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Entry tags:

music: composition

sampled orchestral mockups + music production: part 2: demo of a simple piano sketch in Cubase (DAW)

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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fic: you and me, we're ready for the major leagues

DO NOT JUDGE ME please

you and me, we're ready for the major leagues (12706 words) by Lirazel
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Pitt (TV)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Melissa "Mel" King/Frank Langdon
Characters: Frank Langdon, Melissa "Mel" King, The Pitt (TV) Ensemble
Additional Tags: Post-Season/Series 01, Backstory, Divorced Frank Langdon, Pining, Getting Together, frank has a thing for nerdy girls (which is really just another way of saying 'passionate women')
Summary:

“Does she know?” Cassie asks.

“No. Fuck, I hope not.” The thought of Mel having any idea of the cesspool of emotion inside him terrifies him. He knows her well enough to be pretty sure that she wouldn’t be disgusted or scared, but she might feel pressure, feel awkward. She might pull away. He’d rather die.

“Four more months. Are you going to tell her?”

He can’t even begin to answer that.

Current Music: orville peck - the curse of the blackened eye

Entry tags:

Snacks!

I met

havocthecat for a lovely lunch on Saturday and was introduced to a delicious dish that involved cabbage and Chinese sesame paste. I need to make it immediately. It is reminiscent but different (and delightfully so!) from my peanut lime slaw. I was also delighted by everything else we tried.

That said, I want to be better about eating food I prepare and bring to work rather than my new normal a.) not eating at all or b.) buying food from places around my job. Neither are healthy or sustainable. BUT. I'm also In No Mood to make a lot of things that involve fire or cooking meat. Now, I have happily gone vegetarian in the past and am happy to do it again, but I'm also really tired of grocery shopping atm. SO. I decided to make up mini cheese/meat snack packs for lunch this week and buy a bunch of dried fruit, nuts, grapes and apples to cart along with. I did spend entirely too much $$ on cheese, but here we are.

UPDATE: Snack lunch was delicious and I am v. happy.

Hopefully this will tide me over until I'm able to swing by an Asian grocery for Chinese sesame paste. I already have the black sesame seeds and the right vinegar at home along with some cabbage slaw. Non traditional, but unless I get the overwhelming desire to make dumplings, I'm not buying a whole ass napa cabbage. Honestly, I should invite some friends over to make dumplings this fall. That would be pretty cool.

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television is the love of my life

omg this post is so all over the place

Well, it happened. I stumbled headlong into a new fandom, as I am wont to do. I don't know how long it will last, but for right now, my new hyperfixation is The Pitt.

I am not into medical dramas as a rule, but I was very intrigued by the fact that this one is shot virtually in real time--each episode is an hour in a shift in an emergency room at a hospital in Pittsburgh. I am an absolute sucker for real-time media, and I had heard nothing but good things about the show, so I decided to watch it. I watched the first half a couple weeks back and it was ridiculously good, but it's also incredibly realistic both about how much the healthcare "system" in teh US sucks but also just about how bad things are in the US in general, so I had to take a break from it because I was overwhelmed by life.

But then after shul on Friday night, I watched all the rest, and then I was like, "I wonder if any of my favorite authors have written fic for this," and then I got sucked in and spent the whole weekend reading fic, except for yesterday afternoon and evening, when I spent the whole time writing fic, and now I have 10k words of fic and so many feels.

It kind of blows my mind, how good this show is. Occasionally it goes a little heavy-handed with things, and it's trying to address, like every aspect of American culture right now (gun violence, drug abuse, incels, political polarization around things like masks, the WebMD-ification of life, etc.), but strangely it mostly pulls it off? Probably because an ER is the perfect place to do this, actually, because it's one of the few places in the country where a genuine cross-section of the population converges and people end up spending time with people from different demographics while being very vulnerable. The sheer Muchness of everything that's going on in the show is really realistic, and I hear that the medical stuff is too.

The cast is fanfreakingtastic and the writing is so good and the direction is so good and wow! It's so good!

Anyway, if any of y'all have watched it and made posts about it, link me! I want to know your thoughts!

And now, even though nobody asked, my top ten favorite characters!

