I still plan to write more on my series about early videogame lesbians, but today I want to highlight this enemy character from the Castlevania series who, like many early trans characters, started her existence as an unfunny bigoted joke, but then transcended the meanness by the sheer presence and glory of her gender. I'm talking about the Icy Chick, the Evil Ghost who Transitioned, the Snow Fairy herself: Frozen Half, from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
The description reads: “An evil New Half spirit who wields power over ice. A minion of Galamoth.”
It's finally happened. Enough time has passed, enough other scenes have come and gone in the meantime, that I can be legitimately nostalgic for vaporwave. Not like,
ａｅｓｕｔｈｅｔｉｋｋｕ ironic nostalgic, but just baseline regular nostalgic for the (sunset) golden days of the nostalgia-est of nostalgia genres.
Todo ser aprenderá / a ter as estrelas como guia…
Though I'm sure somewhere out there there's young folk born too late to have caught anything to do with vaporwave, and who now feel nostalgia for the early vapor scene while having never been there. This thought makes me happy.
Feel free to spray-paint these on cop cars, embroider them on the backs of tokkōtai uniforms of your all-girl biker gangs, etc.
Notice that reading 法 as “fa” and interpreting it as “fascism” is non-standard, and a borrowing from Mandarin. I think it works well with the meaning of 法 too, but if you're using those slogans you'll need furigana. If you want clarity you might want to just replace the kanji by katakana ファ (反ファ = hanfa is already established, or maybe gloss the entire 反法 as アンティファ). I'm not very satisfied with any of these solutions, but most of the others I think work well. 也 in a yojijukugo is nonstandard, as is the go'on reading “e”, but I couldn't resist the direct parallel with Kurmancî.
反法警報 hanfa-keihō, Alerta antifascista
全警凶人 zenkei-kyōjin, All cops are bastards
全警標的 zenkei-mokuhyō, All cops are targets
恋同行罪 rendō-kōzai, Be gay do crimes
抗戦命也 kōsen-mei'e, Berwxedan jîyan e
夜友暗抱 yayū-anpō, Die Nacht ist unsere Freundin und ihre Finsternis umarmt uns
民合無敵 mingō-muteki, El pueblo unido jamás será vencido
反法雁行 hanfa-gankō, Faşizme karşı omuz omuza
放火全獄 hōka-zengoku, Feuer und Flamme allen Knästen
戦女生女 senjo-seijo, Frauen, die kämpfen, sind Frauen, die leben
妄動必覚 bōdō-hikkaku, Fuck around and find out
女命自由 jo-mei-jiyū, Jin jiyan azadî
無境無国 mukyō-mukoku, No border no nation
不義不平 fugi-fuhei, No justice, no peace
突破絶不 toppa-zeppu, No pasarán
無君無臣 mukun-mushin, No servants no masters (*actually present in Chinese anarchist Bào Jìngyán in the 3rd century!)
単答革命 tantō-kakumei, One solution: revolution
衆全我無 shūzen-gamu, Para todos todo, para nosotros nada
和舎争堂 washa-sōdō, Peace to the huts, war to the palaces
To circumvent the various restrictions of musescore dot com (e.g. transpose without logging in), you can also download the Musescore file here . (If I forget to update this version in the future, ping me on mirrorwitch (at) transmom (dot) love .)
Lately I've been looking into African rhythm (Western or generally Sub-Saharan). Because after understanding the basics of how melody and harmony works, I want to get a better feeling for rhythm.
Japanese flute music is very comfy for me because the rhythm is free and intuitive and nature-sound-like, but at some point I want to be able to do things like playing modern music at a nice pace or just accompanying wadaiko in festivals. and my problem with that is that I hate metronomes. Really fucking hate metronomes. Can't stand the damn things. (I wonder how European Common Practice musicians trained rhythm before the invention of metronomes.)
It's not the clacking that bothers me, it's the deadness of fitting into a grid. This schoolroom feeling of it, this dictatorshipness (but I repeat myself). Even though rhythm is fitting into a grid? But it feels so different when it's someone playing the drums. I considered using the library's Volca Bass, or borrowing their Stylophone Drums, to have something more interesting than a clack, but in the end a drum backing track on youtube is much better for me, though still I feel like I'm missing something. I'm not sure I can explain it well.
When I tried once to explain briefly to a friend what it was all about, I found that with the exercise of severe economy I took 41 pages and 10,000 words.
(J.R.R. Tolkien) #relatabel#justlikeme#frfr
I think most people haven't browsed the History of Middle-Earth and thus don't know how much Tolkien struggled with executive dysfunction and how much of his work is unfinished. HoME is 12 volumes of unfinished, unedited, often contradictory material; it's not a “history of Middle-Earth” as in, a narrative of events in the realms of Arda, it's a “history of Middle-Earth” as in, I, Christopher Tolkien, will show the boxes and boxes of Middle-Earth manuscripts that my father started and never completed; it's a history of the work we call Middle-Earth, a history of revisions. And that's still not all of it! Most of the stuff that interests me was to be slowly published even later, in the periodicals Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon, and occasionally in books like The Nature of Middle-Earth (2021). It's still not all published, by the way. Christopher and the Tolkien Estate editors involved with this describe it more to the note of “scratched the surface” or “tip of the iceberg”. Yes, this is the most famous name in fantasy and most of his material remains unpublished.
I don't really understand how to learn music. Or arts in general. Because I am a linguistics researcher I know how people learn languages (you don't really “learn” them), and I understand how people learn things like math or sociology, which is completely unlike language. But music is a bit like language and a bit like math. I'm having a lot of fun with musicology (the equivalent of linguistics, as opposed to language learning); but just like studying grammar is an entirely different skill and wholly unrelated to the process of becoming fluent in a language, or just like researching sports science is a different skillset and unrelated to becoming good at playing a sport, so also analysing the structure of music is an entirely different skill than actually being able to produce it. I understand how the former is done, but the latter? It baffles me.
Shinobue books will often have titles like “The joy of shinobue” or “Gentle shinobue for everybody”. Then there's the reverse psychology way of appealing to customers: Toki Tatara's Oni-ren (“demon training”) drills carry the implication that if you survive these intense exercises from hell, your skill level will go up. But does either rationale necessarily follow?
The shinobue is a very simple instrument used for folk music, not meant as something transcendent or intellectual like the shakuhachi or ryūteki. The other day I got the 5€ booklet Yamada Kaishi and Fukuhara Kan, distributed by Suzuki along with plastic instruments, often intended for children.
I was surprised to find, already at this level, a discussion of how the cross-fingering known as 0—nominally the same as a flattened 7—is actually not exactly the same pitch as 7♭, and that the difference should be used mindfully for emotional expression. Moreover the nuances are specifically noted as relevant for what I've been obsessing with for over a year, which is to play a good rendition of Sakura, Sakura in particular.
The description reads: “An evil New Half spirit who wields power over ice. A minion of Galamoth.”
An all-female bōsōzoku gang posing in matching outfits for a “Teens Road” reportage, 1995.
Shinobue books will often have titles like “The joy of shinobue” or “Gentle shinobue for everybody”. Then there's the reverse psychology way of appealing to customers: