Hello. I'm Elanor. There is nothing but nonsense here; mostly trees, with occasional shitposts about politics, walruses, video games, or my friend Phil. Eventually I will actually publish that book about queer Welsh werewolves I keep teasing you with (sorry) (I also delete anon hate without reading so tbh you might as well send it to your therapist instead xoxo)
I am obsessed with fictional guys being really weird about each other. Hard at work in the plausible deniability mines. You know those pairings who would jerk each other off before they'd kiss
I think my favorite part of this post so far is the beatles fans in my notes 1. Acting like this is common knowledge & 2. Saying they got far weirder without elaborating. Alright
I wish to god I was joking or exaggerating but this is just factual beatles lore I'm so sorry for reblogging this for the 80th time op but the people need to know
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Indigenous lands are crucial for climate mitigation and resilience. Research shows their health is a direct result of Indigenous stewardship
While this isn't news to anyone who works in this space, it is useful to have this water-is-wet research to affirm that Indigenous knowledge and land management are extremely effective at storing carbon and protecting biodiversity.
I want to draw special attention to this part of the article:
New research shows that approach overlooks the key role that Indigenous knowledge and culture can play in mitigating climate change. It also reveals a dangerous misconception that has taken hold in global climate discussions: the idea that Indigenous lands are so rich because they are remote or sparsely populated.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The health of Indigenous lands and their ability to store vast quantities of carbon stem from the stewardship of the people who inhabit them.
I'm actually bringing this back around to say another important thing.
I get a fair number of asks and comments on my posts expressing sentiments like "human beings are a plague on this Earth", "humans ruin everything, we deserve to be wiped out", "humanity is inherently selfish, evil, and irredeemable".
I don't think the folks saying these things have bad intentions, I know their words come from a place of very understandable pain, fear, and anger. But to act as though humanity's impact on nature is inherently damaging and extractive is to erase thousands of years of Indigenous stewardship of nature. These ecosystems are thriving because there are humans living there.
This is your regular reminder that you don't need to feel guilty for being a human. You are part of nature--viewing humans as inherently separate from the rest of nature is actually part of the problem. You will be so much better served redirecting that guilt into supporting the humans who are helping nature or resisting those who are hurting it.
I think the reader's response to this post is probably going to either be "That's incredibly minor" or "Holy shit YES I'M ALSO PROUD", depending on people's personal experiences with academia, but:
Today I am incredibly proud of one of my students.
In the interests of disguising identities, let's call them Ceri. Ceri is one of my third year undergrads (meaning their final year, for anyone unfamiliar with UK uni systems.) They transferred to us last year, and within two weeks I was giving them the contact info to get to Student Services and get themself screened for ADHD; they have some mental health struggles, but I clocked pretty quickly that they STRUGGLE with procrastination, and punctuality, and attending 9am lectures in particular. Naturally, as is the way of my people, it took them a further four months to remember to go to the screening. Lol. Lmao. Rofl, in fact.
But, they did it eventually! Their screening lit up like a Christmas tree at the ADHD section, and they got a free laptop and optional one week extensions and a study support worker named Claire. This has helped tremendously, and although mental health + until-then-unsupported ADHD meant their academic profile had slid sideways somewhat, with the new tools available and a couple of resits they passed the year and hit this year running.
Until, that is, the last fortnight.
Now, I take them for a Habitat Management module that has two assessments: an academic poster presentation before Christmas, and a site-specific management plan in May. Naturally this means we are at that happy point in the year for the poster presentations. I give out the briefs at the start of the year, so they've had them since October; I've also been periodically checking in with them all for weeks, to make sure they don't have any major burning questions. The poster presentation was to pick a species reintroduction project, pull the habitat feasibility study out of it, and then critique that study; Ceri chose to look at the hen harrier reintroductions proposed for the southern UK. All good.
Which brings us nicely to today! Ceri's presentation is scheduled for 2.30. At 11am-1pm, I am lecturing the first years on Biodiversity, while Ceri is learning about environmental impact assessment with a colleague I shall call Aeron. This means we are separately occupied during those same hours.
Nevertheless, Aeron messages me at about 12.
"I think Ceri needs to see you after your lecture," he writes. "They're panicking, I genuinely think they might cry. I'm worried. Are you free at 1?"
I say I am. At 1, I get lunch and sit in the common area; Ceri comes to see me. To my personal shame, imagine all of the following takes place while I stuff my face with potato.
Now: this part is going to be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has ever tried higher education with ADHD, especially unmedicated. It certainly was for me. All I can say is, I never had the courage to take the step here that Ceri did.
"I have to confess," they said quietly, and Aeron was right, they were fighting back tears. "My mental health has been so, so bad for the last fortnight. I've left it way, way too late. I don't have anything to present."
"Nothing at all?" I asked.
"I've been researching," they said helplessly. "I found loads on the decline of the hen harrier. But it wasn't until last night that I finally found a habitat feasibility study to critique. Generally... I've been burying my head about it, and it just got later and later. I thought I should come in for Aeron's lecture, and I should at least tell you."
This part is a minor thing, right? But honestly, I remember being in the grip of that particular shame spiral. I never did manage to tell my lecturers to their faces. I just avoided. I honestly can't imagine having the courage it took them to come in and tell me this, rather than just staying home and avoiding me.
"I think..." they said hesitantly, "I know I can submit up to a week late, for a capped mark. I think I need to do that, and apply for extenuating circumstances. But then I'll have both Aeron's assignment and yours due at the same time."
Which meant they would crumble under the pressure and likely struggle to pass both; so me, being as noble and heroic as I unarguably am, stopped eating potato and said, "Let's make that plan B."
(It was good potato. I am a hero.)
So, we made plan A: I moved their timeslot to 4.30, giving them three and a half hours. The shining piece of luck in this whole thing was that this was the crunch time assignment - if it had been Aeron's, they'd have had to try and write a 3000 report in that time. But for me, all they had to write was an academic poster, and those things are light on words by design. We found them a Canva template, and then we quickly sketched out a recommended structure based on the brief: if it's habitat feasibility, look at food availability, nesting site availability, and mortality risks in the target release site. Bullet point each. Bullet point how well the study assessed each. Write a quick intro and conclusion. Take notes as you go, and present the poster itself at 4.30.
"You think I should try?" they asked doubtfully, looking like I'd just asked them to go mano-a-mano with a feral badger.
"If you run out of time, so be it," I said. "But your brain is trying to protect you from a non-existent tiger. That's why you've procrastinated - it's been horrible, and you've been shame spiralling, and your brain is trying to shield you from the negative experience; but it's the wrong type of help for this situation! So while you're sitting there working on it, hating life, every time your brain goes 'This is hopeless, I can't do it', you think right back 'Yes I can, it just sucks.' And you carry on. Good?"
"Good," they said. "I'm going to mainline coffee and hole up in the library. Enjoy your potato."
And then, of course, I had to go and watch the other students' presentations, so that was the end of me being any help at all. I spent all afternoon wondering if they were going to manage it, or if I would be getting a message at 4.25 telling me they'd failed, and would have to submit late and hope for an EC.
And Tumblrs
Tumblrs
Let me FUCKING tell you
They turned up at 4.15, fifteen minutes early, wearing a mask of grim, harrowed determination and fuelled by spite and coffee, and they pulled up that poster and started presenting and yes, okay, I'll admit their actual delivery was dramatically unpolished and yes, they forgot to include the taxanomic name for the hen harrier on the poster and yes, fine, I admit that there were more than a few awkward moments where they lost their place in their hastily scribbled notebook but LET ME FUCKING TELL YOU -
They smashed it. It was well-critiqued, it had a map, it had full citations, it had a section on the hen harrier's specific ecology and role in the ecosystem, it had notes on their specific conservation measures. They described case studies they'd read about elsewhere. They answered the questions we threw at them with competence and depth. There was analysis. All that background research they'd done came right to the fore. They were even within the time limit by 15 seconds.
You would never have known they'd produced it in three hours, from a quivering and terrified mess fighting the bodily urge to dehydrate via tear ducts. After they left, the second marker and I looked at each other and went "So that was a 2:1, right?"
I caught up with Aeron downstairs and he was beaming. Apparently Ceri had seen him on their way out, and had gone over to talk to him. Aeron said the difference between the Ceri of this morning and the Ceri of then was like two different people; in four hours, they'd gone from their voice literally breaking as they admitted the problem, ashamed and broken, to being relaxed and happy and smiling.
"I reckon I've passed," they apparently told Aeron, pleased. "Maybe even a 2:2. There's things I wish I'd had the time to do better, but I'll be happy if I passed."
They won't know until late January what they got, because we're not allowed to release marks until 20 term days after hand-in, and the Christmas holidays are about to hit. But I'm really hoping I can be there when they're released.
But mostly, I'm just... insanely proud of them. I cannot tell you how happy I am. And I know, I know, obviously this is not a practice I would want to see them do regularly, or indeed ever again, and it only worked because they were fucking lucky with the assignment format, but like... when life is just punching you in the face, and you hit a breaking point... isn't it nice? That just this once, you pull off a miracle, and it's fixed? The disaster you thought was about to ruin you is gone? To get that relief?
