Updated?
Does this update include the newest cards? I know the blurb says it’s been updated. The fediverse bot seems to have a lot more cards I’ve never seen in the iOS app. Still the best logjam breaker that seems to be tilted towards musicians. Dunno if the knockoffs can say the same.
The gentlest push
The creative process is more fragile than people admit. Not dramatically fragile — not the romantic collapse of the tortured artist. Quietly fragile. A line that won't extend itself. A chord that knows something is wrong but won't say what. The white resistance of a canvas that has decided, for now, not to cooperate.
I've tried many things in those moments. Walking away. Forcing through. Asking someone. None of it feels quite right, because the problem isn't information — it's perspective. You're too close. You've been staring at the thing so long it has stopped being a thing and become a wall.
Oblique Strategies understands this at a level most creative tools don't bother with. It doesn't optimize you. It doesn't gamify your output or track your streaks or tell you that you've been 43% more productive this week. It gives you a card. One sentence. Sometimes cryptic, sometimes uncomfortably obvious, occasionally so precise it feels like someone has been watching over your shoulder for the past two hours.
Eno and Schmidt built the original deck in 1975 for exactly these moments — for the studio, for the deadlock, for the 3am session where everything sounds like furniture. The iOS version carries that spirit without diluting it. No noise. No dashboard. Just the card, and the silence around it.
You don't have to do what it says. That's almost the point. The value isn't in the instruction — it's in the sudden awareness that there was another direction all along. The push is so gentle you barely feel it. But the room shifts.
Worth every cent for anyone who makes things and occasionally, inevitably, gets stuck.
I've tried many things in those moments. Walking away. Forcing through. Asking someone. None of it feels quite right, because the problem isn't information — it's perspective. You're too close. You've been staring at the thing so long it has stopped being a thing and become a wall.
Oblique Strategies understands this at a level most creative tools don't bother with. It doesn't optimize you. It doesn't gamify your output or track your streaks or tell you that you've been 43% more productive this week. It gives you a card. One sentence. Sometimes cryptic, sometimes uncomfortably obvious, occasionally so precise it feels like someone has been watching over your shoulder for the past two hours.
Eno and Schmidt built the original deck in 1975 for exactly these moments — for the studio, for the deadlock, for the 3am session where everything sounds like furniture. The iOS version carries that spirit without diluting it. No noise. No dashboard. Just the card, and the silence around it.
You don't have to do what it says. That's almost the point. The value isn't in the instruction — it's in the sudden awareness that there was another direction all along. The push is so gentle you barely feel it. But the room shifts.
Worth every cent for anyone who makes things and occasionally, inevitably, gets stuck.
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Great to kickstart a stuck mind
Any card you see will cause you to have a new perspective on whatever difficulty you perceive.
OS
It's Oblique Strategies for the iPhone
Thanks, DB and BE
Essential.
