ivy astarael, the tone of doom

bene gesserit!

i spent 3 hours remastering a song i wrote 20 years ago

2005, just a filthy darkstep banger

it's been sitting on my computer all that time and it's fucking brilliant

i got to polish it back into light

that was genuinely ~fun~

damn, those were different days

and it would seem like self-defense, because we "don't want to be racist"

but it isn't, and it's ~never~ justified

it's the institution protecting itself

it's power refusing to be subjugated

absolute garbage

use your self-reflection and stop defending the way this shitty world functions

most white americans genuinely believe that there is a passive, neutral, middle ground between "actively racist" and "actively anti-racist"

this theoretically neutral position does not exist when standing inside a racist system

and if this is ever pointed out, the white person ~will~ lash out

white people, statistically speaking, are totally uninterested in being anti-racist

they don't want to "be racist", because as a society we view that negatively

but you can tell the difference because the definition of "being racist" is always set by white people

institutional power will never willingly divest itself

no matter how "progressive" or "liberal" your leaders are, people operating with power in a broken system are not interested in fixing that system

those people are happy for the ~optics~ of reform and change, but it's only a veneer

compositionally, i haven't changed anything (at least in the single song i've done so far)

but damn

the cohesion of all these elements

this makes the difference between something sounding like a song and something sounding like a kid experimenting with garage band for the first time

the main difference between then and now is definitely my knowledge of how to use a parametric eq

followed second by knowing how a compressor works and having the ability to sidechain

i'm revisiting a bunch of songs i wrote back in college (so 15-18 years ago) and remastering them with the tools and techniques i use on my current songs

holy cow, what a difference

i wrote these tracks using reason 3.0

remastering them with a relatively modern daw (reason 11) is spectacular

100% this is true

as a fruit who appears in ~veggie tales~, bob the tomato is canonically trans

oh, positively delightful

a woman with red hair is wearing a shirt that says tree huggle Alt: a woman with red hair is wearing a shirt that says tree huggle

ooh, i love this one

i'm always advocating for more nature and more life, and that includes insects (although i don't advocate for spreading human illnesses), even the annoying ones

i routinely make 50 track "me, condensed into musical form" playlists and i always include a taylor song

i don't post them publicly though because i don't want to be linking publicly to my spotify account

ao3 is my temple of self-indulgence

i'm not going to tell you what to do or what to believe

i'm just going to let you know, based on an unwilling insider's perspective, that people who believe in real world race war are very happy to promote fantasy world race war too

why would you do that to yourself?

the robot character is a stand in

this is the real point

it's why "evil" races in d&d are a problem

not because the robots or the orcs are real

but because you're training your brain to be racist

i grew up in a white supremacist movement

training yourself to be racist is a ~big deal~

history teacher in 50 years: So in September, that’s when the president signed an executive order criminalizing anti-fascism and saying all resistance would be crushed

student: oh so that’s when the whole country realized they were living under fascism

teacher: haha what? oh no lol not at all. no.

i ~am~ pretty sure i didn't, so it seems plausible that you did not either

what the fuck "for working on" is supposed to mean, i couldn't tell you

i got interrupted several times while trying to post

excerpt from a digital painting showing a white woman's hands above her head in steel manacles attached by chains to a point out of frame. the image has a navy blue background and the hands and chains are casting a clear shadow onto the background.

here's an excerpt from a painting i'm for working on, and i am so, so fricking proud of these chains

so is the subject of the photograph

seems fair, n'est-ce pas ?

i'm willing to be the 19th 😘

the problem with mechsploitation is that if you turn a girl into a dog that's also an ace pilot you've just succeeded in creating Snoopy

i have ~never~ tried them frozen

when my girlfriend and i used to make them we usually ended up devouring them fairly quickly

although in my case i was forced out for being autistic, not for being trans

you can guess which one i am

ayyyye

i know it's been said plenty of times

but i remain in awe of just how perfect a sequel ~hades ii~ is to an original that i never expected to be so excellent, never mind to be matched

sex is great but like mostly what i crave is just like the intimacy of being touched and held safely by someone i can trust it doesn't need to be sexual just to share a moment where we can feel that eachother is real that im real that i wont break if im touched or you wont be repulsed by my touch