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[image description: photos of The Disco Elysium Tarot, printed letterpress in an edition of one from handset lead type and linoleum blocks. It is a complete 78-card tarot deck printed primarily with white text and illustrations on medium grey cardstock, in a custom dark grey hardcase box with a hand-marbled orange and yellow endsheet. The backs of the deck are decorated with an illustration of a sprig of may bells, and a quote from Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns: "None of this matters at all." The interpretive meaning of each card is expressed on its face with a small excerpt of the game's text. The Minor Arcana are divided into four suits of Harry's Attributes—Motorics, Psyche, Physique, Intellect—and each card in that suit is a quote from a skill under that Attribute. The Major Arcana are assigned quotes from other sources like NPC dialogue or Thought Cabinet problems & solutions. Pips for the Minors are counted with diamonds like the game's skill points; each actor or title is printed with their in-game color, but made shiny & metallic with bronzing powder.

each piece of text was set in handset lead type, assembled from individual pieces for each letter and space, and printed relief on a chandler & price clamshell press. end description.]

🎊🎊 Desert Bus for Hope starts for 2023 on nov. 11th and i have made an item this year for the craftalong that will be up for giveaway between 6am-12pm on Monday the 13th! 🎊🎊 It is a full tarot deck based on Disco Elysium and it has several pieces of my heart & soul in it but NOT my blood because i put a bandaid right on that :) donations for this and any other auctions & giveaways for Desert Bus go to Child's Play Charity.

notes: i did not make a whole new interpretive model for this deck, apologies, that was outside of my scope. it's generally compatible with a Rider-Waite model, with Motorics for Wands, Psyche for Cups, Physique for Swords, and Intellect for Disks. (full distribution of text listed by card, linked below. any spelling or transcription errors you find there, i promise i fixed them in print—that's copied from my digital mockup which was copied hastily from screenshots.)

i also do not track hours on these kinds of projects because that way lies madness, but i will say: i knew how much time it would take to print it. it was a lot but i was not worried about it, i know how to print. i was very worried about how much time it would take to absorb the sheer amount of text, and distribute it across the cards, and really get an array i believe in. i was right to worry, and i have absolutely had a few anxious nightmares about discovering the Perfect excerpt that should've gone in and i missed it, and the suit of Intellect made me want to lay on the floor a few times, but still! i believe there's many versions of a deck you could make from this game and this one is a good one.

i think the Minors fit really well with the double-edged sword of Harry's skills, their advice, their priorities. the circular way the Fool-World assignment works out makes me smile every time. The colors on The Star came out so nice. i think Justice fulfills some of my favorite things about Kim's character & purpose in the story. i worried sometimes that editing to such short clips would lose too much of the politics of the game, but of course you can't really take them out and they're especially present in the Majors—the Devil and the Hierophant, The Star and The Sun. i've wanted to design a tarot deck for years and i love this game deeply and i let this idea percolate for a few months and it never stopped making me laugh so here it is, & given a beautiful purpose :)

i also literally could not have done this without xyrilin's Disco Reader and the FAYDE On-Air Playback Experiment to navigate the dialogue and skill checks. Really couldn’t have tied the whole concept & colophon in its final bow without the Disco Reader :)) thank thank thank, they're so fun to investigate that it was honestly very difficult to focus on my task instead of veering off and exploring every branch in an extremely disorganized way.

actual printing went well honestly, very few problems! i think that means i'm getting pretty good at planning one of these monstrosities, although perhaps it also means i'm not challenging myself enough. hmm. no that's silly there's 78 ding dang cards in this thing. anyway the drop & replace formes worked well, no registration issues. mum convinced me to overprint another half a deck's worth of cards when I was printing backs & borders and of course she was right :/ there were a handful of cards that actually had better line breaks and fewer lines total in true type than in the digital mockup, so i needed all the spares I had to put those new short quotes into the appropriate border breakage. next time i will not question her.

handset in Garamond, Eden Bold, and secret Neuland.

