extrapenguin: Northern lights in blue and purple above black horizon. (Default)
([personal profile] extrapenguin Sep. 26th, 2025 10:13 pm)
Hi! This is my first [community profile] festivids and I am very excited! WIP letter alert!

Music-wise, I like things with female vocalists that have both a melody and a (danceable) beat, especially
  • dance pop (Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Britney Spears...)
  • symphonic metal (Oryad, Pythia, Xandria...)
  • power metal (Unleash the Archers, Battle Beast, Rexoria...)
  • whatever Madder Mortem and Charlotte Wessels are doing currently (no idea how to subgenre categorize either of them)
  • instrumentals in general

Music in languages other than English is welcome! I like knowing what they're singing about, so unless it's in English or Finnish, I'd like translated subtitles.

I generally don't vibe with folk, ballads, or rap.

In vids, I like women, women doing things, motion and motion matching, "thematic" vids/vids focusing on a theme, lyric matches, "danceability", humor/comedy, and weird/odd stuff. In general, if you're thinking "is this too bonkers for ExtraPenguin?" the answer is no.

I'm not too keen on diegetic audio, especially if it's on top of the lyrics.


Short films directed by 流云蕊 | Liu Yun Rui [UMBRELLA] [SAFETY]
Intro post by douqi, list of asian wlw short films (Ctrl+F for 流云蕊).

云泽传 | Legend of Yunze (TV) [SAFETY]
Carrd with links. Here I really love Jiang Zhaoyun and A-Ze's relationship! Also how Zhaoyun is a demon who's being good, even when everyone thinks demons are bound to be evil, and just that conflict/contrast going on.

双镜 | Couple of Mirrors (TV)
10×45 min, assassin lady trying to be a regular photographer × author lady in an abusive marriage. Yan Wei is my absolute blorbo and I'd love anything with her, whether her relationship with Xu Youyi or something thematic about how she's tried to escape her past but oops she still needs to pull out a gun, or her dealings with the justice system.

Oh and at some point I hallucinated a Yan Wei & Detective Jiang vid that had a song going "she's the one that got away / but maybe that's okay" and recontextualized it into a detective & criminal cat and mouse thing, so if that floats your boat, that as well!

华山论剑:东邪西毒 | Duel On Mount Hua: Eastern Heretic and Western Venom (TV 2025)
8×45 min. An adaptation of a standalone part of Legend of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong. I really like the action/fight scenes and would greatly enjoy just rolling around in them for the length of a vid. I really like Feng Heng, and also I think Ouyang Feng would make for a good comedy vid, with how he keeps getting into situations.

飞狐外传 | Side Story of Fox Volant (TV 2022)
40×45 min. An adaptation of Legend of the Flying Fox, one of Jin Yong's lesser known novels. Again, I really like how the action/fight scenes are choreographed! I would love something featuring/showcasing them. While the men's hairstyles are dire (Qing dynasty), the officials' hats are peak, so some sort of hat spotlight vid? Or something foregrounding the ever-present corruption. Or, like, a horse POV vid, since there are lots of horses present!

My blorbo here is Yuan Ziyi! I love how devoutly Buddhist she is. I also like Miao Renfeng.
mrissa: (Default)
([personal profile] mrissa Sep. 26th, 2025 12:12 pm)
 

Thirteen Swords That Made a Prince: Highlights From the Arms & Armory Collection, Sharang Biswas (Strange Horizons)

Biologists say it will take at least a generation for the river to recover (Klamath River Hymn), Leah Bobet (Reckoning)

Watching Migrations, Keyan Bowes (Strange Horizons)

With Only a Razor Between, Martin Cahill (Reactor)

And the Planet Loved Him, L. Chan (Clarkesworld)

Holly on the Mantel, Blood on the Hearth, Kate Francia (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

The Jacarandas Are Unimpressed By Your Show of Force, Gwynne Garfinkle (Strange Horizons)

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gorgon, Gwynne Garfinkle (Penumbric)

In Connorville, Kathleen Jennings (Reactor)

Orders, Grace Seybold (Augur)

Brooklyn Beijing, Hannah Yang (Uncanny)

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([personal profile] mrissa Sep. 25th, 2025 10:20 am)
 In May the subscribers of If There's Anyone Left got to read my short story, The Things You Know, The Things You Trust. Now it's free to read online! Go, read, enjoy!
yhlee: a stylized fox's head and the Roman numeral IX (nine / 9) (hxx ninefox)
([personal profile] yhlee Sep. 24th, 2025 09:32 pm)


Candle Arc #1, color version, at [community profile] candlearc just to keep it corralled. Note that it's viewer discretion advised on account of cuss words, violence, and hexarchate-typical awfulness.

UPDATED: Alternately: Candle Arc #1 on its own website at Candle Arc (candlearc.com).

I have the Ka-Blam setup in progress so fingers crossed I can make it available via print-on-demand at Indyplanet in the nebulous future, depending on how orchestration homework is going. /o\

Preview & update notifications at Buttondown. (This is an email newsletter, but it's archived online. You do not need to sign up.)
hrj: (Default)
([personal profile] hrj Sep. 24th, 2025 09:30 am)
Perhaps the odd thing is that my overall reading patterns *haven't* changed that much in retirement, although I do have more time for it. A substantial amount of my reading continues to be non-fiction for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, and that continues. In fact, I have to fight the temptation to spend most of my productive time working on that. But today I wanted to talk more about fiction.

Pre-retirement, my pattern was to have an audiobook going for commuting and my lunchtime bike ride (though bike rides were also for podcasts, since they fit better). If an audiobook really grabbed me, I'd find excuses to do things (like house or yard work) to continue listening. I generally also had one print book in progress at any given time, but they took a long time to finish because I didn't have a fixed context for reading. (Sometimes I'd read them during the break in my weekend bike rides.) Despite doing most of my buying via ebooks, they mostly just piled up because by the time I was done with work and other things, I didn't want to stare at a screen any more.

So what's changed? Well, for one thing, I cancelled my Audible subscription as part of paring down fixed expenses while I get settled into my new budgeting. But I decided it was well past time to actually get a local library card, and now I'm discovering the joys of Libby for audiobooks. I can't necessarily get the instant gratification (and there are plenty of audiobooks they just don't have), but I always have something going. And the borrowing logistics mean that once I've borrowed an audiobook, I make sure to prioritize it.

Print books aren't making any more of a dent on my time than they did previously, in part because my bike ride breaks are pretty much all LHMP all the time. So consumption is about the same.

Ebooks are getting a bit more of my attention. I'm trying to keep the iPad with the books (long story, two iPads for different purposes) charged up so that I can grab it when I'm in the mood. I'm gradually capitulating to the need to track about four different ebook apps, since Apple Books can get weird about showing me non-Apple books that I've side-loaded via the laptop. (It's not all-or-nothing. Some non-Apple books show up on my phone but not the iPad. And some do show up on the iPad.)

That brings us to reading during my recent New Zealand trip. Part of the trip plan was to include lots of relaxation time, and I cued up a bunch of books I'd been wanted to get to. One thing I found (when giving myself time and context for reading) was that I want to be more hard-nosed about DNFing when a book just isn't working for me. And one of the things that more and more doesn't work for me is books with blah prose.

There were several of those during the NZ trip. Stories that had a good premise, and themes that should be appealing to me, but the writing was just...not good. Not bad. Not awful. Just not *good*. Stories where if felt like the author was explaining the story to me rather than telling it. Stories where there were too many WTF moments in the plotting. Stories where the prose was relentlessly pedestrian. And because I started half a dozen novels in quick succession on the trip, it was easy to compare the ones that *did* work for me. Books with singing prose. Books with solid plot and character work. Books where I didn't want to get up from the couch until I'd finished them.

I need to get caught up with my "things I've read" posts, which will have more specifics.
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extrapenguin: Zhu Jiu from Guardian enthusing about his self-insert RPF (zhu jiu enthused)
([personal profile] extrapenguin Sep. 23rd, 2025 09:18 pm)
So I'm (kinda) into sewing – wearables so far include one lined sleeveless A-line dress (made of velvet, because no-one told me velvet was a tough fabric lol) and one pair of pleated pants. I decided to make my own body blocks so I can draft my own things/alter crotch curves etc of other patterns to fit me. Today I decided to test out the bodice block.

expectation: I will have to do at least 1 round of alterations to get my bodice block to fit properly
reality: perfect block with optimal wearing ease on the first try????

So I now have a woven tank top made of a nice sky blue clearance bedsheet. I think I'll bind the armscyes, neckline, and bottom in bias binding and then have a wearable for next summer! I just need to buy a bunch of buttons for the closure (I'll put it in a side seam) and figure out a neckline. Currently, as befits a block, it's jewel, but I need to get it over my head so I'll need at least a keyhole and small button at the back...
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
([personal profile] jazzfish Sep. 22nd, 2025 03:22 pm)
I Am An AI Hater: "I am not here to make a careful comprehensive argument, because people have already done that. If you're pushing slop or eating it, you wouldn't read it anyway. You'd ask a bot for a summary and forget what it told you, then proceed with your day, unchanged by words you did not read and ideas you did not consider."

How to not build the Torment Nexus: "I guess what I'm saying is that it's getting close to impossible to be in this industry -- at the moment -- without being on the Torment Nexus Team. And lest you think 'at the moment' is load-bearing... well, I wouldn't lean too hard on it. I don't see shit improving too soon."

How to Tell the Difference Between a Lone Wolf and a Coordinated Effort by the Radical Left: McSweeney's, no humour beyond the obvious repeated dark variety, plenty of links and documentation.

And, not about the present and thus more cheerful reading, Your Review: Joan of Arc: "This is, then, an agnostic's review of the evidence for Joan of Arc - artillerist, fraudbuster, confirmed saint, and Extremely Documented Person." Fascinating reading.
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
([personal profile] yhlee Sep. 19th, 2025 07:19 am)
Ah, the art yarn of it all. :3

handspun yarn

2-ply from these singles:

lizvogel: What is this work of which you speak? (Cat on briefcase.) (Work)
([personal profile] lizvogel Sep. 18th, 2025 08:51 pm)
(Copied from comments elseweb, because I want to be able to find this should it happen again.)

I don't deliberately choose stories to stretch my writing ability; I just write what catches my interest. But sometimes, it seems, stretchy sneaks up on you.

The current WIP is definitely of the snuck-up-on-me kind of stretchy.

Some of it is simply that I'm having to be more analytical than is my wont. For example, I need a bigger cast for the ending to work, so I'm having to deliberately create characters, when normally they just wander into my head fully-formed. I'm trying to balance the demographics, because while I don't care, my MC would. And I'm measuring out their introductions so that I don't end up dumping a whole horde of people in at once Because The Plot Said So, which means I'm watching the pacing/structure a lot more carefully, when usually I'll just do things whenever it feels right.

There's also a lot more threads in play than I anticipated for something as surface-simple as "man survives Apocalypse". I wouldn't go so far as to call them all plot threads, but they're definitely concepts in play throughout the novel. So I have to keep the theology discussions balanced against the practical necessities, and time them so that the one supports or feeds off of the other. I introduced an additional outside threat that I planned to do more with, ended up dropping, and am going to have to weave back in PDQ before it becomes a broken promise to the reader. There's a character with a Secret, who spends the first two-thirds of the book saying things that everybody takes one way, but that the character and I know mean something else entirely. (That part's been fun; cue evil author cackle of glee.) I'm having to do more set-up than I'm used to for the ending, because none of the characters know what's coming so none of them are actively working toward it, but several of them are unknowingly doing things that will contribute to it. Having to hide the plot from all the characters is definitely a new thing for me.

Looking at it like this, none of these things are supremely stretchy for me (except maybe hiding the plot from the characters). But trying to do a whole bunch of moderately-stretchy things at the same time definitely adds up. And here I thought I just had a nice little trying-not-to-die-in-a-devastated-world story. (No, seriously, I thought this one was going to be relatively easy.)

It's definitely taking longer, too. Not so much in time (I'm always slow) but in word count. I'm at 80,000 words right now; my natural length is usually 80-90,000. This sucker's got at least 30K more words to go, maybe more, and I've been saying that for at least the past 10,000 words now. The more I work on it, the farther from the end I get. So the little voice in the back of my brain saying "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" is not helping.

And of course all this is coming to a head at about the two-thirds point, which is where I usually bog down on a novel anyway. I know what happens, I don't care any more, can rocks just fall and everybody dies? This has nothing to do with the quality of the story and everything to do with the writer, but it's hard enough to slog through even when the path forward is relatively, er, straightforward. When I have to keep jumping between multiple paths and keeping them all in sync and this is hard work, dammit, it's awfully easy to decide the yardwork is a higher priority.

hrj: (Default)
([personal profile] hrj Sep. 18th, 2025 01:39 pm)
I've posted the birdwatching report from my New Zealand trip on my Alpennia blog (https://alpennia.com/blog/new-zealand-birding). The non-bird parts to come.

Today's rhythm was thrown off by the need to check in at 11:30 on my potential jury duty service. Which also meant that when I went online to set up an optometry appointment, I didn't think I could commit to the "earliest possible" slot next Tuesday, with the next options starting in late October. And then when I checked in and found I was excused from jury duty, that next Tuesday slot had been snapped up.

It became clear to me on the NZ trip that I really needed to update my vision prescriptions, though in part this was because I was doing a lot more close-distance reading than usual and it became clear that one of my eyes has drifted more than the other. Then coincidentally, yesterday I got a note from Kaiser saying that my current glasses prescription was about to expire (it's been two years) and I should make an appointment.

But anyway, since I didn't want to go off on the bike this morning because of the check-in, I wrote up my birding notes. And now I'm thinking that since my routine is already off, I could just go off script entirely for the rest of the day. (Yes, yes, I have a fixed routine in retirement. What can I say?) Maybe I'll do something wild and crazy like pick rose hips. I have three or four bushes that have a lot of hips--enough to do something interesting with, anyway--and it might be fun to try some comparisons.
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jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
([personal profile] jazzfish Sep. 18th, 2025 09:30 am)
marseille, ochre, Lacoste )

Next: return to Paris, mostly cathedrals, and home.
extrapenguin: Woman in pre-Tang Dynasty official's garb reads officially. (xia dong reads)
([personal profile] extrapenguin Sep. 16th, 2025 09:54 pm)
As we all know, the ancient Greeks and Romans had a 7-day week, where they named the days Moonday, Marsday, Mercuryday, Jupiterday, Venusday, Saturnday, and Sunday. The Romance languages mostly preserve this (except they call Sunday Lordsday, dies Dominica), but turns out that the Germanic languages have the exact same paradigm (except for Saturday): Mániday, Týrsday, Óðinsday, Thorsday, Frīgsday, Washingday, Sonnaday. Máni is the personification of the Moon, Týr a god of combat (like Mars), Odin/Woden a psychopomp (like Mercury), Thor the god of thunder (like Jupiter), Frīg as Venus was known as Frīg's star, and the Sun is, well, the Sun. Though note that English has Saturday in a closer Romance loan, rather than a descendant of laugardagur (launderday?).

Anyway, that's neat, and you probably already knew that. However! I encountered the Japanese 月曜日, and saw the 月 and thought "Huh, Monday is Moonday in Japanese as well? What a coincidence."

Not a coincidence at all, actually! Turns out the Chinese discovered the planet-named 7-day week in the 4th century AD, whence it was transmitted to Japan before 1000 AD and used for astrological purposes before being promoted to the official week naming system as part of Westernization. Thus modern Japanese has 月曜日, 火曜日, 水曜日, 木曜日, 金曜日, 土曜日, 日曜日, where 月 and 日 are the Moon and the Sun, and the days between named for the planets, each of which is associated with a Chinese classical element: Mars with fire 火, Mercury with water 水, Jupiter with wood 木, Venus with gold 金, and Saturn with earth 土. Chinese has replaced them with numbered days, Week 1 Week 2 etc (though Sunday is still 周日), but in Japanese, they remain. So if you're ever going WTF at the Japanese (or Korean!) names of the week, just blame the Ancient Greeks!
 Guess what I’ve been up to? Yes! It’s a novella! It’s the story of an ex-harpy, her harpy ex-girlfriend, and some extremely opinionated weaponry. Pastries! Operettas! Complicated friendships! All in one conveniently sized volume (or file)!

Seriously, very excited, friends.


