Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

Thanksgiving is over

Christmas is over

New years is over

is… is this supposed to be the plot?  “universal basic income is bad”? what?

But instead, we have a creator who hates feminism and misses the entire point of dystopian fiction:

The spelling and grammar gets steadily worse over the course of the story, messing up simple words and even the main character’s name (variations on Ebony include Enoby, Enony, Eboby, and my favorite Enopby). The author gives frequent shoutouts in the A/N at the beginning of each chapter to someone called Raven, who she considers a friend and apparently functions as a beta. In chapter 16, Tara severs ties with Raven, expels/murders Raven’s character Willow, and changes Ebony’s full name to Ebony Dark’ness Dementia TARA Way. It’s suggested that they fought because Tara stole Raven’s poster of Gerard Way. By chapter 17, they appear to have made up and Willow is brought back with no further explanation.

The plot, of course, is just insane, but the story was obviously being read; Tara begins each chapter furiously ranting about “flamerz” leaving bad reviews, terribly misspelled. At one point, Ebony was referred to as a Mary Sue and she immediately tried to shut that down, citing “Satanism” and “depression” as flaws. She held each new chapter hostage, demanding a certain number (usually 5) good reviews before she would update. Assuming the spelling and grammar mistakes were intentional, the natural progression of them getting worse and worse is incredible. The difference between Tara’s A/Ns and Raven’s edited text is also astounding, although chapter 16, during their supposed rift, is not noticeably more poorly written than the chapters immediately preceding and following it.

The misspellings of character names and general slipups get worse and worse to the point that once, “Enopby” is referred to as “Tara”, and at another point, “TaEnby”, further to emphasize that Ebony is, in fact, the most obvious self insert in the history of literature. The reference to Marty McFly (he appears at the end of chapter 35 to spirit Ebony into the future) confounds me; Tara does not seem like she’d been aware of pop culture enough to have seen “Back to the Future”, given that she describes “The Nightmare Before Christmas” as this serious, depressing, Adult movie. She’s young enough to consider “he put his thingy into my tool” an accurate description of sex. Further, she references Tom Bombadil, a character in “Lord of the Rings” who I believe just shows up and sings for a while and is strongly implied to be God and then disappears, not really relevant to anything. He’s not even in the movies. Would Tara Gilesbie have read “Lord of the Rings” when she admits she’s never read the Harry Potter books?

like you can tell me all you want how the sound is stored in the grooves but fucking H O W 

HOW DOES THAT GET INTO THE NEEDLE

HOW ARE THE VIBRATIONS TURNED INTO MUSIC THAT YOU CAN HEAR???

The grooves in a record are an analogy for these vibrations, a method of remembering them so that they can be recreated later on. 

Put your hand on a speaker while loud music is playing and you’ll feel the vibrations. Those are exactly the same vibrations happening inside your ear when you hear the music. 

But how do you capture that? 

Take a surface that vibrates strongly when a sound is played, like the skin of a drumhead for example. Connect that surface to a little tool - when sound causes the surface to vibrate, the tool digs a little bit into some wax, leaving behind a pattern that matches - in proportion - the vibrations of the surface caused by the sound. This is your analogy (hence: analog music). 

Now, when there’s no sound playing, you run that little tool back over the pattern. This causes the skin to vibrate again, this time in response to the tool running over the pattern instead of because of an external sound. The vibrations should match, proportionally, the original vibrations of the music.. and thus these new vibrations, if you were to amplify them, would be a recreation or “recording” of the original music.