hardlyarthardlygarbage

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in case you missed it i am editing a new podcast called codex entries (spotify) about the dragon age games!! if you want to hear two funny people play and discuss DA2 in great detail, there are 5 episodes out now and more coming every other week!!!! its a really delightful show and i implore you to give it a listen and kick us a buck or two on ko-fi if you enjoy it!

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This rules, all of these bands are worth listening to, the perfect life after garages list. And since three of my bands are on here and I don't advertise us enough I'm gonna indulge! I don't talk about it a lot but if you liked the ballad of unremarkable Derrick Krueger or firewalker with me, that style is what my real life band Noiseland does all the time, to the point where a version of Firewalker is gonna be on our next album. You can find our old EPs at noise-land.bandcamp.com and on basically all streaming platforms. They're pretty lo-fi but without them I wouldn't have been on the team that made DISCIPLINE. The big news is that the aforementioned next album should be out soon, in the next few months, and I think it's the best thing we've ever done. Queer, isolated post-punk and shoegaze with decent production for once. Keep an eye out, I'll announce it here and on IG (@noiseland_) when it drops! Girls Occurs, my indie pop band with the inimitable @bardapologist, also has a single and live EP on streaming and at girlsoccurs.bandcamp.com and while there's not much there I think it's some of the best non-garages work I've ever been a part of, and required listening for anyone who needs Carly to rip their heart out. And of course if you're gay, horny, sad, and over 18, check out just friends, networking, my band with zack.ry that started as a joke and then became like 8 songs of homoerotic desperation. everyone loves us, you should too. We're not on streaming yet because distrokid sucks but someday we'll get back there.

This month's roundup is a little late due to the watg release, but here's some other bands by various garages!

You can find a link to the original google doc list here (not sure how often we'll update it, but hey, better than a static image).

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apropos of nothing, but fwiw they're who Calvin and Hobbes (of the comic) were named after.

Me, starting a video that says it's going to explain how Victorian poorhouses fucked up the concept of charity forever: ok, show me what you've got

Video: it starts with the ideas of the Christian philosopher --

Me: DON'T SAY IT DON'T FUCKING SAY IT

Video: -- John Calvin

Me:

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Reblogging to post the best post-punk song about someone not coming out as trans because as a fat person of color they know they will never be seen for who they are

The fat transfem experience is multitudes more difficult than you realize

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I know yr getting roasted in the tags for the late game revelation but honestly I'm really stoked you had that reaction. A lot of us *were* just using blaseball lore and terms as metaphors/symbolism for our own life (i.e. "Firewalker With Me" is ostensibly about someone who set people on fire whenever he left them behind but is really about my feelings of alienation and anger when I realized that being very visibly trans meant I could never go back to my home, family, and friends in Texas again) so the fact that that sense of metaphor not only made them more parsible to people outside the fandom but also let them apply it to their own lives and loves means we did something right, and there is something universal at the core of even the most absurdly specific references. That's super cool!

my brain is melting

the band that wrote the number 2 song on my spotify wrapped, the garages,. this year is a fake band from an ARG (??? i think it's some kind of ARG???)

i got recommended them this summer by another baseball tumblr girlie, and based on their lyrical content i just kinda assumed they were former college/high school players who were still big fans.

thought they were like a poppunk band that wrote mostly about baseball. their bandcamp said they were from seattle. like where the mariners are from (to be fair i did think it was weird that none of the players they namedropped were mariners). and i thought that they were a normal band.

like i'm a long time los campesinos fan and they're constantly referencing soccer. and baseball metaphors are a huge thing in USamerican culture, so i kinda assumed that it was like that

anyway according to my friends they're from some ARG called blaseball that happened in 2020? like The Garages are a fake baseball team in the ARG, and the music is part of the ARG? i don't get it. i've been sending my baseball yaoi friends their songs and saying "this is so horii" or "god this is just what it's going to be like when this guy retires" and just. i feel deranged. what the fuck do you mean The Garages aren't a real band?

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anon bcause I feel so stupid asking this

is garages your band?

youre not stupid for asking!!!! yes the garages is a music collective im in!!! its a 50+ person band that largely organized around the now-defunct baseball simulator/horror game Blaseball. our activity has ebbed with the end of blaseball but we were very active in the pandemic and put out over 50 albums in two years!

here’s a good written primer on what blaseball was

here’s a people make games video on blaseball

here’s a bandcamp daily writeup on the garages

here's a seattle met article about the garages

and lastly, here's one of my FAVORITE of our live shows!!!!!!

lots of garagesposting happening rn because we played perhaps our very last “live show” on the charity stream Desert Bus for Hope last wednesday :') the end of an era. we are all love the garages

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Here's a roundup of every live show the garages have played so far.

Just cause.

