Teaching your brain to read and play sheet music without constantly looking up and down? Want to break your overreliance on sight for hand placement?

Introducing: The Piano Hat!

Blocks all sight of hands and keys so that all you can see is the sheet music!

#Piano

I'm not sure why this has been so difficult to internalize, but I feel like I'm finally starting to at least get to a point where I can *feel* the difference between jumping with my legs and "jumping with my arms"!

#rollerskating #🛼

Ok, so... I've gotta say, it isn't as fancy as a Chopin Nocturne or whatever, but this is turning out to be one of the most fun things I've played in a while now 😀

#SailorMoon #Piano

Sailor Moon is America themed, right? She's got all the right colors 🤔🇺🇸❔️

Although I've gotta say, "I'm the pretty guardian of Nationalism and Cultural Imperialism" just doesn't have the same ring to it 👎

Happy Comfest Y'all

#Rollerskating #HulaHoop #ICanOnlyDoThisForLike5SecondsButIt'sReallyFunForThose5Seconds

Goth people 👋 Hi! 🙋‍♀️

I miss my old phone, also 😭 This one just doesn't pick up sound nearly as well

#BlueMonday #NewOrder

I also like to post stuff like this because you rarely get to see learning steps; only end results.

So I recorded myself learning just *20 seconds* of a totally new song. This is 1 hour'ish of practice in 33 seconds, at 100x.

Learning new things is hard, but I can do hard things and so can you <3

And then there was day 0, where I planned everything around a single event (Cat Maid Cafe), and it wasn't even a specific character. I just wanted something cute and mostly logistically uncomplicated!

#Colossalcon

So the Foam Party was a catastrophic failure of an event at Colossalcon 2024; the con organizers effectively paywalled the outdoor pool for a day, and misrepresented the event in the months leading up to the con, saying it would not impact the outdoor pool. I don't typically spend a ton of time at the outdoor pool, so I feel like I didn't really have a horse in that fight, but it was fascinating watching the drama around it unfold, and the very understandable anger towards the con organizers. Like... Y'all, we're already paying an arm and a leg for some of this stuff, and now you want to charge us another $40 to use the outdoor pool during the peak outdoor pool day of the convention... At a water park? And the icing on the cake was the event itself was a disaster. Nobody went; people pretty universally boycotted it, and THE FOAM MACHINE DIDN'T WORK. Like; it... Definitely sprayed *something* out across the pool area, but they seem to have completely messed up whatever mixture they were supposed to use, because instead of foam it was just this toxic blue spill like a scene from Pacific Rim. So obviously, I decided to cosplay John Kalahari, inventor of Kalahari, hosting The Foam Party. Which meant building a modular (so I could transport it to the con in my car) ring of Kalahari-style fencing, getting a waterproof poster of the infamous sign they posted on the pool last year, getting a "foam machine" that would actually WORK (bubbles! :D), and a lil speaker with a playlist. I knew those would produce an area-of-effect impact, so I only had the speaker on while movin' in very open areas, and only had the bubble machine on when I was in places where they wouldn't bother people, which wasn't a ton of the time, but I still felt like those details really completed the cosplay in an extremely satisfying way. A few more details in next alt...

Anyway, what I really wasn't expecting was for it to be so mobile. Like, it wasn't EASY to move around in by any means, I had to partially disassemble it to get through doors, and this thing was kind of heavy, and I was wearing 5 inch heels. So... Not *easy* to move around in. But *POSSIBLE* to move around in to an extent I hadn't expected. So most of my day just became a game of "Ok, where will they *let* me take this thing?", and the answer generally seemed to be "Wherever I can physically get to with it" The basic construction was: Bamboo sticks cut to semi-random sizes, nailed onto a frame of two spray-painted weighted snap-together hula hoops, with gaps in the *nailed* sticks at 4 of the snap-together points so the nails wouldn't fuse the snap-points shut permanently. To cover those gaps, I wove some twine around some sticks and bound them manually when I assembled it on site to close the gaps. That way the stick-wall over those parts could just be untied at a single point and the wall could swing away, leaving access to the hoop snap closure points.

