a lot more competitive than I look

texas tech's quartback, brendan sorsby, was investigated for sports gambling. i know sports betting is all the rage right now, but athletes themselves are not allowed to do it. it is Rule Number 1 and it is the highest priority rule for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), who governs all athletic programs at about 1,100 colleges in the US.

the invesitagetion of sorsby revealed that, not only did he place more than 9,000 sports bets when he himself was a collegiate athlete, but 40 of those bets were AGAINST HIS OWN TEAM when he was playing at indiana university. immediately, this threatens the integrity of the sport, and especially because indiana is the hottest team right now as the defending national champion.

the NCAA, which is largely a sham organization these days (they've truly lost their grasp and college athletics are the wild west now) actually enforced their Number 1 Rule and told sorsby his career is over, that he would never play college football again (and, subsequently, that he would never get drafted into the NFL because his college career was cut short).

well, because the NCAA is a husk of its former self, sorsby and texad tech immediately took this to court. MANY athletes have learned these past few seasons that if you can find a judge who's a fan of your team, you can get any NCAA ruling overturned. that's exactly what texas tech did. they filed a suit in Lubbock, where the university is located and where every judge is an alum of texas tech. so sorsby was granted an injunction and will now only be suspended for the first 2 games od the 2026 season (which are alwayd against no-name teams that will be destroyed regardless of who's suspended).

every other school in the country immediately went on the defensive because this is a very clear integretiy issue. so nebraska and georgia (sic em dawgs) released statements saying that all currently-scheduled competitions witb Texas Tech in ANY sport will be canceled and there will be no future schedulings. at least 3 of the major conferences (SEC, Big 10, Big 12) , who account for almost all division 1 sports teams in the country, are also in discussions about cancelling comtests. Texas Tech is part of the Big 12, and there is serious talk of all other teams in the conference shutting texas tech out.

now would probably be time where i say that texas tech is one of the wealthiest programs in college football becaise there is a single billionaire alumnus pouring money into the program with hopes of essentially buying a championship. so texas techs integrity has always been questionable. anyway, the university president put oit a statement that he doesnt care that sorseby violated regulation and that texas tech will sue any school that refuses to play them because it jeopardizes their championship prospects if they're umable to play any games.

For portraiture you have the unique challenge of capturing the distinctive features while flattering them. There’s a tension of “what makes the person look like themselves?” against what they WANT people to see.

Acknowledging and respecting that, reflecting a View of the Self instead of a simple photograph, has always been an ephemeral and noble challenge of portraiture. It’s a rare skill, and while I’m not claiming to be a brilliant practitioner, here’s how I go about it. You want the person to feel SEEN - on a level and in a way that only a portrait artist could.

If someone in a novel were to spend a paragraph studying the portrait, they ought to be able to say something plot-relevant, like “the artist had faithfully captured the FAMILY RESEMBLANCE in the notable features and the PLOT POINT in the shape of her eyes… but no photograph could have captured the wistful turn of the mouth. Across a hundred years of distance, her soul was clear, speaking to Protagonist as if she were merely in another room…”

That’s the skill of portraiture, really, and it’s rarer than the ability to do good lineart (which I can’t do either; note that I’m not claiming to be GOOD.)

The immediate outstanding features of the “fan” are

Dark, hooded, distinctive eyes - she’s probably proud of them

Challenging, knowing expression

Long dark hair is a feature she’s proud of; because it’s well-cultivated

A sweet beauty of youth, but I can see what she’ll look like when she’s older

Notes on her features:

Roman nose that’s unusually short for the bridge type. Doesn’t have the space to be “hooked” but has the shape.

Natural brow with natural arch - fuzzing in to a shapely tapered form

Rounded face but with an interesting composition of flat slabby cheekbones and a high flat forehead. I’d love to look at it from other angles but she could model for a LOT of time periods and a LOT of artistic traditions.

Cool olive skin - very tricky!!! Especially with that pink lip. Frankly beyond me to depict fairly tbh… but at least I tried

Dark pigmented undereye and eyelid, which I chose to handle in the sense of “flattering eye makeup”rather than true depiction of her colouring.

Full mouth with NO CUPID’S BOW - fullness in lower lip

I’d elide the faint double chin out of gracious recognition of the angle and acknowledgement of the fact that the sitter would PROBABLY prefer it not to be noticed. I ultimately alluded to it, but elided it.