Industry says government’s failure to address cooling demands means AI growth plans are ‘fatally flawed’
“There appears to be an assumption that the country will always have enough water for its economic needs,” the briefing said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
In May, a House of Lords report said England faced a 5bn litre a day shortfall for public water supplies by 2055.
Water UK said datacentres were already being built in water-stressed areas, with more than three-quarters located in the south and east of England. Millions of people in these regions have been placed under a hosepipe ban by water companies after prolonged extreme heat and lack of rainfall.
[...]
The government has designated datacentres as critical national infrastructure, on the basis that their loss or compromise could result in “major detrimental impact on the availability, integrity or delivery of essential services” and “significant impact on national security, national defence, or the functioning of the state”.
Oliver Hayes, head of big tech and campaigns at the campaign group Global Action Plan, said it was not clear why datacentres had been given this status, but that water companies may be powerless to restrict their water use as a result. This could risk datacentres being prioritised over households at times of peak water demand.
“I think it is highly likely that we’re going to end up seeing datacentres that are actually running chatbots, or enabling people to do benign and very wasteful, pointless things, protected and given favourable treatment when it comes to resources,” Hayes said.
I would love to hear the mini essay about the Beatles success through the lens of music theory if you’re up to it sometime! Your rec post was delightful and I’d happily read more of your Beatles thoughts :)
YOU WILL REGRET THIIIIIS
OKAY SO
Cultural Background
I mentioned this briefly in that other post, but a lot of Western musical genres birthed around the early 20th century have this in common: cover songs. It would be decades before every household had a record player. Gramophones were expensive. Most people heard music in dance halls, or maybe on the wireless, but the wireless mostly played classical music. So, live bands in music halls had to be able to play anything the audience requested, because that was how people got to listen to their fave songs
(Quick side note - jazz as a genre can still do this to this day. Put two jazz musicians who've never met into a room and ask them to play a jazz song that doesn't belong to either, and 99% of the time they can. It's still a popular convention to create jazz covers of contemporary hits. A very cool element of the genre.)
As baby teenagers, the Beatles formed (as the Quarrymen, among other names) in the late 1950s, and they trained in music halls in Hamburg, Germany in 1960, at a point George Harrison was still too young to legally be there (he lied about his age to immigration). They learned their trade by playing 7 to 8 hour sets in which they therefore had to play EVERYTHING. R&B, jazz, ballads, rock and roll, music hall, vaudeville, pop, musical theatre... all of it. This meant two things:
They learned an absolute kaleidoscope of genres that they later drew from when composing their own music; none of them had any formal training, it all came from this time; and
This was where they first learned that they could alter cover versions to create their own sound (e.g. changing the chords, adding solos, etc), which let them work out how to be influenced by, rather than copying or taking.
And this sets the stage for the defining trait of the Beatles as musicians: they were experimental, and intuitive, and fascinated by other musical traditions and philosophies, and they loved to combine these threads into creating incredibly varied songs that were still theirs. You can see this in a lot of their later work: Your Mother Should Know is a pure music hall song, and Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite is vaudeville with Victorian funfair organs and circus ring drums; and yet, both sound like Beatles songs, still.
BUT ALSO let's take a quick look at the absolute bullshit classical music was pulling during this time
A Brief Musical Interlude
So lets talk keys and chords.
A defining trait of Western musical construction is the complexity and versatility of its harmonies - keys and chords. Chords are basically colour palettes of notes that go together well without clashing, which Western music likes to place beneath a melody to change the feel of the piece and to drive it along. A "discord" is literally a note that doesn't fit in the chord, like a clashing colour
But, chords like to self-group into patterns that we all instinctively recognise; when does the music sound happy? Sad? Triumphant, intense, relaxed? Western composers have been using these tricks for centuries, and that brings us nicely to the last piece that will fill in the frame of this jigsaw so we can focus on what you all REALLY came for, which is to hear me wax lyrical about Tomorrow Never Knows at the end of this post: and that piece is "classical music in the early 20th century."
Because, up until this point, most Westerners were familiar with two very broad genres: classical music, played by orchestras and on the wireless and still very much in dance halls and theatres and the like; and the relatively new "popular" music, still nascent, still ill-defined, influenced by other less recognisable (to a white audience) forms but still very simple.
And at this point, particularly in the 40s and 50s, classical composers suddenly decide that chords are BORING, guys, even BEETHOVEN AND THAT were using them AGES ago, we should REDEFINE MUSIC and start on a project to dismantle the chord system. Anything can be music, they say! Let's push the boundaries! Let's make something new!
(I can only assume this was the influence of the War.)
After a while, composers even started claiming that literally any sound could therefore be defined as music, and started scraping sandpaper together and throwing ping pong balls at piano strings and that. All very artsy, to be sure, but not exactly a pleasant listen. Anyway, audiences in their droves went "Well that's disgusting," and suddenly an ENORMOUS rift opened up between musicians and music lovers.
And what was waiting in the wings to gather these lost listeners unto its burgeoning and chord-loving bosom?
Pop music.
Enter: the Beatles. On Chords.
Now pop was aggressively on the other side of this debate. Pop LOVED chords. Pop, in particular, loved about four chords, and by god was it faithful to those four chords. This, in fact, is still largely true even to this day, and this is a gift to those of us who like mash-ups.
And the Beatles were initially no exception!
They crashed into public consciousness in 1963 with the album Please Please Me. Let's take a look at the best song on the album, I Saw Her Standing There.
(Shout out to the artist who colourised that video, damn good job).
This song is such a good example of the trendiest of trendy music at that time. Absolute classic 1960s rock and roll banger. Catchy, perfect rock and roll beat, excellent hook. And, it contains the tidy four chords of everyone else! Nicely done, no issue. (Though, in the interests of fairness, some of the songs on Please Please Me were already showing signs of what was to come. From Me To You is another very solid rock and roll song, but its middle section was already showing more interesting chording than most contempories).
It is not, however, a particularly revolutionary song. But, as mentioned, the Beatles were incredibly experimental musicians. I Saw Her Standing There, with its catchy four chords and rock and roll beat and concept, was created in 1963.
Four years later, in 1967, they released I Am the Walrus. So! Let's play this as a game!
How many chords do you think I Am the Walrus contains?
If you want to play on hard mode, guess now; if you want a hint, here's the song:
...
...
...
Have you guessed?
The answer is 16. The intro before John Lennon's vocals begin contain eight alone. That's four times the number of most pop songs even now, sixty years on.
And it suits the song! Those chords are not just stuffed in like a weird aural piñata. It's a typical piece of Lennon songwriting at this time, actually - the melody is quite simple, but the chording is complex as fuck to create this shifting, unstable sort of landscape for a song that was deliberately written to be confusing and weird. It's an Alice in Wonderland type of song, and while the melody is fairly solid, the chords under your feet are a mudslide, never quite letting you get your bearings. They drive the song on, and they produce the psychedelic effect that the Beatles were heavily experimenting with at this time.
And, this is very much the defining trait of later Beatles stuff; even mid-era stuff, actually. Once they got their feet under them and realised what they could do with chord complexity, they did not look back.
But! That's just Lots Of Chords. Lennon liked putting lots in. He was a big fan of the Lots of Chords approach. But there are other things you can do with chords; the more advanced settings, as it were, and this is where Paul McCartney specialised.
Chords: Advanced Settings
Modulation
So, I talked about how chords are basically pretty colour palettes of notes to choose from. But, chords themselves can also form palettes, and also have a relationship to one another.
The fun thing with chords is that they sort of self-group into patterns, and we're all very familiar with this even if we've had zero training in musical theory. I mentioned above, we can all recognise happy, sad, angry etc music. Sometimes! Sometimes you hear a chord! And you just KNOW it's kind of incomplete in the song. It inherently feels like the penultimate chord. If the song finished on it, you'd be like "What the fuck is that, where's the ending. Illegal. Resolve that right now." It's the closest non-synaesthetes come to experiencing synaesthesia I think.
So LET'S TALK MODULATION
Take a chord like F major. Its available colour palette contains seven possible notes: F, G, A, B flat, C, D and E. You can pick any number of these, and they'll sound good together, but chords in pop music are normally three notes, so here you can pick F and two others. Let's say, F, A and C. (Try this on a virtual online piano for maximum effect)
It's a nice chord! Sounds pretty.
Now, add in an E flat.
OOOOOOH! Instant unsettling weirdness, right?!?? It's wobbly! It's unfinished!! This, my friends, is modulation - the chord has been modulated! This is the chord known as F7 and it is Weird!! It feels like it's begging to have another chord come along and resolve it to make it feel like it's finished!! And that's because it is.
Next, play a B flat chord. F major as a palette shares a B flat, so they "speak" to each other. You can choose between B♭, C, D, E♭, F, G, and A; pick B♭, plus any other two.
And now play them one after the other. F7, then B♭. And relax. Crisis over. The chord is no longer wobbling. It is resolved. That is your glimpse on the world of synaesthesia. Imagine feeling like that with fucking book titles. Welcome to my world.
Anyway let's see an example of exactly these chords being used by the Beatles in the iconic Hey Jude (song starts at 55 seconds; at 1:40 is the bit we're focusing on):
We're going to examine the transition of the first verse to the chorus. On the line "Then you begin/ to make it better", on the word "better" they use F major.
