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howtomusicmajor reblogged
hivs
why does this whole scene look & sound like a YTP
This is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
“Why is he staring at me like that? I don’t like it”
is this… a Mozart shitpost
Yes
BBC animated opera - the magic flute
Source: maoh
howtomusicmajor reblogged
So initially I'm watching without audio, cause "oh cool, some pole dancing". But turn the fucking audio on
Do you know how hard it is to do this while standing still.
Do you know how hard it is to do this while doing something incredibly physically demanding.
Sound on.
So shook that I recognized them! That's Khadija Mbowe, a brilliant video essayist on youtube. Here's a link to their channel. They're brilliant and compassionate. Go check them out!
Do they have seven lungs oh my GOD
howtomusicmajor reblogged
I've seen this before, but it's been years and it just came across my Twitter in its dying days. The words are from a favorite author of mine, Maggie Stiefvater, and they are the words I most need to hear when it comes to dealing with chronic pain and illness. I didn't need this the first time I saw it, six years ago. I need it now. Maybe you do, too.
Sorry bout breaking your dash :3 just wanted to share the boop 😼😸
No no no don't be sorry, this is Incredibly Funny
So far @mathamota has booped me at least 190 times. But my notifications broke. So now this is all I see:
boop
howtomusicmajor reblogged
Rules For Making Art
- You can quit. If you want to quit, if you explicitly want to quit, you can. You must never forget that. It is not a negative, it is not a penalty, it is not a failure. Your life is yours to live. The amount of time spending art is yours to choose.
- If you do not explicitly want to quit, you cannot. You can rest. You can rest as long as you like.
- But unless you say, to your self, in a quiet moment, "I do not want to do this" then you keep going.
- You can rest as long as you want.
- Months. Years. Decades.
- It doesn't matter. The art is there when you get back. It doesn't expire.
- You're alive? It's still in you.
- Skills can be relearned. All of them. New skills can be added.
- You should rest.
- It isn't a need, it is a demand. It is maintenance, it is itself part of the art because it is part of being alive and being alive is part of the art.
- There is no penalty for slowness.
- The benefits of speed are vastly outweighed by the hidden costs: wear and tear on machinery, your body, your mind. You think these are gossamar costs because they are out of sight, out of mind.
- Until they are not.
There is no penalty for slowness, the benefits to speed are ephemeral and difficult to calculate, resting is not a need it is a requirement.
- Your art is yours. Your life is yours. It can be big, it can be small, it can be both. It can be cheap, it can be expensive, it can range between the two.
- The audience brings to the table their wants, their needs, their curiosity.
- The audience does not dictate the art.
- You do not dictate the audience.
This is a collaboration. Both sides are equal, artist and audience. This keeps your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds.
- With fire, I recommend making art that you think should exist, but doesn't yet. That's the stuff, that's the best stuff.
- Weigh the costs. Financial, social, physical, mental, spiritual, temporal. Constantly. Is this what you want? Are you following your heart? This is not a loaded question. It is spoken softly. I speak this to you as softly as I would a lover who has fallen asleep in an uncomfortable position.
- If you can't make what you want, where can you reduce scope? Where can you increase time? Can you make it smaller, can you make it less elaborate? Take longer time to do it?
- Can you make something else entirely?
- Can you keep this idea in idea form while you work on something else?
Weigh the costs. An unrealized dream left to dust because it was too hard, too expensive, preventing you from making a realized dream, is worthless.
- Make it small.
- Make it simple.
- Review the scope. You want to make a widget. I ask you softly, do you want to make this widget? Not something else?
- Make it smaller than that.
- Make it simpler than that.
- Review the scope. You want to make a fidget. I ask you gently, if you pursue this path it will cost you much, would you be as satisfied if you made smaller things in greater quantity?
When you feel like quitting, ask yourself with the clarity of cold water on a hot day. Hot water on a cold day. Do you actually want to quit or do you need to rest? Are you not resting because the cost of resting feels like giving up?
- There is no giving up.
- Failure doesn't exist.
- You either want to do this, and do.
- You either want to do this, and do it simpler, smaller.
- You either want to do this, and rest for awhile, so you can gather resources to do it later. Mental, physical, financial, social, spiritual.
- You either want to do this, and plan alternatives, break it apart and do other things first, work up to the grand vision, rescope the grand vision, remix it, shift it around.
- Or you don't.
- And if you don't? If you truly don't? Then don't force it.