Even without the double chin, her determined yet rounded chin is another charming and forceful contradiction that lends what we call “character” to the face

💯 keep the moles

Presumably a fan of Instagram anime art is familiar with conventions and is therefore hoping for a portrait with glow brushes and SHEEN and TEXTURE and anime petals and veils barfed all over it - so I did a final version with those things - presuming it would make the “customer” happy

Obviously you can see that I’m quite humbly and realistically not an ARTIST but I thought it was interesting to contrast what skills are valued in a party trick of portraiture (breaking down and flattering features, playing a delicate game of flattery/pleasure and clear-eyed recognisability) vs a much more skilled and stylish render that is based on replicating anime aesthetics and thus - despite being better which I acknowledge! - didn’t engage so much with the goals of portraiture. Returning to the goals of portraiture - likeness, gesture, expression, picking out features, affection for the subject - is so,so good for the soul. For one thing, it reminds you of your ability to fall in love with faces…

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

I gave

1 teeny Métis sash woven with crewel wool on a rigid heddle loom, sized for an 18" doll such as Our Generation or American Girl

In exchange for

1 out-of-tune hammered dulcimer

WHAT IS MY LIFE. I said "Yeah, if I were to seriously learn an instrument it would be the hammered dulcimer, but they're impossible to find on a budget," and the person I was talking to said, "I have a hammered dulcimer I don't use."

(I don't have enough fingers to play a lot of the instruments I want to, and my formative music instruction was in Orff ensembles, so it's the best overlap between what I'm capable of and what kind of music I want to make)

okay

Well, one famous thing about the Spanish Civil War is the International Brigades: volunteers, largely in highly varied shades of leftism, from all over Europe and the world who showed up to fight the fascists. (Anglophone readers may recall Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.) So alongside the songs in Spanish and Catalan that came out of or get associated with the war, there are many International Brigades songs in English, German (yes, lots of German communists and other anti-fascists in the '30s went off to fight fascism where it seemed vulnerable), Italian (ditto), French, and this collection appears to have at least one each in Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and one that's attributed to "Yugoslavia" but I do not have the South Slavic expertise to tell you what language it is in. Not a song, but I have seen a poster specifically recruiting Esperantist volunteers. Very multilingual environment already.

And then... the Spanish Republic lost. The fascists won. The songs went pretty quiet in Spain. But the international volunteers that survived and went home kept singing them. And so did one of their sympathizers: Pete Seeger, whose recording Songs of the Lincoln Brigade introduced many of them to a broader audience. On that album you can hear Seeger singing songs in both English and Spanish:

Or how about the German communist volunteer and singer Ernst Busch doing the "Song of the United Front" in Spanish, English, French, and German:

(oh gosh my YouTube music recommendations are going to be so communist for a bit. That's all right, they've been quite Jacobite lately so that will balance it out.)

Of course, fascism in Spain didn't last forever, and today many singers and groups in Spain do perform and record the same songs. ... Including the International Brigade ones. (Unfortunately I can't track it down, so this may not be true to any extent at all, but I have read a remark somewhere [possibly in someone's liner notes?] that after the death of Franco, young people in Spain rediscovered these songs specifically through Pete Seeger's recordings...!)

So you can find the Catalan "Quartet Brossa" singing the Italian Bella Ciao:

Or the evidently Spanish-speaking "Coro Popular Jabalón" doing their best American English in the soldiers-complaint song "Quartermaster Store":

On the same album they have a song in Basque:

And so on and so on.

(You may have noticed Spain's minority languages, including Catalan and Basque, making a good showing here: that's no accident, those were evidently quite republican areas, as will not surprise you if you know anything about Franco's language policy.)

Anyway those are the main historical reasons I'm aware of why music from and about Spanish Civil War is so multilingual. Obviously my original claim that "almost nobody is ever singing in their native language" had an element of hyperbole - the Americans do sing songs in English (as do the Irish), the Spanish in Spanish, the Germans in German, and of course the Catalans in Catalan. But if you look for Spanish Civil War music, many of the "standards" you'll find are International Brigades songs, many others are Catalan as well as Spanish, so no matter what your native language is you will have plenty of songs that aren't in it.

And apparently you sing them anyway. Because, at least for the people making these records, it seems it's not about where you're from, or even whether your accent is any good, it's about standing side by side.