectful in this department, but it is not unusual at all to experience bullying, stalking, and harassment if you have a large web presence of any kind. Managing parasocial connections with grace will be part of your job once you become public-facing at any level.
It helps to be a masochist.
If you walk in confidence, and set firm boundaries as an artist, you may be read as difficult. Do it anyway. Communicate your limits and your truths, and let people come and go. You cannot control how anyone else reads you, but you can control your own honesty and integrity. You cannot control who does and doesn’t like you, and not everyone will. You cannot control what anyone else receives from you, or what they do with the gifts once they’re out of your hands. You will be asked for more than you are willing or able to give sometimes, and it is fine to say no! You are FREE to nope out of this and go do something more respectful with your time if you can. You’ll be offered crappy deals—don’t sign anything you don’t understand. You will have cranky days, and miscommunications, and get yelled at. You will occasionally put your foot in it and need to take accountability, and perhaps even apologize and change your own behavior in public.
You’ll need a thick skin and good manners around criticism in any creative or service oriented field. If you want to keep growing as an artist, learn to appreciate constructive criticism and honest feedback you can use to improve the work. But you MUST do work that interests and speaks to YOU, or you will burn the fuck out right out the gate. Learning when and when not to take the feedback is part of the vocation. You can opt not to follow a critique without feeling any ill will or ruffled feathers about that person’s opinion.
Skilled marketers good at marketing with unoriginal content are generally much more successful than skilled artists great at innovating who suck at marketing. Don’t be shocked by that, and try to learn some SEO skills ASAP. If you DO, then in time, your audience will start organically commenting accurate attributions on your work when your watermarks fall off and it gets “reblogged,” which is NICE and HELPS a lot. 🙏 (Bless.)
Talented people are not inherently too silly, spacey, disorganized, or incompetent to brain marketing, btw. That’s a disrespectful myth, and a trap to believe about yourself. This happens because art production, content creation, and marketing are each full time jobs that take full time hours to learn and execute at pro levels. This is an hours-in-the-day problem for everyone, and a systemic ✨predation and labor exploitation✨ problem for full-time indie creatives whose work gets ripped off constantly by marketers, scammers, Silicon Valley, and the fast-fashion industry, etc. If you are a skilled artist, assume and start believing that you are perfectly capable of becoming a skilled business person, and dedicate some of your weekly time to business learning.
If you’re a solopreneur, you’ll need to divvie up your production time and your admin/marketing time 50/50. That means you need to pick a field and medium wherein you can work efficiently and passionately enough to produce full-time content on a half time schedule! Work strategically, and keep pivoting until you find that sweet spot in your workflow, OR collaborate with a business partner.
In any creative field, you might never get seen, so you’d damn well better see yourself and know who you are for you. You might never get paid, so have another source of income or support as you grow. If you don’t know who you are, make a passion project of finding out before and as you become public-facing. If you don’t like what you see in yourself, then make a passion project of crafting a self you can stand by.
Keep a foot in the world OUTSIDE your tarot/witch/pagan/occult/spirituality bubble no matter how deep you go in your personal practice. Many of our bubbles are prone to unhealthy imbalances, and refusing religious insularity can help you spot and correct them. Besides which, many people from other backgrounds are cool and FUN, with interesting things to say!
Keep a part of your practice and soul off-limits and private for you. You don’t have to give your whole self away in your work.
You and the work might never get your due. But if you’re here to do the stuff, you find a way to do it, without getting crushed. Stay adaptive and stay pissed.
If you are an inspired person, with something to give, keep nurturing and tending the flames of your inspiration, and never blame your muse for how hard it is to work in the human world.
Entrepreneurship is grueling. The arts are systemically abusive to their workers by design. The human world is hungry, panicked, predatory, and ailing. No individual can heal all that. You will experience compassion fatigue if you step up as any kind of teacher, healer, or carer. If your art wires and your spirit wires are crossed, all of this will be compounded by the challenges of occasionally “running too much current” for your system, grounding your mysticism, and keeping a firm foothold in ordinary, practical reality. It is normal to get burnt by what we give. Some would say inevitable. It’s part of the process. You’re not a lesser creator, worker, diviner, or channeler when you get burnt. Think about how to rise from your ashes if you’re crafty.
It is NOT an artist’s field at all in 2025 and you will need to be scrappy, devoted, adaptive, a little bit nuts, and quite possibly externally or independently supported to stay afloat if you want to jump in! Pace yourself, and keep the flame alive.
And for the love of goodness, recognize when you’re spent. It’s a fine thing to get spent; it means you gave the thing away.
