I made a transparent green version of that old geocities dragon vibe gif I was searching for a while back, and I figured while I was there I might as well export a bunch of other colours in case people would like to use them! The last two are solid white and solid black, in case your theme makes either of them invisible lol
I used these to script a little virtual pet that can follow your cursor, get bored, wander around the page on its own, and even use the web console to say things sometimes!
I designed it for use on people’s neocities pages (instructions for use are in the HTML source), but in theory it could be used anywhere…
update: more dragons! Some rainbow ones that should work with arcanacheque’s cursor chaser and… (drumroll pls) MANES! Now that I’ve drawn all the mane frames (heh) I can change them to be any colour I like going forward, woo!
been reading cicero’s rant about words being given obscene meanings and i don’t think i’ve ever seen a latin sentence that made me burst into such immediate and violent laughter before
had a couple people be like “i have no idea what this means” so to clarify: the word penis in latin originally meant tail and only later got the sense of, uh. penis. so this is cicero complaining that nowadays all these hooligans are using the word “penis” for naughty purposes
it might sound obvious, but i had to learn this the hard way: don’t date someone who you feel you can’t 100% be yourself around. maybe you can keep up shutting down 5-90% of yourself but 1) why would you want to 2) why should you have to when there’s countless people out there who would love ALL of who you are
i’m saying this because i dated a guy who said we were being “healthy and open” by saying all our grievances. what that involved was any time i talked about something that i was passionate about he would shut it down with “babe, sorry i just wanna be honest, i don’t care about this at all. sorry. love youuu <3” and i thought that was healthy for whatever reason.
now i’m with a guy who actively encourages me in my interests, even the ones he’s previously uninterested/unfamiliar with. he doesn’t just passively listen but asks questions and joins in with what i’m doing. some people might say this is a low bar to set but i wish someone had told me this when i was younger. pay attention to who’s building you up and who’s tearing you down.
literally 2 minutes after posting this and he proves my point <3
can’t believe the Human Pet Guy called for the restoration of the French monarchy in my mentions, leading me to discover he follows me on Twitter and almost certainly for fetishistic reasons (his following list was full of trans and asian porn accounts and also elon musk)
if you want me to consume a new media you MUST catch me at the exact moment when the stars are aligned and the air pressure is equal to the current degree of the sun’s peak against the horizon and all the cosmic energies are perfectly unified (aka my old interest is fading out) or i will nod and say “im adding that to my list!” Knowing theres no chance i will check it out
“unless its a book!” “unless you tell me it has gay people in it!” “this but only for live action shows” “theres a good chance i’ll get to it eventually” no wrong this post is not for you this post is ONLY for bitches who could have a treasured friend recommend them something that sounds grown in a lab to be your personal catnip and, with no choice in the matter, immediately know it will never be the right time to watch/read/listen to it
This is the oldest piece of music known to humankind. It’s engraved in cuneiform on a tablet from 1400 BC. And it was a hymn to their goddess Nikkal.
I wasn’t actually expecting something serious.
That was, um, actually unexpected.
What is this grand old instrument? It is almost ethereal to my ears!
I wish more ancient music was written down. It’d be interesting to study it!
Only 15th century BC kids will remember this bop
It would’ve likely originally been played on a sammûm, a bit like a lyre, in accompaniment of a singer.
Whilst its the oldest piece of music, it’s not complete (I believe the oldest complete song is the Seikilos Epitaph), so it’s transcription is controversial; there are a few differing decipherments.
In short, here are some of the things a musicologist would have to do in order to get to the point where you can start looking for someone who plays an ancient Mesopotamian lyre (yes, the sammûm is a type of lyre):
1. Find the tablets. 2. Know enough cuneiform to identify the language, the culture, the time period, and the fact that this is music notation, which was vanishingly rare in a culture where people wrote with a stylus on wet clay. 3. Know what instruments people played and how they were used. 4. Figure out how many strings this instrument had and how they were tuned. This is harder than it looks because, while instruments can sometimes survive millennia, strings tend not to survive, and as any string player knows, tuning often doesn’t survive a single performance. 5. Figure out the tuning system – our Western even-tempered scale is a recent invention. J.S. Bach composed the Well-Tempered Clavier to show off even-tempered tuning in 1722. The octave is a creation of physics; dividing the octave into pleasing individual notes that can be put together to make music is a creation of culture, and there’s no reason to assume that ancient Mesopotamians used modern Western scales. 6. Learn the corpus of music theory that supports the structure of this piece of music. If you know the theory, you can figure out what the music is doing; if you don’t know the theory, you have a random string of notes, not music. 7. Because this was only a semi-written culture, music was heavily improvisatory. You have to know that what’s written down is more of an outline or a suggestion. The real art is in filling in the rest of the pattern. A lot of traditional non-Western music works like this (and up until fairly recently, quite a bit of Western classical music also incorporated this aspect; even today, the art of playing a cadenza is a Thing), so if you’re not an ethnomusicologist, you’ll want to bring one in, preferably one who works with contemporary West Asian folk and/or classical forms. 8. Ahhh! At last! You’ve gotten to the point where you think you can figure out what this piece is supposed to sound like. Now you have to transcribe it all into Western staff notation (which isn’t designed to handle music like this). 9. Unless you are also an expert on building and playing ancient Mesopotamian lyres, you must now go and find someone who is. Fortunately, there are one or two of these people around. Give that person your music, and book the recording studio!
10. The next time anyone asks you why studying music is important, now you know.