AND I COULDN'T BELIEVE THEY STILL HAD THE ACTUAL FOAM MACHINE FROM LAST YEAR! It was new as of last year, so I thought maybe they'd just rented one for the event; I didn't realize the Kalahari actually bought it to have there permanently! So I got to actually MEET what I was cosplaying IN PERSON!

And this kind of felt like the ultimate silliness; getting this thing into the indoor/outdoor walk-up bar hot tub.

I also cosplayed the infamous 2024 Foam Party!

Definitely the most ambitious cosplay I've ever done!

Logistically difficult since I was staying offsite, but it came together perfectly (with some help from a friend to store my tools post-assembly! Thank you! :D)

Details in alt text!

#Colossalcon

I bought this outfit less than a month after Prime last year; someone said "Miku theme next year?" in the Colossalcon Facebook group and I was immediately like "Can we please?"

I had fun at Colossalcon! I got to meet new people, hang out with friends from prior years, and the most ambitious cosplay I planned worked out way better than expected!

Since Bluesky only allows 4 pictures/post, simplest cosplay first: Miku! No extra theme, I was just excited to be swim Miku :D

I have a book of all Chopin's nocturnes; since I've got the whole book I might as well use it!

This is Op. 15, No 3

I'm also trying something new with this one. I learn mostly by ear, but I've never heard this one, so I'm not looking it up; I want to try to learn it solely from what's on the page!

Also, Beethoven go brrrr; I feel like I'm finally getting halfway decent at this one! Or half of it anyway; after this, there's two more parts I *can* play, but it's still rough, and after that, there's a part that's.. Kinda tedious, and I don't love the sound. Might just skip it 🤔

#Sonata13

Today's skate night was so fun!! I had an outdoor "parking lot practice" skating playlist I'd listen to when I was just starting out, and they played almost every song from that playlist tonight! Blondie, The Go-Gos, Vicki Sue Robinson, Pink Pony Club... eeeeeeeee!

Rollerskates go brrrr 🛼➡️

So this is a new challenge; I'm really not used to doing scale runs with my left hand, much less going *down*...

I've been at this for hours now, just trying to smooth out these first 6 measures. And I'm making progress, but my left pinkie and ring finger are both screaming at me to take a break 😅

Also now I can actually play this and have it sound good; it's delicate, so any tuning issue stands out, and it's kinda slow, so without a fully/consistently working sustain pedal it just sounds super awkward.

I also tried out recording with an actual microphone!

Song is Chopin Nocturne 9, No. 2!

I had my piano tuned, and it sounds great! 😀 And I also had the sustain pedal adjusted so it actually works consistently across all the keys, which means I don't have to constantly murder the pedal, creating weird amounts of sustain in some keys, in order to get *any* of them to sustain!

I want to make a longform post about how I learned why harpsichord/baroque music can't easily be emulated on a piano, and how I found out my electric one actually *can* be tuned to put middle A at 418 Hz, but bsky only gives me 300 chars, so..

Behold! An almost-real Harpsichord! 😀

Taking a break from a fun, but also kinda dark and depressing Beethoven thing to learn some Stardew Valley stuff 💜👩‍🌾🥔

Just want to say this stuff does NOT work; not only did the guy next to me not shut up, but I am now also permanently banned from all AMC theaters 🙄

The cat agreed to this, by the way

Aircat Carrier

Helicater

Submeowsible

Aeliking Longship

Hairplane

Sopwith Catmel

I will not be taking questions cat this time.

Felireme

Cank

I remember seeing someone doing a really smooth Jackknife on skates on the internet a few weeks after I started learning how to skate, and I was like "Hey, that looks fun. I want to do that." And now I am doing that, and in heel skates! 👠 😀

I broke out the high heel skates again today! 😀👠🛼

Oook, I figured out the weird part that bridges them, so these two parts are connected now! 😀🎹

🛼 ➡️ ➡️ ➡️ ➡️ ➡️ ➡️

How is it that we've figured out how to make a plastic box that uses arcane magic to instantly know when we need towels, but we haven't figured out how to get food to everyone who needs food?