 

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([personal profile] mrissa Sep. 16th, 2025 06:53 am)
 

Karen Babine, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo. Babine's take on both camping and more generally living as a single woman is particularly interesting because she is very much not solo most of the time in this book--this is a book that is grappling with her roots, her family, and engaging with her current family. It paints a picture of a life that can be satisfying without fitting prior molds--and our demographics are such that there are a lot of tiny details that really resonated with me.

Angeline Boulley, Sisters in the Wind. This is the third YA thriller about Native issues in the US, centering around the same families and clusters of characters. Boulley is writing them to try to be stand-alone but interwoven, and I'd like to see how someone who hadn't read the earlier volumes felt about how well this succeeded. I did read the earlier volumes, and I felt like there was quite a lot of "here's an update on someone you already know" going on here, and like the balance of that with the narrative at hand was a bit off. I also think she's set herself a very hard task, because when the real life issues you're writing about genuinely produce people who behave like cartoon villains, you don't want to sanitize them into something more understandable, and yet then you're stuck with the people who behave like cartoon villains. It's a tough problem. So I still found this worth reading, but I felt like the earlier volumes were stronger in some ways.

A'Lelia Bundles, Joy Goddess: A'Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance. I picked this up from the "new books" shelf in the library, and I fear it's one of those books where the author had a reasonably good bio of a famous ancestor in her, and she wrote that already (a bio of Madam C.J. Walker) and has gone on to what is clearly a labor of love writing about her famous ancestors but doesn't rise to be nearly as interesting to me as the events and subjects on the periphery of the book. Probably mostly recommended for people with a special interest in this era/location.

Martin Cahill, Audition for the Fox. My copy of this arrived early, but it's out now, I think? Interesting take on gods and their relationship with humanity, a fun fantasy novella.

Emilie A. Caspar, Just Following Orders: Atrocities and the Brain Science of Obedience. This is a fascinating book by a neuropsychologist who has not only done the more standard kind of campus studies into obedience and the variables that affect (or, apparently, in many cases do not affect) it but has also done a lot of interviews and various kinds of brain imaging (fMRI and EEG primarily) on groups of people who could reasonably be described as the foot soldiers of genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda. Caspar's willingness to admit which things she does not know is only one of the things I find refreshing about her work. She's also willing and able to engage with these interviewees on the subject of stopping either themselves or others from committing similar acts, what factors might be important there. This is not a book with all the answers but I'm really glad she's out there asking the questions.

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Reread. The curious thing about this reread is that it's so smoothly written, it's such a pleasant and easy read, that it was startling to notice how little momentum this book has. Each chapter is a lovely reading experience if you like that sort of thing! (You've seen the number of 19th century novels I read. Of course I like that sort of thing.) But also each chapter is a conscious decision to have more of it, because there's very little of either plot or character pushing forward in any way.

Brandon Crilly, Castoff. Discussed elsewhere.

Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Joy Is My Middle Name. Only a handful of these poems really resonated with me, but the ones that did really resonated with me, which is an interesting experience to have of a poetry collection.

Georges Duby, France in the Middle Ages: 987-1460. This is largely about the evolutions of the concepts and theoretical bases of power in French society in this era, and was really interesting for the things it bothered to examine in that way--where and when and how the Roman Catholic church got involved in various life milestones, for example, generally later than one might think while living in a world so shaped by those processes that they may seem obvious. Worth having. Did not hate Philip Augustus enough but is that even possible.

Xochitl Gonzalez, Anita de Monte Laughs Last. I found this harrowing in places, because I am auntie age, so the story of young women making themselves smaller and less interesting for men has my auntie heart wailing "OH BABY NO DON'T DO IT" without, of course, being able to do one darn thing about it. Do they come through the other side from that behavior: well, what is the title, really, it's not a spoiler to say yes. More concretely: this is about a murdered (fictional) Latina artist in the 1980s and an art history student in the late 1990s putting the pieces together. Most of it is not about the putting the pieces together in any kind of thriller/mystery sense. If you're used to that pacing, this pacing will strike you as very weird. Mostly it's about the shapes of their lives. I liked it even when I was reading it between the cracks between my fingers.

