#I am a music nerd

[dongslinger--420]

I feel like it is extremely important to realise that the piece that they play when Princess Carolyn having her painting fantasy is from Pictures At An Exhibition. And it's from the first movement, which is called Prominade. It's an amazing pun and it literally could not be more perfect for this scene like I don't think you underSTAND.

[packitandgo]

[demigodwitchdw]

When Wolverine shows up again, I want him to have an identity crisis about his hero identity, resulting in him singing a song about it, ending with "Who am I? Who am I? I'm Wolverine!"

Deadpool, is, of course, waving a torn up Canadian flag in the corner

[speed-metal-punk]

Just here to say yes, I am in fact with all the elitists and gatekeepers when it comes to punk. Yeah your DIY sucks, no it's not punk there isn't a single fucking punk band on there, and yes I'm pointing and laughing with my cool ass friends. Get with it or fuck off, we're busy having a good time

[makeriia]

Fantober day 31!! A free day again.

Recently gotten into HADES, and I think about them a normal amount (lie)

[mr-laveau]

"Let him feel the pain that his mother felt and rot."

Listen, do I know that I'm supposed to want Odysseus freed? Yes, I do know this but also! She kinda ate with that.

[nonbinarywardenamell]

I was pleasantly surprised by the good defibrillator usage in the Taste music video

Here is Jenna's character spreading conductive gel between the paddles

We can even see the gel on the paddles

The actual defibrillation wouldn't work properly because she uses it through clothes a few times, she would get burned but I am just glad that the paddles don't look dry.

[inktasticmagic]

I get to do a Greek myth presentation for my exam. Hahah..Fear me. I wrote the whole thing down in a single lesson (This project was meant to take 4 lessons in total)

The whole time I don’t think I blinked

Only Zeus himself can smite me down. I call it ‘Godly hyperfixation’ others call it ‘Diagnosed Autism’

[clockworkreapers]

Since I am a big nerd and really into it rn I ended up making a very long playlist for TFTGS as a series. Its ordered chronologically to the story beats so if you have read the books the songs line up to things that happen in them in order - for the people who DO know... you might just be able to match up the songs with where you are in the series...

[334iwatchshit]

really sick of being magnetically pulled to things middle aged people enjoy

[gothisopod]

we don’t talk enough about that joel is a drummer. and used to be in a band.

why is no one incorporating that into fics?

pls

[heyyesimtrash-whatofit]

“And all of this is captured by the greedy eyed photographer who stalks me like a vulture!” -Nick Carraway, The Met

(Non Text Version and ramblings under the cut)

Back to our regularly scheduled Gatsby Posting as of late. This time the song of inspiration is The Met from The Great Gatsby Musical! I would be a lying fool if I said the symbolism in this song has not had an iron grip on my writer brain from the very start. I adore the blatant spotlight it places on Nick and his constant being overshadowed and almost hunted by those around him throughout the story. Seriously, whoever wrote these lyrics, you are great. Also Noah J Ricketts an absolutely amazing Nick I just have to say that. I will absolutely be continuing to loop this soundtrack and am actively trying to plan a trip to NY to see the show live because if I don’t my sorry English nerd self will perish. Until my next post!

Non text version:

[bebop-station]

Shostakovich and Aziraphale

I was thinking (and talking to @balance-of-probability endlessly) about the choice to have Shostakovich's fifth symphony feature so heavily in S2 ep 1, and how it struck me as a little odd as there are a bunch of composers Aziraphale loves mentioned in the book and Shostakovich isn't amongst them.

Backstory: In 1934, Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk premiered to huge popular acclaim, which was very briskly walked back in 1936 after the Stalinist newspaper Pravda published an article denouncing it.

Actually more than denouncing it, condemning it. It wasn’t credited but was authored by a guy called David Zaslavsky who was almost definitely scribing for Stalin himself. Lady Macbeth was banned in the USSR until 1961.

Anyway by 1936 Shostakovich had written his fourth symphony, which he withdrew from public performance until 1961 because it was more of the same thing that had made the Soviet leadership cancel Lady Macbeth – it was unconventional, anti-patriotic, and indicated that Shostakovich was a “bourgeois formalist”.

So he shelved it and started working on Symphony No. 5 which is, on the surface at least, Soviet as fuck. And that’s what we hear Aziraphale listening to in S2E1.

