#program notes

[chokopoppo]

MONSTROUS REGIMENT. // And the new day was a great big fish. [[ Listen on Spotify ]]

Program notes--and spoilers for Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett--below the cut.

1.Children's Work // Dessa

When the wagon tipped, I prayed over your body I asked God to take the damage out on me Ten years later, he finally gets the memo Sent it to accounting and knocked out my front teeth

'She hadn't set out to be an ornithologist. But birds brought Paul alive. All the...slowness in the rest of his thinking became a flash of lightning in the presence of birds. Suddenly he knew their names, habits, and habitats, could whistle their songs, and, after Polly had saved up for a box of paints off a traveler at the inn, had painted a picture of a wren so real you could hear it.'

OR

'...well, yes. She'd heard the song, too. So what? Paul was her brother. She'd always kept an eye on him, even when she was small. Mother was always busy, everyone was always busy at The Duchess, so Polly had become a big sister to a brother fifteen months older than she. She'd taught him to blow his nose, taught him how to form letters, went and found him when crueler boys had got him lost in the woods. Running after Paul was a duty that had become a habit.'

2. Barnacled Warship // Johnny Flynn

Well, I left home three days ago I feel like going to bed Open the courts and a new religion Burning through my head

' "All the good bits in this country are in this tent," said the voice of Wazzer.

'Embarrassed silence descended.'

OR

'Jackrum softened his voice a little when he saw their expressions. "Lads, this is war, understand? He was a soldier, they were soldiers, you are soldiers... more or less. [...] Bury 'em decent and say what prayers you can remember, and hope they've gone back where there's no fighting." '

3. The Railroad // Goodnight, Texas

Run, run, run with the railroad Get out of their sight When the engine turns and you've got to move on Then you've got to move on at night

' "I expect you were glad to leave," was all Polly could say.

' "The basement window was unlocked," said Tonker. '

OR

' "D'you know why we joined up?" said Tonker, red in the face. "To get away! Anything was better than what we had! I've got Lofty and Lofty's got me, and we're sticking with you because there's nothing else for us! [...]"

"Then go!" shouted Polly. "Desert! We won't stop you, because I'm sick of your... your bullshit! But you make up your mind right now, right now, understand?" '

4. Dig Gravedigger Dig // Corb Lund

I asked about ghosts and spirits I asked him if he ever got spooked I asked him if he ever got haunted by souls, But he reckons that he buries them, too.

'The charcoal-burner and his wife were buried to the accompaniment of, to Polly's lack of surprise, a small prayer from Wazzer. [...]

'Wazzer prayed for everyone. Wazzer prayed like a child, eyes screwed up and hands clenched until they were white. The reedy little voice trembled with such belief that Polly felt embarrassed, and then ashamed, and, finally, after the ringing "amen", amazed that the world appeared no different than before. For a minute or two, it had been a better place...'

5. You're Dead // Norma Tanega

Don't ever talk with your eyes Be sure that you compromise You're dead, you're dead, you're dead You're dead and out of this world

' "Why do you smoke? It's not very... vampire, really."

' "Well, I'm not supposed to be very vampire," said Maladict, lighting up with a shaking hand. "It's the sucking. I need it. I'm on edge. I'm getting the no-coffee jitters. [...]"

' "We've got plenty of tea--" Polly began.

' "You don't understand! This is about... craving. You never stop craving, you just switch it to something that doesn't cause people to turn you into a short kebab!" '

6. We Stand Alone // PigPen Theatre Co.

We stand alone with the bones of our father's breath Retching our souls with the stories of life and death Come pass away on the sinews of our strings But watch your weary eyes and protect thy dreams

'No one spoke at all. The thing was... the thing was, Polly realized, that they were no longer marching alone. They shared the Secret.'

OR

'... Er, your sleeping friend... will you leave her here?"

' "No," said the squad, as one woman. [...]

' "We stick together," said Polly. "We don't leave a man behind." '

7. Bigmouth Strikes Again // The Smiths

And now I know how Joan of Arc felt Now I know how Joan of Arc felt As the flames rose to her Roman nose And her hearing aids started to melt

'She didn't know much about what went on in [the School], but imagination rushed to fill the gap. And she wondered what happened to you in that hellish pressure cooker. [...] If you were Wazzer, dealt a poor hand to start with, and locked up, and starved, and beaten, and mistreated Nuggan-knew-how (and yes, Polly thought, Nuggan probably did know how), and pushed deeper and deeper into yourself, what would you find down there? And then you'd look up from those depths into the only smile you ever saw.'