Get out when you lose the spark. Pass the flame to something else for you, and pass the torch to someone else. Are we clocking the vibe? Are we reading between the linessss here my besties?
It helps to be a masochist.
If you walk in confidence, and set firm boundaries as an artist, you may be read as difficult. Do it anyway. Communicate your limits and your truths, and let people come and go. You cannot control how anyone else reads you, but you can control your own honesty and integrity. You cannot control who does and doesn’t like you, and not everyone will. You cannot control what anyone else receives from you, or what they do with the gifts once they’re out of your hands. You will be asked for more than you are willing or able to give sometimes, and it is fine to say no! You are FREE to nope out of this and go do something more respectful with your time if you can. You’ll be offered crappy deals—don’t sign anything you don’t understand. You will have cranky days, and miscommunications, and get yelled at. You will occasionally put your foot in it and need to take accountability, and perhaps even apologize and change your own behavior in public.
You’ll need a thick skin and good manners around criticism in any creative or service oriented field. If you want to keep growing as an artist, learn to appreciate constructive criticism and honest feedback you can use to improve the work. But you MUST do work that interests and speaks to YOU, or you will burn the fuck out right out the gate. Learning when and when not to take the feedback is part of the vocation. You can opt not to follow a critique without feeling any ill will or ruffled feathers about that person’s opinion.
Skilled marketers good at marketing with unoriginal content are generally much more successful than skilled artists great at innovating who suck at marketing. Don’t be shocked by that, and try to learn some SEO skills ASAP. If you DO, then in time, your audience will start organically commenting accurate attributions on your work when your watermarks fall off and it gets “reblogged,” which is NICE and HELPS a lot. 🙏 (Bless.)
Talented people are not inherently too silly, spacey, disorganized, or incompetent to brain marketing, btw. That’s a disrespectful myth, and a trap to believe about yourself. This happens because art production, content creation, and marketing are each full time jobs that take full time hours to learn and execute at pro levels. This is an hours-in-the-day problem for everyone, and a systemic ✨predation and labor exploitation✨ problem for full-time indie creatives whose work gets ripped off constantly by marketers, scammers, Silicon Valley, and the fast-fashion industry, etc. If you are a skilled artist, assume and start believing that you are perfectly capable of becoming a skilled business person, and dedicate some of your weekly time to business learning.
If you’re a solopreneur, you’ll need to divvie up your production time and your admin/marketing time 50/50. That means you need to pick a field and medium wherein you can work efficiently and passionately enough to produce full-time content on a half time schedule! Work strategically, and keep pivoting until you find that sweet spot in your workflow, OR collaborate with a business partner.
In any creative field, you might never get seen, so you’d damn well better see yourself and know who you are for you. You might never get paid, so have another source of income or support as you grow. If you don’t know who you are, make a passion project of finding out before and as you become public-facing. If you don’t like what you see in yourself, then make a passion project of crafting a self you can stand by.
Keep a foot in the world OUTSIDE your tarot/witch/pagan/occult/spirituality bubble no matter how deep you go in your personal practice. Many of our bubbles are prone to unhealthy imbalances, and refusing religious insularity can help you spot and correct them. Besides which, many people from other backgrounds are cool and FUN, with interesting things to say!
Keep a part of your practice and soul off-limits and private for you. You don’t have to give your whole self away in your work.
You and the work might never get your due. But if you’re here to do the stuff, you find a way to do it, without getting crushed. Stay adaptive and stay pissed.
If you are an inspired person, with something to give, keep nurturing and tending the flames of your inspiration, and never blame your muse for how hard it is to work in the human world.
Entrepreneurship is grueling. The arts are systemically abusive to their workers by design. The human world is hungry, panicked, predatory, and ailing. No individual can heal all that. You will experience compassion fatigue if you step up as any kind of teacher, healer, or carer. If your art wires and your spirit wires are crossed, all of this will be compounded by the challenges of occasionally “running too much current” for your system, grounding your mysticism, and keeping a firm foothold in ordinary, practical reality. It is normal to get burnt by what we give. Some would say inevitable. It’s part of the process. You’re not a lesser creator, worker, diviner, or channeler when you get burnt. Think about how to rise from your ashes if you’re crafty.
It is NOT an artist’s field at all in 2025 and you will need to be scrappy, devoted, adaptive, a little bit nuts, and quite possibly externally or independently supported to stay afloat if you want to jump in! Pace yourself, and keep the flame alive.
And for the love of goodness, recognize when you’re spent. It’s a fine thing to get spent; it means you gave the thing away.
