#mtx talk

[mtx-lol]

ill be entirely honest, iceberg with a gas mask has not left me alone ever since its been conceptualised randomly while on my content hunt

[do-you-know-this-adhd-character]

Do you know this (noncanon) ADHD character?

Evidence below the cut!

he majorly hyper-focuses and once he starts a design project he cannot stop until he finishes or crashes, whichever comes first. He gets set in how he does things, whenever someone rejects his building plans and makes him change them he gets really frustrated. This all is pretty well based in his actual story. I also hc him to have rejection-sensetive dysphoria.

[reserwrekt]

To be trusted to willingly, purposefully, poisoning my own body every week is crazy to me and I never get used to it.

[fangmich]

I am at the end of dd2 with so many teleport options and ferrystones the game literally begs me to use them...

So the whole dlc makes even less sense now and I would've wished people actually criticised this part instead of spreading misinformation while pretending to be hollier than though.

I also have more to say about this kind of "activism" and how some people are very selective what they want to criticise while ignoring other things entirely.

[inverttheory]

happy arthritis thursday everybody . it's when ypur arthritis is bad & it's thursday .

[genderkoolaid]

tbh my opinion isnt so much that trans men cannot have male privilege. its that the way we understand male privilege is based in cis women, specifically otherwise privileged (esp. otherwise-gendered privilege, i.e gender-conforming/straight/perisex) cis women's understanding of gender as something static and inherent to who you are, rather than something fluid which is, in part, constructed by society and placed onto you separately in every moment.

can a trans man experience (cis) male privilege? yes. can a trans woman? yes. and so can a cis woman! hell, a femme perisex cis woman with a gender neutral name could if she's assumed to be a cis man on a resume. male privilege is not an on/off switch. the idea that it is stems from cissexist understandings of male/female as entirely separate and static categories which everyone can and must be understood through. trans people in feminism are expected to constantly defend and deflect accusations of being Privileged Male Oppressors by promising cis perisex women that our experiences are just like theirs! we don't have any scary opinions that don't align with their worldview! we swear we won't ever make them have to reflect on how being cis+perisex has biased them and potentially made their analysis of gender at all inaccurate! trans experiences are only considered valuable to cisfeminism to the extent that they reaffirm what cisfeminists already hold true. thats why they only ever want to talk about a very simplistic narrative around wages pre/post-transition. its extremely unthreatening to cis people because it presents transness in patriarchy as just going from one cis role to another; it doesn't ask cis feminists to expand their paradigm to include the ways in which trans people are treated as a class and their own complicity in transphobic oppression.

which is why trans men have been getting fucked over by trans-affirmng cisfeminism. because by virtue of having our gender acknowledged, we are expected to forfeit our place in the feminist movement and adopt the role of outsider along cis men*. and its also why trans women and MTX people get fucked over the minute they cannot or refuse to describe their experiences through the one or two approved narratives. cisfeminism cannot tolerate transness-as-transness. it has to be compressed and reduced and diluted into something that fits within a cis-centric framework. we aren't allowed to have nuanced and intersectional conversations about trans men & other trans folks relationship with male privilege, the things we have to sacrifice to there, how fleeting it can be, the fact that for some of us being read as "biologically male" is actively more dangerous than being read as female... if it isn't familiar to cis women, then it means you aren't really oppressed.

*cis men should not be outsiders in feminism either btw but thats another post

[velvetvexations]

in my opinion, the problem with transmisogyny exempt (tme) / transmisogyny affected (tma) as terms is that, in practice, it works backwards. it Assumes that only amab people who are mtf or mtx are transmisogyny affected, rather than simply being a term for anyone who can or does experience transmisogyny.

which causes issues Both because it became a new way to ask nonbinary people what's in their pants (the Same issue with how agab language can be used against nonbinary people)

And because these aren't the only groups that can experience transmisogyny. they're the Main groups of course (the ones the term is named after), but they aren't the Only ones.

there are afab intersex people who overtly experience transmisogyny because of the way that they look, some who consider themselves cis women and some who don't. there are multi-gender and genderfluid and agender people who medically transition and present in ways that aren't cleanly binary. who mix masculine and feminine traits in ways that get them interpreted as all sorts of things. there are trans men and trans masc who are gnc, before during and after medically transitioning, who will share traits with trans women.

and the argument in response to that is Usually something along the lines of "sure these groups Can experience transmisogyny, but it's Misdirected. they're not the Main Groups who experience transmisogyny so the term shouldn't be for them."

and the thing about that is ! we already Have the terms "transmisogyny" and "trans woman" and "trans fem." we Have words to talk about the issues that these groups of people face. so it confuses me that we've created a term that Specifically means "everyone who is affected by transmisogyny," that apparently Doesn't include Everyone Who Is Affected By Transmisogyny.