8. Buzzard Song // Ella Fitzgerald

There's two folks livin' in this shelter Eatin', sleepin', singin', prayin', Ain't no such thing as loneliness And we are young again.

'Polly stared out at the bright, unchanging landscape, empty except for a buzzard making wide circles in the forbidden blue.

' "I'm not sure about that," she said. "But someone up there likes us." '

Additional Context: Buzzard Song is a piece of incidental recitative from the American folk opera Porgy and Bess. The native buzzards of Charleston are seen as an omen of misfortune and death by the residents of the fictional Catfish Row; when one circles at the midpoint of the opera, it is chased off by the triumphant Porgy, who believes he has finally found happiness.

Like many other pieces of music from Porgy and Bess, Buzzard Song came to separate acclaim following its orchestration by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. However, unlike other pieces from the opera, such as Summertime or I Got Plenty O' Nuttin', Buzzard Song never entered the jazz standard repertoire, due to this additional dependence on the text.

9. One Foot in Front of the Other // Emilie Autumn

I've been in chains since I was nothing but a kid We don't know freedom, not quite sure that we ever did Now that we have it, how will we make use of it? We've been committed, now to what do we all commit?

' "I don't want to end up in the School, though," said Betty aka Shufti. "They took away a girl from our village and she was kicking and screaming--"

' "Then fight them!" said Polly. "You've got a sword now, haven't you? Fight back!" '

OR

'Polly remembered what she'd said, hours ago, about fighting. You had to start somewhere.

' "I want to try the Keep again," she said. [...] I'm going to try it, Sarge!"

' "You are not!"

' "Try and stop me!" The words came out before she could stop them. And that's it, she thought, the shout heard round the world. No going back after this. I've run off the cliff and it's all downhill from here.'

10. The Trapper and the Furrier // Regina Spektor

What a strange, strange world we live in Where the good are damned, and the wicked forgiven What a strange, strange world we live in Those who don't have lose, those who got get given- More, more, more, more

'It was a terrible thing. Her mother had been a kind woman, or as kind as a devout woman could be while trying to keep up with the whims of Nuggan, and she'd died slowly and painfully, amid pictures of the Duchess and among the echoes of unanswered prayers...'

OR

' "Ever run across someone called Father Jupe?"

' "Oh, yes," said Polly, and, feeling that something more was expected of her, added, "He used to come to dinner when my mother--he used to come to dinner. A bit pompous, but he seemed okay."

' "Yes," said Tonker. "He was good at seeming."

'Once again there was a dark chasm in the conversation that not even a troll could bridge, and all you could do was draw back from the edge.'

OR

' "I feel sorry for the Borogravians," he said.

' "Me too, sir," said Angua. [...] "Their religion's gone bad on them. Three years ago it was abominable to grow root crops on ground which had grown grain or peas! [...] It means no real crop rotation, sir. The ground sours. Diseases build up. You were right when you said they were going mad. [...] I've had a look around. They're very religious here, but their god's let them down. No wonder they mostly pray to their royal family." '

11. Genesis 30:3 // The Mountain Goats

For several hours we lay there, last ones of our kind Harder days coming, maybe; I don't mind. ... I will do what you ask me to do Because of how I feel about you.

' "... Shall I tell you that Tilda was pregnant when they brought her back to the Gray House after the fire? She had it, and they took it away, and we don't know what happened to it. And then she got beaten again because she was an Abomination Unto Nuggan. Does that make you feel better?" said Tonker, tying the rope to a table leg. "There's just us, Polly. Just her and me. No inheritance, no nice home to go back to, no relatives that we know of. The Gray House breaks us all, somehow."

Additional Context: The Life of the World to Come is the 12th studio album of The Mountain Goats, and consists of twelve poems, each meditating on a single verse of the Jewish Tanakh or the Christian New Testament.

The text of Genesis 30:3 is as follows: 'And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.'

About the text, John Darnielle has said "...that story is the most beautiful love story I've ever heard in my life. [...] All the relationships in the Bible prior to that are working relationships, but there's people and love in this story." [Source]

12. The Goddess and the Weaver // Spiral Dance

Arachnia weaves, and she weaves so well She weaves a passage where the Gods will fly Athena laughs as she casts her spell While she watches from her loom on high

' "You must invade Borogravia! In the name of sanity, you must go home! [...] Fight Nuggan, because he is nothing now, nothing but the poisonous echo of all your ignorance and pettiness and malicious stupidity! Find yourself a worthier god. And let...me...go! [...]"