1. Mel - nothingcompares2u.mp3. My baby my darling my sweetheart my best girl. I would die on a battlefield for her and I want her to have every good thing in the whole entire world.
2. Mohan - The most beautiful, kind, and empathetic woman in the world is also a workaholic with no life and no friends. Incredible. No notes. I would watch an entire show about her crying in the bathroom. Or marry her. Y'know, whichever.
3. Dana - We all know a woman like that, right? Way too competent, way too underpaid. Everyone adores her but she’s still somehow underappreciated. I am so glad she’s coming back next season but also NO ONE HAS EVER DESERVED TO RETIRE MORE THAN SHE DOES. The world does not deserve her.
4. Cassie - Imagine her life. And she just keeps going. She’s a superhero. No wonder her ex is still obsessed with her even though he's The Worst.
5. Perlah and Princess - The Statler and Waldorf of this show. What would we do without their snark and gossip and facial reactions to everything? 10/10.
6. Garcia - Every time she comes into the room I want to burst with happiness. I love what a bitch she is. I am so glad I don’t know her in real life because she would both terrify me and piss me off. Lesbian ice queen, I’m calling it.
7. Whitaker - I bet you were wondering when a dude would show up on this list. Well there’s only one, but no surprise that it is the poor bedraggled puppy dog who got left outside in the rain. I am rooting for him. You're a good man, Dennis Whitaker.
8. Collins - The second most beautiful woman in the world. She breaks my heart. LET HER HAVE WHAT SHE WANTS DAMMIT.
9. Santos, actually - I still don’t actually like her, but what a fanfreakingtastic character. Top tier writing.
10. Javadi - She’s at the bottom of the list because she triggers my second-hand embarrassment too much. But you’re doing great, bb girl.

I actually love everyone, but but the LADIES!!! THE LADIES!!!!

And now a word about shipping:

So I watched the show without any particular shippy feelings. I of course had favorite dynamics because I am me, but I was just letting the whole thing wash over me and loving all the individual characters.

But then after I finished the show, I made the mistake of thinking, "I wonder if any of my favorite fanfic writers have written for this?" and it turned out that several had, including one who has written, like, hundreds of thousands of words of fic, and it all just happens to be Mel/Langdon, and fastforward to now and I...um...might have a new ship? Not in the sense that I want them to be together in canon--I don't think that's necessary and in fact I loooove their platonic dynamic on the show--but in the, "yes, I absolutely will read every halfway decent fic about these two that I can find."

Mostly I think the appeal is that I love Mel so damn much and I want someone to love and adore her as much as she deserves it, and thankfully said fanfic writer decided to write Langdon as being really unhinged with how much he loves and wants Mel, and I am a sucker for that. I am mostly a person who wants all the foundations of a relationship laid out in canon--y'know, your Mulder/Scully, Spock/Kirk, Buffy/Spike, Wangxian kinds of dynamics where they're clearly so ridiculously important to each other and we've seen it in front of our own two eyes. But very occasionally, a really great fandom can fill in the blanks for me, and wow, I guess that's what happened with this.

I so so so so so do not want to get into ship wars about this, which I have heard of from afar. Apparently they've got the biggest No Romo contingent since MSR, but I want to stay far far away from it. I 1000% respect anyone who doesn't ship it but I don't want to hear about it elseweb. I trust my friends here to be like, "Yeah, not for me," but live and let ship, but in other places on the internet? No way.

And also...I wrote a whole entire fic about them yesterday and am now already planning on a second. ¯\_(ツ)_/

Now I've gotta find time to make some icons....

Current Mood: chipper
Current Location: Bamberg

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To start the week with

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds finished its third season, and you may have deduced from the fact I didn't review the remaining episodes that for me, it did not take a turn for the better. The Ortegas episode was probably the most, in lack of a better term, Trekian, not to mention the long awaited one with a focus on Ortegas beyond "I fly the ship", but it shares with far too many ST: SNW episodes the way it is just incredibly derivative, of both other franchises and earlier ST. And the series finale chose to pick my least favourite DS9 plotline and scenario, sigh. To complete my turn to an old grouch, the feeling of this season as Star Trek: The Rom Com didn't help, either. Anyway. I'll always have Discovery and Prodigy in terms of new ST that manages to unite both affection for the past AND originality and the courage to try out new paths and characters.
*****

Given the daily horror show that is the news, it's all the more important to find joy in fannish things, so I was delighted to discover this new Sense 8 vid. Now there was a show celebrating joy and diversity:

Sense 8

Voice in my Throat

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And on another joyful note: Yuletide nominations have started!

