Beemancer (n.) /bēˌmansər/: One who foresees or foretells future events through the use of bees or similar eusocial insects.
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Constant Companions Closeup #9: OBJECT OF AFFECTION
(also on spotify!)
O, wayward soul, I beg of thee an ear;
Companionship, a Constant of desire,
is all too fleeting. Would thee quell this fire?
My love, do you know what you want to hear?
Welcome back to the Constant Companions Closeups - a series of in-depth dives into the songs off of my latest album, Constant Companions! Yesterday was some gay shit (Liaison) and today is some more gay shit (Object of Affection)
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I'm usually pretty good about letting go of the things I make and letting them live imperfectly, but there is exactly one released song of mine that I've ever been actively unhappy with the final product of, that I haven't been able to let go of my displeasure with.
It's not that it's a bad song, or that it didn't have good ideas! In fact, I genuinely think it shares more with the music I make now than a lot of my older work does. Rather, it was incredibly rushed and full of uninspired choices I made for the sake of completing the song rather than making it the best version of itself, and it ultimately ended up falling incredibly flat relative to what I wanted it to be!
I really like the intersection of synthpop/electropop and fantasy. One of my favorite musicians ever is Baths, whose album Romaplasm is chock full of this exact thematic and sonic intersection, and it's so deeply inspiring to me that it still gets put on whenever I want to dream things up. I've always wanted to make things like that! Bubbly and fantastical, brimming with a sense of magic so pervasive it makes even the mundane seem mystic.
...Also I'm just a fantasy dork okay. I like wizards and shit. Sue me
I've been wanting to make a grandiose and fantastical story song for years, and my single attempt to do so felt like it missed the mark entirely. I did touch on fantasy a couple times on Bittersweet, but ultimately, when I started working on this album, I knew exactly what I wanted to take a second crack at.
The intended story in question here is fairly vague, but to sum it up as literally as possible:
A rebellious, disobedient, gender-questioning prince has mildly inconvenienced "his" royal lineage one too many times. Their solution is to invoke magicks widely regarded as heretical - what's a fantasy monarchy without some hypocrisy - to seal their "son's" soul within an automaton body, rendering "him" a perfect, subservient doll.
This doll is promptly spirited away under cover of darkness by a mage, and is granted free will once again. She experiences the crushing weight of newfound self-awareness and nearly spirals out of control, before realizing the mage who saved her is the same - a doll. It turns out being a magical-mechanical construct has its perks if you are TRANSGENDER. then they overthrow the monarchy and fuck nasty or whatever idk this is where the story gives way to things like "metaphor"
this is a song about artifice and being transgender
Seriously, though, I know that being an electronic-music-producing transgender lesbian with a thing about dolls or robots or whatever is a major endless-store-shelves-of-identical-buzz-lightyear-action-figures moment on my part, but dammit, I own a copy of Logic Pro and a genuine leather wizard hat, I inject estrogen into my stomach fat every Wednesday, and I think ball joints are cute. I'm posting this on Tumblr, for gods sake, I am unconcerned as an active choice
With the exception of Liaison, the entirety of Constant Companions utilizes only three unique vocal synth characters - ANRI, Gumi, and Teto. This trifecta was born organically from simply being the vocal synths I enjoy using the most, and in this song, I wanted to use all three of them almost like one single singer, freely shifting intonation based on the context. I messed with this idea before on Ballroom, my voice meshing and melting into Gumi V3's voice, but it felt especially appropriate for this context; Plus, I feel like there aren't a lot of examples of vocal synths being used/recontextualized in this way, and that's a shame in my opinion!!
I really want to do more story-driven songwriting like this in the future as well. Now that I'm a bonafide VocaloP I've been floating the idea of doing a song series with this trio... I'm mostly just worried I'll want to get too ambitious with it.
Off the top of my head, Object of Affection references at least eight other songs of mine - Honor Majesty is an obvious one, but it also directly samples parts of Autumn Every Day, and lyrically references genuinely just a bunch of things. I'm probably forgetting some, even!
I know I'm the Leitmotif Lover, but it's a lot even by my standards. However, this song's entire existence already served to satisfy a fairly self-indulgent desire, and these days, I don't deal in half measures. I think the final product serves as a lovely little look back at where I've come from, though, and perhaps even a little glimpse into the future!
That all being said, Object of Affection in some sense is also a love letter to a beloved part of my creative process - the voice memo. A lot of the audio I've provided with these posts have been recordings off my phone for good reason! Not only are the chops at the beginning of the song entirely comprised of edited recordings I got on my phone, but the sample at the very end happens to be from a particularly legendary recording, never before heard by the public...
Until now. I present to you an excerpt from "the worst beat on planet earth", featuring none other than unit.0.
That's about it for today!! If you have any questions, I'll gladly answer them below, but otherwise, I'll be back here tomorrow to talk about this album's title track laid askew - My Darling, My Companion!
In 2026, the chicest thing a gay actor can do is never explicitly come out as gay but also make it abundantly clear that he is. Coming out is too modern. Staying closeted is too old fashioned. But this method merges contemporary freedom with Old Hollywood glamour and allure, and it weeds out the dumbest people who truly don’t get it. I call it the Pascal Method.
You clearly don't go here or to queer history and signaling, or both, enough to have this conversation and I'm not going to explain it to you. You could have asked questions, you could have done even a modicum of research. You didn't and you made yourself look ignorant. Goodbye.
#I'm fucking crying#this is an instant classic#this is the next meme#i can't believe I'm here to see a baby copypasta nary two hours old#I can't#lol#i laughed way too hard#iconic
yeah yeah rainbow capitalism is bad and whatever but like. when I was a child, being pro gay was not the popular or lucrative choice. I'm happy that times have changed.
I miss rainbow capitalism. I do. I miss when it felt like public opinion was still pro gay. I understand it was always an empty gesture, but it mattered in a sense of knowing how socially acceptable being queer is. If that makes sense.
Is rainbow capitalism deeply cynical in nature and just a way for companies to profit off social movements? Yes, but it was also a pretty good sign when entities focused solely on profit decided it was worth it to try to cosplay as progressive, and deeply concerning how many companies started inching away from it again cause that's a sign that the wind's turning
I'm imagining a world where RPGMaker somehow made it as the de facto codebase for software and you have to navigate your banking app by walking around in a huge room full of NPCs named "make deposit" and "make withdrawal" etc and there's loud as fuck stock music playing
A rule change pushed by White House officials would slash benefits or end support for as many as 400,000 Supplemental Security Income recipi
The Trump administration wants to make a rule change that would decrease or end benefits for SSI recipients who live with their family. As many as 400,000 disabled people may have their benefits cut if this rule change occurs.
It's worth noting as always that as things currently stand, the MAXIMUM benefit a person can receive from SSI is $994 a month.
If two people on SSI are married, the MAXIMUM they can receive is $1,491 a month, total, for both of them. (Meaning marriage to another SSI recipient reduces your maximum income possible to $745 a person each month.)
Could you live on that?
Could you live on that without living with family?
The administration is working on a rule change that would deduct the value of a disabled adult’s bedroom from their SSI allotment, even if the family members they live with are poor enough to qualify for food stamps. This would mean slashing the benefits of some of the most low-income SSI recipients by up to a third — about $330 a month in Burton’s case — or ending their support altogether.
The SSI rule change is being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, a process that involves editing the draft regulation and considering where it falls on the list of the president’s priorities. Once it’s returned to the Social Security Administration for initial publication, there will be an opportunity for public comment; it could take until next year to be finalized, depending on the amount of opposition it faces.
(quote from article above)
AND IT NEEDS TO FACE A LOT OF OPPOSITION, SO CALL AGAIN!!
im gonna look up contact info for the office of management and budget staff, White House Budget Director Russell Vought, and Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano. Bombard them. no peace for em.
The thing is you can have a grassy lawn or even a golf course without it being an ecological disaster, you just have to a: be cool about having the occasional non-grass plant in the mix and b: be willing to live in a climate that supports grass without irrigation.
I always thought that golf as a sport should be adapted to the local native landscape. I think this will encourage regional pride when local golfers completely trounce visitors at Swamp Golf, Desert Golf, Forest Golf, etc. Rich tourists will be pressured to travel extensively to experience all forms of golf, instead of staying in their backyard country club golf courses. Internet discourse will probably somehow get worse but I think this is a small price to pay.
"This is getting ridiculous now. Where did you find this contraption? How did you build it? You're not really rolling them straight :/ I'm not sure I like this at all, I don't like the noise. See what's the point! That didn't break with the contraption, so it doesn't coun- I liked that one. That one was neat and clean. It was a clean break. Don't like the noise - she was with chil- you're BEATING the child! It's just sick. It's twisted - HE was with child. Okay. Something about this is... where are these children coming from? Seems unnecessary that they're all pregnant. Just straight beating that Pepsi and their plastic. I don't like this - it's SADISTIC. This is sadistic. I don't - they're SPRITZING me!" *from other video, a man's voice, vaguely sounding like a moan: oooooooooh. oohhhh* lady: "I'm sorry. What was that?" *last bottle falls* (with disappointment) "No."
One of my vet tech coworkers gave me an emotional support joltik bc I was stuck staying late bc of an appointment going over our closing time (it was also a day we had 9 emergencies)
Think tanks explicitly founded to "abolish transgenderism" will publish a report that's like "there's no evidence that trans healthcare works if you ignore all the evidence" and be taken seriously, meanwhile actual researchers go "there's seriously NO evidence that gatekeeping helps" and get ignored
Like on the one hand there's new papers each year going "So it turns out that there's literally no fucking reason to restrict transition access based on these arbitrary criteria, and in fact, they were explicitly made up by some Danish fuck because he was personally obsessed with the idea that trans people were demons, and as it turns out the only measurable impacts of this policy are to increase risks to the patient" that have no impact on the healthcare systems they're criticizing whatsoever.
And then, on the other hand, you've got "Shockingly, this life-altering treatment that massively impacts how the patient is perceived by others in all facets of life is primarily supported by observational studies, as opposed to the enormous violations of bodily autonomy and human dignity necessary to perform a true randomized control trial. We recommend that treatment ceases immediately because you don't understand how evidence-based medicine works." And that becomes a linchpin of the politics of multiple European countries' trans healthcare politics for the next several years.
It's fucking clown world. Nobody who enabled this should be in a position of any power whatsoever.
germansingergirl
areudirty
jacobvanloon
2087
blakekathryn
prguitarman
romaincrisis
janainaart
vaporwave