'As one woman, as one man, the crowd in the room reached up hesitantly to their left cheek. And Wazzer folded up, very gently, collapsing like a sigh.'

13. Jackaroe // Joan Baez

"I know my waist is slender, my fingers are neat and small But it would not make me tremble to see ten thousand fall" ... The war soon being over, they hunted all around And among the dead and dying, her darling boy she found.

' "Oh, we had great times, great times," said Jackrum, stopping for a moment to stare at nothing. "He never got promoted on account of his stutter, but I had a good shouty voice, and officers like that. But Willie never minded, not even when I made it to sergeant. And then he got killed at Sepple, right next to me."

' "I'm sorry."

' "You don't have to be, you didn't kill him," said Jackrum evenly. "But I stepped over his body and skewered the bugger that did. Wasn't his fault. Wasn't my fault. We were soldiers." '

14. The World Turned Upside Down // Chumbawamba

I dreamt all men were equal And there were no starving poor And nations never did quarrel Nor never went to war

'Kissing don't last. Oh, the Duchess had come alive before them and turned the world upside down for a spell and maybe they had all decided to be better people, and out of certain oblivion had come a space to breathe.

'And then...had it really happened? Even Polly sometimes wondered, and she had been there. Was it just a voice in their heads, some kind of hallucination? Weren't soldiers in desperate straits famous for seeing visions of gods and angels? [...]

'All we were given was a chance, thought Polly. No miracle, no rescue, no magic. Just a chance.'

15. The Times They Are A-Changin' // Bob Dylan

The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast The slowest now will later be fast As the present now will later be past The order is rapidly fadin' And the first one now will later be last 'Cause the times, they are a-changin'

'At which point, Polly decided that she knew enough of the truth to be going on with. The enemy wasn't men, or women, or the old, or even the dead. It was just bleedin' stupid people, who came in all varieties. And no one had the right to be stupid. [...]

'And the new day was a great big fish.'

[prokopetz]

The fascinating thing about this particular patch note is that it implies the game engine is fully rendering your character's penis at all times, not just when you take your pants off.

[dillyt]

Great news for uninsured adults in the USA who want a COVID-19 booster! It now appears that ALL CVS locations are now active participants in the Bridge Access Program. The Bridge Access Program gives out free Covid-19 vaccinations to 18+ adults who otherwise can't afford one, so if you have a CVS near you, please go get one! For others who don't have a CVS near them, please go to vaccines.gov, click on "Find Covid-19 vaccines", fill out which vaccines you prefer (you can mix different vaccines if you have to so i reccomend just marking all of them for the age groups you need), and when the next page loads mark the "Bridge Access Program Participant" option to see only locations that are Bridge Access Program participants. Hopefully, other places that aren't CVS will start participating soon, so just check back every so often to see if there are any updates. The CDC Bridge Access Program website also has more details on what locations will be participating, but only CVS is appearing as an active participant on the vaccines.gov location finder at the moment.

[xexiar]

Based on how this turned out, I can’t do small canvas and low resolution. Sure, my prefer 300 dpi makes the file bigger. But my pieces comes out beautifully. I’m just gonna have to deal with the headache that is CSP slow saving time and potentially losing hours of work due to that, along with storage limits on my iPad. But I rather smooth rendering over fast savings. Even if my bigger file size tends to also need a lot of storage space. But fuck it.

Like with how procreate is going, it’s ok with the basics. But layer management and my style of sketching gets lost in that app. It could also be due to my limited brushes, since I haven’t found one that feels right. Don’t get me wrong, it took me a year to translate my photoshop illustration style over to CSP. So, I’m positive that I will find a similar flow eventually. Which gives me hope.

For example this thing ^^. I did this in procreate, as a way to try out brushes and my typical traditional painting techniques. So, it gives me hope that I can find a way to sketch and eventually fully illustrate a range of things. Right now, I’m just using my go to practice concepts to learn the software and it’s limits on what is possible. From CSP file saving dilemma to Procreate layer management and effects.

Here’s a Timelapse for fun.

[theofficialastronomy101]

(NEW UPDATE WITH PHOTOS) Send us your best photos!

Absolutely beautiful! I hope everyone took this in! Makes you think just how small we are. A moment the world comes together as one! That’s true humanity . We will be uploading more amazing photos to this same post. So come back later on and check out our 2024 once in a lifetime eclipse photos.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I hope you take this as the compliment it is intended to be, but you strike the same chord of irreverence-as-love, jokes-to-showcase-sencerity that I get from Chuck Tingle, and I adore both of you.

You have bestowed the greatest honour upon me.