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: Eagles vs KC on tv

Entry tags:

looking at the spot

My original plan was to make pork chops with peach butter for dinner tonight, but then no peaches arrived with my grocery order, so I did a quick pivot to pork chops in lemon-caper sauce (NYT gift link) and they are delicious. I think it would also be very good with chicken if you don't eat pork (or eggplant, which seems to be my veggie substitute for meat these days, though it is more labor-intensive).

Anyway, I substituted a half-cup of chicken broth with a tablespoon of white wine vinegar for the wine and forgot to add the flour until I'd already added the broth, but it all turned out all right. Definitely recommended!

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In other news, I've had Saja Boys' Soda Pop stuck in my head all day. "Tom's Diner" vanquishes it briefly but then it returns. It's a cute song! Very catchy! I'd like to not have it in my head all day!

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Entry tags:

crafts: spinning

a 3-ply yarn

That Sure Was a Season of Star Trek

Strange New ~~disappointments~~
~~Straight~~ New Worlds
Strange New Worlds

I frickin' loved the first season of SNW. The second season included one of my all time favourite episodes of Star Trek (the Lower Decks crossover). I was so hyped for season three...and, like, it was bad? So bad that I was like...did I hallucinate this show ever being good?

Thus follows a brief list of my gripes about S3 of SNW:

1. It's not funny. I agree with the reviewer who said that this season desperately wants to be Lower Decks, except the writers don't have the comedy chops, so you end up with a season that is 50% "comedy" episodes, culminating in the episode Four and a Half Vulcans a thuddingly unfunny episode of television that was nonetheless teased at comic con last year, like they inexplicably thought that was them putting their best foot forward.

2. Speaking of Lower Decks, the nostalgia bait of LD worked because sometimes it was super weird, and sometimes it was a deep cut, but it always felt like it was written by people with a deep knowledge and love of Star Trek, while the callbacks in SNW all feel like they were written by people who vaguely remember having watched The Original Series as kids.

Like, at the end of the episode Terrarium, actually one of the better episodes of the season, the freakin' Metrons turn up to monologue, all like, "We have trapped a human and a Gorn together on a planet, and we will do it again!" And, like, we all remember the episode with Kirk and the Gorn. It's a very famous episode! They made fun of it in Galaxy Quest. And, like, anyone who doesn't know, doesn't know who goshdarn Metrons are either!

3. The overwhelming, bordering of offensive, heterosexuality of SNW is not new - I've said before that making a big ensemble show in the 2020s with not even a token queer character feels like a very deliberate choice has been made - but it did feel like it's stepped up a gear this season. There was a trailer for S3 that went like: "All New Worlds! All New Adventures! All New Relationships!"

And, like, Sorry? What? Pardon? Who is watching Star Trek for the romance?

This gripe has sub clauses, y'all

a) I did not especially care for the Spock/Chapel ship in the first two seasons, it felt like it took over the show slightly, and turned what was basically 'two co-workers have a weird vibe because one has a crush on the other and maybe they had an inadvisable snog at the work x-mas party' into an interminable story of star-crossed lovers. Then they dropped it like a hot potato, because it felt like the writers belatedly realised that the ship as written didn't jibe with turning SNW into the Original Series.

b) I didn't actually hate Spock/La'an; it was low key, didn't overwhelm the show the way it felt like Spock/Chapel had, made sense for both characters. It was just that it fit into a pattern this season of the writers having no interest in their female characters beyond deciding which dude's tongues they were going to shove into their mouthes.

c) I like Patton Oswald, and I'm usually happy to see him pop up, and I might have disliked this less if I felt like I had learned anything about Una this season other than she's definitely straight y'all.

d)Beto Ortegas--

Hang on, this sub clause has addendums

i. Erica Ortegas has a brother, doubling her number of known character traits to 1) flies ship, and 2) has brother.

ii. That brother is the pivotal character in an episode called What is Starfleet? which concludes that Starfleet is a bunch of people who almost do a warcrime and then decide not to at the last minute.

iii. Said brother has a stilted, awkward, and unconvincing romance with Uhura. I mean, it wasn't like they were doing anything else with the iconic character of Nyota Uhura, right?

iv. There is an episode where Erica is lost on a hostile planet and Uhura is orders of magnitude more upset than the rest of the crew which would have made a bajillion times more sense if Erica and Uhura had been the ones to have the flirtation/relationship.

