From a letter to Ault, September 9.
Then there were the tarot cards. Back when the Iraq Most Wanted deck came out, I thought: that would be an interesting idea for personal cards for people in our group — but it just isn’t imaginative enough, and doesn’t fit the theme.
Felicia did tarot and helped me understand that I wasn’t going to be causing havoc on a global scale by modifying them. (In fact, I later learned that that was the tradition of how tarot decks used to be created — with the royalty and famous people portrayed as characters.)
I made up a couple of samples. Then I showed them off hoping that people would take it up and learn a bit of Photoshop, enough to do their own cards — and we would have some to hand out, and it would be cool. Turned out about half a dozen people did their own cards. I learned a lot of Photoshop Elements and did almost all the cards. Everyone who showed up regularly chose a card, so with a few wildcards and camp cards we had a full deck of 78, of which I printed about 100, along with personal cards to give away.
Many of them were just cropped heads (some in more ways than others) but some we did poses and costumes. They turned out rather amazing, I’m not ashamed to say.
We didn’t limit it to the Albano-Waite deck — some people wanted cards from the Crowley Thoth deck, but I let someone else do the editing on those. I may be foolhardy but I’m not insane, so far as I know.
I picked up the printed cards as I was heading out of town.
Punching the corners was really really annoying — the punches jam up and it hurts your fingers and takes forever. But everyone loved the cards, and a lot of them got handed out. I myself lost mine, which was not a big deal since I’m not really one for handing out cards anyway.
The San Diego Burning Man camp was called Fuegodiego — Fire of San Diego. All these people had “playa names.” I was still justfred.