Tag Archives: Journal

Tarot and Me

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Three Hares

Three Hares

My time with tarot started in the early 80s in a Goth-phase when someone bought me the Thoth deck for my 18th birthday, I liked it but it never really seemed to fit.

Three years later I was reading tarot on The Mound during the Edinburgh Festival using the Thoth deck when a friend came with a new deck and told me that she felt this was much more me. This was the Sacred Rose Tarot and I’ve used this deck on and off since 1985 now and I feel a really good, deep connection with it.

During that period I was also reading palms, runes, astrology charts, and I-Ching, though over the years I’ve only really kept on the tarot as it seemed the most popular with family, friends, and the occasional client.

I’ve been using The Sacred Rose Tarot deck for over 38 years now and feel I really know it but I wanted to experiment with a few other decks and we all know how that goes… let’s start a new collection!

I’ll be writing about returning to my old witchy ways and exploring this pathway, there will be bits about everything that comes across my mind but it will mainly be tarot. There will be readings, explorations of different decks, book and deck reviews, and more.

First thing I’ll be doing is collecting old posts from other blogs and getting these all set up here.

You can also commission me for a reading on Ko-Fi, and watch here and my Bluesky for when I do a single card draw for myself.

Roll of £20 Notes

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Card Storage

Card Storage

I’m going to tell a story about something that happened when I gave up MTG for the last time, but I’m going to catch up with the gaming week first.

I’m still finding it a challenge returning to any sort of gaming rhythm after so long away from it all and a lot of disappointments I’ve felt with Games Workshop over the last few years and have decided to move on from all Warhammer games and concentrate on micro-RPGs, board games, and some card games.

I’ve done a bit of sorting out in the shed though and have got the gaming bits separated into two large categories. One pile are the games I’m keeping, the other (much bigger) pile are the sprues that are going to be stripped to populate the shop on Ebay.

But on with the story.

This case is about 42x48cm, though the ones I had were slightly longer and could hold many more cards than these.

The first time I played Magic the Gathering was at the end of Ice Age and started really casually but it really ticked all my collecting boxes.

I then started playing quite competitively at around Invasion, going to regular tournaments and all the qualifiers, winning loads of cards and always having to have the latest tech and best decks and this meant I had thousands of cards.

A lot of them at high value, very high value as I played all formats. I had twenty of these large boxes, plus many folders, deck boxes, and other bits of storage.

Then I suddenly lost interest in the game all together and could really do with a bit of cash, so I started listing everything I had then listed it on eBay and after a few false starts it sold for a LOT of money to a gentleman from Norway.

We discussed sending it across and he realised that it would be easier and cheaper for him to bring his son with him and get the ferry to Newcastle, it would also be quicker.

We arranged to meet at the petrol station at the Durham services, so I packed up the car and with my partner we set off.

We got to the services and met the buyer, we then started to transfer the boxes across to the boot of his car. Once we had finished this I was handed rolls of £20 notes, loads of rolls, a satisfying amount of rolls.

As we were driving back with a back seat covered in these rolls of £20 notes my partner noted that all our activity would have been recorded on CCTV and that it would probably have looked extremely dodgy.

Thankfully we never had a visit from the Durham Constabulary wondering why I was selling loads of guns/rifles to a Norwegian.

A Gaming Life

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Ice Age

Ice Age

I’ve been gaming since the late 70s in one form or other, starting with really basic RPGs and moving on to D&D when it was established properly in the Red Box.

Over the years I’ve played many different games, RPGs, board games, miniature games, but always came back to card games as they are so portable and had tons of great art.

The games I’ve spent most time with were Magic: The Gathering and the original Legend of the Five Rings before Fantasy Flight took it over, though I have played and collected several more.

Right now though my main games are RPGs and miniature games but whenever I get a chance to play in an MTG draft I jump at it but getting to one has been so difficult recently.

This part of the blog is mainly about a few directories, trying to list all card games, rpgs, miniature games, and board games that I can find any information about. It will also be following my take up of various solo gaming systems as it continues to be hard to find groups to play with.

