a-flyleaf.github.io

musichoard behemoth post

December 24, 2023

2023/12/24: This was originally a monthly notedump post, in a similar vein as two covering January and February, but for March.

It sat in my files, unpublished and messy as hell, until today. It’s still messy as hell, but I archived/replaced a bunch of links. Addendums prefaced with [12/24].

March

  • 1
    • ♪ Idioteque
    • art: MAR1/:)
      • In an effort to maybe slowly move away from deviantArt as a primary source (and since I usually if not always link the dA upload somewhere anyway), gonna link art as posted on my site by default, with dA as a fallback if I didn’t put it anywhere else. Still don’t plan on ceasing to use dA any time soon, if ever, but the site increasingly sucks (the psychic damage I take viewing it logged-out with no blockers….) so y’know.
  • 2
  • 4 ♪ High Class Bout, Suffer With Me, Fake You Out (via [12/24] since-deleted tweet. I don’t actually know why I linked this though because I’ve known about 21p, and by extension that last song, for years??)
  • 5 ♪
  • 6
    • a-flyleaf.github.io:
      • shuffled deprecated versions of major pages into an “oldpages” folder
        • includes layout test-pages
      • assorted backend improvements
      • new plaintext layout (you’re looking at it! very similar on the surface, granted, but it should be simpler for me to use and dark mode is less stark)
      • by extension, updated a bunch of pages:
        • blog
        • sitemap
        • privacy + colophon, which could probably be in the footer but I just recoded everything and don’t feel like doing it again
      • started overhauling the About
    • ♪ Sir Sly’s Gold, High, Ghost
    • ♪ proceeded to binge other Sir Sly music, didn’t like it as much as those three, but at one point (wasn’t paying attention to when) I was reminded of this unrelated bop: The Wheel (Is Turning Now), and I forget if I’ve rec’d the whole album alrady but I’ll do it again because it’s very good
  • 7: art: smad.mdp
  • 9
  • 10: art: whole lotta busts
  • 11
    • Solutions and Other Problems is a fun book and I vibe with its absurdist approach So Much
    • ♪ bruh???
  • 13
    • worked on the H20:HCL piano transcription again; draft #2! still not quite where I want it, need to play it a bit, but getting there >:3c
    • ♪ the artist Baths has some cool music; I’ve listened to two albums, Obsidian & Cerulean
    • also read some sobering-ass twitter threads in the evening, links & details below
  • 14
    • so fun fact a while ago I was trying to remember this one chill instrumental song that I found ???somewhere, at random, but all I had was the album art and nothing else. Today I just happened to be going through my saved Flight Rising scries (essentially a dragonmaker demo) and lo and behold, I apparently made one based on the dang song! Zero memory of doing that. Self-reminders are buried in the weirdest places.
    • ♪ friend rec: OST is Cool
  • 15 buncha ♪: Pavlov’s Daughter · Isolate · Megalovania · Sburban Jungle · “When You’re Gone” (full & acoustic ([12/24] that video seems to be gone now, RIP)) is another one of those songs I did not like on a first listen but kept going back to inexplicably · Never Get Used to People, meanwhile, was love at first listen
  • 16
    • ♪: “Roses”, remix & official
      • it dawns on me I think this music-rec thing was supposed to be like, songs I actually had on repeat as opposed to remembering “oh yeah, that exists,” playing once, and being done. on the other hand, a lot of these are songs that I did have on repeat at some point in the past. there’s a big “backlog” to get through here okay
    • on a wildly unrelated note, I don’t remotely go here but this is a good video essay, love me some good fandom nuance that also doesn’t turn around and shame the shit out of people who interpret it differently
  • 17 ♪ thank you random dragon description for reminding me of this cool song, based. also how the fuck did I find this, it was definitely during the ENA phase (even redrew the cover to commemorate it) but i can Not remember if I heard it in a fan animation or not and it is Irking Me
  • 18: read the graphic novel version of long way down at work; first of all, woof, that’s good. second, while it’s not thematically synonymous at all, it does remind me that you can say a lot in a literally limited space; nearly the whole thing takes place in one elevator ride. sometimes simpler is better.
  • 19: dragonotes post + assorted updates
    • ♪ evening music: Caravan Palace’s “Black Betty”
      • gotta say, it’s very weird intentionally discarding the quotation marks around song titles (the technically correct way to punctuate them, but since they mainly serve to distingush proper nouns from the surrounding text, I figure just having links suffices) but then using them again elsewhere (like here, where I wanted to designate that the song is a cover and thus included the artist name, and subsequently felt it appropriate to re-include the marks). makes this one feel wrong in comparison, y’know?
  • 20
  • 21: went outside! touched wood and dirt and grass in the real! fire is wack. I did not take photos because staring at open flames (and a rocky shoreline, incidentally) is probably the closest I will ever get to having a spiritual experience; It Soothes The Soul.
    • might say more on this later but as of typing this note it is nearly midnight and I have been banging away at JavaScript for roughly 6 hours straight >8V
  • 26: have been under the weather for a few days big F. indulged myself today with a personal minisite (will not be published) to compile assorted fic-thoughts—something I would normally use Google Docs for but fuck google y’feel. every day I am so grateful for markdown
  • 27 ♪ spontaneous earworm: Electric Twist
  • 28 ♪
    • going through some hrvatski music, this one stuck
      • which is a weird one to stick out because I don’t actually remember watching this movie?? I did, however, have a CD of assorted Disney film songs and this was one of them; always thought it was kinda neat/weird, stood out played alongside all the more Broadway-esque numbers
    • +wildly, wildly different tone but parents remembered this song and that intro is gonna be stuck in my head now
      • bonus: it’s a cover of a song from the 60s, apparently! gotta love that ~20–30-year nostalgia cycle
  • 30 Omori hrvatski real.

