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cincodenada · 20 hours
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Pride month vest project, a patch a day #29: Wheat But Not Bread, Fruit But Not Wine
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cincodenada · 24 hours
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cincodenada · 3 days
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Jeans by Alexandra Armata.
Created as a part of their ‘30 Jeans in 30 Days’ Project.
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cincodenada · 5 days
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EXCUSE ME THERE IS A PLANT THAT CAN MIMIC FAKE PLANTS?????
IT'S CALLED A BOQUILA TRIOFOLIOLATA AND IT'S FUCKING WITH MY BRAIN
IT APPARENTLY CAN MIMIC OTHER PLANTS AND AT FIRST I WAS LIKE "oh cool man it must take it's genetic code and copy it or feel the roots or something like that!! :3"
AND THEN I READ AN ARTICLE ON IT AND THESE FUCKING PARAGRAPHS HIT ME LIKE A BUS
LIKE READ THIS SHIT
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WHAT THE FUCK MOTHER NATURE
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cincodenada · 6 days
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Portland out here truly innovating with a Combination Pizza Hut and Hip Weed Shop
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cincodenada · 8 days
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cincodenada · 8 days
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Why Firefox?
Firefox isn't trying to take away my ad blocking software, forcing me to wade through advertisements to traverse the web. I rarely have to stop and put up with ads in my day to day browsing experience. Google has made it very clear that they don't want you to have that power.
I'm very used to a specific UI in my browser, and I'm able to tweak Firefox to my needs. I don't use tabs when I'm at home, and being able to eliminate the tab bar can totally be done with Firefox (I won't elaborate on that here). However, there are many other things I can add to Firefox to improve my experience!
You know how sometimes you want to download an image on a webpage, but you can't right click on it, or it's hidden behind another element? I've got a Firefox tool for that called Right-click boroscope.
Don't want scripts to load in on a page, and cause havoc? Firefox has me covered again with NoScript.
I want to immediately reverse image search something I find regurgitated here on tumblr, in search of the original? There's a TinEye extension for Firefox to do that and save time.
For using tumblr more efficiently, there's XKit Rewritten. In Firefox.
Sick of Youtube's shitty search suggestions, and shorts being pushed? There's a Youtube Search Fixer add-on for Firefox for that.
I've also got the Wayback Machine integrated into Firefox.
The thing is, whatever reasons I enumerate to use Firefox, there are another hundred good reasons that other folks can add to this list no problem.
In some ways, it sucks that I should have to make so many modifications to my web browser to make it suitable for taking control within the modern webscape, but it also says alot that I have the freedom to make those modifications to my browser should I so choose. At work I'm forced to use chrome, and even though I'm only browsing ad-free internal corporate pages to get my job done, I still can't stand that experience.
We should be free to control our web browsing experiences. If a company finds a mantra like "don't be evil" too restrictive, maybe I don't want to help perpetuate their advertising machine (and don't think for a second that chrome isn't part of said machine). The web is supposed to be this free and open place, and it sure as hell isn't helped by browser monoculture. I really don't like the idea of supporting a monopolistic browsing experience that is the sea of chrome clones. Everything else seems to have turned into another chrome.
Fuck that noise.
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So I will continue to use Firefox.
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cincodenada · 11 days
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"Anarchist" but gets triggered when people voluntarily don't wear bicycle helmets.
Me when I know what anarchy is
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cincodenada · 12 days
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In 1944 a kitten named George (short for General Electric) was saved from drowning by a U.S. Navy crew member. George was then photographed and given a liberty card and detailed health record. Source.
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cincodenada · 12 days
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WILLIE NELSON ORVILLE PECK DUET OF COWBOYS ARE FREQUENTLY SECRETLY FOND OF EACH OTHER ‼️‼️
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cincodenada · 12 days
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Twenty years ago, February 15th, 2004, I got married for the first time.
It was twenty years earlier than I ever expected to.
To celebrate/comemorate the date, I'm sitting down to write out everything I remember as I remember it. No checking all the pictures I took or all the times I've written about this before. I'm not going to turn to my husband (of twenty years, how the f'ing hell) to remember a detail for me.
This is not a 100% accurate recounting of that first wild weekend in San Francisco. But it -is- a 100% accurate recounting of how I remember it today, twenty years after the fact.
Join me below, if you would.
2004 was an election year, and much like conservatives are whipping up anti-trans hysteria and anti-trans bills and propositions to drive out the vote today, in 2004 it was all anti-gay stuff. Specifically, preventing the evil scourge of same-sex marriage from destroying everything good and decent in the world.
Enter Gavin Newstrom. At the time, he was the newly elected mayor of San Francisco. Despite living next door to the city all my life, I hadn’t even heard of the man until Valentines Day 2004 when he announced that gay marriage was legal in San Francisco and started marrying people at city hall.
It was a political stunt. It was very obviously a political stunt. That shit was illegal, after all. But it was a very sweet political stunt. I still remember the front page photo of two ancient women hugging each other forehead to forehead and crying happy tears.
But it was only going to last for as long as it took for the California legal system to come in and make them knock it off.
The next day, we’re on the phone with an acquaintance, and she casually mentions that she’s surprised the two of us aren’t up at San Francisco getting married with everyone else.
“Everyone else?” Goes I, “I thought they would’ve shut that down already?”
“Oh no!” goes she, “The courts aren’t open until Tuesday. Presidents Day on Monday and all. They’re doing them all weekend long!”
We didn’t know because social media wasn’t a thing yet. I only knew as much about it as I’d read on CNN, and most of the blogs I was following were more focused on what bullshit President George W Bush was up to that day.
"Well shit", me and my man go, "do you wanna?" I mean, it’s a political stunt, it wont really mean anything, but we’re not going to get another chance like this for at least 20 years. Why not?
The next day, Sunday, we get up early. We drive north to the southern-most BART station. We load onto Bay Area Rapid Transit, and rattle back and forth all the way to the San Francisco City Hall stop.
We had slightly miscalculated.
Apparently, demand for marriages was far outstripping the staff they had on hand to process them. Who knew. Everyone who’d gotten turned away Saturday had been given tickets with times to show up Sunday to get their marriages done. My babe and I, we could either wait to see if there was a space that opened up, or come back the next day, Monday.
“Isn’t City Hall closed on Monday?” I asked. “It’s a holiday”
“Oh sure,” they reply, “but people are allowed to volunteer their time to come in and work on stuff anyways. And we have a lot of people who want to volunteer their time to have the marriage licensing offices open tomorrow.”
“Oh cool,” we go, “Backup.”
“Make sure you’re here if you do,” they say, “because the California Supreme Court is back in session Tuesday, and will be reviewing the motion that got filed to shut us down.”
And all this shit is super not-legal, so they’ll totally be shutting us down goes unsaid.
00000
We don’t get in Saturday. We wind up hanging out most of the day, though.
It’s… incredible. I can say, without hyperbole, that I have never experienced so much concentrated joy and happiness and celebration of others’ joy and happiness in all my life before or since. My face literally ached from grinning. Every other minute, a new couple was coming out of City Hall, waving their paperwork to the crowd and cheering and leaping and skipping. Two glorious Latina women in full Mariachi band outfits came out, one in the arms of another. A pair of Jewish boys with their families and Rabbi. One couple managed to get a Just Married convertible arranged complete with tin-cans tied to the bumper to drive off in. More than once I was giving some rice to throw at whoever was coming out next.
At some point in the mid-afternoon, there was a sudden wave of extra cheering from the several hundred of us gathered at the steps, even though no one was coming out. There was a group going up the steps to head inside, with some generic black-haired shiny guy at the front. My not-yet-husband nudged me, “That’s Newsom.” He said, because he knew I was hopeless about matching names and people.
Ooooooh, I go. That explains it. Then I joined in the cheers. He waved and ducked inside.
So dusk is starting to fall. It’s February, so it’s only six or so, but it’s getting dark.
“Should we just try getting in line for tomorrow -now-?” we ask.
“Yeah, I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible.” One of the volunteers tells us. “We’re not allowed to have people hang out overnight like this unless there are facilities for them and security. We’d need Porta-Poties for a thousand people and police patrols and the whole lot, and no one had time to get all that organized. Your best bet is to get home, sleep, and then catch the first BART train up at 5am and keep your fingers crossed.
Monday is the last day to do this, after all.
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So we go home. We crash out early. We wake up at 4:00. We drive an hour to hit the BART station. We get the first train up. We arrive at City Hall at 6:30AM.
The line stretches around the entirety of San Francisco City Hall. You could toss a can of Coke from the end of the line to the people who’re up to be first through the doors and not have to worry about cracking it open after.
“Uh.” We go. “What the fuck is -this-?”
So.
Remember why they weren’t going to be able to have people hang out overnight?
Turns out, enough SF cops were willing to volunteer unpaid time to do patrols to cover security. And some anonymous person delivered over a dozen Porta-Poties that’d gotten dropped off around 8 the night before.
It’s 6:30 am, there are almost a thousand people in front of us in line to get this literal once in a lifetime marriage, the last chance we expect to have for at least 15 more years (it was 2004, gay rights were getting shoved back on every front. It was not looking good. We were just happy we lived in California were we at least weren’t likely to loose job protections any time soon.).
Then it starts to rain.
We had not dressed for rain.
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Here is how the next six hours go.
We’re in line. Once the doors open at 7am, it will creep forward at a slow crawl. It’s around 7 when someone shows up with garbage bags for everyone. Cut holes for the head and arms and you’ve got a makeshift raincoat! So you’ve got hundreds of gays and lesbians decked out in the nicest shit they could get on short notice wearing trashbags over it.
Everyone is so happy.
Everyone is so nervous/scared/frantic that we wont be able to get through the doors before they close for the day.
People online start making delivery orders.
Coffee and bagels are ordered in bulk and delivered to City Hall for whoever needs it. We get pizza. We get roses. Random people come by who just want to give hugs to people in line because they’re just so happy for us. The tour busses make detours to go past the lines. Chinese tourists lean out with their cameras and shout GOOD LUCK while car horns honk.
A single sad man holding a Bible tries to talk people out of doing this, tells us all we’re sinning and to please don’t. He gives up after an hour. A nun replaces him with a small sign about how this is against God’s will. She leaves after it disintegrates in the rain.
The day before, when it was sunny, there had been a lot of protestors. Including a large Muslim group with their signs about how “Not even DOGS do such things!” Which… Yes they do.
A lot of snide words are said (by me) about how the fact that we’re willing to come out in the rain to do this while they’re not willing to come out in the rain to protest it proves who actually gives an actual shit about the topic.
Time passes. I measure it based on which side of City Hall we’re on. The doors face East. We start on Northside. Coffee and trashbags are delivered when we’re on the North Side. Pizza first starts showing up when we’re on Westside, which is also where I see Bible Man and Nun. Roses are delivered on Southside. And so forth.
00000
We have Line Neighbors.
Ahead of us are a gay couple a decade or two older than us. They’ve been together for eight years. The older one is a school teacher. He has his coat collar up and turns away from any news cameras that come near while we reposition ourselves between the lenses and him. He’s worried about the parents of one of his students seeing him on the news and getting him fired. The younger one will step away to get interviewed on his own later on. They drove down for the weekend once they heard what was going on. They’d started around the same time we did, coming from the Northeast, and are parked in a nearby garage.
The most perky energetic joyful woman I’ve ever met shows up right after we turned the corner to Southside to tackle the younger of the two into a hug. She’s their local friend who’d just gotten their message about what they’re doing and she will NOT be missing this. She is -so- happy for them. Her friends cry on her shoulders at her unconditional joy.
Behind us are a lesbian couple who’d been up in San Francisco to celebrate their 12th anniversary together. “We met here Valentines Day weekend! We live down in San Diego, now, but we like to come up for the weekend because it’s our first love city.”
“Then they announced -this-,” the other one says, “and we can’t leave until we get married. I called work Sunday and told them I calling in sick until Wednesday.”
“I told them why,” her partner says, “I don’t care if they want to give me trouble for it. This is worth it. Fuck them.”
My husband-to-be and I look at each other. We’ve been together for not even two years at this point. Less than two years. Is it right for us to be here? We’re potentially taking a spot from another couple that’d been together longer, who needed it more, who deserved it more.”
“Don’t you fucking dare.” Says the 40-something gay couple in front of us.
“This is as much for you as it is for us!” says the lesbian couple who’ve been together for over a decade behind us.
“You kids are too cute together,” says the gay couple’s friend. “you -have- to. Someday -you’re- going to be the old gay couple that’s been together for years and years, and you deserve to have been married by then.”
We stay in line.
It’s while we’re on the Southside of City Hall, just about to turn the corner to Eastside at long last that we pick up our own companions. A white woman who reminds me an awful lot of my aunt with a four year old black boy riding on her shoulders. “Can we say we’re with you? His uncles are already inside and they’re not letting anyone in who isn’t with a couple right there.” “Of course!” we say.
The kid is so very confused about what all the big deal is, but there’s free pizza and the busses keep driving by and honking, so he’s having a great time.
We pass by a statue of Lincoln with ‘Marriage for All!’ and "Gay Rights are Human Rights!" flags tucked in the crooks of his arms and hanging off his hat.
It’s about noon, noon-thirty when we finally make it through the doors and out of the rain.
They’ve promised that anyone who’s inside when the doors shut will get married. We made it. We’re safe.
We still have a -long- way to go.
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They’re trying to fit as many people into City Hall as possible. Partially to get people out of the rain, mostly to get as many people indoors as possible. The line now stretches down into the basement and up side stairs and through hallways I’m not entirely sure the public should ever be given access to. We crawl along slowly but surely.
It’s after we’ve gone through the low-ceiling basement hallways past offices and storage and back up another set of staircases and are going through a back hallway of low-ranked functionary offices that someone comes along handing out the paperwork. “It’s an hour or so until you hit the office, but take the time to fill these out so you don’t have to do it there!”
We spend our time filling out the paperwork against walls, against backs, on stone floors, on books.
We enter one of the public areas, filled with displays and photos of City Hall Demonstrations of years past.
I take pictures of the big black and white photo of the Abraham Lincoln statue holding banners and signs against segregation and for civil rights.
The four year old boy we helped get inside runs past us around this time, chased by a blond haired girl about his own age, both perused by an exhausted looking teenager helplessly begging them to stop running.
Everyone is wet and exhausted and vibrating with anticipation and the building-wide aura of happiness that infuses everything.
The line goes into the marriage office. A dozen people are at the desk, shoulder to shoulder, far more than it was built to have working it at once.
A Sister of Perpetual Indulgence is directing people to city officials the moment they open up. She’s done up in her nun getup with all her makeup on and her beard is fluffed and be-glittered and on point. “Oh, I was here yesterday getting married myself, but today I’m acting as your guide. Number 4 sweeties, and -Congradulatiooooons!-“
The guy behind the counter has been there since six. It’s now 1:30. He’s still giddy with joy. He counts our money. He takes our paperwork, reviews it, stamps it, sends off the parts he needs to, and hands the rest back to us. “Alright, go to the Rotunda, they’ll direct you to someone who’ll do the ceremony. Then, if you want the certificate, they’ll direct you to -that- line.” “Can’t you just mail it to us?” “Normally, yeah, but the moment the courts shut us down, we’re not going to be allowed to.”
We take our paperwork and join the line to the Rotunda.
If you’ve seen James Bond: A View to a Kill, you’ve seen the San Francisco City Hall Rotunda. There are literally a dozen spots set up along the balconies that overlook the open area where marriage officials and witnesses are gathered and are just processing people through as fast as they can.
That’s for the people who didn’t bring their own wedding officials.
There’s a Catholic-adjacent couple there who seem to have brought their entire families -and- the priest on the main steps. They’re doing the whole damn thing. There’s at least one more Rabbi at work, I can’t remember what else. Just that there was a -lot-.
We get directed to the second story, northside. The San Francisco City Treasurer is one of our two witnesses. Our marriage officient is some other elected official I cannot remember for the life of me (and I'm only writing down what I can actively remember, so I can't turn to my husband next to me and ask, but he'll have remembered because that's what he does.)
I have a wilting lily flower tucked into my shirt pocket. My pants have water stains up to the knees. My hair is still wet from the rain, I am blubbering, and I can’t get the ring on my husband’s finger. The picture is a treat, I tell you.
There really isn’t a word for the mix of emotions I had at that time. Complete disbelief that this was reality and was happening. Relief that we’d made it. Awe at how many dozens of people had personally cheered for us along the way and the hundreds to thousands who’d cheered for us generally.
Then we're married.
Then we get in line to get our license.
It’s another hour. This time, the line goes through the higher stories. Then snakes around and goes past the doorway to the mayor’s office.
Mayor Newsom is not in today. And will be having trouble getting into his office on Tuesday because of the absolute barricade of letters and flowers and folded up notes and stuffed animals and City Hall maps with black marked “THANK YOU!”s that have been piled up against it.
We make it to the marriage records office.
I take a picture of my now husband standing in front of a case of the marriage records for 1902-1912. Numerous kids are curled up in corners sleeping. My own memory is spotty. I just know we got the papers, and then we’re done with lines. We get out, we head to the front entrance, and we walk out onto the City Hall steps.
It's almost 3PM.
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There are cheers, there’s rice thrown at us, there are hundreds of people celebrating us with unconditional love and joy and I had never before felt the goodness that exists in humanity to such an extent. It’s no longer raining, just a light sprinkle, but there are still no protestors. There’s barely even any news vans.
We make our way through the gauntlet, we get hands shaked, people with signs reading ”Congratulations!” jump up and down for us. We hit the sidewalks, and we begin to limp our way back to the BART station.
I’m at the BART station, we’re waiting for our train back south, and I’m sitting on the ground leaning against a pillar and in danger of falling asleep when a nondescript young man stops in front of me and shuffles his feet nervously. “Hey. I just- I saw you guys, down at City Hall, and I just… I’m so happy for you. I’m so proud of what you could do. I’m- I’m just really glad, glad you could get to do this.”
He shakes my hand, clasps it with both of his and shakes it. I thank him and he smiles and then hurries away as fast as he can without running.
Our train arrives and the trip south passes in a semilucid blur.
We get back to our car and climb in.
It’s 4:30 and we are starving.
There’s a Carls Jr near the station that we stop off at and have our first official meal as a married couple. We sit by the window and watch people walking past and pick out others who are returning from San Francisco. We're all easy to pick out, what with the combination of giddiness and water damage.
We get home about 6-7. We take the dog out for a good long walk after being left alone for two days in a row. We shower. We bundle ourselves up. We bury ourselves in blankets and curl up and just sort of sit adrift in the surrealness of what we’d just done.
We wake up the next day, Tuesday, to read that the California State Supreme Court has rejected the petition to shut down the San Francisco weddings because the paperwork had a misplaced comma that made the meaning of one phrase unclear.
The State Supreme Court would proceed to play similar bureaucratic tricks to drag the process out for nearly a full month before they have nothing left and finally shut down Mayor Newsom’s marriages.
My parents had been out of state at the time at a convention. They were flying into SFO about the same moment we were walking out of City Hall. I apologized to them later for not waiting and my mom all but shook me by the shoulders. “No! No one knew that they’d go on for so long! You did what you needed to do! I’ll just be there for the next one!”
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It was just a piece of paper. Legally, it didn’t even hold any weight thirty days later. My philosophy at the time was “marriage really isn’t that important, aside from the legal benefits. It’s just confirming what you already have.”
But maybe it’s just societal weight, or ingrained culture, or something, but it was different after. The way I described it at the time, and I’ve never really come up with a better metaphor is, “It’s like we were both holding onto each other in the middle of the ocean in the middle of a storm. We were keeping each other above water, we were each other’s support. But then we got this piece of paper. And it was like the ground rose up to meet our feet. We were still in an ocean, still in the middle of a storm, but there was a solid foundation beneath our feet. We still supported each other, but there was this other thing that was also keeping our heads above the water.
It was different. It was better. It made things more solid and real.
I am forever grateful for all the forces and all the people who came together to make it possible. It’s been twenty years and we’re still together and still married.