They then take it to F7 just as they move into the chorus, on the last beat before the line "But any time you feel the". WOBBLY. UNCERTAIN. DO NOT LIKE.
And then it resolves to B flat on "pain".
This is a song for a young boy whose parents were divorcing so his adulterous father could marry someone else, who was struggling with the emotions of it all; McCartney was a vital influence on young Julian Lennon at that time. But that chord modulation really supports the meaning of the lyrics there. F7 is a lost child's pain; but B flat is its resolution, a soothing lullaby that everything will be alright in the end. Absolutely beautiful use of the tactic.
Now, famous composers do this all the time - think Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture, and that famous swell of the violins slamming up into their triumphant, cresting wave (in the linked video, it's at 13 minutes - listen to that 20 seconds and you'll see what I mean). It almost feels cheesy by now, actually, and that's because culturally it now sort of is - it's been heavily used in romance films at the moment of the leads finally kissing or whatever for decades, so it feels old-fashioned to us.
It's therefore rarer in pop, including in the 60s. So, the most skilled composers hide their modulations, so you don't notice them. McCartney became a master of this, and here is his best example of the work:
Penny Lane is a song about a man nostalgically going on a journey through a place he left long ago, but is still home. It's a wistful, optimistic sort of song.
Let's play again! How many modulated key changes do you think this song contains?
...
...
...
THAT'S RIGHT KIDS it's seven. SEVEN.
Every transition from verse to chorus has his voice go up - so far so normal. But in counterpoint, the key modulates down. That gives the chorus a wistful feel, rather than a relaxed, chill feel; but the key change is hidden! We do not notice! Back into each verse it then modulates back up, so the verse feels like an optimistic new day after the chorus. And then, the final chorus modulates up with the vocal instead of down, giving it that joyful, triumphant feel. And I bet for most of you the only one you noticed was that last chorus.
(It also features a baroque piccolo solo, inspired by Bach. The Beatles actually did do a lot to influence contemporary classical music into returning to using chords and that, and this is part of why/how.)
Keys vs Modes
Anyway we've put it off long enough. Let's talk about Eleanor Rigby.
I actually mentioned this briefly on that other post, but the beautiful, sinister, haunting feel of Eleanor Rigby is down to the fact that, rather than using major or minor key, it's not actually in a key at all. Instead, McCartney used a much older tradition from Western music, going all the way back to Ancient Greece, called a mode.
Modes are super old - keys were introduced around the Renaissance, but before that, we used modes. They're similar, and if you want to look into them and their technical differences more you can; but here, I'll just say that the important thing is that the 6th note in the palette is raised by a semitone.
You actually might be familiar with another famous song in the Dorian mode. The most common mode used in Anglo-Celtic folk music was the Dorian mode, and this is what gives us the song Scarborough Fair, and its haunting feel. Eleanor Rigby uses a combination of Dorian and Aeolian modes, and that's what creates its atmosphere.
But, there's another trick Eleanor Rigby uses - its final chords.
Cadences
Also known poetically as a "dying fall", a cadence is essentially how you finish and close off a song. The final two chords played to signal to the hind brain that the song is finished. As with everything else, there are commonly used methods; the most common, even today and across many genres, is the "perfect cadence", where the chord goes from fifth to first, first being the "tonic" - the root note in a chord's colour palette (e.g. the F in the F major options listed above. That's what we call the tonic). It gives a clear sense of finality to the song.
Eleanor Rigby, however, uses something that was at the time - and largely still is - unheard of in pop, classical, or pretty much any other contemporary genre. It drops from second to first. This was last popular among composers in the 14th century. The effect is that mournful, almost unfinished feeling - perfect for a song about loneliness, and a man whose life's work failed.
Other songs also get some unusual cadences. Yesterday, She's Leaving Home and And I Love Her all finish on a plagal cadence - a drop from fourth to first. You may recognise this cadence from Christian hymns - it's the cadence used to sing "amen" at the end of a hymn. It is otherwise basically absent from pop music.
(I don't think any of these were the result, btw, of McCartney going "today I am going to write a song in the Dorian mode with a plagal cadence to end." As I say: he's an intuitive musician, and he drew from a LOT of influences. Apparently that included hymns.)
India and the Culture Shift
So, the band, like most young people in the 60s, had dabbled a lot with drugs - LSD in particular. I'll come back to that at the end, but the long and short of it is: Lennon and Harrison were big into the stuff and had a hardcore psychedelia phase, Ringo had a go, but McCartney was very against it. It was one point of tension among many, the others being ego, child abandonment, and Yoko Ono getting cameos.
But a big driver of it was that they were, ultimately, four kids when they were suddenly catapulted into a kind of mega-stardom that the world had never seen before. None of them handled it well, if we're all being very honest with ourselves and each other. The obvious impact was to John Lennon's relationship with his first wife and son (though, side note: he'd started mellowing and making a lot of amends in the 70s, before he was tragically murdered); but none of them exactly behaved very well.
And so, like a lot of people in that sort of situation, initially they turned to drugs (particularly in the 60s). But when it wasn't giving them the meaning they craved, they turned elsewhere, and this brings us nicely to the big contribution made by George Harrison: the replacement of LSD with Hindu spirituality and Indian music.
George's interest began in 1965, and that was when he started learning sitar from Ravi Shankar - he played it on Norwegian Wood, in fact. But in 1967, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the inventor of transcendental meditation, held a seminar in Bangor, Wales, and the Beatles, led by George, attended. It had such a profound effect on them that they went to Rishikesh to do a training course in it in 1968. When asked why, Harrison was quoted as saying "We have all the money you could ever dream of. We have all the fame you could ever wish for. But, it isn't love. It isn't health. It isn't peace inside, is it?"
(George also became a Western spokesperson for transcendental meditation, and would often appear on TV with the Maharishi to tell people about its benefits. This made a lot of white Christian English men Big Mad and they would also go on television and yell at him a lot.)
BUT THE POINT IS this was a big turning point in the Beatles music. They were all fascinated by the spiritual teachings. They started using more Indian instruments in their music - Within You Without You was inspired by classical Hindustani music, and Harrison got Indian musicians to play the rest of the instruments on it (sitar, tabla, dilruba and tambura); in fact, he was the only Beatle on the track. But, for as much as he was the main devotee, Harrison wasn't the only one.
I mentioned earlier that John Lennon's work, for a long time, was characterised by simple melodies and complex chording. The Indian influence was what changed this. During Rishikesh, he wrote a song called Child of Nature; it was never released as a Beatles song, but years later it resurfaced as the song Jealous Guy on his solo album, and you can really hear the melodic Indian influence on the tune. This is because, as is very commonly characteristic in traditional Asian music, it's pentatonic - put simply, it's the black notes on the piano.
They wrote songs like demons in that retreat, often when they should have been meditating (except George, who was very strict; even so, he wrote about six songs in that time). Most made it onto the White Album. But that fusion of Indian and Western music was ahead of its time - and, it was an early foray that helped smooth the way a little for the development and rise of bhangra in the UK in the 70s.
But all this is basically prelude to the most innovative song they ever created.
Tomorrow Never Knows
Now LISTEN. I am not here to say this is the best song of all time. Personally I do not think this is even the best Beatles song of all time. It's not even the best in its genre.
But Tomorrow Never Knows is a song for which you can make a dazzlingly strong argument that it revolutionised modern music as we know it. Take my hand, I shall explain
So: this song crops up on Revolver, in 1966, and several important elements come together for it:
For the album Rubber Soul, the Beatles had made it big enough that they could do whatever they wanted in their own studio. They could ignore the recording conventions of the day; what they wanted, went. Total creative control.
For Rubber Soul, they also started thinking of the whole album as a unit of art in its own right, rather than a collection of individual songs.
For Revolver, which followed Rubber Soul and utilised these same concepts, they took their time. Every song was recorded and re-recorded and played with, and in several cases the final version was not the one they went into the studio with. Rubber Soul took fewer than 80 hours to record. Revolver took 220.
The thing to know about Ringo Starr - he was not the world's greatest drummer. He really wasn't. Lennon once famously said Ringo wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles. But, he had one talent on the drums, at which he was absolutely unbeatable: his sense of time. Lennon also said of him that he was more accurate than a drum machine; and this was 100% true.
George Harrison had introduced them to Indian music, and the first stirrings of Hindu spirituality. He had learned sitar by this point.
Paul McCartney had started hanging out with avant-garde classical composers, who, as mentioned, were playing with some widely-considered-dogshit techniques at the time. From them, he learned the practice of tape loops - recording a single sound onto a strip of tape, cutting and gluing it into a loop, and then playing it to repeat itself
John Lennon wanted to create, in a song, an art installation - a soundscape that would replicate how it felt to have an acid trip.
And so. The stage is set.
Firstly, this was unknown territory. No one had done this soundscape idea with commercial music before. The technology was partially invented by this song. I mean that sincerely - some of the tricks used did not exist before this song. Most notably, the vocal modulation effect. These days, you'd press a button on a mixing desk; at that point, the tech didn't exist. So, they fed Lennon's vocal through the revolving speakers in a Leslie cabinet, designed for use with a Hammond organ. One of the sound engineers invented automatic double tracking for the song, to layer the vocals.