I feel like the term tma could be Useful as an all-inclusive term. to talk about the affect transmisogyny has on All people, without specifying any specific kind of person. but as is the only point I see it used for is cutting people Out of conversations.

the problem with "tma" is that it comes packaged with "tme." gender and sex and presentation and identity are Messy, people who are very different on paper often share spaces and experiences with each other. and being squeamish about that fact, about having to Share with people who are different from you, is often directly what leads to exclusionism.

bigots don't care if you're Really a trans woman or not, they just see someone who's visibly Other in a way they don't like and treat you accordingly. so to decide that a whole group of people is Exempt from being interpreted as a trans woman by a bigot misses the point.

straight people can be Affected by homophobia, whether that straight person is cis and perisex and allo or trans and intersex and aro/ace. and it doesn't hurt anyone to acknowledge that the same is true for transphobia and transmisogyny (or transandrophobia or exorsexism)

This is all really, really well said and you put a lot of thought into dissecting this inside and out, it's a really good analysis of why and how it doesn't work. I think ultimately it comes down to the fact that this vocabulary does not actually exist to solve any problems in the first place.

[vyl3tpwny]

loudness in music.

you may be listening to music that is lesser in quality than artists really intend.

(pictured: a visual guide of FabFilter Pro L2's metering section)

this post is mainly aimed to talk to non-musicians and non-audio engineers, but if you're one of those and also feel for this post, cool. but i want to put this into perspective for people who aren't in music (recording and production in specific). i'm going to attempt to explain a very complicated concept as simply as i can fathom.

there's a lot of stages to the creation of a song or album. there's the writing, recording, production, mixing, and mastering (to simplify). what i'm going to be talking about has to do with "mastering", the final stage a song goes through before it's considered 'final' (in a sense).

mastering, in short, is the process of taking a fully recorded, produced, and mixed song; cleaning it up and preparing it for people to listen to it. a mastering engineer will often add some equalization adjustments to the overall song, adding some compression to bring things together and unify elements, and other stuff like that.

but the duty of establishing the "perceived loudness" is imparted on the mastering engineer.

loudness ≠ amplitude. amplitude is the true measurement of an audio's volume. but "loudness" is a measurement of how loud we actually perceive something. there are technically quiet songs that you perceive as louder than they are, and loud songs that you actually perceive as quiet. this is because loudness ≠ actual technical volume. amplitude is measured in Decibels (db) and perceived loudness is measured in Loudness Units Full Scale (LUFS).

audio processing and transmission always has a limit. for example, if you turn up the volume up too high while listening to music on your headphones, distortion and crackling may occur. this is called "clipping". the threshold for clipping varies from one device to another. cheap earbuds may distort without you even pushing the volume much. other headphones may be really hard to even get audio to clip.

(image source: MTX)

thus, because of the limitations of how audio works — both in the digital and analog domains — the mastering process of music seeks to finalize a song to be loud enough, but not so loud that it clips in a way artists and listeners don't want.

enter: The Loudness War

in the 90's when digital music studios started to become a thing, people started mastering songs louder and louder because things didn't distort as much when you pushed them in digital spaces. you can get stuff to clip in the digital world, yes, but it was much easier to push things louder than on purely analog equipment. ever since then, songs have been getting mastered louder and louder. we've called this "The Loudness War", because people compete to have the loudest mastered songs.

something you must understand is that the louder you try to master a song (without it clipping above a digital threshold) the more squashed the song gets. the methods for mastering a song really loud often make it lose quality and fidelity. for some people this is fine. stuff like dubstep usually benefits from the squash and the distortion (although it's a personal preference). nonetheless, people have actively chosen to master songs loudly to compete with each other, but at the cost of a song's quality and dynamics.

quick side note: a song's dynamic's is a measurement of how quiet the quiet parts are, how loud the loud parts are, and what the ratio is between these are. so a VERY dynamic song will have very quiet parts and very loud parts. a NOT VERY dynamic song will have mostly everything in the same volume range at all times.

so ok. artists and engineers have been fighting in this loudness war. everyone wants to have loudly mastered songs even though the more you try to push a song to be loud the more it will lose fidelity and the more compressed it will become.

below is a video containing three versions of my song "bonnie". the first version is the original master. the second version is being pushed into a mastering limiter hard. and the third version is being pushed into a mastering limiter VERY hard. a mastering limiter is usually the last part of the signal path of a song's master. i've (very roughly) gain matched the examples so that instead of hearing the loudness differences, you will hear the quality differences. they should be roughly the same volume, but the quality differences will be what you hear. pay close attention to the waveforms getting progressively more squashed the more the song is being pushed into the limiter.