It will also be about my return to gaming over the next year or so starting with RPGs, solo board gaming, and some card games (even some console gaming things). There will be some old stories and such and read throughs of old gaming magazines.

Basically anything that takes my fancy.

I’ll also be linking to my Ebay shop where I’ll be selling some gaming bitz, mainly for Warhammer but there could also be some card games stuff there.

Watch out for this part of the blog as it develops.

Future Planning

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The All Is One

The All Is One

I’ve had a reseller account at Heart Internet since around 2004 and was reasonably successful for quite a while but over the last several years people have been dropping off and I’ve found I’ve no energy to work to replace them.

This is where I’ve been hosting my own domains as I had no need to pay for the hosting costs as it was covered by incoming fees from my clients, this has changed and I’m now having to pay some money each month out of my own pocket and it’s getting close to where it’s becoming uneconomical blogging from there.

In preparation for the time when I move from Heart I’ve setup this blog where I’ll be mirroring everything from the other blogs and Ko-Fi.

The added benefit of here is that it has https which everyone seems to complain about the others not having.

This is all in anticipation of change and with me not wanting to be all out there much longer, I’ll be turning back to clocks to the GeoCities days where I blogged about whatever I liked and had a small social media footprint.

New Headphones Then

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I’ve recently made the change from Spotify to Qobuz, there were lots of reasons for this, but one of the main ones was the amount artists were being paid and how aggressively Spotify were trying to minimise this as much as they could by introducing ‘ghost’ music to the mix.

Music that isn’t really produced by active artists and Spotify holds the copyright to, with some rumours even going as far as to say AI-generated tracks.

These tracks were then proactively encouraged to us in our artist radios, Spotify-generated mixes, and weighted to nudge down original artists according to a report in Harper’s Magazine.

According to an article at ear Qobuz pays more than every other music streaming service, this is probably because there is no free tier and that seems to be one of the reasons that their income is higher than other services due to their commitment to encouraging the continuation of music production and their self-proclaimed love of music.

As soon as I saw all this I started the free trial, but it wasn’t long until I upgraded to the paid Duo plan for me and my partner as the sound quality is stunning! This was the next main reason I’d been told about, sound quality.

The lowest quality on Qobuz equates to the highest quality on Spotify and the difference was so noticeable even through ear buds but especially on our good quality headphones (it does make me want to buy excellent quality headphones now though).

The interface is a bit more grown up and there is a magazine section to read articles from music journalists all about music and hi-fi, been dipping into this now and then and it’s been really interesting so far.

When I transferred my files across there was a bit missing but when I looked into it it seemed to mainly be playlists generated by Spotify and one album, which is a shame as I really like that album, but hey-ho nothing is perfect.

Overall after a week of using it I’ve got to say how impressed I am by the service and quality, music discovery is a bit harder but it’s the ease of ‘discovery’ on Spotify that allowed them to get away with the slop they were serving their customers, and I’m sure after a bit of practice I’ll get more used to the way Qobuz works

British Journal of Photography

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British Journal of Photography

British Journal of Photography

As part of developing my photography practice I decided to subscribe to The British Journal of Photography for the more serious discussion and exploration of the art practice of photography.

I did subscribe to this before when I was part of the photography group at the now defunct Darlington Arts Centre and always appreciated the rigour of the writing and the breadth of works that were included in each issue of the magazine.

Really glad that they have a great app as well, especially for the sake of space as magazines just build up and tend to take over once you start collecting them. In fact there are two apps, one for the iPad for the main issue and the other for the iPhone delivering more regular content.

I do subscribe to another photography magazine and have for quite a while, Black+White Photography, and again this has a good workable app for the iPad. This magazine though full of good articles about artists and exhibitions also has quite a bit of practical information and project ideas.

I’m also looking for a third but this may be an art magazine like Aesthetica but I will have to play about and see what’s out there unless you have a recommendation for me?

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