Secondly, this was therefore a project of unprecedented creation. This is the song they took the longest on, that changed the most from start to finish. And, if you're going to be experimental on this level, with three talented musicians working intuitively to channel pure invention...
Well, you're going to need an extremely accurate drummer to keep them tied together, aren't you? Someone who won't go off-piste no matter what the others do. Someone more accurate than a drum machine.
Thirdly, McCartney's tape loops, brought from the classical world, were key. They discovered that, while the classical guys would just play these as sounds in their own right (remember, this was the era of rubbing sandpaper together and declaring that it, too, was music, before dodging the tomatoes of a booing crowd), they could run these loops and layer them up to create the soundscape they wanted; something never before created. Some of the loops were so long they extended out of the control room and down the corridor. They also realised you got yet another sound playing them backwards, which Harrison made great use of by deliberately playing in such a way that it would produce the desired reversed sound.
Fourth, Harrison and Lennon - they created both the simulation of an acid trip, and the concept of spiritual enlightenment on top. With Harrison's guidance, Lennon wrote lyrics based on the teachings of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Guru Timothy Leary.
Fifth - Harrison chose to add, not chords, but a sitar drone. A drone is a single note, played as a backing to a melody - commonly used outside of Western music, such as in India. This was, I believe, the first drone recorded as used in Western music since the Middle Ages.
And the final result was this:
It's hard to overstate the impact this song had on listeners, on the industry... Nothing like it had ever been heard before. Remember the start of this post? Remember I Saw Her Standing There? Compare the two. This is an aural kaleidoscope, a soundscape effect never heard before. We can't imagine it now, because these are now techniques that have become standard in the industry. But imagine going from I Saw Her Standing There, with its catchy melody, four chords, three guitars and a drum set, to this. Where's that gif of Rapunzel remembering in Tangled. Where the camera goes in her eye and she staggers. That was the entire nation when Revolver was released, and it finished on a three minute art installation producing sounds no human ears had ever before heard.
Concluding Points
I do want to stress, mind, that most of this was not unique to the Beatles. I do think insufferable fans - in the same vein as insufferable fans in every single fandom ever - have overstated the value of the Beatles as being, like, the One True Band, and claiming they invented from whole cloth every single thing they ever did; and I hope this post made it very clear that that is simply not true. Like all human innovators, their innovations were built on previous inventions and discoveries and innovations from other art forms, including other musical genres. This is just a quick overview, really, to outline what they were specifically doing with their music to make it stand out so much; and it did, of course, have enormous influence. But that's not the same thing as "absolutely no one else was doing any of this."
They were also, like many young folks in the 60s, very happy to blur traditional societal lines in pursuit of broadening their musical horizons (and in line with the general hippie movement). They socialised and worked with a LOT of artists from a lot of different genres and even media. There are plentiful records of them doing jam sessions with artists of different genres, races, genders, nationalities, all sorts, many of whom became friends, and had an influence on the band's music (and later solo songs). This means some elements were things that were being done in genres traditionally created/dominated by artists of colour, but a lot of insufferable fans attribute these things directly to the Beatles, and that's not fair. Like every other artist ever, they built on a pre-existing foundation by those who preceded them. The band themselves, at least, acknowledged it, even if the fans won't.
But, on the whole, this was a band defined by its experimentalism, its intuitive grasp of music, and its incredibly diverse genre background that nonetheless was drawn in to create something that sounds like them. Some of it, where cohesion was disintegrating and the experimentalism went A Bit Far, sucks tremendous penis, I'm not going to lie (the White Album has my whole heart but Jesus fucking Christ, John, what the fuck were you thinking with Revolution 9). But without the incredible bombs, you don't get gut-wrenching emotional ballads like While My Guitar Gently Weeps, or the Fool on the Hill. You don't get tongue-in-cheek anti-capitalist songs like Piggies. You don't get the spiritual psychedelia of Within You Without You or Strawberry Fields Forever, or the fun children's songs like Octopus' Garden or Yellow Submarine, or the human portraits of working class struggle in Lady Madonna or Eleanor Rigby, or a host of the most covered songs of all time like Yesterday and Get Back and Come Together, or the anthem of Hey Jude.
Anyway. I highly recommend you try Piggies. Very Tumblr-friendly lyrics. Well done, George.
Final Fun Bit
And it wouldn't be worth doing a post like this without adding these:
And my favourite line from the film A Hard Day's Night:
Angry man: I fought the war for young people like you!
Ringo: Do you wish you hadn't won?
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Do you have any recommendations for dealing with critical feedback? Im just finishing the second year of my PhD and feel like I havent made any progress from the feedback I was given on my first year report (masters length for some reason). This one is meant to be paper style and I wanted to show I had tried to implement feedback from last time but it doesnt seem like I managed to at all. It makes me feel like I shouldn't have even been accepted for a PhD but I know thats just me being overdramatic. The feedback was all constructive which is useful but it just makes me feel like everything I do is worthless. Any tips for how to take constructive feedback in the vein in which its meant?
Thank you!! I love your blog, I learn a lot and it cheers me up!
I think mostly your question here is more in RSD territory, which I'm very luckily able to say I don't have; so, I'll throw that open to the floor.
However, academically speaking - when you say "it doesn't seem like I managed to at all", am I right in inferring you've submitted this one and had the exact same feedback? And that's why it looks like you haven't implemented it after all? Or are you just concerned for yourself that you haven't managed it, but you don't currently know because a lecturer hasn't looked at it yet?
If it's the first, I strongly STRONGLY recommend that you contact your supervisor/whoever graded these, and have a sit down chat. Show them where you tried to Do The Thing, and ask what they'd have wanted you to do instead. This will help your brain go OHHHH, I see now. Right now, I think a lot of the despair is stemming from the fact that you thought you'd done it, but it turns out you hadn't, and you can't see what you were supposed to do after all. But, PhDs have supervisors for a reason - make yours be useful.
If it's the second, I strongly STRONGLY recommend that you contact your supervisor/whoever graded the first one, and have a sit down chat. If you're allowed to show a draft, do so. Ask if this is what they meant when they gave the feedback. If it is, great! If it's not, work out with them what you need to do instead.
In both cases, I recommend you put your supervisor to work. If there's ever feedback that you're struggling with, for any reason, always always go for a face to face chat to explore it.
Final note - imposter syndrome is incredibly common in academia, particularly the higher levels, so no, you're not being overdramatic. This is a very normal response. But! Your brain is wrong. You absolutely have the ability to do this, you just need to pick a different tool from the toolkit to move forward past the next step. If it helps, the greatest advice I ever got was: don't ask "what did I do wrong?" Ask, "what did I learn?" It's much more constructive.
Holy shit, I wish I'd had more teachers like you. Your student killed it, because you were there to help in the exact ways she needed. Thank you for msking the world a bit better.
That's very kind of you! But, really, I didn't do much there; they did all the work, including the difficult bit of asking for help in the first place.
But I do think, though, there's a lot to be said for having struggled through the system myself, and choosing to do the things that would have helped me once. I have neurotypical colleagues and they're very well-meaning, but with ADHD symptoms in particular, they need to be reminded constantly that this is a struggling disabled student, not a feckless lazy idiot. I hope I'm at least extending the right amount of grace where it's needed.
I’ve heard of fire in Wales, are you and yours okay?
We are, thank you! The whole country is going up at the minute, everything has dried to tinder. Fortunately, nothing much in Swansea. I hope all's good where you are
Hi Elanor! I’m seeing Steffan at the Fringe today because you recommended it and your Big Dog recaps etc got me through some of the lockdowns (I’m from Melbourne, Australia, we had the longest covid lockdowns in the world, wooooo go us). I’m looking forward to the show! Are you hanging around Edinburgh for any of the run?
Ooh, enjoy! He loves talking to the audience after, don't be afraid to go and say hi if you want; he gets a kick out of it when it's my Tumblr followers, too.
If you have any interest in it, I can also recommend my friend Phil, of whom I have spoken many times on here. He's in Hoots at the Apex (same venue as Steff, so an AIR CONDITIONED ROOM, this is not a drill) at 20.35. I have other recs too if you need them!
I'll be up from the 21st until the end, so I imagine we'll miss each other. But, I'm delighted my silly observations of the fall of the Tory party was useful, lol.
Hi! Recently I've been reading a lot of (translated) Japanese fantasy light-novels for my sins, and they often fall into the pattern of "Find the nearest Adventurers Guild, sign up as a new adventurer, have the clerk explain how the guild works even though they all work the same in every fantasy universe, then go do the first quest which is Gather Herbs In Beginners Forest". As the best plantologist I know, I'd like to know your take on 1) how many newbie adventurers it'd take before all the healing herbs in the nearby Beginners Forest are gone, and 2) why don't they have herb gardens
Hahaha!!! Yeah
Alright:
This of course depends on factors such as how many adventurers, how big a forest, how resource-rich a forest, how often they forage, etc; but I think a reasonable estimate is probably A Week, all told
For the same reason prepper men don't learn fibre arts while preparing for doomsday - wild forests are more rugged and adventurous than gardening
The No-Prize:
There is a herb garden. It's extremely prolific and well-stocked and magically supplemented, and fastidiously maintained by breathtakingly well-paid gardeners in the Guild.