sobering-ass twitter threads

to link: the dreamwidth founder’s thread on cohost, and relatedly why this matters: thread 1 + thread 2

in general: search computer word, get results. may make you want to quit internet forever, which is a blessing and/or curse.

(this is mostly a separate section so I can warn for it properly because woof there is some heavy shit in the T&S thread)

[12/24] There are content warnings in the threads themselves; “thread 1” is the heaviest, with thread 2 intentionally summarizing to avoid the heavy subjects.

“Search computer word, get results” was referring to me searching various tech- and social-media-related keywords on this twitter and being enlightened. Not always in the best way, but it’s important stuff written by someone who’s been there.

There is some immediate mood whiplash happening with the next subheading, yes:

hrvatski???

am learning! is fun. deserves a few words.

[12/24] Nažalost, I did not get around to writing said words. Osjećam loše o tome, iako sad znam dva jezika, i mislim da to… speaks for itself! ;V

april.

anwyay this got bottlenecked to shit because I started making a bunch of major overhauls but lost steam midway through and haven’t picked up since :V oops. maybe uhh, I’ll just revert those for now and make minor changes instead….

[12/24] At this point I stopped even pretending to format things, so I’ve just… left them basically as-written. Why not.

dude oh my god it’s May

ok god forbid I start using this into another month but real quick. while I’m here. this song is good, the video is very good, the constant motion gave me some type of vertigo when I first watched it the other day but the song randomly occurred to me today (5/3) and broke the Brame/Omori earworm streak. My music tastes make sense and fit neatly into a quaint little box and all that.

anyway also omorisite updates happened but eh just go check the changelog, I’ll link those next time maybe. ([12/24] lol.) or uh, change up the entire thing here, I don’t know if this is worth it :V …which sounds depressing actually, but what I mean is like,

  • I do everything here to stare into a pool of my own ego, and maybe sometimes other people will get a kick out of it too
  • except if I’m not getting anything out of it then it won’t be done, which is a good and sustainable workflow
  • and that is why I haven’t updated my main site in like three months asdgjhsagjdshgsjdghsdgjsdsf

but yeah the song is good the video is great, real Utena vibes. I need to finish watching that eventually actually

. . .

5/9 caravan palace is good. that’s all
5/24 99% of my music lately has been either “Brame” or Omori… spontaneously got this stuck in my head though

random earworm: nilili mambo. the homestuck one. the vid will forever slap
and later: acnl day music. ahh, nostalgia

5/25 oh Björk homogenic is a neat album, that too
+after dark

5/26 feeling this. https://haleynahman.substack.com/p/146-the-problem-with-being-present

A few months ago, I started experimenting with taking fewer photos. It started with a moment of lucidity on, of all places, my yoga mat. I’d only just sat down when I noticed a golden ray of sunlight falling across a stack of books to my left. I reached for my phone camera instinctually, but it wasn’t there. Too humiliated to stand up and get it, I decided to just look instead.

Trite as it may sound, that light on those books presented me with an ordinary lesson about presence that, until then, I’d repeatedly failed to internalize. The photo I might have taken, however pretty, would have been useless compared to simply witnessing the beauty in the exact moment it was happening. That, right then, was its greatest purpose. Not as a memory, not as more detritus in my overstuffed camera roll. But simply a moment enjoyed. There was no need to hoard it. There was beauty everywhere. I could find more whenever I wanted.

it appeals very much to the person in me who wants to document everything (see: this monster of a file), and also to the person who was well aware i could’ve got my camera and shot the burning tree as it curled and singed, but just… eh. didn’t want to. it was nice to sit there and take it all in.

5/27 been reading more from that person, it’s good. found this through one of the end links https://www.gq.com/story/mary-h-k-choi-on-family-grief-and-love-modern-lovers, and it is also good. I love these works of nonfiction that are basically prose in their own right; the line is so thin anyway

5/28 oops

We document accordingly, obsessively. And implicit in this compulsion is the suspicion that ourselves and our lives are best understood at a remove, even a physical distance, the way someone else might experience us, rather than the way we experience ourselves.

https://haleynahman.substack.com/p/71-always-watching

The curse of fame as I understand it is that it only deepens your desire to be known, because the more strangers think they know you, the less known you feel.

