#Dj lesson

[swampwhompaaod]

Made a lil tutorial on how to use a vinyl turntable with an entry-level DJ deck that doesn't have phono ins. Give me a follow, let me know what you think!

Track IDs: Teddy Killerz - I'm Doing It, DJ Rap - Good To Be Alive (Ganja Kru Remix)

[thepersonalwords]

When you are there for people who dont need you. They make fun of you and make you a fool.

De philosopher DJ Kyos

[lesson-b]

[purplemilkadraws]

My fave moments!

(click/tap for better quality view)

[threewaysdivided]

Hobson Heckled into Historical Haute-Couture

Continuing the Dan Jones & Dragons gala parade with Hobson, the Flower Crowns' oft-harried Halfling Warlock (played by the ever-wholesome Dan Floyd). Is he trying to massage away the realisation that letting his literally-half-brained patron choose his gala attire might have been a mistake? Is Valse giving him a headache over something else entirely? Did he use Detect Magic in a room full of powerful items and accidentally flash-bang himself? Yes.

More Flower Crowns Gala Outfits: Morenthal | Gelnek

As always, design talk under the cut:

But before that, a short story: I've been following Dan's content on Youtube for... oh jeez, that sure is almost a decade now, both on his current New Frame Plus/Playframe channels and back when he was the primary founder and narrator for EC. His old games education videos helped me get one of my earliest jobs in project work and introduced me to a bunch of media production concepts (like scope management) that would go on to inform some of my own storytelling analysis posts. It was a startling little moment of artistic ouroboros to realise I was mentally running through key points from Dan's own Pose Design 101 video as I was drawing his DnD character. Never expected things to come full-circle like that, but if you're seeing this, Dan: here's to you 🫡 If you're not Dan and haven't already, do go check out his stuff - it's all super well-produced, informative, funny and he's just an overall stand-up guy.

Now: onto the tiny little nerd and his passé party attire

This was a really fun costuming challenge, with a bunch of interesting curveballs thrown in the mix. Unlike the rest of the Flower Crowns, Hobson didn't choose his own party outfit: it was picked out by his patron after Valse kibbitzed him into giving up and letting a heroism-obsessed Fey call the shots. Dan cited Valse as having the fashion sense of Stede Bonnet-as-depicted-in-OFMD, briefing a vaguely 19th century-style outfit that had frilled sleeves and 'would have looked gaudy even when it was in fashion a century earlier'.

Actually dating his outfit was the first challenge. D&D settings are kind of an anachronistic uchronia, with classic swords-and-sorcery fantasy campaigns potentially pulling inspiration points from anywhere across the Arthurian era up to pre-war modernity. Which leads to the question: how do you make something seem dated in a setting where most everything looks vaguely ye-olde-fantasy? The other challenge was that, IRL, the 19th century (i.e Victorian era) was when menswear started taking on a lot of the shapes that would eventually become modern suit and top-'n'-tails fashion. Since Trilby was already going to be wearing classic top-'n'-tails formalwear, I decided to set Hobson's style earlier in the 1800s-1820s and pull in some 18th century Stede Bonnet flourishes to visually set them apart. This article provided some great reference images, and once I hit on the figured silk waistcoat I knew I had a potential starting point.

Colour-wise, I stuck with the burgundy-and-gold palette the Dans gave Hobson in his official gala stream art, since those looked good together and matched up with Dan J's tendency to draw Hobson wearing greens/earth-tones and Valse in reds/jewel-tones. The combination is a lot more colourful and richly saturated than is typical for this style of Victorian-adjacent clothes, which felt appropriate for Valse's gaudy tastes.

Fabric-wise, I figured a fun way to gaudy things up even further would be to lean into the silks and satins that were fashionable at the time, but make all of his outfit shimmery rather than just a single feature piece. As a bonus, silk and satin clothes tend be hot, inelastic and have horribly itchy seams if worn unlined, which felt like exactly the kind of thing Valse's all-form-no-function sensibilities would inflict upon the small, long-suffering fellow. Both these fabrics also have a habit of behaving hideously and ripping themselves apart when worn wet, which makes this a great outfit to, say, accidentally fight an Aboleth in. Poor Hobson.

Some other details, just for fun: 1. Hobson's sketch layers include a drawing of his un-removable cursed left bracer. He's pulled the frilly, puffy sleeve over it but you might spot hints of the shape and the gem if you squint. 2. The reference waistcoat I used had floral embroidery on it. Had this actually been a Hobson outfit, I would have converted them to his garland flower (Forget-Me-Nots), but since it was a Valse pick I decided to make them Senaliesse chrysanthemums; a flower given out to friends of the Feywild's Summer Court as a sign of protection and favour. (It also adds extra layers to Pocket mistaking Hobson for a denizen of the Fey, which is fun).

Close crop on the details because I'm very happy with how they turned out:

[druvjelly]

Dj Octavio is trans

Only female octopuses have suckers that go all down. Male octopuses have those things instead

[schizononagesimus]

if you thought my spotify wrapped was gonna be fucked up already wait until you see what happens when the official version of planet of the bass is released on 22 august

[chaoticbard]

{{ Finally beat the Neth.erbrain. What a lovely epilogue that was! I'd been spoiled to small bits of it, but most of it was a very delightful surprise. }}

[schooloftuneage]

Lesson 3: This is not a test...

CLASS IS IN SESSION

Rick Rubin is one of the most influential producers in the music biz. He turned Linkin Park from what could have been a two-album flash in the pan into one of the deepest acts in alternative music (no kidding, A Thousand Suns remains one of this berk's top 20 albums of all time). He introduced the world to more iconic acts than I can count. And before all that… he was in a shitty punk group that was more known for fake fights and fake arrests than anything else. (His dad was a policeman and would pretend to arrest Rick when he got into planned altercations with planted hecklers - an attempt at getting traction that failed.)

