Minimal Oracle

This started as a Perl script (and snark) when I was working for a company that did online Tarot readings. It consists of several oracles of varying degrees of seriousness, from the obligatory coin flip and Magic 8-Ball, to Art Wells' lyrical I-Ching adaptation, Newwings, (and a couple of Tarot-like remixes of it), four variations on Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies deck, the Viking Runes, and bibliomancy using the Norse Hávamál.

It's a pretty straight port of the original commandline Perl program and it shows. This might or might not change, depending on how copious my seldom copious spare time becomes. If you'd like to alter or enhance it, the code is embedded in this page and is shared under the BSD license.

New feature: Rather than depend on the vagaries of your browser's random number generator, you can move your mouse pointer around over the square at the right for a while before clicking on an oracle link. This utilizes the technique described in the Technē article on random access stable PRNGs to derive randomness—information-theoretic entropy—from your mouse motions. If you leave the new randomizer square alone, the original default randomizer is used.

Select an oracle:

Your reading: