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This post was made 4 days ago. Probably a good time to take another look at these threats

not to be maya on side but please do not call someone or something “mayan” when talking about our people, culture, etc. “mayan” refers to our language family (a language FAMILY, in which there are plenty of unique languages). we are the maya, not the mayans. i am maya, not mayan. it is the indigenous maya community, not the indigenous mayan community. 

you can reblog this 😔

"why are you so jumpy?"

my brother in the forest, i have the nervous system of a creature that is hunted as his place in the ecosystem. the toaster popping is, for all intents and purposes, a direct threat to the monarchy.

Merry Crisis! Today is my third seasonal social engagement, and I still have more ahead of me. I think I'm going to become a hermit for the entire month of January.

Fun Story: My director kept telling me and my tenor sax buddy to play softer. No matter what we did, it wasn’t soft enough for him. So getting frustrated, I told my buddy “Dont play this time. Just fake it” 

Our Band Director then informed us we sounded perfect. 

To my readers: “p” means quiet, “pp” means really quiet. I’ve never seen “pppp” before haha.

On the contrast, “f” means loud, and “ffff” probably means so loud you go unconscious.

I had ffff in a piece once and my conductor told me to play as loudly as physically possible without falling off my chair…

Me and my trombone buddies had “ffff” and he sat next to me and played so hard that he fell out of his chair.

The lengths we go for music.

Okay yeah so I play the bass clarinet and the amount of air you have to move and the stiffness of the reed means it only has two settings and that is loud and louder, with an optional LOUDEST that includes a 50% probability of HORRIBLE CROAKING NOISE which is the bass equivalent of the ubiquitous clarinet shriek.

One day, when I was in concert band in high school, we got a new piece handed out for the first time, and there was a strange little commotion back in the tuba section — whispering, and pointing at something in the music, and swatting at each other’s hands all shhh don’t call attention to it. And although they did attract the attention of basically everyone else in the band, they managed to avoid being noticed by the band director, who gave us a few minutes to look over our parts and then said, “All right, let’s run through it up to section A.”

And here we are, cheerfully playing along, sounding reasonably competent — but everyone, when they have the attention to spare, is keeping an eye on the tuba players. They don’t come in for the first eight measures or so, and then when they do come in, what we see is:

[stifled giggling]

[reeeeeeally deep breath]

[COLOSSAL FOGHORN NOISE]

The entire band stops dead, in the cacophonous kind of way that a band stops when it hasn’t actually been cued to stop. The band director doesn’t even say anything, just looks straight back at the tubas and makes a helpless sort of why gesture.

In unison, the tuba players defend themselves: “THERE WERE FOUR F’S.”

FFFF is not really a rational dynamic marking for any instrument, but for the love of all that is holy why would you put it in a tuba part.

This is the best band post 

Everyone else go home

Oh man, so I play trombone, and we got this piece called Florentiner Marsch by Julius Fucik, and we saw this

which is 8 fortes. We were shocked until,

that is 24 fortes who the fuck does that

Who does that?

This guy. Take a good look - that is the moustache of a man with nothing to lose.

Julius IdontgivaFucik

More like Julius Fuckit

Pyrozod’s tags for this were too hilarious not to share

I’m literally crying and only music people will really understand this but I see our tuba section doing this xD like I’m dead

24 fortes is an existential threat, my dude. I don’t see you producing that much wind without detonating a bomb.

Goddamn composers writing music that can’t be performed properly because we don’t yet have the cybernetic enhancements for them.

The words over the eight fortes is “Not for lukewarm-showerers”, aka “Not for fucking wimps”.

The words over the 24 fortes are “Without slowing down“

For a legitimate use of 4 fortes, see for example this piece, where you have a single sousaphone (which is basically just a B-flat bass you can wear) effectively being the lead instrument of a full brass band. Getting an instrument that low to sound out over the higher instruments takes volume:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxH9Dg1JLio

Pretty much the whole piece is at fff, and it goes to ffff at 5:25 and 5:37 - a level of oomph where even a tremendously skilled player is basically unable to hold the note together.

you know when you’re talking w/ someone and you just feel.. Warm. like.. not.. warmth temperature-wise but just this.. sense of overall coziness like on an emotional level speaking w/ them is the equivalent of whenever you step into a patch of sunlight… that’s something

Reposting my own tags here, but... I think this is something a lot of orthohuman folks don't get about being transspecies.

When transgender people transition, even in social ways like changing gender marker, we know that in some ways it will make our lives worse. This society isn't set up for people who blur the lines of gender and sex, and especially not those who discard those categories altogether. We know we're opening ourselves up to a life of being questioned, othered, restricted from jobs and educational opportunities. We know that if we end up on the wrong side of the law, or if we need a DV shelter, or simply if someone takes offence to our bodies, we're at extremely high risk of sexual assault, even murder. Anyone transitioning under an authoritarian government, or doing sex work, is risking that daily.

And yet we do it anyway, because the alternative- to live in daily denial of who we are- is even more soul-crushing. Because we know there are people out there who will see us for our true selves. Because we know that the alternative to flying too close to the sun in exultation is to fly too close to the sea out of fear, and either way we'll probably drown; so we may as well drown as ourselves.

For someone like me, to actually transition fully the way I want to- if it were even possible- would catapult me into a world of fame and, equally, infamy. There would be no such thing as stealth; I wouldn't be able to leave the house without causing actual panic in people. I wouldn't be able to drive or even sit in a seat on public transit. Every blog and every news outlet would have opinions on me, many of them cruel. To survive at all, I'd probably have to leverage that, turning myself into a freakshow piece. I wouldn't even be able to escape into the wild and live as an animal; a wolf or even a whale might be able to do that, but a dragon? I'd be a cryptid, the sole member of my species.

And yet if not for the rest of the system, I'd be willing to do it, because the alternative- not living as myself- is even more soul-crushing. Because at least then I'd be taken seriously as someone who really does want to live this way.

People will say I haven't thought it through. I've been thinking it through for over 20 years; I'm in my early forties now. People will say I'm making a mockery of transgender people, yet I can't think of any experience more transgender than knowing you'll be hated for changing your body and needing to do it anyway. People will say I can't be being real about this, that this isn't a real concern that people have, that there are so many more important things to worry about- but if it's not real then what have I been feeling all this time? Am I a mirage to you? What clout do you think I could possibly get for lying about this? All I'm doing is trying to share what's going on inside my head.

I've seen therapists, countless times, and they have no advice or solutions for me. The only solution I've come to is simply to not front, and let the rest of my system take care of things for me. But also, I was born here. This was my body, partially, and to survive at all, I've had to renounce that and admit I can't live in this world full-time.

That's rough, to say the least. I feel like I've failed in this whole "being human" thing, which everyone keeps telling me is the right and normal and indeed only way to be a person- when all I really want is to live as myself. I just want to know what that could be like.

This is what being transspecies is for me.

PSA from the actual coiner of “neurodivergent”

Yo. Many of you need to take an entire stadium of seats. Like a football arena in Texas number.

I coined neurodivergent before tumblr was even a thing, like a decade or more ago, because people were using ‘neurodiverse’ and ‘neurodiversity’ to just mean autistic, & possibly LDs. But there’s more, like way more, ways a person can have a different yet fucking perfect dammit brain.

Neurodivergent refers to neurologically divergent from typical. That’s ALL.

I am multiply neurodivergent: I’m Autistic, epileptic, have PTSD, have  cluster headaches, have a chiari malformation.

Neurodivergent just means a brain that diverges.

Autistic people. ADHD people. People with learning disabilities. Epileptic people. People with mental illnesses. People with MS or Parkinsons or apraxia or cerebral palsy or dyspraxia or no specific diagnosis but wonky lateralization or something. 

That is all it means. It is not another damn tool of exclusion. It is specifically a tool of inclusion. If you don’t want to be associated with Those People, then YOU are the one who needs another word. Neurodivergent is for all of us.

Annoyedly yours,

Neurodivergent K of Radical Neurodivergence Speaking

Reblogging this as a reminder to everyone that neurodivergent doesn’t just mean neurodevelopmental disabilities!

Dont forget learning disabilities, neurological communication disabilities, cognitive disorders, neurodegenerative disorders, brain damage, movement disorders, seizure disorders, neurosensory conditions, neurological sleep disorders, neurological/psychological eating disorders, addictive/dependant disorders, behavioral disorders, personality disorders, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, psychotic disorders, somatoform disorders, plurality, dissociative disorders, trauma & stressor disorders, identity incongruence, attractional disorders, neurological/psychological sexual dysfunction, and mental/neurological conditions that don’t fall into any of those categories!

When you say “neurodivergent”, please keep in mind that is a gigantic spectrum of conditions, not just neurodevelopmental ones!

You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?

it's probably from assholes making asks a minefield of trolling/harassment for years with no real blocking ability, which turned people off from allowing asks on their blogs so as a whole the site moved away from it

but now that we do have better blocking, we should try to revive it.

Reblog if your ask box is open.

I hope more folks ask me stuff I like answering 🥺

I actually got several asks today which is nice

Happy to see when I do get asks

a lot of conversations surrounding trans men having male privilege made me realize just how Eurocentric and white most people's view of trans people is, because it doesn't take into account so many countries where women are prohibited from pursuing education, refused independency or forced into child marriages.

male privilege does not save transmasculine people from violent misogyny, it is not a get out of jail card, and so the rights of transmasculine bodies are tied to women's rights. and if to gain access to male privilege you first have to be allowed bodily autonomy and then be legally and socially recognized as a man is it really a privilege at all?

Everyone could laugh at the haha funny meme, but willfully forgot was this was actually about:

"Why are you gay?"

This was a trans man, Pepe Julian Onziema, in Uganda fighting for his rights to be legally recognized as a man. Do you think he, being asked if he's gay, has privilege under the patriarchy he's living in?

#oh wow. i never had this context.#i hate the way the internet has made the experience of trans men jokes for decades#it reminds me of the snl screenshot about the brandon teena story...

Okay listen I have another disability related thing that’s important!!

If you have any disabilities linked to tooth decay/erosion, through direct cause or secondary symptom, it is vital that you get one or both of the following items: Sensodyne toothpaste and enamel repair mouthwash

This includes health conditions such as acid reflux, diabetes, thyroid conditions, fibromyalgia, chronic pain & mental illnesses such as depression that create poor hygiene routines, sensory issue disorders like autism and ADHD, and any health condition that causes frequent vomiting / increased stomach acid, including eating disorders and migraines.

All of these disabilities will erode the enamel of your teeth, not only opening you up to cavities but making it very easy to chip your teeth from such simple things as biting the wrong way on the tines of a fork. (I’ve chipped my teeth at least 4 times this way).

The toothpaste on the left here (sensodyne pronamel) is gentle on your teeth, won’t cause painful sensations from any extreme mint flavor, and will even protect your gums if they’re sensitive from any of these conditions.

The mouthwash on the right (Crest enamel repair) will, as it says, repair your enamel — which is marvelous, because the technology to repair your enamel at all is relatively very new to society! — but it is most importantly non-alcoholic. Meaning that it works well as a once-a-day rinse without any of the burning sensations of antiseptics that typically discourage people with sensory issues from taking care of their teeth.

I know remembering to do these things every day can feel like a lot when you’re sick and exhausted, but I promise a collective three minutes out of every day is going to save you an incredible amount of pain and money in the future. If your teeth are susceptible enough to rot, you can actually die from infection. And as they say, with how little insurance actually covers dental —

Not brushing your teeth??

In THIS economy???

also: ask your dentist about durophat fluoride toothpaste!! I got some on prescription and it is a special formula that helps protect teeth

Clinpro is another great rx toothpaste that has a soft minty vanilla flavor. You can also ask for tooth cleaning powder at your dentist. The brand I use is called "common sense teeth cleaning powder," and it doesn't scratch the enamel off your teeth.

We use it when I need to neutralize the acid in my mouth because of things like acid reflux/the frequent throwing up that I used to endure because of my other ailments. Saved my teeth for sure.

TePe came out with new flavourless toothpastes this year for everyone with taste issues.

Also check out if you can get prescribed flouride tablets that you can use to get your flouride impulse if no toothpaste or mouthwash works. The other ingredients in toothpaste help you clean your teeth more quickly but if you brush well enough you can clean off the plaque with just a damp toothbrush. It takes much longer than with the help of toothpaste though. One trick for kids with sensory issues from my boss is to mash a flouride tablet with a drop of water and then put it on the brush.

trying to get disability benefits is less like applying for aid and more like being put on trial for a crime you didn't commit

they are not reviewing your case to understand how you are disabled. they are investigating you to prove or disprove the assumption that you are lying about being disabled. you are guilty until proven innocent.

Having the time of ferret’s life!

the thrill of finding out what you were made for

#do you think most people are so domesticated they have yet to find their bowl of snow?#people who’s talents lie somewhere outside all this#such as digging really nice holes

these tags did something to me

THIS FUCKING VIDEO MY FRIEND JUST SENT ME OF THE TUNGSTEN D20 HE BOUGHT

bonus: some screenshots of our discord conversation about it