(Sidebar this story is told in Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time which is either a literary wank soup or a masterpiece depending on how cranky you are when you first read it)

So basically what Dmitri Shostakovich did in those years between the fourth and fifth symphonies was something that might be familiar to S2E6 enjoyers/agonisers: he decided to toe the party line.

Kind of.

Listening to the finale of the fifth symphony (and if you want to listen along it’s the recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic, it’ll be called something like Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47; iv. Allegro non troppo) without the context of the rest of the symphony or in fact Shostakovich’s life is like ah yes that’s a bit of a Soviet battle anthem let’s march into Leningrad or whatever.

But it is, as critics have increasingly understood in the years since Shostakovich demurely described it as “a Soviet artist's no-nonsense response to fair criticism”, dripping with irony. This man reviled the Stalinist line on art and life – he takes the Soviet anthem and turns it into a sort of fucked up evil clown march. The whole thing gives me this vibe:

(gif from @goodomensedit)

There’s a lot of stuff about that time in Shostakovich’s life that is extremely hard to verify. There’s a “memoir” which is for sure at least partially fabricated called Testimony in which there’s an alleged quote from our man saying that final movement is a parody, that “it's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, "Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing", and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, "Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing"."

Whether or not Shostakovich said that (some of his friends who outlived him support that reading, including Rostropovich who conducted a bunch of his work) you can definitely hear it in the piece and you can definitely see how it gives us a clue into the decision Aziraphale makes at the end of the season.

What Shostakovich had to decide back in the 1930s was whether he would a) flee to somewhere like the US, where many other artists targeted by Stalin went; b) stay and become a public nuisance, leading almost definitely to an off-the-books execution; or c) become a party-approved Soviet Artist and hope for change. Even nudge it along in a subtle way. Even get on the inside and work to bring it down. We don’t know how true that was for old mate Dmitri and we don’t yet know exactly what Aziraphale has planned. But yeah:

tl;dr: Shostakovich 🤝 Aziraphale

          Staying inside a rancid and destructive militarised culture in the hope that it can change

[i-dreamed-i-had-a-son]

Just saw Les Mis for the first time (also the first time I heard it) and. My life is changed

[gamerexdrex]

So I have a lot of toughts about the Vengance saga. (English isn't my first language and I am writing in a phone)

So, one of the things that jumped to me (and saw that a few people didn't like) is the fact that Odysseus beat Poseidon in a fight in 600 strike, mainly because of the great deviation from the source material and also generally the conventions of greek mythology.

The thing is, for me, it makes scence in terms of the narrative Epic is going for.

Poseidon has been the main antagonistic force of the story and arguably, the character that influences odysseus development the most.

Poseidon is the character that first championed the philosophy of ruthlessness, the one that slaughtered the fleet, the one big obstacle in odysseus way, and the one who's philosophy pushes him into becoming a monster, doing more and more brutal things just to get home.

Poseidon pushed Odysseus to the brink, and now, those very same actions came back to haunt him.

The roles are reversed. Odysseus didn't kill the cyclops, and when Poseidon came for revenge, his pleas for mercy where rejected

Now, Poseidon didn't kill Odysseus, and when Ody came for revenge, his please for mercy were rejected.

Personally, I am not bothered by the changes.

Epic is, honestly, it's own thing besides the odyssey, so in the context of it's own world, I am willing to buy the whole beating the shit out of poseidon, as well as some other silly things.

Besides, it's clearly inspired in RPGs and in those you fight gods or capital G God every time, and I honestly love it

On that note, maybe I will write sometime about why those kinda batshit in Epic elements such as the Windbag JetPack, Disco Hera, and the like are part of it's charm, but I need to sleep first

[ratfreecog]

Listening to far away from tulsa makes me wanna sob it’s like I can hear the wind in the piano and the violin. I can hear the wood of their home in the guitar. It feels like standing on top of a hill and feeling the sun beat down on you like this distinct memory I have from when I was a kid in the springtime laying in the grass. It’s almost overwhelming in how peaceful it is and how it makes me ache and long like them so deeply, how it feels like you can hear the rain gentle on a window pane, the breeze in the trees and bringing leaves down with it. I’ve never listened to a song that feels so deeply in the instrumentation like poetry it makes me wanna cry with them and for them and imagine everything they had and could never have and always wanted in spite of everything. Every time I listen to it I’m struck so deeply with the thought of “I can hear the wind in the air and on my body in this song”