[hellenhighwater]

Best study tips?

Oh you don't want that advice from me. My law school professors are still using me as an example of don't do this (unless it works for you (but it won't unless you're crazy.)) I am an undisputed queen of the eleventh hour caffenated cram session, followed by a 90 minute REM cycle and fugue state exam.

I guess the only things I can say, in good conscience, is to give yourself a place to study where that is the ONLY thing you do. I learned really fast that I cannot study at home. I'm too easily distracted. So instead I would study at the lawbrary for as late as it was open, (usually 2 am) and then relocate to a 24 hour diner if I needed to keep going. Even a noisy diner was easier to study in, because there's nothing to do there but eat or whatever work you brought with. I'm not saying that's necessarily going to work for everyone, but having a physical location where Study Happens really helped me maintain focus.

On a similar note, if you're trying to retain huge quantities of information, physically mapping them out can help. Not just with fitting the info together, but in helping your brain network it together in a consistent and recallable way. When I was Bar prepping, I literally covered the walls of my lawbrary study room with outlines and flowcharts of all of the relevant material. And when I needed to recall it, I would find myself at the testing desk, looking up into the empty space where that information was logged, and I would know it.

But honestly studying is just a process of figuring out what works best for you.

[the-music-keeper]

Objective #16 finally got done. I keep going overboard with how much information I actually need for these.

[citricacidprince]

I noticed that their dynamics were so similar… what if they swapped for a bit

As a treat (For Swansea and Daisuke) and a punishment (For Stan and Soos, but also me, because that shit hurted)

Also, bonus doodle under the cut but be wary of Mouthwashing Spoilers!

[kintatsujo]

my parents had this idea that if we were allowed to have certain things in our rooms we'd never come back out

namely, for the purposes of the point I'm trying to make, my dad actively tried to keep me from having a computer in my room when I was an adult already

and it was like, when I went ahead and bought my first laptop anyway because I was sick of the arguing about it and I had money, one of the other things I did was set up a cheap TV Kiddo could watch dvds on, and a chair that Invid could sit in instead of the bunk bed, even though there was barely space to do that

because confining to my room wasn't because I had things to do in there, it was because Dad had a way of making shared spaces feel like they only belonged to him and you weren't actually allowed in there if you didn't want to engage in His Activities

plus like, if you want a gal to get art finished more quickly staring over her shoulder at the screen isn't going to help

point being if you don't want your kids to skitter off to their rooms every time you're spending time in the living room maybe don't have a rule that Dad has sole custody of the remote control and maybe don't spring chores on them every single time you see them doing "quiet" activities in your presence

[velvet-apricots]

Ghost in the Machine

[crabsnpersimmons]

exam 5 for me... tomorrow!

honestly have been feeling really nervous for this exam since my classmates have either failed it or just barely passed. and i had less time to study this time around because i rushed to book the exam.

so i drew this little encouragement early cuz i need the reminder that no matter what happens tomorrow, i did what i could and i didn't compromise on my boundaries—and that is its own victory.

and i hope that you'll be reminded to celebrate your own big and small victories too!

"You are nervous and that's okay! You did your best! You set boundaries! You took breaks! We're so proud of you, Starlight! Whatever happens, we'll always be here, cheering you on!"

[prokopetz]

Apart from silly bugs, the patch notes I love most are for deeply obscure bugs that have been around forever, but were only identified recently because somebody tried something particularly clever. Like, last week Inform fixed a pronoun confusion issue that had apparently been outstanding for 20 years and was only discovered in 2022. Fantastic.

[turtleblogatlast]

Something I love about Leo is that, canonically, he IS capable of cooking, he’s just completely incapable of using a toaster. He’s banned from the kitchen not out of an inability to make edible food, but because being within six feet of a toaster causes the poor appliance to spontaneously combust.

[thatbadadvice]

Programming Note: USians, urge your Senators to vote no on KOSA!

Hello, friends! Bad Advisor here.

If you're a Bad Advice reader, I suspect you agree it's really important that young folks, including and especially LGBTQIA+ teens, deserve safe and affirming places to gather online. The mis-named "Kids Online Safety Act," or KOSA, impedes rather than ensures this!

Contact your Senators today and let them know you oppose KOSA and they should, too!

Here's more from Teen Vogue

Here's how to find/ contact your Senator

Here's more from ResistBot

Here's more from the Electronic Freedom Foundation

(h/t to the fab Captain Awkward for putting this on the Bad Advisor's radar today!)

Here, have a photo of the Bad Advisor's goober pets as a little treat.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I was *not* longing, I swear.

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