--

HECKDANG

DESERT BUS FOR HOPE (2020)

BLASEBALLIDAYS

TAKEOVER

CAN'T PLAY LIVE

RIV

THE GARAGES VS DESERT BUS (2021)

UNDERGROUND

COYOTE WALL X THE GARAGES @ DESERT BUS (2022)

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i promised @thwackamabob i'd record a noiseland version of firewalker with me so she'd be able to listen to it but now that we're actually putting it on tape I'm realizing how difficult it is to get the lyrics to make sense without any knowledge of blaseball.

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i didn't realize mitch made it to tumblr, he'll be tickled

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shoot for the moon – even if you miss, you'll achieve a kind of malformed androgyny that invites weird comments from basically everyone you meet

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it's really neat that this weird, messy little song, a big what if experiment that's both massively indebted to its influences (in this case, skinny puppy and pulp—to whoever said they're lifting the chorus theme, make sure jarvis cocker doesn't sue) and one of those things where you jump off a cliff and build your parachute on the way down, still seems to be resonating with people. I look back at it in awe all the time because I still have no idea how we did it—i've never really made industrial music before, neither has riley, and that's why we brought in azure when we previously made music that was adjacent to the genre. we were making it up as we went along. case in point—about half of the noises in the verse are rileys voice chopped up, fed through a bunch of effects, and then rhythmically sampled. The other half is, I believe, a 909 drum machine fed through a distortion that, for whatever reason, gave pitches to most of the samples, almost like a ring mod, making them sound more "musical" (which is to say, more cacophonous than rhythmic). The little bit of quiet before the first chorus is just that pitched drum machine and a bit of riley's sampled voice, to give an idea of what i mean. anyway, I think this is maybe my favorite riley performance on any of our collabs, she really went wild with it. from what i understand it was kind of a happy accident—the vocals i sent her as like, a style guide, she didn't know they were super processed, and tried to mimic them naturally, and the result is the shaky shrieking thin. caterwauling through the track. just incredible work throughout, so visceral, it ends up making the jimmy swaggart stuff feel a bit limp in comparison. the screams on the bridge feel downright animalistic in a way i didn't know riley was capable of—but then at this point I should know better than to think her incapable of anything. i'm rambling now, anyway, the point is i know this is sort of a weird song from a weird ep released at a weird time so it means a lot to me that it hits so hard for people, because it hits really hard for me too. much like DK there wasn't much to yips as a character so it got really messy and personal and that's always where the fun stuff happens.

happy YIPS KANEKO THRUSTS HER BLOODY FIST THROUGH THE UNFEELING EYE OF GOD monday 👍

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i spent time today organizing my demos for a light went out on my local drive and i love getting to see Numbers

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Hello friends, thank you so much for your help last time, unfortunately things haven't gotten much better and I'm still in trouble. If you can share this around it would help a lot. Thank you. https://gofund.me/e773d332

Help

Hey buds, it’s me, mother love blone from the garages., I’ve run into some really rough financial issues lately. If my music has helped you at all and you can do anything to help (be it chipping in a few bucks or just sharing it around) i would be eternally grateful https://gofund.me/d18cadc4

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late to the party but wtf how did i beat lorde. y'all know she did melodrama right?

Ribs (Lorde)

This dream isn't feeling sweet/We're reeling through the midnight streets/And I've never felt more alone/It feels so scary getting old

"It's the nostalgia in real-time its the existential dread that comes with coming of age it's the fleeting memories of friends long since passed it's the desire to return to simpler times its- [sobs]"

Firewalker With Me (The Garages)

They say you can't go home again, it's true/Especially when your home burns down around you/I lit the match with a flick of the cleat/From the league that hexed me/Yeah, I'll see you in hell/'Cause it's hell that sent me...First you do it for the money/Then you do it for the fame/Then you do it for your teammates/Then you do it for the flame

"Oh my god it's so. listen to me. what if you destroyed everything you ever left and could never stop moving. what if time just kept going and you kept leaving the past behind as it goes up in flames and you can't escape the relentless march of time and the destruction and loss of everything you ever tried to love do you get it do you understand me. and also everyone's looking at you"

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Help

Hey buds, it’s me, mother love blone from the garages., I’ve run into some really rough financial issues lately. If my music has helped you at all and you can do anything to help (be it chipping in a few bucks or just sharing it around) i would be eternally grateful https://gofund.me/d18cadc4

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I know in the shuffle of the mourning the fandom is going through this will probably get lost, but I'd like to ask any Blaseball fan take a look at their favorite Garages song(s) on Genius and annotate any lyrics you think are really significant of historical happenings, attitudes, or in-jokes that otherwise get lost. Some songs are still missing lyrics or missing entirely, at that! These songs do so much to encapsulate what happened during these years, and I'd love some help annotating things!

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a last blaseball missive

i’ll probably be processing the end of blaseball and everything the garages was for a while, but in the meantime, i went ahead and published a passion project I’d been working on off and on for the past few months and finally finished in a flurry over the past few days: a guide to getting into the garages. i hope it gives you something to point to when your friends wanna get into the garages, and if not I hope it’s at least an entertaining read https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PS3WIXzIzPa5hPimLWeT9Bsf-40YH2XMUA09OK71ppU/edit?usp=sharing