Guy Gavriel Kay, Written on the Dark. I feel like the smaller scale of this bit of fantasized history doesn't serve his type of writing well--there's not the grand sweep, and he's not going to turn into a painter of miniatures at this stage of his career. I also--look, I know he's writing these things as fantasy, so he's allowed to change stuff, I just feel like if a character is still obviously Joan of Arc I'm allowed to disagree with his take on Joan of Arc, which I do, on basically every level. Ah well. If you like Kay books, this sure is one all the same.

T. Kingfisher, Hemlock and Silver. I was mildly disappointed in this one. The mirror magic was creepy, but the romance plot felt pro forma to me, some of the plot beats more obvious than a reinterpreted fairy tale novel would strictly require. Of course she can still write sentences, and this was still an incredibly quick read, it just won't make my Favorite T. Kingfisher Books Top Three.

Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners. Reread. This title could also have matched up with The Book of Love but definitely not, not, not vice versa. This is not a book of love. It's a book of disorientation and weirdness. Which I knew going in, but having been here before doesn't make it less like that.

Alec Nevala-Lee, Collisions: A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs. Look, I can't explain to you why Alec, who seems like a nice guy, has chosen a career path that could be described as "writing biographies of nerds Marissa would not want to have lunch with." But he does a good job of it, they're interesting books and manage to learn a lot about--even understand--their subjects without falling the least bit in love with their subjects. This one is Luis Alvarez. Did a lot of interesting things! Also I went into this book with the feeling that even an hour in his company would be more than I really wanted, and I did not come out of it with any particle of that opinion altered.

Lyndal Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War. An account of a really interesting time, illuminating of things that came after, somewhat repetitive.

Vandana Singh, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories. Reread. Yes, the stories here were also satisfyingly where I left them, science fictiony and vivid.

Travis Tomchuk, Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the US, 1915-1940. This is actually a book about Italian anarchists in Canada that recognizes that there was a lot of cross-border traffic, so it also looked at those parts of the US that directly affect Canada--Detroit-Windsor, for example. Lots of analysis on Italian immigrants' immigration experiences either as caused by or as causing their radicalism. Interesting stuff but probably not a good choice My First History of Early Twentieth Century Radicalism.

Natalie Wee, Beast at Every Threshold. It is not Wee's fault that I wanted more beasts. Poets are allowed to be metaphorical like that. I did want more beasts, but what is here instead is good being itself anyway.

Fran Wilde, A Catalog of Storms. This was my first reading of this collection but not my first reading of the vast majority of stories within it. This is the relief of a collection by someone whose work I enjoy, knowing that each of the stories will be reliably good and now I have them in one spot, hurrah, glad this is here.

yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
([personal profile] yhlee Sep. 16th, 2025 04:02 am)
behold, a spammer

A particularly hilarious example of low-effort spammer/scammer.

Seriously considering how much spam I could effortlessly screen out if I set up my email to automatically delete ANYTHING with the word "Amazon" in it that isn't on a very small (like, a half-dozen people small) whitelist of family and close friends.

ETA #1 (2025-09-23): Ah, more spammers. Let's now add automatic deletion of ANYTHING with the word "Goodreads" in it as well! Blissful quiet.
I got my COVID booster today at the local Massachusetts CVS store; this time around, it was in the in-store Minute Clinic rather than at the main pharmacy/vaccination counter.

Very easy online signup this time around, with plenty of same-day timeslots available. The signup form had a single "are you eligible for this vaccine y/n?" checkbox; no need for us under-65s to elaborate which official risk factors are applicable.

Very quick appointment as well: in, jab, and out. The nurse-practitioner wasn't masked, alas; however, they were running air filters in the little examining room.

Another win for Team Moderna.
(cross-posted: [community profile] communal_creators)

earlier:
- part 0: preliminaries
- part 1: brief demo: engraving software (Dorico)



Brief walkthrough of the start of a fake piano sketch in Cubase Pro that I'll build into a hybrid orchestral piece using MIDI and VSTs. I don't claim this is good music, just something for demonstration purposes and to talk through some of the technical details. This is musically unexciting but covering DAW basics will make the later hybrid orchestra bits easier to understand, hypothetically.

(Sorry, the audio recorded in mono; I will look at my audio interface settings again.)

For those curious about my usual style(s) of music, my music reel.
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