- Live your life doing literally anything else. That's great too. Equally. The entire point of being alive is to fill up the well of your soul. There are infinite paths.
If you want to make the thing? Make the thing. Maybe it's great. Maybe it is objectively terrible. Most likely it is somewhere on that spectrum.
- Did you enjoy it?
- Then it was worth it.
- That's literally all that matters.
- Everything else is secondary.
- Quality is secondary.
If you make things publicly? Quality is quaternary. Here is the order of priority. I'll spell it out. I believe this with my entire soul.
- Your enjoyment
- The enjoyment of your friends
- The enjoyment of people who don't know who see it
- The quality of the piece itself
Maybe it wins awards. Maybe it's in publications, maybe museums. I've had work win awards, be published in books, shown in museums. I have stuff you've seen if you've shopped in the grocery store in the United States sometime in the last 25 years or so. And far broader places.
That's great. Resources to keep going.
Secondary.
I love making art.
If you do, too, I hope you make art. If not, that you're resting. And if doing neither, I hope you rest until you it's art time again.
Cheers my fellows.
I hope we all make it.
howtomusicmajor reblogged
I teach a lot of undergrads these days. About 3 years ago, I started dedicating a full two hours early every semester to a lecture and discussion about the history of the concept of plagiarism, because I was so annoyed that my students were walking into my classroom with the ironclad belief that they weren't plagiarizing when they were. Sure, the university had some official plagiarism guidelines that they could hypothetically read in a code of conduct somewhere, but they didn't. All they had was a vague memory of some teacher in Grade 8 telling them 'don't copy and paste from wikipedia' and a little learning from experience afterwards.
My hypothesis (which I was delighted to find is shared by Brian Deer, the journalist who broke the Wakefield story and who was the source Illuminaughti plagiarized in the hbomberguy video) is that the rise of automatic plagiarism checkers meant that, in the minds of many students, the formerly more abstract concept of plagiarism ('passing someone else's work off as your own') became a more concrete concept operationalized by the plagiarism checker. Under this concept, a text is plagiarized if (and, implicitly, only if) it is detected as plagiarism by the plagiarism checker. I have spent many hours with students sobbing in my office after I told them that their essays were plagiarized, and they all say that they thought changing the words around was sufficient to make it not plagiarized. Maybe some of them were lying for sympathy, maybe they all were, but I see no reason to not take them at their word. They think that what they're doing is dubious (hence the shame) but they don't think it falls under what they take to be the definition of plagiarism - the thing they can face sanction from the university for. They need to have it pointed out to them that there has been plagiarism for a lot longer than there have been automatic 'plagiarism checkers' and that as their professor, I'm the only plagiarism checker they really need to be concerned about.
It's really easy for me to get frustrated about this. It's frustrating to me that the American public high school system (the source of the majority of my students) has failed to prepare them to think about information, facts, and where they come from. It's frustrating that students can't be arsed to read the university's code of conduct and that the only way I know they have is if I read it straight to their faces. It's very frustrating to see the written scholarly word, a medium to which I have dedicated no small part of my life, treated like it's not worth anything. I'm frustrated to know that most students are not in my class, or in the class of someone else prepared to teach this lesson, so they'll go through their whole lives thinking that an uncited light paraphrase is enough to be worthy of credit. I'm frustrated that people with such a lax attitude towards information are my fellow voters. I once read a real fucking academic essay that was submitted for grades that cited a long quote from Arthur Conan Doyle that, when I traced it, was actually a quote from a fucking TJLC blog. That one isn't frustrating, I guess, that's just funny. It's not all bad.
I'm glad for the hbomberguy video. I hope it will make it easier to convince my students in future. It's too bad he didn't go into the academic context, but it's not like he was short on things to talk about already.
But this is a more general problem than just the video essay context shows. If we're not careful, the very concept of plagiarism can get eroded. I'm not a linguistic prescriptivist, either! If enough people start taking this new concept as plagiarism, that will be what it becomes. I think a world in which that notion of plagiarism is the relevant one would be a worse world. Don't let people erode the idea of credit. You're going to want it later.
@venus-light I hope you don't mind me responding to you here. I have no intention of killing you! And if I went around killing people for this kind of misunderstanding, I'd have to kill a lot of my students, which I suspect my employer would not like. This is a really common problem. I'm glad the video helped, and I too hope you're not the only person it helps.
