tri a pul . cz tarot script

The script itself is available to you through this gopher
hole. This is where you can get it yourself.

If you are any bit like myself, you must have come across the
romantic naivety of the occult.  Conversing with spirits,
offering your bodies to unearthly deities or summoning daemons
are a few examples of occult practice usually propelled into
the mainstream through books and movies, leaving one wondering
what the truth behind it all is or whether there is one at
all. I have not personally talked to any ghosts, even though I
have tried once during a summer camp - the only result was me
being accused of defacing an old tombstone. I have much
experience with bodily possession when it comes to various
types of flus and viruses, none of which I would title
unearthly however. And the only way I ever talked to daemons
was through rcctl(8).

And even though the surrealist notion is to purvey the unknown
and undebunkable to fish for untapped secrets of the world we
reside, I will not busy you with the aforementioned examples
in this article. We won't be questioning the probability of
finding banknotes on the sidewalk or weighing the odds of a
functioning prayer either. We will instead look into the
lenghtily guarded secrets of fortune telling - something I
have been warned about by the Czech Association of Magic Card
Readers not to do, since it threatens the proprietary methods
of maintaining livelihoods of gypsies all over the world. This
is something I have chosen to ignore, possibly risking several
curses addressed to my name. I have been losing hair by the
handfuls lately, so it shouldn't be too hard to get one for
ill reasons, if cinematic ways of witchcraft have taught me
anything.

While I am not one to rush into replacing our finest fortune
tellers by automatisation, fortune(6) has done so for many
decades already. We will instead concentrate solely on the art
of card reading.  More specifically card shuffling. Should any
of you find the following script useful in a way which will
stop you from visiting your local card reader and replace them
by a shell script, at least send them a gift basket and tell
them I'm sorry. But as will become obvious, unless you know
what each magical card means, you still might want to give the
gypsy a call to ask about the cards your UNIX-like machine
gave you. On second thought, maybe don't and look up the card
meanings online.

The script shuffles a deck of the following cards and outputs top
three cards of the deck. (I heard it's
back luck not to shuffle the deck after reading.)


#!/bin/sh
# Cards taken from an Austrian mid 19th century gypsy deck. Translated into English.
# ~prahou 

CARDS() {
cat << EOF_
Widdow
Mistress
Road
House
Message
Widdower
Falsehood
Jealousy
Thief
Merriment
Child
Soldier
Enemy
Lover
Constancy
Thoughts
Love
Marriage
Death
Money
Luck
Gift
Grief
Loyalty
Misfortune
Illness
Priest
Hope
Annoyance
Taxman
Desire
Unexpected joy
EOF_
}

VESTBA() {
cat << EOF_
Looks serious.
Scary stuff, innit?
Much luck awaits someone. Is it you though? I don't know, I'm a computer.
Back for more?
Blunders here and there.
No, I don't know what it means.
*sounds of cartomancy*
Dropped one. 
I wouldn't drink anti-freeze, is all I'll say.
Lenny who?
You'll be back.
EOF_
}

VESTBA | sort -R | head -n1

echo

CARDS | sort -R | head -n3

echo
exit 0