Manuela Malasaña

today ended up in a situation in which i had to speak spanish. it's been a hot minute but fluency remains thank god. my accent is still p good, no dipthongized terminal vowels or nothin, aspirating and eliding in all the right places for the local dialect. why thinking "just do the vowels like im speaking spanish" does not work when im singing in italian i have no idea

regardless of if ur a christian or not u gotta appreciate what a monumental achievement the king james bible is. a small team of scholars managed to translate the entire bible by cobbling together quotes from books written in the future

AAAAAAAAAAA I finally figured out how to sound like the professional classical contraltos I hear in recordings! oh sweet lord finally!!! I can't actually stay in that configuration on all vowels yet but it's such a relief to know the potential is there. i was scared maybe my mutant voice just wasn't physically capable of it. it is SO different from what my voice sounds like otherwise, absolutely surreal

I am having the carpet in my bathroom replaced with vinyl tile. the whole experience has been very 20th century. The sales rep came to my home, measured the space, gave me my quote, and a phone number. No email. I did end up accepting the quote, and now they are coming back today with the paperwork for me to sign rather than handling that remotely with docusign or similar. really makes me feel connected to my ancestors

the tenor friend who requested the MIDI I made for the aria from Friedrich Ludwig Benda's 1779 Barber of Seville sent me a video of himself singing it. It sounds so good when done with the instrument it was written for. I had a moment of sadness, I rescued the aria from the scrap heap of history, but I couldn't truly restore it. There is nothing written for a voice quite like mine. But maybe that's what lets me evaluate each piece on its own merits rather than thru the lens of "is this for me"

Dogpit Jam 13 is nigh! Make a game based on the theme "chimera" and submit it by the deadline! Details and sign-up here https://itch.io/jam/chimera-jam #dogpitjam

I recently found that I could get better resonance by willing the hard palate just behind the front teeth to go up, even though there is no articulation there. It does not move the hard palate at all yet it was doing something. I discovered there is a muscle attached to the soft palate that goes there, this was what I was actually willing to move. it's somewhat unsettling that there are internal muscles you can't feel at all that you can learn to move on command anyway if you realize they exist

there are several anecdotes about Senesino being a terrible actor. my favorite is that he once heard Farinelli sing a mournful aria with such skill and beauty he immediately ran over to embrace him, before remembering that he was playing the wicked king whose torture was the cause of the sad aria

Reflecting on all the times in my career as a software engineer I have been told that, yes, things were a bit unfair to me as a woman, but that I was being a trailblazer, I was the one discovering and establishing the path that would enable others to follow.

But you go back to the 70s and you see the same number of women programmers, being fed that exact same line
And in the 80s
and the 90s
and so on to today. The "trailblazer" narrative is a lie told by managers to make themselves feel better

RE: @Xibanya@mastodon.xyz

so okay why am i preparing to fork like 200 euros over to some library in milan?

i read that a composer, Constantino Dall'Argine, premiered a Barber of Seville that used Sterbini's libretto (the libretto created for Rossini's Barber of Seville) so ofc i wanted to see the score. in all my searching i found nearly identical phrasing of this claim, which is a dead giveaway of some fact deriving from just a single source,