kevinthetarotreader

[kevinthetarotreader]

Other tarot readers want like a nice shop with plants and crystals or a super aesthetic room with chill lighting to do their readings in.

Meanwhile I just want to appear before some urban explorers in a place like this and ambush them with a card reading that alters the course of their lives.

[kevinthetarotreader]

Remember, if you’re perceived as a fortune teller, witch, or occultist, a lot of people think you’re spooky, and you can in fact, weaponize that.

[kevinthetarotreader]

New Tarot spread just dropped, pull a card for each of your executive dysfunctions and then sob quietly.

who’s gonna tell tumblr that executive dysfunction is more than Not Doing Things?

[kevinthetarotreader]

I spent 5 fucking years making videos on, being annoyed by, having fun with, and finding community on TikTok, and this is how I found out the ban went through early. 5 years of content, conversation, and friendship, and it got pissed away by some rancid old fucks who don’t understand what Wi-Fi is and some shit gobbling piss guzzling billionaire jackasses.

The reasoning was a mix of xenophobic saber rattling and straight up lies. Nobody wanted this. Nobody asked for this. The Supreme Court unanimously decided this. The Republican and Democrat parties ignored their constituents, ignored the people they were elected to represent, ignored all facts surrounding the app, and ignored the first fucking amendment of the constitution.

TikTok ban happened before anything the people of America have been begging and screaming for over the past 20 years.

[kevinthetarotreader]

[kevinthetarotreader]

Free public reading, but only if you ask an interesting question. Silly, serious, deep, shallow, any subject, no limits. As a professional eccentric lunatic, I’ve answered questions ranging from “why do children suffer awful diseases” to “what’s in hotdogs” to “how can I still have fun in Minecraft after finally beating the Ender Dragon?” so feel free to get as creative as you want/can.

(Disclaimer: You assume all responsibility for whatever answer is revealed in the cards. I am not a doctor, attorney, or similar expert, I’m a stranger with magic cards. Consult experts on serious subjects, and take everything I or any other reader says with a grain of salt.)

Picture unrelated. Side note: charcoal incense burners do not toast marshmallows very efficiently and frankincense does not pair well with campfire treats.

[kevinthetarotreader]

Cutting an apple but you fail a skill check VS Cutting an apple, but you fail a skill check (Reaction Speed: Trivial) and disappoint Kim, all of Revachol, and lose 1 Morale and 1 Health.

[kevinthetarotreader]

In the 2005 martial arts action movie “The Protector” (called Tom Yum Goong in the original Thai), there’s a scene where the protagonist faces off against a Capoeira master in a burning Buddhist temple that’s been flooded by the sprinkler system.

The protagonist has thus far been ploughing through hordes of armed and unarmed henchmen using Muay Thai to elbow and knee everybody with a face. Here however, he is suddenly thrown completely off his game by the shirtless man seen in this picture throwing a strong kick while in the middle of a fucking hand stand.

Up until this point, none of the antagonists or their lackeys really managed to outclass the protagonist, until here, except via cheap shots. The Capoeira fighter (played by Lateef Crowder, and actual Capoeira master who has cross trained in other martial arts) walks up to the protagonist and immediately manages to stun him with a feint and kick to the head. He manages to keep Tony off balance, overwhelming him with a combination of spinning kicks, sneaky sweeps, and overall evasiveness, even nearly knocking him out with a sudden boot to the chin.

Shit was sick, frankly.

Unfortunately, Lateef Crowder tears his Achilles tendon doing a pair of flips, and another stuntman from his team has to finish the scene for him.

I CANNOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME FIND IT, BUT I SAW AN INTERVIEW WITH LATEEF CROWDER WHERE HE SAID THAT IF HE DIDN’T GET INJURED DURING THIS SCENE, IT WOULD HAVE CONTINUED WITH HIM BEATING TONY BEFORE FINALLY BEING OVERCOME AT THE END OF THE MOVIE AND I REMAIN ENRAGED THAT I WON’T GET TO SEE THIS VERSION OF THE MOVIE

Anyways, the main point of this two card spread was to illustrate the feelings this scene initially conveyed: of the unorthodox attacking the conventional from unexpected angles. Tarot began as a card game, and card games are games of strategy, seeking advice on how to change your strategy up to approach problems, people, and furious Muay Thai fighters trying to save their poached elephants, is a valid and useful means of using divination to its fullest.

[kevinthetarotreader]

If RNGesus won’t help, something else will.

[kevinthetarotreader]

There is no such thing as AI.

How to help the non technical and less online people in your life navigate the latest techbro grift.