WIP : full text card assignments

bonus photo of the kind of trash notes i always take to plan things like how many borders were printed with space for short excerpts vs long excerpts, and how many of those are majors vs. minors, because they have a slightly different frame at the bottom edge, etc.

[image description: they are truly garbage notes, i tell you. half of it is written at angles to the other half, many numbers in the math problems are not labeled, mistakes are scribbled over. it gets me there but it doesn't look pretty. end description.]

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The funniest detail in "Resolve" is that Sherman is shown to keep his abacus on a hook by the front door of his apartment. Meaning it's apparently something of a convention in the Highest Light to keep your abacus in roughly the same location as your coat or keys, and that Jonas Spahr, known pretentious asshole, decided on the most EXTRA possible way to do this

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*through sweat, blood, and tears* YOU WILL NOT EDIT THE FIRST DRAFT AS YOU GO. YOU WILL NOT EDIT THE FIRST DRAFT AS YOU GO. YOU WILL NOT EDIT THE FIRST DRAFT. AS YOU GO.

YOU. WILL. NOT. EDIT. THAT. FIRST. DRAFT.

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if you think the posts i make are bad you should see the thoughts i am thinking. in my mind

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these are the same

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Duck Swimming through Cherry Blossoms

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Out of idle curiosity:

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Season 3, Episode XI Appendices 🔎 | A Hastily Scrawled Note On A Napkin

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scylla Mouth perfec t size for put sailor in to s\ail! inside very Soft and Comfort sailor sail safely put sailor in Scylla Mouth. Put Sailor In Scylla Mouth. no problems ever in scyylla mouth because good Shape and Support for sailor ship weak of big ship mast. Ascylla Mouth yes a place for a sailor put sailor in scylla mouth can trust scylla for giveing good love to sailor. friend scylla

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Saskia 🤝 Spahr I do all this crucial work for this organization, and yet nobody ever tells me anything important

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sincerely obsessed with how now multiple people have told me "the Deja Vu episode of Game Changer is extremely good, do not watch it, you specifically should not watch it"

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one of the funniest things about the Midst is that the nature of the setting means that every single scene in the Highest Light, no matter what time of day it's happening, has the lighting conditions of 1pm

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“how would you feel if someone blocked you just because they found you annoying?” then i wouldn’t have to interact with someone who thinks i’m annoying? i don’t see a problem

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because I am who I am, I am once again wondering about the specifics of Spahr's family situation, i.e. where the hell are his parents.

it's stated that Costigan is his closest family "in some ways" and that she "knows him better than his own parents do, that's for sure". like, that distance simply might be a function of the fact that he was in the Company young, having started no later than 20 per Phineas math: spent so long, so young working for and traveling with the Company that he simply never developed a relationship with them perhaps. but, I wanna know if that's the case! and even if it IS the case, I want to know the details, I want to know who his parents are and what they do, I want to know the whole situation! especially because so much of this narrative is about family, particularly parent-child relationships. I want to know more about what he thinks about his parents—and what they think about him.

I also think a lot about that marble bust of "some ancestor of his" because it's such a specific and unusual object. its existence implies that they've been in the Trust for a decent number of generations now, like, putting Spahr at least fourth-gen since "ancestor" implies further up than grandparent. who is this ancestor? what did they do to warrant a bust in their likeness? why does he have a bust of them specifically? the narration is so dismissive, so like does Spahr just not really care about them or like what? how did he even come by this? is this something his family already owned? who commissioned it? why is it in his possession specifically rather than like at his parents' house? are there other busts of other relatives? if so, why is this person's the one he hangs his abacus on? what's the deal there? IS there a deal here at all, because it might just exist to help illustrate Jonas's pretentiousness. but, all my questions remain. it's a fascinating object.

I just have SO many questions about the Spahr family, both because I'm a Spahr girlie and because they've been generally alluded to as a group twice now! it's just very interesting to me to think about what the family dynamics there are. what is his family situation like! who are his parents! who is this bust even of! tell me about this family!

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