I know writers who use compulsory heterosexuality, they are all cowards.

4. Captain Pike has a love interest named Captain Batel. She nearly died at the end of S2, he was very sad about that; at the end of S3 she turns into a statue, and Pike is very sad about that too. I have no idea what Marie Batel thinks about this Nu Who ass ending because the show cares about her character so little that it can't even be bothered to decide what her job is, over the course of her guest appearances she is 1) a starship captain, 2) a courtroom lawyer, 3) a starship captain again, 4) on the supreme court, I guess.

Anyway, she's a statue now.

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

The Pitt Fic: Irish Cream (Abbot/Robby, NC-17)

Irish Cream (5106 words) by Alethia
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Pitt (TV)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Jack Abbot/Michael "Robby" Robinavitch
Characters: Jack Abbot (The Pitt), Michael "Robby" Robinavitch, Parker Ellis
Additional Tags: Post-Season/Series 01, Established Relationship, Developing Relationship, Celebrations, Hugs, Porn, parker ellis has little shit tendencies, and we love her for it, who doesn't want a piece of jack abbot, couldn't be robby
Summary:

"Everyone, can I have your attention, please," she said, using her soccer captain voice. The floor instantly quieted as everyone paused to look at her, curiosity replacing the usual distracted bustle. Parker looked back to Jack, smirking now. "We have a celebrity in our midst."

"Man, what are you on about?" Jack asked, getting a little annoyed now.

Parker flashed a grin. "Dr. Abbot has just officially become the most-cited emergency physician in the entire country," she announced with a little relish.

Entry tags:

scavengers reign

(no subject)

We watched Scavengers Reign because it was enthusiastically recommended to

genarti as fun animated science fiction about being stranded on an alien planet with interesting alien biology. Which is true! This is not incorrect! Not Mentioned was the extent to which it is also very definitely lovingly animated body-and-survival horror ..... every time we watched we checked in with each other like 'still good to proceed? not too much eugughghhhhhh?' '[grimly] let's watch at least one more episode and see what happens,' and in this way we eventually crawled through all twelve episodes.

NONETHELESS I do think it was very good, once we acclimated to the eugughghhhhhh factor. (I ended up higher on it than

genarti did, in some part because I liked the ending for my favorite character better than she liked the ending for hers.) The first episode introduces you in media res to the several sets of people stranded on this planet that the show will be following:

- Sam and Ursula, an older man and younger woman traveling together, who've developed a plan to bring down their heavily damaged ship, the Demeter,, still in orbit around the planet with most of the crew in cryosleep; Ursula is fascinated by the planet and interested in learning more about it, while Sam is laser-focused on Getting Out Of There
- Azi, a motorcycle butch who's been in crop-growing survival mode supported by (a) Levi (unit), a pleasant manual labor robot whose behavior is becoming increasingly altered by some kind of planetary growth thriving in its innards
- Kamen, alone and still trapped in his escape pod, on the verge of death until he encounters a telepathic creature that brainwashes him into symbiotic/parasitic collaboration, and yet somehow his biggest concern is still His Divorce

Over the course of the story, we learn through flashbacks more about who these people were on the Demeter and what happened to strand them on the planet, while they cope (or don't) with the various challenges of the planet and the hope of escape provided by the Demeter. The real fears that the show evokes, IMO, are isolation and transformation -- being, yourself, transformed without your knowledge or consent, or, perhaps even worse, seeing your only companion changing into something unrecognizable and untrustworthy. These are things that scare me personally very much and so I often found this a very scary show! But -- like Annihilation or Alien Clay, the two other stories that Scavengers Reign reminded me of the most -- it also evokes the flip side of this fear, the beauty and wonder of the transformative and strange. The animators loved animating these weird alien ecosystems.

You can watch the trailer here:

Watch on YouTube

(The trailer is very clear and accurate to the amount of body horror in the show. From this you will be able to tell that we did not in fact watch the trailer before we began the show itself.)

A second season was planned, but has not been ordered and may never be made; IMO the first season does stand as complete but I would very much like to see the second season and I hope it happens.

Entry tags:

music: composition

sampled orchestral mockups + music production: part 1: brief demo of engraving software + playback

(cross-posted to

communal_creators)

Earlier:
- part 0: preliminaries (includes partial glossary of terms)

Watch on YouTube

I know there are a lot of people who haaaaaate being forced to sit through video but since audio playback is inherent to the enterprise...This is under a minute, promise.