I've seen other people say stuff to this effect but it's worth reiterating. Today in class, my professor was talking about a news article where a celebrity's likeness was used in an ai image without their permission. Then she mentioned a guest lecture about how AI is going to help finance professionals. Then I pointed out, those two things aren't really related.

The term AI is being used to obfuscate details about multiple semi-related technologies.

Traditionally in sci-fi, AI means artificial general intelligence like Data from star trek, or the terminator. This, I shouldn't need to say, doesn't exist. Techbros use the term AI to trick investors into funding their projects. It's largely a grift.

What is the term AI being used to obfuscate?

If you want to help the less online and less tech literate people in your life navigate the hype around AI, the best way to do it is to encourage them to change their language around AI topics.

By calling these technologies what they really are, and encouraging the people around us to know the real names, we can help lift the veil, kill the hype, and keep people safe from scams. Here are some starting points, which I am just pulling from Wikipedia. I'd highly encourage you to do your own research.

Machine learning (ML): is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines "discover" their "own" algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. (This is the basis of most technologically people call AI)

Language model: (LM or LLM) is a probabilistic model of a natural language that can generate probabilities of a series of words, based on text corpora in one or multiple languages it was trained on. (This would be your ChatGPT.)

Generative adversarial network (GAN): is a class of machine learning framework and a prominent framework for approaching generative AI. In a GAN, two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss. (This is the source of some AI images and deepfakes.)

Diffusion Models: Models that generate the probability distribution of a given dataset. In image generation, a neural network is trained to denoise images with added gaussian noise by learning to remove the noise. After the training is complete, it can then be used for image generation by starting with a random noise image and denoise that. (This is the more common technology behind AI images, including Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. I added this one to the post after as it was brought to my attention it is now more common than GANs.)

I know these terms are more technical, but they are also more accurate, and they can easily be explained in a way non-technical people can understand. The grifters are using language to give this technology its power, so we can use language to take it's power away and let people see it for what it really is.

[kevinthetarotreader]

This is how many bullets they shot on a fucking kid.

[kevinthetarotreader]

The Knight’s pronouns are ⚫️/⚫️

I like them

[kevinthetarotreader]

“Cuno doesn’t know the spot, Cuno IS the spot! Cuno’s where the smoke sesh happens, Cuno IS the fuckin smoke sesh! People pass joints around the Cuno, pigs can’t even tell cuz Cuno’s air fuckin tight, hotbox shit, fuck do you know?”

Reaction Speed Check: Success (Trivial)

“Okay. We have to ask. We’re not ignoring that, right?

Cuno how the hell did you turn into a building?!?

“Fuck you asking that for?! You just heard Cuno tell you, air fuckin tight. Not squealing shit about my shape shifting, fuck off.”

C-can you even turn back?

“…Cuno’s gonna be real for a second, the Cuno isn’t sure about that one.”

Cuno spotted on Väike-Tähe street in Tartu, Estonia !!!! Holy shit living in the same country that DE was made in has so much benefits.

There were paint drops around the art so it must be somewhat fresh

[kevinthetarotreader]

I ain’t hear no bell.

[kevinthetarotreader]

I haven’t seen this yet, has anybody made a Baldur’s Gate mod where the dice success and failure noises are swapped with the ones from Disco Elysium, and everywhere in the Lower City in act 3 has the soundtrack of Revachol?

[kevinthetarotreader]

One concept I don’t see covered often enough is the way each card interacts with other cards. My geeky ass believes that the best way to illustrate this is through Chrono Trigger’s game mechanics.

Everybody who’s played it and also reads cards might have immediately grasped it just looking at the first sentence of the post and recognizing the characters, but for those outside the center of the Venn diagram of classic Super Nintendo RPGs and tarot readers (or those who didn’t get it) here’s a breakdown:

Chrono Trigger is a 16 bit JRPG about a group of kids saving the world from a space monster with time travel. The plot matters less than the actual way the game is played for this Tarot tip.

In this game, you fight monsters, evil wizards, robots, and knights with a colorful cast of characters, each of whom uses different attacks and weapons in semi-turn based combat

In addition to their own attacks and spells, each character can combine their attacks to create a new move, sometimes with completely different effects than both individual attacks.

I’m sure more recent games illustrate this overall concept through their gameplay well enough (2D fighting games with tag-in attacks and how those can affect combos or whatever, items in roguelikes like Binding of Isaac or Hades and their various synergies, character classes in Baldur’s Gate, skills creating story shifts in Disco Elysium, etc) but none as well as Chrono Trigger’s battle system, in my humble opinion.

This is something to take note of, the various shades of meaning created by each card reflecting and filtering through its neighbors.

[kevinthetarotreader]