But at the same time, Rick was keeping his thumb on the pulse of the New York music scene, and when he found out about a few rapidly growing groups that were turning out incredibly danceable music with an antiestablishment ethos, his first thought on listening to them was that it was Black Punk Rock.

The music in question was, of course, hip hop.

Let's delve in.

Hip hop was influenced by numerous sources - talking blues, disco, R&B - and tracking all those down would be great, but we're going to truncate slightly today, because A) I'm saving a lot of that for a later lesson, and B) because the most pertinent one is actually disco, believe it or not. See, like punk rock, there was a single spark that ignited the movement, and while it was slower to burn, it had the perfect kindling. The place was in the slums of the south Bronx, in a rec room at 1520 Sedgewick Avenue. The person was DJ Kool Herc, who spun records for dance parties there.

The above documentary gives us a good glimpse at how Herc did his thing. Today we just know it as basic mixing, but back in the day, this kind of thing was revolutionary. Add in an emcee - Coke la Rock - who would handle the microphone while Herc was mixing, and you had the first emcee-deejay combo.

Over time, more groups came together. Grandmaster Flash picked up Herc's skills, and then hammered them down, bringing them to new heights of awesomeness. He couldn't even try to get on the mic while he was mixing, too focused on the beats he was crafting, so he got an enterprising B-boy they called Cowboy to do the honors. Over time he amassed a group of five emcees to work with him - Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. The Treacherous Three, the Funky Four (Plus One More) - you can see a sort of theme in these early groups. Rap battles were a thing, inheriting a little bit of gang battle ethos from their founders - early rap adopters the Zulu Nation were ex-gang members who were trying to veer into a more constructive direction, and they did so well.

But for most, the genre was locked away. Sure, rapping was easy enough to do, but to be a real hip hop artist you needed a deejay, and that equipment was expensive. As I said, the spark was there, but it needed kindling.

And just as punk had its watershed moment in 1977 in London, so hip hop did in 1977 in New York. On July 13th, NYC had a city-wide blackout that lasted just over a full 24 hours. A mob mentality decended over the city, with widespread looting… and in the aftermath of these riots, a lot of expensive sound equipment made its way into the hands of enterprising would-be deejays, either through their own actions or through pawnshops who didn't ask questions about where the equipment came from in the weeks after the blackout.

Now, there is much - MUCH - to say about this scene… but as I'm delving in, I'm realizing that someone else has already done this lesson, and arguably done it better than I could ever dream of doing it. Cartoonist Ed Piskor has done a series, Hip Hop Family Tree, that chronicles the early rise of the scene beautifully. And in the spirit of the early rap bootlegs that we're going to be discussing… you didn't get it from me, but hereyago:

That's twelve issues of greatness right there.

Now, with THAT link dropped, let's talk seminal moments for the origins of hip hop.

The first track on wax that was nothing but a deejay showing off their mixing prowess? "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel". This one was even more notable because Sugar Hill Records didn't like paying royalties to artists that they sampled, and tended to use original compositions rather than having Flash or other deejays mix in the background (which, yes, was kind of insulting to the art of the deejay…). Also, please note, there are NO editing tricks here. This was just Flash at his best, and he laid the whole track down in only four or five takes.

The first rap "superstar", arguably, was Kurtis Blow. At the very least, the man was both responsible for the first gold record in the hip hop genre and the man who brought it to Soul Train, with "The Breaks".

And now, we're going to zig-zag-zig back to an earlier point.

The early hip hop scene was full of bootlegs. Some were recordings of live events - Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five had a full live track that had never been released recorded, and it's still more popular, as the studio version lacks the passion of the live recording. (Bozo Meko's version of 'Flash it to the Beat', fyi.) Unscrupulous producers would record artists in the studio under the guise of 'letting them play around' and release their work under different names - and again, that happened to the Furious Five, with "We Rap More Mellow" being released as the work of The Younger Generation. And then there were bootleg compilations released for the deejays - packages of "essential" disco songs pressed as unofficial collections, distributed behind the counter of record stores.

Our TRACK OF THE WEEK is the first of those. A recording of a live event - something that we now recognize as the first rap battle, Busy Bee Starsky vs. Kool Moe Dee. A battle that Starsky phoned in because he assumed he'd have no real competition, and Moe came loaded for bear for. This one's a slaughter, kiddos.

And we're gonna have a lot to say about hip hop in the future... but for now, that gets you to the starting line.

Class dismissed.

[thepersonalwords]

Choose to hustle now, to work hard now, to make all the sacrifice now. So that you can enjoy your tomorrow. Whatever it is that you suppose to do now. If you don't do it now, it will affect you badly for the rest of your life.

De philosopher DJ Kyos

[lesson-b]

[wildflowercryptid]

it's tough out here for us giacomo lovers....

[rabideyeartist]

1000 Tiny Magnets Show #455: November 10, 2023

1000 Tiny Magnets Show #455: November 10, 2023 Rabideye presents1000 Tiny Magnets Show #455: November 10, 2023 ** displayed on track list = Explicit Lyrics = warning for sensitive listeners NEW & NEW-TO-ME VOCAL DANCE MUSIC. 📥 DOWNLOAD and prepare to have your ears pinched by rabid pixies Artist, Track Ferreck Dawn (Feat. Stevie Appleton), Change Your Mind, Anabel Englund, A lesson in…

[lamp2003]

not going to quit my job but im definitely fantasizing about it

[aroacesigma]

sitting in the counselling office doing my work and seeing that mfing teacher that is currently half the reason im stressed walk by . currently resisting the urge to run out and whack him