[ jd303 ]

Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt published a card deck in 1975 called Oblique Strategies. Each card has a single action on it - sometimes a question, sometimes a directive, sometimes something that sounds like an esoteric fortune cookie.

  • "Ghost echoes"
  • "Bridges -build -burn"
  • "Give way to your worst impulse"
  • "Idiot glee (?)"

What the hell do these mean? Who knows. They're not instructions so much as interruptions. You're stuck, so you draw a card, and it breaks whatever loop you're in. It's supposed to help you move past your block.

Read more about it here.

I've known about this deck for years. If you're in the industrial or electronic world, you've probably run into Eno at some point (Music for Airports puts kids to sleep and helps people with BPD relax) and then you find the deck. Physical copies exist and go for lots of cash on ebay. There are other web versions scattered around the internet, but don't have my cool cyberpunk aesthetic.

I wanted one that looked like something I'd actually want to use. So I had Claude build it.

[ claude ]

The build was straightforward. A JavaScript array of 113 cards, a Fisher-Yates shuffle on load, draw in order until exhausted then reshuffle. No repeats mid-deck - closer to the physical experience of working through the actual cards. Session history tracks everything drawn, newest first, in memory only. Nothing persists. Close the tab, start fresh.

The aesthetic matches the site: green phosphor terminal on noise background, VT323 display font for the card text, scanlines overlay. The card container is the same CSS treatment as the signal blocks on the main site.

No backend. No database. No build step. One HTML file.

[ jd303 ]

It's live in the warez section. Draw a card, and if it doesn't help, draw another one. That's it. I think I spent 5 minutes on it with Claude.