There are also forest managers. They rotate the sections adventurers are allowed to enter and forage; they maintain the roads leading to each entrance to be conveniently blocked off by landslide, itinerant fish markets, sleeping megafauna and a slew of alterable roadsigns and maps, to direct the newbies to the right one.
The gardeners supply the forest managers with a steady supply of new plants that can be transplanted into the resting sections and magically established, before being rotated into use for newbie adventurers to practice their skills. For bonus points, they'll also allow in low level monsters and the like, depending on the Guild's requirements.
And thus, magical ecological balance is maintained.
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I think the reader's response to this post is probably going to either be "That's incredibly minor" or "Holy shit YES I'M ALSO PROUD", depending on people's personal experiences with academia, but:
Today I am incredibly proud of one of my students.
In the interests of disguising identities, let's call them Ceri. Ceri is one of my third year undergrads (meaning their final year, for anyone unfamiliar with UK uni systems.) They transferred to us last year, and within two weeks I was giving them the contact info to get to Student Services and get themself screened for ADHD; they have some mental health struggles, but I clocked pretty quickly that they STRUGGLE with procrastination, and punctuality, and attending 9am lectures in particular. Naturally, as is the way of my people, it took them a further four months to remember to go to the screening. Lol. Lmao. Rofl, in fact.
But, they did it eventually! Their screening lit up like a Christmas tree at the ADHD section, and they got a free laptop and optional one week extensions and a study support worker named Claire. This has helped tremendously, and although mental health + until-then-unsupported ADHD meant their academic profile had slid sideways somewhat, with the new tools available and a couple of resits they passed the year and hit this year running.
Until, that is, the last fortnight.
Now, I take them for a Habitat Management module that has two assessments: an academic poster presentation before Christmas, and a site-specific management plan in May. Naturally this means we are at that happy point in the year for the poster presentations. I give out the briefs at the start of the year, so they've had them since October; I've also been periodically checking in with them all for weeks, to make sure they don't have any major burning questions. The poster presentation was to pick a species reintroduction project, pull the habitat feasibility study out of it, and then critique that study; Ceri chose to look at the hen harrier reintroductions proposed for the southern UK. All good.
Which brings us nicely to today! Ceri's presentation is scheduled for 2.30. At 11am-1pm, I am lecturing the first years on Biodiversity, while Ceri is learning about environmental impact assessment with a colleague I shall call Aeron. This means we are separately occupied during those same hours.
Nevertheless, Aeron messages me at about 12.
"I think Ceri needs to see you after your lecture," he writes. "They're panicking, I genuinely think they might cry. I'm worried. Are you free at 1?"
I say I am. At 1, I get lunch and sit in the common area; Ceri comes to see me. To my personal shame, imagine all of the following takes place while I stuff my face with potato.
Now: this part is going to be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has ever tried higher education with ADHD, especially unmedicated. It certainly was for me. All I can say is, I never had the courage to take the step here that Ceri did.
"I have to confess," they said quietly, and Aeron was right, they were fighting back tears. "My mental health has been so, so bad for the last fortnight. I've left it way, way too late. I don't have anything to present."
"Nothing at all?" I asked.
"I've been researching," they said helplessly. "I found loads on the decline of the hen harrier. But it wasn't until last night that I finally found a habitat feasibility study to critique. Generally... I've been burying my head about it, and it just got later and later. I thought I should come in for Aeron's lecture, and I should at least tell you."
This part is a minor thing, right? But honestly, I remember being in the grip of that particular shame spiral. I never did manage to tell my lecturers to their faces. I just avoided. I honestly can't imagine having the courage it took them to come in and tell me this, rather than just staying home and avoiding me.
"I think..." they said hesitantly, "I know I can submit up to a week late, for a capped mark. I think I need to do that, and apply for extenuating circumstances. But then I'll have both Aeron's assignment and yours due at the same time."
Which meant they would crumble under the pressure and likely struggle to pass both; so me, being as noble and heroic as I unarguably am, stopped eating potato and said, "Let's make that plan B."
(It was good potato. I am a hero.)
So, we made plan A: I moved their timeslot to 4.30, giving them three and a half hours. The shining piece of luck in this whole thing was that this was the crunch time assignment - if it had been Aeron's, they'd have had to try and write a 3000 report in that time. But for me, all they had to write was an academic poster, and those things are light on words by design. We found them a Canva template, and then we quickly sketched out a recommended structure based on the brief: if it's habitat feasibility, look at food availability, nesting site availability, and mortality risks in the target release site. Bullet point each. Bullet point how well the study assessed each. Write a quick intro and conclusion. Take notes as you go, and present the poster itself at 4.30.
"You think I should try?" they asked doubtfully, looking like I'd just asked them to go mano-a-mano with a feral badger.
"If you run out of time, so be it," I said. "But your brain is trying to protect you from a non-existent tiger. That's why you've procrastinated - it's been horrible, and you've been shame spiralling, and your brain is trying to shield you from the negative experience; but it's the wrong type of help for this situation! So while you're sitting there working on it, hating life, every time your brain goes 'This is hopeless, I can't do it', you think right back 'Yes I can, it just sucks.' And you carry on. Good?"
"Good," they said. "I'm going to mainline coffee and hole up in the library. Enjoy your potato."
And then, of course, I had to go and watch the other students' presentations, so that was the end of me being any help at all. I spent all afternoon wondering if they were going to manage it, or if I would be getting a message at 4.25 telling me they'd failed, and would have to submit late and hope for an EC.
And Tumblrs
Tumblrs
Let me FUCKING tell you
They turned up at 4.15, fifteen minutes early, wearing a mask of grim, harrowed determination and fuelled by spite and coffee, and they pulled up that poster and started presenting and yes, okay, I'll admit their actual delivery was dramatically unpolished and yes, they forgot to include the taxanomic name for the hen harrier on the poster and yes, fine, I admit that there were more than a few awkward moments where they lost their place in their hastily scribbled notebook but LET ME FUCKING TELL YOU -
They smashed it. It was well-critiqued, it had a map, it had full citations, it had a section on the hen harrier's specific ecology and role in the ecosystem, it had notes on their specific conservation measures. They described case studies they'd read about elsewhere. They answered the questions we threw at them with competence and depth. There was analysis. All that background research they'd done came right to the fore. They were even within the time limit by 15 seconds.
You would never have known they'd produced it in three hours, from a quivering and terrified mess fighting the bodily urge to dehydrate via tear ducts. After they left, the second marker and I looked at each other and went "So that was a 2:1, right?"
I caught up with Aeron downstairs and he was beaming. Apparently Ceri had seen him on their way out, and had gone over to talk to him. Aeron said the difference between the Ceri of this morning and the Ceri of then was like two different people; in four hours, they'd gone from their voice literally breaking as they admitted the problem, ashamed and broken, to being relaxed and happy and smiling.
"I reckon I've passed," they apparently told Aeron, pleased. "Maybe even a 2:2. There's things I wish I'd had the time to do better, but I'll be happy if I passed."
They won't know until late January what they got, because we're not allowed to release marks until 20 term days after hand-in, and the Christmas holidays are about to hit. But I'm really hoping I can be there when they're released.
But mostly, I'm just... insanely proud of them. I cannot tell you how happy I am. And I know, I know, obviously this is not a practice I would want to see them do regularly, or indeed ever again, and it only worked because they were fucking lucky with the assignment format, but like... when life is just punching you in the face, and you hit a breaking point... isn't it nice? That just this once, you pull off a miracle, and it's fixed? The disaster you thought was about to ruin you is gone? To get that relief?
I think the reader's response to this post is probably going to either be "That's incredibly minor" or "Holy shit YES I'M ALSO PROUD", depending on people's personal experiences with academia, but:
Today I am incredibly proud of one of my students.
In the interests of disguising identities, let's call them Ceri. Ceri is one of my third year undergrads (meaning their final year, for anyone unfamiliar with UK uni systems.) They transferred to us last year, and within two weeks I was giving them the contact info to get to Student Services and get themself screened for ADHD; they have some mental health struggles, but I clocked pretty quickly that they STRUGGLE with procrastination, and punctuality, and attending 9am lectures in particular. Naturally, as is the way of my people, it took them a further four months to remember to go to the screening. Lol. Lmao. Rofl, in fact.
But, they did it eventually! Their screening lit up like a Christmas tree at the ADHD section, and they got a free laptop and optional one week extensions and a study support worker named Claire. This has helped tremendously, and although mental health + until-then-unsupported ADHD meant their academic profile had slid sideways somewhat, with the new tools available and a couple of resits they passed the year and hit this year running.
Until, that is, the last fortnight.
Now, I take them for a Habitat Management module that has two assessments: an academic poster presentation before Christmas, and a site-specific management plan in May. Naturally this means we are at that happy point in the year for the poster presentations. I give out the briefs at the start of the year, so they've had them since October; I've also been periodically checking in with them all for weeks, to make sure they don't have any major burning questions. The poster presentation was to pick a species reintroduction project, pull the habitat feasibility study out of it, and then critique that study; Ceri chose to look at the hen harrier reintroductions proposed for the southern UK. All good.