keep in mind, this example is extreme and unscientific, only meant to demonstrate the kind of quality deterioration that occurs when you try to push a song to be potentially too loud. these quality issues often exist at least a tiny bit in songs that are mastered to be really loud.

so we know that trying to master something loud comes with tradeoffs. but people still really like to do it and sometimes it can be pulled off just fine. but not every song handles these treatments equally.

but what i really want to get at here is the fact that mastering things super loudly in the modern day is kind of pointless! the main exception i can think of is club mixes, DJ's really like to have loud stuff to work with because of the complications that come with DJing in venues. but aside from that, there kind of isn't a point to mastering that loudly anymore.

streaming services like spotify and youtube follow broadcasting standards and automatically adjust music to be roughly in the same range. this is so people listening to music on these platforms, especially through playlists, won't be bothered by a discrepancy in REALLY LOUD songs and really quiet songs being in the same space.

i've been thinking about all of this for a long time. i've been learning how to master my own music for maybe 4-5 years now? but recently an audio engineering youtuber, white sea studio, came out with this video:

i highly recommend you watch it if you have the time and are interested in learning more on this aspect of music. but to divulge upon the points and information they talk about...

...it's unanimously recommended to master your music to be at least ABOVE -14 LUFS. there are two kinds of misconceptions. the first being that you should try to have your song reach EXACTLY -14 LUFS. wytse explains in the video how this is wrong, and that experts instead recommend you master just to be above -14 LUFS, not exactly and certainly not lower. popular and loud music is being delivered at around -5 and -4 LUFS even. this is really loud and you can imagine there are lots of compromises to quality to get songs to be that loud. but as wytse continues to explain, there's clearly not much point in doing this if streaming services are going to be turning loud songs down anyway.

we're in an age where the loudness war really shouldn't exist. not only has it caused lots of songs (including my own) to be finalized and delivered with compromises to quality and dynamics as well as unfavourable distortion, but it's established this misconception that songs need to be mastered super loudly in the first place.

if it were so simple though, i don't think we'd be talking about this at all. to speak from personal experience, i actually feel self conscious if my music isn't as loud as other songs in the same genre that i'm making. i've found myself not even checking if i'm making it above -14 LUFS, often times i'm just trying to get everything to be as loud as possible. and this is a huge problem for me because i make music in every genre. period. my album CUTIEMARKS mixed dubstep, pop, rock, acoustic, ambient, and so many other genres in one place; but i worked so hard to get everything to be consistently the same loudness. the reality is that it's so hard to pull that off and i'm pretty sure the album is lesser in quality because of it. i already have frustrations listening back to things like "nonexistent meet-cute" and "how to kill a monster" from that album because i tried to push them to close enough loudness to a dubstep song lol.

but despite knowing all of these things very transparently, i still feel very self conscious about it. and i feel like this conversation actually needs to extend beyond musicians and engineers. that's why i'm writing this. i want listeners and fans to know that there's this thing going on and it's been going on for a while and it causes a lot of stress and misconceptions. i'm especially self conscious because i'm actually going to try to actively master my next album quieter than all my other ones on purpose. to try and combat all of this. even if it makes me self conscious to listen to some of my favourite albums of this year and know how much louder they've been mastered compared to mine. but i think it's really important we let songs breathe and not try to compromise quality anymore. it would relieve a lot of stress from me personally to be able to know this is all ok.

if you ended up reading this whole thing, thanks so much. this is a thing that's actually been affecting a lot of musicians who do their own engineering a lot. and it's been affecting all audio engineers anyway. this is an extremely complex topic and to anyone who knows as much as i do about it, trust me i KNOW this post is EXTREMELY simplified. but i want to speak to listeners and fans, not musicians and engineers specifically.

[mtx-lol]

#mtxt = real life/life talk, blog talk, misc stuff

#mtx talk = fandom talk(headcanons, stories etc)

#mtx fanart / #mtx art = does what it says in the tin

#mtx oc = original content like ocs and such (rare)

asks are now open ! you can now give me a prompt to do smthin' idk,

#mtaxk= inbox messages and asks

(drawing requests are allowed but limited to just doodles rather than full fledged artworks)

[bearphase]

Sorry for the millionth vanishing act

Working on Sims stuff again, though! Anyway, rant/vent under the cut.