It sounds like you have a much better grasp on this now, but I want to take this opportunity to expand on the point a bit. I'm home sick from work today and not in a position to do anything but read and write, so I'm going to write a bit about plagiarism in university essays, and what I think is the best way for an undergraduate to avoid it. I've addressed it to you, because you're the one who replied, but this is really for any undergraduate who happens to be reading it.
The common pitfall that people fall into when thinking of plagiarism is thinking of it as the violation of some discrete set of rules. Thou shalt cite thy sources. Thou shalt not copy and paste. Thou shalt format thy citations according to the divine command of the Chicago Manual of Style (17th Edition). Rules like that. Trouble is, that approach can only ever be so useful. There's a lot of contextual variation when it comes to the question of how much paraphrasing is appropriate - for instance, an assignment that's just asking you to summarize a particular text will have a lot of paraphrasing from one source in it, and that's not a problem. What will serve you better than specific rules is a more general heuristic.
Let's zoom out a bit and ask a larger question: what's the point of a college humanities essay? Why do we professors make students do them? It's certainly not for our benefit - they're difficult and time-consuming to grade - and we certainly know that students don't like them. It's not because we want to be informed of facts, or even because we want to make sure you have command of facts. In-class testing is a way more effective way to establish whether or not you have command of relevant facts, and it's also a much easier method to grade. So, an essay is doing something different.
The point of a college essay is to give you an opportunity to practice joining a scholarly discussion. We don't just want to see that you've read parts of the existing discussion, we want you to try to add your own voice to it. That's why professors will often ask for a minimum number of different sources in an essay - if you have to synthesize many voices and build them into a coherent body of text, you'll probably end up offering some authorial insight of your own along the way (in a way, this is what Somerton could have been doing, had he been less lazy. There is a real skill in synthesizing and comparing disparate sources!). Your job in an essay is not merely to use sources, but to judge them. If you find two sources that conflict, you get to explain which you think is in the right (if either). If you think two seemingly different perspectives can be put into productive dialogue with each other, you get to say so. And if you think that everyone you've read is wrong, actually, you absolutely get to say so. That's how academics treat each other, and that's the point of an essay. We want you to try to be a historian or a philosopher or a literary critic for a few days (yes, a few. I know you think you can do it in one. Everyone thinks that and everyone's wrong).
Often when I tell students this they respond with a kind of deference - after all, they're not experts, but the people they're reading presumably are. Who are they to judge? And that's true! Students are definitionally not experts. We're not expecting you to be. If you miss something that anyone who's gone through grad school would know about, that's fine. We know that's going to happen. It takes years in grad school to achieve mastery of the canon. It's okay to not already have expertise when we're trying to help you achieve it! Deference to expertise makes sense in other contexts, like when you're writing for the public, but it's not what is being asked of you in a university essay. Gaining expertise requires you to practice thinking like an expert - not just learning, but judging. Reading broadly in the relevant subject is vital, of course, but it's only half the battle. The other half comes from you. The university essay is a safe space to try to figure out what the part that comes from you sounds like.
This may be a surprise to hear, but I actually still remember quite a lot of specific student papers years after I graded them. And that's because I remember what specific students brought to their papers. I got to see them learning that they could intervene in a discussion - that they could bring their own judgement to the table. That their voice could matter. This is one of the great privileges of teaching.
It may feel like we've come a long way from plagiarism, but we haven't. Because this is why plagiarism in education actually matters. In assigning you an essay, I am handing you a microphone and asking what you want to say. I'm not interested in hearing what someone else has said. If you only give me a bunch of stuff paraphrased from elsewhere, there's a real sense in which you just haven't done the assignment, because you haven't said anything. That's the same problem that the youtube plagiarists have - in their rush to talk as much as possible, they say nothing. What does Illuminaughti actually think about Wakefield? What insight does a self-proclaimed Internet Historian have about the tragic tale of Floyd Collins? Somerton mashes up a tonne of different people's writing, but the different people think different things - who does he think is right? We don't know. They said nothing, and then deceived us into watching them say nothing. What a waste of time.
That's the heuristic. That's the thing that will help you avoid plagiarism in the future. Be proud of what you have to say, and don't miss the opportunity to say it! Indicate clearly where you're drawing on other people, not just for their benefit, but for yours - so that it's absolutely clear that your words are your own. You have thoughts worth hearing about, and this is one of the few times in life where you can be sure that at least one person is going to hear about them. And if you can look at your essay and know that it says what you wanted to say, then you don't need to worry about plagiarism anymore. You'll know it's yours.