Which brings us nicely to today! Ceri's presentation is scheduled for 2.30. At 11am-1pm, I am lecturing the first years on Biodiversity, while Ceri is learning about environmental impact assessment with a colleague I shall call Aeron. This means we are separately occupied during those same hours.
Nevertheless, Aeron messages me at about 12.
"I think Ceri needs to see you after your lecture," he writes. "They're panicking, I genuinely think they might cry. I'm worried. Are you free at 1?"
I say I am. At 1, I get lunch and sit in the common area; Ceri comes to see me. To my personal shame, imagine all of the following takes place while I stuff my face with potato.
Now: this part is going to be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has ever tried higher education with ADHD, especially unmedicated. It certainly was for me. All I can say is, I never had the courage to take the step here that Ceri did.
"I have to confess," they said quietly, and Aeron was right, they were fighting back tears. "My mental health has been so, so bad for the last fortnight. I've left it way, way too late. I don't have anything to present."
"Nothing at all?" I asked.
"I've been researching," they said helplessly. "I found loads on the decline of the hen harrier. But it wasn't until last night that I finally found a habitat feasibility study to critique. Generally... I've been burying my head about it, and it just got later and later. I thought I should come in for Aeron's lecture, and I should at least tell you."
This part is a minor thing, right? But honestly, I remember being in the grip of that particular shame spiral. I never did manage to tell my lecturers to their faces. I just avoided. I honestly can't imagine having the courage it took them to come in and tell me this, rather than just staying home and avoiding me.
"I think..." they said hesitantly, "I know I can submit up to a week late, for a capped mark. I think I need to do that, and apply for extenuating circumstances. But then I'll have both Aeron's assignment and yours due at the same time."
Which meant they would crumble under the pressure and likely struggle to pass both; so me, being as noble and heroic as I unarguably am, stopped eating potato and said, "Let's make that plan B."
(It was good potato. I am a hero.)
So, we made plan A: I moved their timeslot to 4.30, giving them three and a half hours. The shining piece of luck in this whole thing was that this was the crunch time assignment - if it had been Aeron's, they'd have had to try and write a 3000 report in that time. But for me, all they had to write was an academic poster, and those things are light on words by design. We found them a Canva template, and then we quickly sketched out a recommended structure based on the brief: if it's habitat feasibility, look at food availability, nesting site availability, and mortality risks in the target release site. Bullet point each. Bullet point how well the study assessed each. Write a quick intro and conclusion. Take notes as you go, and present the poster itself at 4.30.
"You think I should try?" they asked doubtfully, looking like I'd just asked them to go mano-a-mano with a feral badger.
"If you run out of time, so be it," I said. "But your brain is trying to protect you from a non-existent tiger. That's why you've procrastinated - it's been horrible, and you've been shame spiralling, and your brain is trying to shield you from the negative experience; but it's the wrong type of help for this situation! So while you're sitting there working on it, hating life, every time your brain goes 'This is hopeless, I can't do it', you think right back 'Yes I can, it just sucks.' And you carry on. Good?"
"Good," they said. "I'm going to mainline coffee and hole up in the library. Enjoy your potato."
And then, of course, I had to go and watch the other students' presentations, so that was the end of me being any help at all. I spent all afternoon wondering if they were going to manage it, or if I would be getting a message at 4.25 telling me they'd failed, and would have to submit late and hope for an EC.
And Tumblrs
Tumblrs
Let me FUCKING tell you
They turned up at 4.15, fifteen minutes early, wearing a mask of grim, harrowed determination and fuelled by spite and coffee, and they pulled up that poster and started presenting and yes, okay, I'll admit their actual delivery was dramatically unpolished and yes, they forgot to include the taxanomic name for the hen harrier on the poster and yes, fine, I admit that there were more than a few awkward moments where they lost their place in their hastily scribbled notebook but LET ME FUCKING TELL YOU -
They smashed it. It was well-critiqued, it had a map, it had full citations, it had a section on the hen harrier's specific ecology and role in the ecosystem, it had notes on their specific conservation measures. They described case studies they'd read about elsewhere. They answered the questions we threw at them with competence and depth. There was analysis. All that background research they'd done came right to the fore. They were even within the time limit by 15 seconds.
You would never have known they'd produced it in three hours, from a quivering and terrified mess fighting the bodily urge to dehydrate via tear ducts. After they left, the second marker and I looked at each other and went "So that was a 2:1, right?"
I caught up with Aeron downstairs and he was beaming. Apparently Ceri had seen him on their way out, and had gone over to talk to him. Aeron said the difference between the Ceri of this morning and the Ceri of then was like two different people; in four hours, they'd gone from their voice literally breaking as they admitted the problem, ashamed and broken, to being relaxed and happy and smiling.
"I reckon I've passed," they apparently told Aeron, pleased. "Maybe even a 2:2. There's things I wish I'd had the time to do better, but I'll be happy if I passed."
They won't know until late January what they got, because we're not allowed to release marks until 20 term days after hand-in, and the Christmas holidays are about to hit. But I'm really hoping I can be there when they're released.
But mostly, I'm just... insanely proud of them. I cannot tell you how happy I am. And I know, I know, obviously this is not a practice I would want to see them do regularly, or indeed ever again, and it only worked because they were fucking lucky with the assignment format, but like... when life is just punching you in the face, and you hit a breaking point... isn't it nice? That just this once, you pull off a miracle, and it's fixed? The disaster you thought was about to ruin you is gone? To get that relief?
So the UK will reroute a fucking Internet cable for a fake grave for a fake elf because a bunch of brain dead nerds through a pissy fit, and meanwhile real actual natives in the US are getting arrested for trying to keep oil sand pipelines from going through their actual graves, holy sites and unceded territory. Burn it all down.
they routed the project and such that it's close to an actual Bronze Age burial site btw. so they're possibly disturbing REAL graves in order to not "disturb" a fictional character's "grave"
Yeah, this is in West Wales - Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire. Shit head tourists keep going there and littering it with fucking socks and painted pebbles. It's in a national park and is environmentally sensitive, so yes, please, do go and destroy the fucking thing
I read our tags on that beatles post and I suddenly thought, she's right. I've always said they suck, but I cant actually name many songs by them. What do you consider their best work? What should I check out?
Oh ho HO
So an accurate answer would probably have to depend on what sort of music you normally like, which obviously I don't know. So! I shall instead ramble on about my personal favourites and you never know, some of it might be useful. If you want to jump straight in and just listen to an album, though, the easy recommendation is the White Album.
Also for the most part I am not going to give the mini-essay I have locked and loaded at all times about the musical theory behind the Beatles' success because this is not that sort of post, but there will probably be bits here and there.
The Early Stuff - Please Please Me to Beatles for Sale
Most of this is Bad.
(lol)
Though, that's actually because most of it isn't theirs. It was very much the fashion in the 60s to do a couple of songs that were your own, and otherwise a shit ton of covers. That's also one of the big things that shaped jazz music as a genre, because Spotify didn't exist yet and if you wanted to hear a favourite song, for most non-rich folks you had to ask the live band entertaining you in the dance hall to play it for you; it was a while before everyone owned a record player.
This was also true in pop/rock and roll for a long time. So, for the first four albums, you get a couple of fairly iconic songs, and then a ton of filler; something they stopped doing from Help! onwards. Partly because, as I say, the songwriting team of Lennon-McCartney was a level of productive that is vanishingly rare - they were constantly writing new songs and trying new things, both together and alone. Those mad lads produced a full album a year for a decade, like. Absolute scenes.
(Though, there's an interesting old story from that period - one of the songs they covered on their first album was Twist and Shout, and afterwards John Lennon said they shouldn't have done it because it was a song totally entrenched in black culture and he felt it lacked its deeper meaning when covered by four white guys. Which is an interestingly progressive take from a deeply flawed white English 19-year-old in 1963.)
Anyway, in all honesty, there's only one song from those first albums that I actually love, therefore, and that's the absolute swinging sixties banger that is I Saw Her Standing There. There are others of note I suppose, but like a lot of artists, it's Early Work Stuff - they hadn't quite cracked the winning formula yet.
.
The Good Stuff - Help! to Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
OKAY NOW WE'RE COOKING
No more covers lads we are LOCKED IN we are MAKING MUSIC we have CRACKED THE SYSTEM
Even so there's a real gradient from start to end as their sound evolved here. Towards the end they started getting experimental in a big way, but even at the start, they'd found the winning formula, so to speak.
Help! is very classic 60s. It's also I believe the origin of the Paul Is Dead conspiracy theories, because the semaphore on the cover was chosen to look good rather than spell "Help", and deranged fans are the same the world over. My personal pick from this one is I've Just Seen a Face, which is super fun to sing because of its tempo and deceptively tricky chorus melody.
(Side note - this is the album that gave us Yesterday. Not my fave, but I must admit that if you like singer songwriters, it's a fucking banger.)