This month has been hard. I need (just a fairly minor non-urgent thing, not dying, dw) surgery, it was scheduled for the nineteenth, and I suddenly had it canceled and have had to find a new surgeon in network. Basically, I'm on humira and methotrexate for psoriatic arthritis, and my rheumatologist advised I go off only humira for surgery and continue mtx, but my surgeon wanted me off mtx, too, and two whole weeks in advance. So, I did that and developed a massive patch of psoriasis (I have psoriatic arthritis, after all) right where they needed to operate, which they can't operate on (unless it's an emergency, I'd assume.) So, they ask me to talk to my rheum about "alternate plans". Rheum says to stay on methotrexate, like she originally said, so I don't get a psoriasis flare right before surgery. Surgeon's office says no. It ended up as a massive back-and-forth of "you need no psoriasis AND no psoriasis meds" vs "that would be a literal miracle, why the fuck do you think I'm on the meds?" (except... politely.) Until the nurse (I haven't gotten to speak to the surgeon at all) said she'd discuss with the surgeon and... ghosted me entirely! No more replies. I scheduled the surgery months in advance and planned to be unable to do much for a couple weeks, too, which makes this even more annoying. My consultation with the other surgeon isn't until June, either.

[two-dead-swans]

I'll save you the time and tell you this does talk about how trans women & mtx nonbinary ppl used to be men btw

[kieuecaprie]

Finished Dragon's Dogma 2. It really was the Dragon's Dogma.

My favorite part was when my main pawn turned around and she said "It's Dogma time, Master." and then Dragon'd all over the place.

Performance issues (and MTX, c'mon, that topic's been talked to death by now) aside, it's been pretty good, it was fun, I liked it. My biggest issues were that it kind of got samey towards the end, especially when I started outlevelling the world and only really started to get challenged, somewhat, towards the endgame.

For those curious, it take me 32.2 hours to finish and I beat the game ending on Level 50. Not much rushing was done, just a lot of oxcarts and tactical portcrystal placements.

Also here's my Pawn:

[transmaverique]

it's kinda pissing me off that words like transtrender and theyfab are being called transmasc slurs as a blanket statement. it's kinda pissing me off people talk about exorsexism in transmedicalism as if it were simply incidental, and like enbies werent literally one of their primary targets. it's kinda pissing me off that people who support transandrophobia theory, and the word itself, and the creation of the word to discuss the real world occurences it describes, will then forcibly assign "transmasc" to all afab trans people bc "it's just a political designation! we need a word! we cant make a new one or something to be more inclusive!" - never mind that transneutral ftx enbies are not treated the same as transmasculine ftx enbies. it's kinda pissing me off that people divide up the nonbinary community into gendered binaries, like AFAB or AMAB, and transmasculine or transfeminine, and leave the rest of us out of it entirely. it's kinda pissing me off how many trans people - enbies included - treat us like we're cis-adjacent by default. it's kinda pissing me off that transneutral ftx enbies are regarded as privileged for being seen as cis women - for being misgendered constantly and endlessly. it's kinda pissing me off that mtx enbies are only ever uplifted as a counterpoint, as martyrs, and otherwise completely and utterly erased from trans-centric conversations.

[masterdetectivexx]

Hi mtx!

Can you plz explain me two different events, first what did Shu mean by saying "the target didn't appear" in last panel of file 289, I mean wasn't Vermouth as Araide there with them? The second thing is what Masumi meant by her words in last panels file 775 about deleting evidences and why did she delet Haibara's photo? I really don't fully understand this whole thing of masumi-haibara at that case

Thanks!

In File 434, Akai referenced again that the "main target" didn't show up (after they fought off Vermouth), so he wasn't talking about Vermouth.

It's more than likely that he was referring to Gin, since Gin was the "main target" during his infiltration as Rye that the FBI wanted to capture in order to reach the boss (File 599).

As for the Masumi scene, it was simply showing that she was deleting all the info she had saved in that hotel room PC and she was simply highlighting outloud that despite deleting it, it's still stored in her mind (Gosho basically teasing that her suspicions will be continued).

[cooliogirl101]

Also it's really cool that you're getting in SVSS! I like MTX's books and I LOVE the conceit of being transmigrated into the scum villain (which makes me sad I didn't like the original SVSS novel), and it's? Just so cool one of my favourite authors are talking about it now. It's also just awesome to see people being enthusiastic and passionate about something? I'm glad you found an OTP to ship and have a soft spot for SQQ (I do too even though I know he's horrible) :D Also LOVE your SVSS ideas

SQQ/SJ fucked up in so many ways and is canonically a bitter abusive asshole…but he has a compelling backstory and ends up getting blamed for a ton of things that aren’t actually his fault (according to fandom at least) which makes him a fun character, especially in redemption-type fics

[belghast]

Necropolis MVP

Necropolis MVP - This morning I talk about the interaction between the Allflame of Sulphite and the Sulphite Scarab of Greed in Necropolis League.

Morning Folks! If you have read this blog for any length of time over the last few years, you will know I am a “Delve Enjoyer”. One of the nuisances of Delve is that you need to pop out every so often to refill sulphite that you use to power the minecart or in my case the tunnel bear mtx… used to traverse the darkness. Generally speaking even with full Niko support on the Atlas tree it will take…