#feeling bad for my family dealing with the hypothetical funeral arrangements but it's okay

[naura-speaks]

Okay tumblr Stays. This is your native territory. If anybody's gonna enjoy this, it's you. From one Stay to another, blow this up...pretty please. I know this ain't tiktok lol.

But yeh I made an English cover of Maniac! I threw some fun little nods to the source material in the visuals (no shut up we're not talking about the members here) and my translation itself.

I'd toss this in a reblog, but I don't especially want it to get lost if someone wants to see it. Here are some more deets on how I made it!

I speak like. twenty words in Korean, so I did not directly translate it from the og lyrics myself. HOWEVER. What I did do was take the English subs from the MV along with a bunch of other lyric videos and translations (and sometimes I even looked up translations of specific words) in order to get a good picture of the original intention of the lyrics, with obvious priority given to the official translation from the MV. Then I tried to figure out how to make that singable in English. Some of it, I could keep nearly the same as the original subs, but other parts translate more awkwardly, so I took some creative license while trying not to take that too far.

Not gonna cap with you, I am not that experienced of a producer, and anybody who is will probably know that right off the bat. Part of the point of this was to force a learning experience on myself by RPing as 3racha for a bit 😂 Hence why I didn't try to come up with my own arrangement, but literally replicate every. single. sound from the original audio. If Maniac has 175M views, I'm 175 of them just from trying to make this dang thing. And that's before I wised up and just ripped the audio to insert as an audio track in my Logic session to hear it side by side rather than replaying parts of the MV every dang time it can't be illegal if I own the literal CD. Seriously though, I came out of this project knowing way more producing stuff than I had before, and I'm really proud of myself for that.

Those two are the big things, but in other fun facts, the pic I used for myself in the video was taken directly after I got back to the hotel after going to their Newark D2 concert! Were there other pics I probably could have used? Ones where the bottom half of my hair isn't approximately the color of seaweed? Sure. But it's the principle of it, man. It's the principle. and hey at least I matched with Minho for a short bit

Catastrophe is a way better producer than me and a super sweet guy, so it was really great to have him look over my work and help out with a few things, on top of his contributions as a featured artist 😭 And though JoePav's part in the cover was tiny, his enthusiasm in the project and its progress has been mighty and appreciated beyond words! When you don't have a big following, it can be a bit harder to get excited about your own work sometimes, so having somebody else get excited on your behalf is contagious and really nice 😊

I stayed up on 3/17-18/22 to listen to Oddinary when it dropped at midnight, and I started my lyric translation the very next day. I'd say the next morning, but I think I had classes. But I was vibrating that entire morning because despite having been a kpop fan for a good year at that point, Oddinary was the first album I'd bought, and it got delivered that day when it wasn't supposed to come for days yet. It was also my first anticipated skz comeback. By technicality, I'd probably been a Stay since somewhere around Kingdom by pure happenstance, but I was in denial I was as deep in the hole as I was, so I didn't call myself a Stay until after NOEASY. BAHAHAHAHA so much denial, but also so much gradual falling into Stayville because I did in fact listen through the whole album within a week of it coming out.

This got so off topic, how did it get so off topic

I remember listening to Maniac for the first time and just feeling so at home with the lyrics of it. Like even if I didn't end up covering it, it was a message that resonated so much with me and with one of the main messages I like to communicate in my own lyrics and as a person: normal is overrated. Yeah, sure, it's kind of been tossed around nerd communities so much that it almost sounds like a pick me at this point, but like, being comfortable enough with "being yourself" to act a little weird in public is a bigger feat than people give it credit for. And yep, it's one of the biggest reasons I stan Stray Kids. They're a bunch of unapologetic weirdos, and it feels like home. I like to say that they feel like family, both in the straightforward understanding of the phrase and because they often act like my literal blood family does. Like a bunch of nutcases.

And now that I've spent a literal hour or more on this brain dump (why. why did I do that.) I will let this post and myself go to bed after using my resin in genshin. Hope it was interesting enough, and if not, oh well. At least my brain has been thoroughly emptied.