Rubber Soul is where they were allowed their own musical direction, rather than having to just follow the recording conventions of the day, and from there onwards shit starts to get real. There are a LOT of different influences there, folk, baroque, Indian... They really loved African American soul, and started working with a lot of musicians/producers from that world around then. And, like. Named the album in its honour - "Rubber Soul" is a pun. Also, and importantly, this was a turning point - while they weren't the only artists to ever do this, this was the point they stopped thinking about an album as being a collection of singles, and started thinking about an album as being a complete unit of art in and of itself, and that had an enormous influence on both their own work and the wider industry.
I like this album - but, I wouldn't necessarily blindly suggest any of these. Not unless I knew what sort of music you like. There's psychedelic stuff on there, there's baroque stuff, there's the start of comedy/pastiche stuff, but for my money, nothing I personally find exceptional.
Revolver, though, has a few. This is where George Harrison fell in love with Indian culture, became a Hare Krishna, got yelled at on national television by a furious bellowing white Christian for using his fame and status to bring Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to the UK to corrupt the youth with (checks notes) meditation, and started seriously incorporating Indian instruments and musical techniques into his work. His big contribution here is Love You To, which he recorded using Asian musicians and no John Lennon. Also, three of the Beatles were on acid, and the fourth (McCartney) was vehemently against it, so the arguments were starting. The upshot of this is that they arranged and rearranged each song even while recording, so you get some truly impressive stuff.
Eleanor Rigby is famous, but for good reason. You know how most music is written in a key? Major key, minor key, etc? Eleanor Rigby is written in a mode instead. For pure fun, I'll also add Got to Get You Into My Life; great summer song
And then! Sgt Peppers.
This is an early example of a concept album. The opening song is Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band being introduced to an audience; the subsequent songs are supposedly sung by this fictional band; then it finishes on a reprise of the first where the band say goodbye. It's incredibly varied - it's got vaudeville, circus, Indian and Western traditions, psychedelia, avant-garde, and a ton more besides; and so, this is where I start giving a lot more recs.
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! is a song I fell in love with as a teenager, and it fucking slaps. You feel like you're in the circus itself. You can smell the sawdust. You can feel the lurking horror clowns. Within You Without You, by contrast, is George Harrison going full Hare Krishna influence-meets-pop. When I'm Sixty-Four is perfect Paul McCartney pastiche. It's worth listening to all three, and remembering they're on the same album.
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The Amazing Stuff - Magical Mystery Tour to Let It Be
THIS IS THE BEST ERA I mean they hated each other during it. Boy howdy but there are some STORIES. But what you therefore get is multiple different musical directions at once, from people who had by then honed their craft. George Harrison really came into his own in this era. Ringo was also there.
Magical Mystery Tour was mostly the soundtrack to the film of the same name, with a couple of additions. It's got some bangers. The obvious one is the Fool on the Hill. Harrison's final psychedelic song before he gave up the drugs was Blue Jay Way.
But then, of course, we get the greatest work - the White Album. Written largely while they were on a meditation retreat in India - they seriously clashed by then, but John Lennon would clandestinely sneak into McCartney's room when they were supposed to be meditating and they would write and write and write (and presumably fuck nasty). Famously considered one of the greatest albums of all time, which is truly impressive, given that it contains multiple songs recorded by only one Beatle because he wasn't talking to any of the others (this happened with more than one Beatle), and part way through recording Ringo Starr actually left the band for two weeks.
And yet.
While my Guitar Gently Weeps. One of the greatest songs ever written by anyone in any genre. Regina Spektor did an amazing cover for the film Kubo and the Two Strings.
Piggies. YOU WILL LOVE THIS ONE. LISTEN TO THE LYRICS YOU WILL LOVE IT
Happiness is a Warm Gun
Back in the USSR - the bootlegged underground hit in the Soviet Union, done as a parody of 'Back in the USA' and the Beach Boys
Blackbird. Just beautiful.
Rocky Raccoon. The Marvel character is named after this song
I could go on, I've missed a few I suspect I have done a disservice, but try those on for size.
Yellow Submarine - no stand-out song on this one tbh. Not in my view, anyway. The song Yellow Sub is fun, I suppose.
Abbey Road - the final one they recorded (the penultimate one released.) Banger after banger. Come Together has been heavily covered, but it's worth hearing the original; maybe one of the rockiest songs they ever made, though there are a few on the album in a similar vein (Oh! Darling and I Want You (She's So Heavy) both count here). McCartney's comic pastiche offering this time is Maxwell's Silver Hammer is about a serial killer who even kills the judge in his own trial. Because is a piece written around Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata's chords played backwards by Yoko Ono. And of course, the album finishes with a 16-minute medley of about 8 combined fragmentary songs, most of which are amazing, and finishing with a song called The End that featured all of them - even Ringo - doing a solo each.
And then, Let It Be - the final released album before they disbanded. It's not their best work, but Get Back is another that's been covered a lot, and is worth hearing. It was also the star of their rooftop concert. Personally, though, I'm a fan of two others here: Dig a Pony, written by Lennon for Yoko Ono except he then decided he hated it and called it a piece of garbage; and, my favourite, George Harrison's I Me Mine, which was ostensibly based on Hindu teachings about selfishness but nakedly actually about his stupid fucking bandmates and their stupid fucking squabbles and presumably led to a lot of foot shuffling and zero eye contact during the recording. And, of course, shout out to Let It Be, the song itself. Massive tune.
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ANYWAY. I hope somewhere in there is a useful answer! But as I say, if you just want to give one album a go, choose either the White Album or Abbey Road, I would. See if anything sticks.
It's half past midnight and I've got a mystery Dr Who scene stuck in my head and am desperately trying to remember which episode it is from. The Dr and companion are being chased through the Tardis Benny Hill style. I recall a shot looking down a hallway and everyone crossing back and forwards from side passages repeatedly. Any suggestions would be very appreciated.
My immediate thought is the Invasion of Time, with Tom Baker and Leela. Try that if you can, and check back in if not!
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I think the reader's response to this post is probably going to either be "That's incredibly minor" or "Holy shit YES I'M ALSO PROUD", depending on people's personal experiences with academia, but:
Today I am incredibly proud of one of my students.
In the interests of disguising identities, let's call them Ceri. Ceri is one of my third year undergrads (meaning their final year, for anyone unfamiliar with UK uni systems.) They transferred to us last year, and within two weeks I was giving them the contact info to get to Student Services and get themself screened for ADHD; they have some mental health struggles, but I clocked pretty quickly that they STRUGGLE with procrastination, and punctuality, and attending 9am lectures in particular. Naturally, as is the way of my people, it took them a further four months to remember to go to the screening. Lol. Lmao. Rofl, in fact.
But, they did it eventually! Their screening lit up like a Christmas tree at the ADHD section, and they got a free laptop and optional one week extensions and a study support worker named Claire. This has helped tremendously, and although mental health + until-then-unsupported ADHD meant their academic profile had slid sideways somewhat, with the new tools available and a couple of resits they passed the year and hit this year running.
Until, that is, the last fortnight.
Now, I take them for a Habitat Management module that has two assessments: an academic poster presentation before Christmas, and a site-specific management plan in May. Naturally this means we are at that happy point in the year for the poster presentations. I give out the briefs at the start of the year, so they've had them since October; I've also been periodically checking in with them all for weeks, to make sure they don't have any major burning questions. The poster presentation was to pick a species reintroduction project, pull the habitat feasibility study out of it, and then critique that study; Ceri chose to look at the hen harrier reintroductions proposed for the southern UK. All good.
Which brings us nicely to today! Ceri's presentation is scheduled for 2.30. At 11am-1pm, I am lecturing the first years on Biodiversity, while Ceri is learning about environmental impact assessment with a colleague I shall call Aeron. This means we are separately occupied during those same hours.
Nevertheless, Aeron messages me at about 12.
"I think Ceri needs to see you after your lecture," he writes. "They're panicking, I genuinely think they might cry. I'm worried. Are you free at 1?"
I say I am. At 1, I get lunch and sit in the common area; Ceri comes to see me. To my personal shame, imagine all of the following takes place while I stuff my face with potato.
Now: this part is going to be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has ever tried higher education with ADHD, especially unmedicated. It certainly was for me. All I can say is, I never had the courage to take the step here that Ceri did.
"I have to confess," they said quietly, and Aeron was right, they were fighting back tears. "My mental health has been so, so bad for the last fortnight. I've left it way, way too late. I don't have anything to present."
"Nothing at all?" I asked.
"I've been researching," they said helplessly. "I found loads on the decline of the hen harrier. But it wasn't until last night that I finally found a habitat feasibility study to critique. Generally... I've been burying my head about it, and it just got later and later. I thought I should come in for Aeron's lecture, and I should at least tell you."
This part is a minor thing, right? But honestly, I remember being in the grip of that particular shame spiral. I never did manage to tell my lecturers to their faces. I just avoided. I honestly can't imagine having the courage it took them to come in and tell me this, rather than just staying home and avoiding me.
"I think..." they said hesitantly, "I know I can submit up to a week late, for a capped mark. I think I need to do that, and apply for extenuating circumstances. But then I'll have both Aeron's assignment and yours due at the same time."
Which meant they would crumble under the pressure and likely struggle to pass both; so me, being as noble and heroic as I unarguably am, stopped eating potato and said, "Let's make that plan B."
