Blicke in die Zukunft, dirty style

Look to the future with humouristic warnings and jokes, dedicated to all the beautiful ones.
The cards can never be deceived! Choose, fair ones, for pleasure, of these for you to contemplate. They form a meaningful bouquet.

 The Blicke in die Zukunft ("Look Into The Future") is one of those humorous 19th century decks. You may have seen a few. I have a couple of British ones: one card is captioned "Sudden losses will cause you some anxiety" with a scene of people getting their clothes stolen while skinny dipping. Another shows a strong wind blowing the wigs off a couple, and it's captioned "You will experience sudden losses." So I set about translating the text on this deck expecting something similar. 

Translating a deck that's over 200 years old (plus it's in Fraktur german) can yield ambiguous results. The translation can seem nonsensical, and online translators are far from perfect. So when in doubt, it's best to check with an actual human who speaks the language. I was very much in doubt, because some of what I was getting sounded kind of...ribald. 😜

As it turns out, that's because it IS ribald. A couple of examples:

King of Diamonds

Take this gentleman without shyness,
he'll love you without feints,
he'll never grab your chests,
he's wearing the key on his backside 

 

 

7 of Hearts
 

My child, your man will never
dance after your whistle.
If you pout, he'll just think 
"Keep nagging!
I can play my own fiddle"

 

It puts the lie to the idea that people have that old decks can't refer to any of these things. You don't need extra cards, everything is already there.

You can see the cards here: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1896-0501-465

Play around with them here, just click on the old lady to draw a card: https://www.lilith-kartenlegen.de/zukunftsblick/index.htm

Or if you'd like to order, they're available here. https://www.etsy.com/listing/1444461407/fortune-telling-cards-32-cards-germany

A Little Help?

Hello, all. I'm sending out an SOS of sorts, though I'm not optimistic I'll get results.

I recently acquired the deck above. It's thought to be the first fortunetelling deck published in the US, ca. 1830. https://www.rubylane.com/item/404269-T00004075/Turner-Fisher-x93American-Fortune-Telling-Cards

Quite a discovery, wouldn't you say? But it appeared quietly on the Gamecrafter site, with not a peep from any of our deck historians. Of course I ordered.

In about a month, it shipped. In the meantime I noticed it was no longer being offered for sale, and the listing had been marked private. That worried me a little, but arrive it did.

The issue is that two cards are missing: the 9 of Spades and the King of Spades. Very IMPORTANT cards.

I understand that when one acquires an antique deck, it may not be complete. But if one is going to reproduce it and offer it for sale, the fact that there are missing cards needs to be disclosed, at the very least.
 

This is the response I got from Gamecrafter:

The person offering the deck has not responded to emails, of course.
As you can see, they've emblazoned their website on the card backs. Not only that, but they actually put their name on every card of the incomplete deck:

Short version: do not purchase from Shellay Maughan, her site Blazing Hearts Cards, or her Gamecrafter shop.

Anyway, this is my SOS: if anyone knows where there are scans of the complete deck. or even just the King and 9 of Spades, could you point me to them? Thanks in advance.

ETA 5/20/2023: After another email, I received the following from TGC:

I now have the complete deck.

Yes, the seller made it right. But it was a lot more trouble than it ought to have been.
I'm not sure what happened. The deck is still designated "not for sale" on TGC site. If it's offered again, you can probably order safely since she appears to possess scans of the complete deck.
But why not sell the complete deck to begin with? Why ignore emails?

A brief postscript re: AI

 

There's been some discussion where someone creating an AI deck defends it by saying what matters is "the intent of the creator." The problem with that is that AI ignores intent.

Last night I went to DALL E and made a simple request: Theda Bara reading playing cards. The image exists on the net, both the image above and this movie poster version:

What I got was this:

 

 

Besides the usual horrifically blinded eyes and deformed hands (something nobody intends), none of them are Theda Bara.

The first one looks liked Shirley Feeny from Laverne and Shirley.

 

All of this stuff is in its infancy, and in spite of what some folks think, it isn't putting jobs on the chopping block. Manufacturing plants need people to monitor and run the robots, otherwise they damage product in all kinds of hilarious ways, or just stop working. I don't see automated vehicles being used for trucking, either. There's enough horror stories about the cars. Imagine an interstate full of automated 18 wheelers.

Its one thing to enjoy playing with it. But it makes lousy deck images.

There's a (zombie) elephant in the room (and it's walleyed and the trunk is fused with...something.)

 

I made the above with DALL-E. I told it to give me Jean Harlow under the moon with spanish moss and a dog. It gave me this.

Admittedly, I don't spend much time with AI at all. So I haven't found the right words to make it give me anything sane looking. But the thing is, a lot of people DO spend a great deal of time with it, they're making decks, and none of those are sane looking either. I won't be so mean as to publish anyones' images here. But suffice to say that I'm seeing misaligned eyes, clothes growing out of peoples' skin, fused and deformed body parts, motors and mechanical parts in nonsensical places, tons of destroyed mattress stuffing...well, you get the idea.

I was talking with someone about this, saying how the people and animals resembled zombies and road kill. And they said that was the darkness and monstrosity they felt from it. They called it Frankentarot.

I've used the term Frankendeck before, to refer to those decks people put together from scavenged Public Domain images. While some of them are nice, many are jarring - the art styles can be incompatible. 

But this takes it more than a few steps further. You can think of the AI as Dr. Frankenstein and Igor. They go forth collecting parts from graves and gallows, bring them back, and stitch something together for you. Interesting, but not what I want in a reading deck.

Tradition

 

We all know how a lot of people will dig their heels in and refuse to learn cartomantic traditions, instead choosing to rely on "intuition." That would be fine, but for the fact that they push their views on the public, thus polluting the waters. Or they might make a deck, but choose to "innovate" rather than design the cards according to the reading tradition. There's a metric fucktonne of unreadable schlock out there.

I've been hanging out at cast iron discussion groups and found quite the opposite, in many cases. Let me explain first that a long time ago, people washed dishes with lye soap. Lye is used to this day to strip the seasoning from cast iron cookware. (Sometimes seasoning gets really crusty and needs to be stripped and done over.) The lye turns it to sludge and it washes right off. So you didn't want to wash your pans with soap then. People wiped their skillets with a rag, or scrubbed them with salt. But our modern dish detergent like Dawn is safe for washing pans. Still, some people still try to say you "should never use soap." I call bullshit. Wash your damn pan.

A lady at one of my cast iron groups said she knows this, she just doesn't use soap because her grandmother didn't, or told her not to. It's a way of keeping her grandma with her, I get that. Others will strip their pans by throwing them into a fire, risking cracks, warping, red scale and general heat damage. There are safe, inexpensive methods available but they choose to risk ruining their pan. They do it because a family member used to.

So people will follow a tradition for sentimental reasons, even if it's fatally flawed. But if there is no sentimental attachment, they want to tear it apart in spite of the value it has.

It makes no sense.