Get out when you lose the spark. Pass the flame to something else for you, and pass the torch to someone else. Are we clocking the vibe? Are we reading between the linessss here my besties?
🔥 Catching The Spark 🔥
THIS has been a 💌 personal letter 💋 to someone here that I don’t know yet—maybe several of you—and I want YOU to step up and knock it out of the goddamn park, if you can. (Are your arms tingling?)
There is a big, opportunistic GAP in the real, human, non-robotic QUEER TAROT BLOG MARKET, where the excellent and very high quality active players are VALIANT, and badass, and know their stuff… but they are FEW and far between.
Most of us have folded and moved on now. I was one of the longest-running ones left.
Tarot is now and always has been QUEER as FOLK for keeps. And you are gonna need to FIGHT YOUR TITS OFF TO KEEP IT REAL AND HUMAN. This craft is gorgeous, rich, wise, and potentially transformative. Most of the community is lovely. If you love it, it’s worth it, though it may come at a cost.
This community could stand to benefit from fresh blood, new perspectives, and caring community organizers full of piss and vinegar. Bot-licking slobs fuck off. 👏 Bright young & old punks, step up! 👏
Abandon all hope, and do it anyway, like a fuckin’ NAIF!
You will have to be CUNNING AS HELL to rise above the enshittification. (And we may all need to go underground for a bit, depending how the wind blows.) Have fun and make good art while you can.
To Fortuna’s next ink-mavens, art waifs, and queer re-voicers, I wish you the best of luck, good art, and better fortunes than I found here.
I have one last letter for you, to close out Interrobang Tarot, reflect over the Fool’s Journey, personally and universally, thank all my readers, and bridge the gap between this school and the next. As for my work in tarot?
Ten years, two decks, one tome, one dazzlingly maximalist Major Arcana print series, and over 200 tarot spreads. My time and contract in this field have passed organically, and the deal is more than done. May the finished works have been seeds, and continue to find the people they might serve. The Highway Man knocks from the gate below the Ten of Stones, and another Road calls….
I gladly release the inspiration I channeled and tended as a tarot creator and teacher in the name of The Red Velvet Fortuna, with blessings to Her next translators.
The spark is free to catch if you will, Fool.
Your move, cartomancer…. 😉
You can.
You are.
You will be.
-Evvin Out
There is a big, opportunistic GAP in the real, human, non-robotic QUEER TAROT BLOG MARKET, where the excellent and very high quality active players are VALIANT, and badass, and know their stuff… but they are FEW and far between.
Most of us have folded and moved on now. I was one of the longest-running ones left.
Tarot is now and always has been QUEER as FOLK for keeps. And you are gonna need to FIGHT YOUR TITS OFF TO KEEP IT REAL AND HUMAN. This craft is gorgeous, rich, wise, and potentially transformative. Most of the community is lovely. If you love it, it’s worth it, though it may come at a cost.
This community could stand to benefit from fresh blood, new perspectives, and caring community organizers full of piss and vinegar. Bot-licking slobs fuck off. 👏 Bright young & old punks, step up! 👏
Abandon all hope, and do it anyway, like a fuckin’ NAIF!
You will have to be CUNNING AS HELL to rise above the enshittification. (And we may all need to go underground for a bit, depending how the wind blows.) Have fun and make good art while you can.
To Fortuna’s next ink-mavens, art waifs, and queer re-voicers, I wish you the best of luck, good art, and better fortunes than I found here.
I have one last letter for you, to close out Interrobang Tarot, reflect over the Fool’s Journey, personally and universally, thank all my readers, and bridge the gap between this school and the next. As for my work in tarot?
Ten years, two decks, one tome, one dazzlingly maximalist Major Arcana print series, and over 200 tarot spreads. My time and contract in this field have passed organically, and the deal is more than done. May the finished works have been seeds, and continue to find the people they might serve. The Highway Man knocks from the gate below the Ten of Stones, and another Road calls….
I gladly release the inspiration I channeled and tended as a tarot creator and teacher in the name of The Red Velvet Fortuna, with blessings to Her next translators.
The spark is free to catch if you will, Fool.
Your move, cartomancer…. 😉
You can.
You are.
You will be.
-Evvin Out
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Some of them have fucking unhinged captions, because they can, besties. I was calling the bluff of our Discord Wayward Misfits Clubhouse. (Follow the link to join the chat community free. We sling cards and read books and tell jokes, mostly.) My cat is a better psychic wizard than your honors student! (Just LMK if you guys want normal-caption versions of any of the weird ones, lol.) Prints and posters available here as well.
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