# I Ching

The IRC folks at tilde.town have a bot that does tarot readings in the #town channel. I dig it, even if it's just pulling a random card. I have a special love of divination and wanted to contribute something.

The yarrow stalk method of the I Ching is a favorite of mine. I have my sticks over there in a little bag, in fact. There's something wonderfully meditative about the practice, and the fact that this method takes me about 30 minutes to complete means I don't waste my efforts with it frivolously.

In the past I've written about the method on gopher [1] but wanted to go further this time and actually build an app for it. I chose to do it as a shell script (which is hopefully portable).

=> gopher://gopher.black/1/explorations/iching I Ching yarrow stalk method on gopher.black
=> https://github.com/jamestomasino/iching I Ching shell script on github

I knew I wanted to make it accessible to IRC bots which meant I need some method to run it without interaction. After adding that feature I realized I could also make it work on Gemini. This is my first Gemini cgi, and it was quite easy to do thanks to Jetforce.

=> /cgi-bin/iching I Ching on tilde.black

I've written more thoughts on divination and its applicability to digital tools in a note at the end of that page. Enjoy!


Originally Published 2020-07-16 at:
gemini://tilde.team/~tomasino/journal/20200716-i-ching.gmi

If you have questions or thoughts to add please send me a link to your response.
=> /~tomasino/about.txt Contact Information