If you've read this far, thank you for indulging me in my little speech. I hope the end of the semester treats you well, and good luck with your future studies.
I think if any professor or teacher at any point in my life had just simply said point-blank "I'm not asking for the facts, I'm asking you to join the discussion," my early life writing academic papers would have gone a hell of a lot differently and been a lot more enjoyable.
howtomusicmajor reblogged
This is one of the best running gags in cinematic history
howtomusicmajor reblogged
kinda obsessed with these, clearly beginner, rings on Etsy being marketed as garnet when i'd bet money that they are glass
the metal work is. certainly better than what i've ever made, so i don't want to speak to harshly. but uh. um.
howtomusicmajor reblogged
From the book Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD:
- Putting a coat on the back of a chair by the door is fine, but if you prefer, use coat hooks and a large catch-all basket for dropping keys, hats, gloves.
- Small bookcase end-table next to the couch to store craft projects, books, and other things being worked on for easy access.
- Add a storage unit near the dining room table to transition between eating and working there.
- Daily toiletry items should be stored in a basket that you can move easily
- Extra toiletries and medicine cabinet items go in open shelf/basket storage so they can be seen and used easily. If items no longer fit, purge the excess. Don’t obscure the view!
- If you disrobe in the bathroom, place a tall hamper in there.
- Keep a set of cleaning supplies in each bathroom
Reblog and say what project you currently have spread on your dinner table in the tags
howtomusicmajor reblogged
Oh
:0 I need to steal this chart
you don't need to steal it
i drew it and am hereby making it public domain in the hopes it helps you + anyone else seeing it in any format think:
"Hm. Maybe I can more accurately assess responsibility and priority."
I don't say this lightly, I didn't make the chart lightly, I genuinely hope it can help at least someone a little once in awhile.
If the pressures are internal, maybe placing a visual to the stress can help you better asses. Doing the dishes may be your responsibility, but is it an actual risky situation that they don't get done right now? Or all at once?
(etc.)
If the pressures are external, maybe having a visual can help you have Conversations that need to be had. Or help you make adjustments.
(etc.)
As I say
None of this is light.
I am extremely aware
that Problems are rarely just a magic fairy wand wave away from being resolved. I'm also aware that, sometimes, having a chart can be the first step in figuring out how to make things better (at least a little)
okay too many words
it's time to toodle and doodle
best of luck internet strangers
i genuinely mean it for us all
howtomusicmajor reblogged
Blue sunrise on the Oregon Coast
howtomusicmajor reblogged
I hate this so much.
If you'd like to support musicians streaming rights and fair pay you should support United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) who are actively working against Spotify and services unfair streaming policies.
This is a link to write a letter urging your state representatives to support UMAW & Rep. Tlaib's H.Con.Res. 102. Below is a link to their website with other ways to support them further!
howtomusicmajor reblogged
howtomusicmajor reblogged
During yesterday’s game I made an off the cuff remark that Infernal music uses a system of nine modes named after the layers of Hell as opposed to the traditional seven in Western classical music so of course I’ve been coming up with a system of nine tones per octave for no gain whatsoever, I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time on something with absolutely zero game effect
fuckyeahdnd
I mean one obvious benefit is that I can now say that my character plays her lute in the Stygian mode which rules
Now I’m desperately curious as to what that would sound like…
fuckyeahdnd
I haven’t had the time to play around with it so it probably sounds horrible, but okay it’s a system of alternating half-steps and full steps but with two sequential half-steps. The basic Avernal mode in C would be C, Db, Eb, E, F, Gb, Ab, A, and B (and with a final half-step to bring it back to C).
As I said, it probably sounds horrible
I mean it wouldn’t be hard for me to write a piece like that. It won’t sound “correct” to western ears because the root note, C, in that scale will sound like it wants to resolve up to the Db, but if your goal is for music to sound like it’s from Hell, then it’s doable.
Here’s the parameters for this piece:
I’m going to use this scale for expediency’s sake, rather than the two octave scale.
I’m also going to write this piece in 9/8, following the theme of 9′s.
I’m 2 measures in and
It’s uploading to soundcloud now!
fuckyeahdnd
Omg holy shit
There is now a rebloggable version of it on the tumblr audio player! https://dungeonmastersconsortium.tumblr.com/post/185015240331/fuckyeahdnd-heres-a-quick-30-second-version-of-a