vass

did you know that they are capable of imitation? don't worry! apparently no one else does either, but i have personally overheard them doing terrible approximations of not only red-winged blackbird songs, but also rooster crowing, ring-necked pheasant squawking, and what i now believe to be an eastern meadowlark song (which i have captured on video, something about which no one gave a fuck!!)

they are supposed to be drawn to marshes with deep water, over which multiple females will weave nests in single male controlled territories of typically 1k to 6ksqft. the waters of this marsh are wading depth, and the males control micro-territories of what cannot be more than 500sqft each-- territories that they share neutrally with marsh wrens.

A great many people who crossed the same alligator spike pit moats as me told me it's wasn't that bad, and then casually revealed they were gifted grandpa's spike-proof suit and had alligator-charming lessons starting in toddlerhood, and mom's map of the spike layout to study. They thought this was normal, and genuinely believed they had navigated the alligator spike pit moat without an unusual amount of assistance.

As a corollary, the alligator spike pit moat does not, in fact, weed out unserious and/or terminally mediocre individuals, because many of those people have been gifted alligator-grappling tools and spike-resistant boots. Alligators and spikes deter a great many enthusiastic, hardworking, and talented people who don't have a bunch of fancy protective gear and extensive training in alligator spike pit navigation.

As a second corollary, I am very grateful for the unusual amount of assistance I received in crossing the alligator spike pit moat.

A disturbing number of people did, in fact, acknowledge that the alligator spike pit moat was intended to keep people like me away from people like them and loudly expressed their displeasure that I was not eaten by alligators. One of them used the word 'besmirch'.

An equally disturbing number of people have attempted to use my successful navigation of the alligator spike pit moat as proof that my kind are not being kept out on purpose-- if I navigated it, everyone else is clearly just being lazy. Many of these people seemed to hope that my adventure in the alligator spike pit moat would make me see their point of view re: the alligator spike pit moat being necessary to ensure meritocracy bootstraps were happening in a meritorious and bootstrappy manner. It did the opposite.

“A Fragment out of Time”, published in 1974. Kirk / Spock. page 1 page 2

Good parents forgive this debt. Bad parents expect it to be repaid, one way or another. The accepted currencies are varied and cryptic and might be mostly innocuous or they might be horrifically criminal.

Many families don’t realize that there is a debt until the child defaults on it somehow. That could be for any reason—the child simply fails to deliver on the parental investment by not adequately being the child they paid for.

[Image description: Horizontal rectangular graphic; the background is the Disability Pride flag, with adjoining red, yellow, white, aqua, and green stripes slanting together from the top left to bottom right corners on a dark gray background. White text in the center foreground says "Disability Pride: / Suggested Reading / Columbus State Library / library.cscc.edu."]

July is Disability Pride month, and that means it's time for a bigger, better, updated Disability Pride reading list!

A Disability History of the United States, by Kim E. Nielsen

Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist, by Judith Heumann

About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times, Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, editors

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and how to Be an Ally, by Emily Ladau

Disability as Diversity: Developing Cultural Competence, by Erin E. Andrews. Companion case study volume here.

Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, by Eli Clare

The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, by Elizabeth Barnes

Nothing about Us without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment, by James I. Charlton

The Problem Body: Projecting Disability in Film, Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotić, editors

Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, Nick Watson and Simo Vehmas, editors

My Wonderful Life as a Vegetable, Lars Feldballe producer/director

The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation, by Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames

Disability Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Other Personal Narratives, G. Thomas Couser and Susannah B. Mintz, editors

The Routledge Handbook of Disability Activism, Maria Berghs, Tsitsi Chataika, Yahya El-Lahib and Andrew K. Dube, editors

Black Disability Politics, Sami Schalk

Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life, by Alice Wong

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, Alice Wong, editor

From the Periphery: Real-Life Stories of Disability, by Pia Justesen

Young, Disabled and LGBT+: Voices, Identities and Intersections, Alex Toft and Anita Franklin, editors

Disability, Media, and Representations: Other Bodies, Jacob Johanssen and Diana Garrisi, editors

The Routledge Handbook of Disability Arts, Culture, and Media, Bree Hadley and Donna McDonald, editors

Occupying Disability: Critical Approaches to Community, Justice, and Decolonizing Disability, Pamela Block, Devva Kasnitz, Akemi Nishida, Nick Pollard, editors

Use our catalog to search for more titles on this topic!

@rpepperpotshipssciencebros please forgive me for this one

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.

Golp: a roundel purpure.

Roundels are circles in heraldry. They are named according to their color, which also has its own lingo. Let’s meet them!

Bezant: roundel or (gold) 🟡

Plate: roundel argent (silver) ⚪️

Torteau: roundel gules (red) 🔴

Pomme: roundel vert (green) 🟢

Hurt: roundel azure (blue) 🔵

Golp: roundel purpure (purple) 🟣

Pellet: roundel sable (black) ⚫️

you need NONE of that shit!!!!! there’s a website called beepbox.co. literally all you have to do is press things until it sounds a modicum of nice. it’s easy it’s free and it works on anything which has a browser because it’s a website.

if even ONE person starts making music bc of this post it will be worth it.

I'm gonna try and make music

Ableton has excellent free websites to learn the basics:

Learning Music

Learning Synths

You can learn basically everything you need on YouTube. I recommend:

Mercurial Tones Academy

Dan Worrall

Bthelick

A lot of your favorite artists, mainly in electronic music, likely have done track breakdowns, you can watch those to learn how they do things.

DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) ultimately all do the same things, and Cakewalk is a great FREE fully fledged one. Sure it has some issues, and doesn’t have many plugins included, but it works just fine. All the music I released so far was made there, before I made the jump to Ableton.

As for VST plugins:

Vital is an excellent free synth

Native Instruments Komplete Start is a good free collection of plugins

TDR Nova is a great free EQ

There’s a lot of others and I don’t wanna name everything I’m aware of here, but feel free to DM me for more (Or if you have any other questions and stuff too).

And as for samples, you can get a bunch of free ones at:

Cymatics

Ghosthack

Having good headphones is nice and what I’d recommend you invest in first once it comes to it, but even your current ones will probably be fine, mainly if you slap AutoEQ onto them to flatten the frequency response. And ultimately, music isn’t all about the mixing, the most important part is conveying an emotion.

Yeah, there is still quite the learning curve, I get that, though it’s also why it’s managed to hold me as a hobby for so long.

I do however have something of the exact opposite variety too, the most simple way to make music I know of, and a wonderful little semi-social experience, along the lines of the game Journey:

me: no live organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality

An idea I had for Blood of Eden propaganda/recruitment posters featuring some of our favorite guys - combo of digital-print cyberpunk graphic design style with oldschool Saturday Morning Post covers like you'd see Leyendecker paintings on

I was gonna post these ahead of tabling at a small con and selling prints of them but ended up not tabling because turns out grad school is hard