(It was good potato. I am a hero.)
So, we made plan A: I moved their timeslot to 4.30, giving them three and a half hours. The shining piece of luck in this whole thing was that this was the crunch time assignment - if it had been Aeron's, they'd have had to try and write a 3000 report in that time. But for me, all they had to write was an academic poster, and those things are light on words by design. We found them a Canva template, and then we quickly sketched out a recommended structure based on the brief: if it's habitat feasibility, look at food availability, nesting site availability, and mortality risks in the target release site. Bullet point each. Bullet point how well the study assessed each. Write a quick intro and conclusion. Take notes as you go, and present the poster itself at 4.30.
"You think I should try?" they asked doubtfully, looking like I'd just asked them to go mano-a-mano with a feral badger.
"If you run out of time, so be it," I said. "But your brain is trying to protect you from a non-existent tiger. That's why you've procrastinated - it's been horrible, and you've been shame spiralling, and your brain is trying to shield you from the negative experience; but it's the wrong type of help for this situation! So while you're sitting there working on it, hating life, every time your brain goes 'This is hopeless, I can't do it', you think right back 'Yes I can, it just sucks.' And you carry on. Good?"
"Good," they said. "I'm going to mainline coffee and hole up in the library. Enjoy your potato."
And then, of course, I had to go and watch the other students' presentations, so that was the end of me being any help at all. I spent all afternoon wondering if they were going to manage it, or if I would be getting a message at 4.25 telling me they'd failed, and would have to submit late and hope for an EC.
And Tumblrs
Tumblrs
Let me FUCKING tell you
They turned up at 4.15, fifteen minutes early, wearing a mask of grim, harrowed determination and fuelled by spite and coffee, and they pulled up that poster and started presenting and yes, okay, I'll admit their actual delivery was dramatically unpolished and yes, they forgot to include the taxanomic name for the hen harrier on the poster and yes, fine, I admit that there were more than a few awkward moments where they lost their place in their hastily scribbled notebook but LET ME FUCKING TELL YOU -
They smashed it. It was well-critiqued, it had a map, it had full citations, it had a section on the hen harrier's specific ecology and role in the ecosystem, it had notes on their specific conservation measures. They described case studies they'd read about elsewhere. They answered the questions we threw at them with competence and depth. There was analysis. All that background research they'd done came right to the fore. They were even within the time limit by 15 seconds.
You would never have known they'd produced it in three hours, from a quivering and terrified mess fighting the bodily urge to dehydrate via tear ducts. After they left, the second marker and I looked at each other and went "So that was a 2:1, right?"
I caught up with Aeron downstairs and he was beaming. Apparently Ceri had seen him on their way out, and had gone over to talk to him. Aeron said the difference between the Ceri of this morning and the Ceri of then was like two different people; in four hours, they'd gone from their voice literally breaking as they admitted the problem, ashamed and broken, to being relaxed and happy and smiling.
"I reckon I've passed," they apparently told Aeron, pleased. "Maybe even a 2:2. There's things I wish I'd had the time to do better, but I'll be happy if I passed."
They won't know until late January what they got, because we're not allowed to release marks until 20 term days after hand-in, and the Christmas holidays are about to hit. But I'm really hoping I can be there when they're released.
But mostly, I'm just... insanely proud of them. I cannot tell you how happy I am. And I know, I know, obviously this is not a practice I would want to see them do regularly, or indeed ever again, and it only worked because they were fucking lucky with the assignment format, but like... when life is just punching you in the face, and you hit a breaking point... isn't it nice? That just this once, you pull off a miracle, and it's fixed? The disaster you thought was about to ruin you is gone? To get that relief?
Visiting family for the weekend, including my seven year old niece, who is obviously the most special and incredible child on the planet
Anyway, she really, really loves it when I tell her stories. She loves stories anyway, and at first this manifested as "stories about Tad-Cu Bryn", aka my father (her grandfather) who died before she was born. This has been a lovely way to keep his memory alive, and she adores every story - she has her favourites, which she will request.
Then it became apparent that she specifically loves me telling her stories. She'll happily ask others for them too, but from me she just wants any anecdote at all; which of course is wonderful and demonstrates that she is a child of impeccable taste and wisdom and brilliance, but also she has ADHD and the energy reserves of a seven year old and so this gets Tiring very quickly
Yesterday, in the car on the way back from the wildlife centre, she asked for one of my longer stories, and I was like hey, how about we try something different?
And she was like, no, tell me a story about Tad-Cu Bryn
And I was like, this will be a brand new story and you get to play it and help me tell it
And she was like, explain
So I gave her three characters to choose from. The first was a warrior with a sword she could name, who was nonetheless dyspraxic. The second was a gymnastic elf who could commune with trees but was afraid of heights. The third was a dyslexic witch whose spells sometimes go wrong when she spells the words wrong.
She picked the witch. I pulled up an online d20 on my phone. I went to start, and she insisted my mother had to play as the elf.
So I told them that the new queen of the kingdom had called for them, because their palace treasury had been robbed - specifically, a single enchanted coin that brings luck and wealth to a ruler's reign had been stolen. And tales of enchanted coins were suddenly emanating from across the land, so each one needed investigating until the right coin was found.
It turns out kids who like stories will absolutely lap this shit up. She was enthralled. It was the simplest story - they had to get into a bank, revive some unconscious gnomes, then enter the vault, find the coin that had been deposited into it, then get back to the queen. Enough to fill a half hour car ride, basically, but she managed to fill it with all the wacky hijinks you get from a ttrpg, particularly when she tried to smash a door down with a hammer but rolled a 1.
We finished with the queen saying it wasn't the right coin, and then my niece demanded we go again, this time with her playing as a sapient reticulated python. That time we made it all the way to the final boss fight, which was a sorcerer who created a big coin monster out of loads of coins; I asked my niece what she wanted to do, and she described graphically how she wanted to constrict and eat the sorcerer and immediately rolled a 19. So, sure! Okay. The sorcerer is now very dead. The coin monster, though, was still there, and as my niece tried to say she would do the same thing, I was like, no, you're a snake and you just ate. You're now immobile.
At this point, my sister advised her to regurgitate the sorcerer.
Great! said my niece. I'm going to do it at the coin monster.
And rolled a 20.
So she projectile vomited a dead sorcerer into the coin monster, and won the day.
Anyway, today she immediately demanded we play "the game with the story where we choose", and my brother in law is now asking me how he can do this with her ("Are you making it all up as you go along??"). But yeah, turns out, this is a fantastic way to entertain a seven year old. Vague ongoing quest, then three steps: get into (place), resolve (minor puzzle), boss fight to finish. Boom. Easy.
So far I've done a bank, a tavern, and an art gallery (it featured an exhibit that was just a room full of slippery banana skins). I'm going to do a pirate ship next
The aforementioned snake regurgitation bit. What I didn't mention was that at first, when I said she now needed to lie down and digest, her attempt to resolve it was "Nana, you need to find me a heat lamp" and I had to be like, "Nana has bigger problems right now because she is fighting the coin monster, and also you're both trapped down here." Why were they both trapped? Because rather than finding the stairs down to the basement, they chose to hack a hole in the floor and drop through
When they found their first enchanted coin, Niece picked it up with her bare hand. This made her hand swell up to five times the size and turn blue with orange polka dots. Her response? To immediately pick up the coin with the other hand so they could match
Niece decided very suddenly and randomly that slipping on banana skins was funny, and periodically she would competently enter a new room and she'd interrupt me to say "And then I stand on a banana skin!" This is why I made the banana skin modern art installation. Purely for her to enjoy getting through the room
At one point as the witch they decided to jointly fly on the broom to a new location. "You don't need to roll for that," I said, but Niece was enjoying rolling by then, and so did anyway, and somehow rolled a 20. It was the world's greatest broom ride. They had in-flight entertainment, free snacks each, they napped, and they landed 20 seconds before they took off
The morning I left, she saw me and asked if we could play "Dungeons and Dragons", so her father has definitely been discussing playing with her because I never used that name. Delighted to have offered this new past time into their lives, and next time I'll try and write a little detective campaign, I think
Today my co-worker had to bring his nine-year-old daughter to work, and she did great for Many Hours, but at 2pm she definitely was flagging and bored. She started wandering the office and playing with the standing desks and throwing a ball around, as nine-year-olds do, and I thought. Hang on. Hang the fuck on. I have the cheat code now. I can fix this.
She picked the elf, and assigned the witch to her father. Our other co-worker Ian became the clumsy ninja. I sent them to the tavern.
Things I have learned:
No one who isn't already a player of ttrpgs is very good at remembering the quest; they tend to only think as far as the immediate puzzle (get the door open) and not as far as the overall goal (find the coin)
No one who isn't already a player of ttrpgs is very good at asking the NPCs for useful information
Young girls really love the opportunity to beat the shit out of monsters
Kids love a bit of slapstick detail added in
People who are not already players of ttrpgs are astounded when they suddenly realise you're making it all up for them as you go along
Parents of bored young kids are so insanely grateful to you for spontaneously GMing their kids they will offer you many favours vis a vis getting your marking done like 10 out of 10 strategy