Bruh. https://haleynahman.substack.com/p/82-what-im-telling-myself

5/28 also got My Nightmare randomly stuck in my head, went through the rest of this playlist and not for the first time… I do not remember this one [“The Gods Must Be Lying”] though and holy shit. so good (P.S. I Am An Island and Sweet are also old favorites)

5/30 along with phemiec, voices I am in love with

june…

6/5 it is Fascinating listening to a couple songs by Igorrr (contributor to the Brame album) and hearing like. similarities. instruments, riffs, motifs, from aforementioned album. what came first? does it sound less novel/unique when I realize they’re part of the usual repertoire? not sure how to feel about it tbh.
(songs in question: whatever’s playing on the videos on these two pages

update fuck it I’m just listening to the rest of Spirituality and Distortion (first link) now. singing in the first song huh
update2 I did not ([12/24] did not…?) because it was distraction, this is music I kinda need to just sit there and Take In… anyway, if you told me this song was a video game OST I’d be like “oh yeah sure. it’s an Earthbound-like right”

where the hell have I heard this one oh my god I definitely did, like, years ago. heck!!

6/6 finished the Igorrr album, it was… kinda eh, tbh? I liked the frenetic pace of the “Very Noise” tune actually, the rest is more vocal-y than I care for. also idk what to make of the fact the comments are like “most WTF-inducing music ever” and I’m like “yeah, the opera with the drums, we’ve all heard it”

6/12 Wasted Youth, still a good Tara song

6/20 saw a post about this website, it didn’t want to load 100% for me and my cocktail of content blockers but looking up the names that popped up was p fruitful; this slaps and this is funky
p.s. motherfucking piano… clenches fist….

not music but related: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=lGKlIJsz7bM < really cool look behind the scenes of music-making (ah, now I (maybe? slightly better?) understand how an album like Brame can use live instruments!), found via these nifty comments

6/21 fuck it, copying this from my personal notes:

https://exeggcute.tumblr.com/post/720521272554078209/the-great-reddit-api-meltdown-of-23 fascinating, fascinating fucking post, and deeply informative. feel like I’ll need it in the (maybe not so far) future, too. (even for discord itself, lmao.)
+follow-up: https://exeggcute.tumblr.com/post/720532019655950336/an-addendum


6/22 today I shared this beauty with a prijatelj and apparently it was his introduction to the entire song i. fuckign dgjshgdskvsndskdhsndvksdjs

7/5 could’ve sworn I recorded this when I found it but apparently not— this Chinese song got stuck in my head again! found via dance trend compilation, very cool

7/9 bless people who source shit you’re the real MVPs. https://sic-semper-hominibus.tumblr.com/post/722365987602694144/found-the-artists-name-in-the-notes-and-went, plus the song in the video

their music in general slaps actually
also I haaaaate soundcloud autoplay but this came up and also slaps so I will give the platform 0.25% shoutout for the intro. autoplay still sucks ass tho

7/12 keia still a Good. also discovered “slow motion” from an extremely cool animation WIP

7/13 comment-stalking this post because wehhhhh ([12/24] read: makes me go “;w;”, warms my cold dead heart). → https://faggotgamzee.tumblr.com/post/716529468496396288/to-add-on-the-algerian-point-and-other-north, → https://arabictranslations.tumblr.com/post/716236513670791168/so-i-was-listening-to-matwhashneesh-by-cairokee → very lovely song

7/15 also lovely, from the same album as above

August,,,

8/03 all but abandoned this note by now but this is a good fucking paragraph:

Advertising is the art of convincing weak – willed human beings to buy products they don’t need with money they don’t have. It’s a cynical, manipulative industry, where consumerism meets mass media in a matrimony of lies. It preys on our deepest desires, our most basic emotions, throwing away our time and money to give away to anonymous suits who already have plenty of both. Learning to advertise is learning how to psycholigically manipulate people for your own personal gain. It is for this reason that you must learn the trade. Respect the trade. For if you don’t know each and every trick that’s being played off you, then you’ll be just another sheep in this great big herd that is capitalist society.

https://kratzen.neocities.org/articles/2018-08/twenty-books-changed-my-life
this is the second time I’ve happened upon this person’s writings. they’re very good

+quote from a quote:

A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.

[12/24] to clarify: this snippet is on the page linked above, which is a list of book recs; that writer (kratzen) is quoting one of the books, Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

also yo shit typography’s on here, nice
[12/24] Practical Typography, a book that I’ve used a lot!

…hot fucking damn https://10kb.neocities.org/gallery/0015



[12/24] There! Done! You’re (read: I’m) free!!!!! aaaaaaaaaa