Solarpunk Tea Party featuring experimental solarpunk tarot!

Hey Solarpunk Toronto! We'll be meeting at Bampot Tea, which calls itself a "Public Living Room"; it's an extremely solarpunk venue. By agreement with the venue, it will cost $10/person to attend this meetup, for which you'll get one free tea-service! They have so many yummy teas. Anything after that (more tea, food, etc) is extra, of course. Let's have a solarpunk tea party! And let's talk prefigurative solarpunk life, how can we live now as if our desired solarpunk future was here. I hope this experience of community in a "public living room" helps us feel that!

AND: Solarpunk Tarot! Your organizer, Eric Boyd, has been designing a "solarpunk tarot deck", basically, solarpunk themed cards that people will be able to use in order to divine their future in a solarpunk world. So far I've got "alphas", i.e. very early version which is super rough and in need of a lot of feedback and wholesale editing and revision.

Please come out and see the deck! I'll have at least two copies on hand, so there will be a deck for people to look at, while I (or anyone who wants to) can give tarot readings with the other. There are 100 cards, at least half of which are vaguely- or very-solarpunk themed: everything from Community Garden to Eco-Artisan to Sun Salutation to Prefigurative and Protopia. You can see all the art online if you want, the deck is and will be open source.

See you at Bampot for our Solarpunk Tea Party!

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For those who are super curious, here's a lot more info about the solarpunk tarot project (this is edited from the alpha manual):

This project would not exist without the Science Tarot deck. It's beautiful and was my inspiration for this project, plus where I originally learned about tarot. I've wanted to make an even more modern and accessible tarot deck for a long time, but it always seemed like way too big a project (78 ideas! 78 piece of art!, so I never started.

In late 2022, with the rise of Generative AI, the project started to seem more manageable. ChatGPT could come up with card ideas and write the manual. MidJourney could make the art. And I discovered MakePlayingCards.com: they print decks, and they also do manuals, boxes, anywhere from 1 to 15,000+ copies at a time.

Around the same time, I also discovered Solarpunk, which encapsulated all the parts of the desirable future I want. And it came with a wonderful aesthetic which the machines had already ingested. So the project became: Solarpunk Tarot. And I used what I loving call "The Machines" extensively: most of the card names and ALL of the art are made by those GenAI services listed above.

Currently the deck is very rough, basically I did only light curation and editing to exclude the most egregious weirdness, but so much remains, the alpha decks are deeply unfinished. That's why you hold this deck: I need people to point at all the things and tell me what's wrong, what's missing, what's working, what isn't, etc. I'm way too close to it all. I need your feedback!

Give Feedback!

Even if you don't come to the event, if you checked out the cards online, I'd love to have your feedback! All feedback is anonymous. There are two different forms that you can fill in to give feedback:

• Individual Card - where you can give feedback about a particular card, including suggestions about it’s art, manual entry, meaning, alignment with RWS, etc.
• General Feedback & New Ideas - a form where you can submit new ideas, e.g. for a new card, or about suits, reading layouts, project plan, anything new, as well as a place to put any thoughts, experiences, feedback, suggestion, etc that you have about the project as whole.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end, you're a champ! Now join me at Bampot on the 20th :-)