This is a brief demonstration of the opening of one of my compositions partially engraved (~sheet music typesetting) in Dorico. The two industry-standard engraving apps in media composition scoring are Dorico and Sibelius; Finale used to be a third but was sunsetted to much consternation.

If you come from classical music (especially classical orchestral music), you may be ??? about the score formatting. This is because scores for session orchestra and concert/classical orchestra have different formatting! (See part 0: preliminaries for more detail as to why). Differences for session orchestra you see here include:

- Score is in C (NOT a transposing score for the conductor - nota bene, transposing is "allowed" for octaves), but we won't have e.g. horn in F or trumpet in Bb. ( Read more... )

As for playback:

- Guess what, Dorico and Sibelius at the level of orchestral scores are spendy. :]

- I'm using NotePerformer, which is the standard higher-quality playback engine, especially if you don't have time to mock it up in the DAW (or you're an art/concert composer for whom a mockup is not part of your workflow). But that's also money (~$130 USD).

NotePerformer is pretty credible with a lot of orchestral instruments. You still have to massage its output. For example, in Sibelius [not shown] you can set playback to molto espressivo (LOTS OF FEELING) vs. senza espressivo (NO FEELINGS EVER!!!) (etc). My experience is that particular instruments can be less "real"-sounding and the "vocalists" (both SATB choir and associated "solo" voices) are absolutely terrible, as in "my vacuum cleaner sings more credibly than this" terrible.

Aside: There are some good vocal VST libraries for specific use cases. I hate that I am often able to straight-up identify "Oh yeah, XYZ floating ethereal ~Celtic Twilight vibes soprano 'ahhh' ululation in this trailer/score/whatever was $SPECIFIC_VST_LIBRARY" because, apparently, I have no life; but this is not unusual in this field.

I know at least one full-time composer/orchestrator/musician who straight-up bounces NotePerformer output and then processes that in the DAW (reverb etc) and, you know, this person makes a living doing this. So that's one route one can take.

Why, you ask, can't we just export this score-stuff into a DAW with all the fancy (...spendy) VST instruments and "paste in" nicer/more individualized instruments? Dorico (and Sibelius) do in fact export to MIDI and MusicXML. [1] This is a very reasonable question that will be the topic of the next walkthrough (part 2), mainly because it's a surprisingly (annoying) complicated topic as to why this is rarely straightforward. (Let me tell you all about negative track delay...)

[1] Missed these glossary items earlier! ( brief explanations of MIDI and MusicXML )

Happy to answer questions, although I have no idea if anyone else finds this interesting. :p

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I guess this is a Danganronpa post

I was wondering if a fic I’d thought I’d written was something I’d just imagined very intensely, but then there was a month missing in my box of journals, and I was able to find the journal the fic was in shoved way back on my computer desk.

It’s my journal from when the restructure was announced last year! Featuring entries where I was determinedly not writing about that and instead making such comments as ‘I’m worried if I met [Megumi] Ogata in real life, she would easily be able to manipulate me.’ A vital concern, right there.

Anyway, am I in shock at the prospect of an AU version of SDR2 coming out next year? Sure am! Also, would not put it past anyone involved for this to be some sort of bait-and-switch. I guess we will find out!

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Lurker (d. Alex Russell, 2025)

Pop star Oliver invites rando shop assistant Matty to his concert, not realising he has invited a yandere into his life.

( Spoilers etc )

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Land of Hope and Dreams (live) - Bruce Springsteen

Entry tags:

thunder's rolling down this track

A couple weeks ago, I finally realized I was never going to go to someone else to get my hair cut, so with some encouragement from my sister, this morning, I did an extensive detangling (both before and after washing) and then trimmed about 3" off the bottom myself. Is it even? Probably not, but it was in long layers, so I don't think it really matters. It will eventually even out as it grows and I trim it. Mostly what matters is that after 3 years, the old ends have been trimmed away. And now that I know I can do it, I will try to keep up with it on a more timely basis. At least, I don't think I'll let another 3 years go by. *wry*

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The Mets did not get no-hit last night but they did lose, and then lost again today despite leading for 7.5 innings. *hands* There is something very wrong with this team, but who can say what? Sigh.

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