I don't know what I'm doing, but can you please just play along

i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mine—an N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.

so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said “damn. never known a woman to choose…practicality over looks.”

And I just said, “oh. you can go, you’re not getting a drink.” And he said, “what???”

I said, “sir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.”

Piss in a bathroom stall with the stall door wide open

Continue having an animated phone conversation on handsfree through the entire process of pissing.

Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata, first published over two hundreds years ago, is notoriously considered one of the most difficult-to-play piano pieces of all time.

In particular, when Beethoven sent it to his publisher in 1818, he allegedly said, “Now you have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when it is played 50 years hence!”, and much has been made of the fact that it wasn’t publicly performed in its entirety until eighteen years later, by Franz Liszt himself.

Except that’s a bit of a deceptive statistic. See, when Beethoven published Hammerklavier, public solo piano recitals/concerts weren’t really a thing yet. Symphonies, sure; concertos, definitely. But sonatas were “parlor” music—a thing played by amateurs, often skilled amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless, in little sitting-rooms for a bit of entertainment after dinner, or at private salons with a guest list in the low dozens. (And mostly they were meant to be sight-read! The culture of obsessively polishing a piece to make it “performance-ready” wasn’t as much of a thing, back then.) People bought these things the way they bought novels, and, just as someone might buy a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses today and enjoy puzzling over the thing, even if they never read the whole thing or feel like they fully “get” it, well… some folks would enjoy sonatas the same way.

So yeah, Hammerklavier didn’t have its first public performance until Liszt played it in the Salle Érard. But also, Liszt basically invented the format of “star virtuoso pianist hogging the stage for two hours” in order to get a public audience at all.

But in the meantime—I think about how wonderful it must’ve been, tooling around on the piano during that 18-year-span where there was no evidence that thing even was playable, or that, if playable, that the thing even made sense. Beethoven was nearly totally deaf by this point, after all, a fact that was publicly known—had he totally lost it? people had to wonder. And the only way to find out would be… well, trying it out yourself!

It has the sound of a gimmick. And I’ll bet it was, at least a little bit—but just because something’s more interesting to play than listen to doesn’t mean it’s failing in its goal. (Though fwiw it is very interesting to listen to.)

It also has the sound of, like, Dark Souls, to be honest. Proto-video game culture. A new game drops and people are asking each other: can anyone beat this boss? can you beat this boss? do you still consider your time on the game well-spent even if you never 100% it?

Biographies generally agree that Beethoven’s metronome markings (which only appear in his later work, and only *some* of his later work) are preposterous—often borderline-unplayable, and certainly not very musical. I couldn’t find a recording of anyone trying to play Hammerklavier at the marked 138bpm tempo, so I got a computer to do it—and burst out laughing at the result because, yeah, 138bpm is fucking NUTS. But whether intentional or accidental, I love the audacity of its being there, like a taunt: I dare you to do more. I dare you to do better. I dare you to try.

Much has been made of how difficulty’s a way of keeping people out—but it’s also a way of inviting people in, I think. It says: do this hard thing and you will be rewarded. You will be rewarded in the trying. Because the trying is the thing that makes the music live; there is no music without you.

Here’s an old bit from an interview with the game designer Porpentine:

“The purpose of a puzzle [in a game] is to provide resistance. For me, that resistance doesn’t need to be coercive or challenging, just interesting and aesthetic. My mechanics are to be touched. Games are perhaps the most intimate art because the player must remain touching at all times. They must touch or the game does not exist.”

(* Striver Asians are a distinct population from Asian which is an ethnicity. Think Tiger Mom stereotypes. Striver Asians are mostly the offspring of 1st or sometimes 2nd gen immigrants, often are raised with an explicit focus on material success)

at both schools, any time there was a piano nearby, you'd end up with a group of like, the Gamer/ Sport Pianists. As in, they engage with piano as a fun challenge or game that sometimes can be competitive. One of the favourites was always Speed Piano, where everyone went home, learnt the same pieces (usually not an assigned piece from their real piano lessons - it might be a pop song, videogame or TV or movie soundtrack, etc - when I was in school the song Wedding Dress from some k drama was very popular for this, I'd hear it all the time played at more and more absurd tempos)

And then they'd come to school and sit at the school piano they'd Race Each Other. To play Wedding Dress or River Flows in You or some other pop song on the radio.

(oh yeah and their piano teachers haaaated this lol but they can't be stopped)

Other times they'd swap weird scores they found online to challenge one another. A lot of these scores aren't technically playable!

That's what this post reminded me of - the kids at school who yeah, did like music probably, but they mostly went on to do medicine or law degrees... but in high school they sometimes indulged in a bit of Piano-as-a-Competitive-Sport.

WOW I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS MY FAVORITE TELEVISION SERIES OF ALL TIME (it's not out yet)

Strain creates moiré 2D materials without twisting or stacking, opening more scalable route

Cornell researchers have developed a new way to create moiré patterns—atomic-scale structures that can give materials unusual quantum behaviors—without relying on the traditionally used difficult-to-control twisting and stacking methods. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Why moiré materials matter Since the 2018 discovery that slightly twisted layers of graphene can exhibit superconductivity, moiré materials have become of great interest to researchers. Moiré patterns arise when ultra-thin layers of materials are stacked slightly out of alignment, creating structural changes in atomic lattices that can alter how electrons move through a material. This can produce quantum behaviors such as correlated insulating states, magnetism and superconductivity.