We did a domestic partnership a year later to get the legal paperwork. We’d done a private ceremony with proper rings (not just ones grabbed out of the husband’s collection hours before) before then. And in 2008, we did a legal marriage again.
Rushed. In a hurry. Because there was Proposition 13 to be voted on which would make them all illegal again if it passed.
It did, but we were already married at that point, and they couldn’t negate it that time.
Another few years after that, the Supreme Court finally threw up their hands and said "Fine! It's been legal in places and nothing's caught on fire or been devoured by locusts. It's legal everywhere. Shut up about it!"
And that was that.
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When I was in highschool, in the late 90s, I didn’t expect to see legal gay marriage until I was in my 50s. I just couldn’t see how the American public as it was would ever be okay with it.
I never expected to be getting married within five years. I never expected it to be legal nationwide before I’d barely started by 30s. I never thought I’d be in my 40s and it’d be such a non-issue that the conservative rabble rousers would’ve had to move onto other wedge issues altogether.
I never thought that I could introduce another man as my husband and absolutely no one involved would so much as blink.
I never thought I’d live in this world.
And it’s twenty years later today. I wonder how our line buddies are doing. Those babies who were running around the wide open rooms playing tag will have graduated college by now. The kids whose parents the one line-buddy was worried would see him are probably married too now. Some of them to others of the same gender.
I don’t have some greater message to make with all this. Other then, culture can shift suddenly in ways you can’t predict. For good or ill. Mainly this is just me remembering the craziest fucking 36 hours of my life twenty years after the fact and sharing them with all of you.
The future we’re resigned to doesn’t have to be the one we live in. Society can shift faster than you think. The unimaginable of twenty years ago is the baseline reality of today.
And always remember that the people who want to get married will show up by the thousands in rain that none of those who’re against it will brave.
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cincodenada · 13 days
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cincodenada · 14 days
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Hey so I am by no means an expert here but I am fairly fluent in sheet music and playing the piano, and also transcribe songs for fun. Transcription is basically one way of accomplishing what you want here: taking music and writing it down so other people can read it.
Firstly, I think electronic music is a great way to get into this, sequencers let you just throw a bunch of notes at things, play around with them. There are a lot of options here and I'm not super familiar with them, but even something like Super Simple Sequencer will let you just start matching notes to what's in your head and getting them down.
Theory
I don't have a ton of good music theory resources at hand, so I can't offer a ton of help there, but if you don't have a solid grasp of intervals, I'd spend some time learning/practicing those. Getting familiar with what the different "jumps" between notes are and recognizing them (both sequentially and together as chords) is immensely useful in untangling the music in your head.
(Intervals vary depending on what scale you're using of course - you probably want the chromatic scale, aka "Western" music, there are lots of other ways of chopping up and arranging pitches, but I'll assume we're talking treble/bass clef kinda stuff)
Key signatures are important eventually, as are time signatures, but for the purposes of just writing stuff down, I don't think they're that important. If you write something in the "wrong" key signature, in any transcription software it'll be fairly easy for someone who is more familiar with them (be it future you or someone else) to rearrange things later.
Tools
Another post suggested MuseScore which is a good suggestion and is what I use for my transcription, but as that post mentioned, using it with minimal music theory and without being able to read sheet music is gonna be tough. We'll come back to it.
Recording
You said you can sing, and if that means you can take parts of what are in your head and sing them out loud, the most basic approach would be singing bits of what's in your head and recording it - there are all kinds of fancy things to do this, and if you have a favorite go for it, but Audacity is an excellent free tool to do so.
If you're dealing with multiple notes at once (chords/harmony), you can record one line, then play it back and sing a second part along with it, repeating as much as you need to to build up all the notes.
Finding Notes
One of the most fundamental things you'll need to do is figure out what notes you're singing - there are plenty of websites and such that do this, singingcarrots.com seems to have a nice one. Just enable your mic, and it'll show you what note you're singing, so you can write it down, put it in your sequencer, add it to MuseScore, what have you.
Just doing this painstakingly note by note for a bit will start getting you familiar with intervals, too - eventually you'll be able to sing a couple notes and know that they're a third apart, or a fourth, which will help speed things up.
Analysis
I'm gonna add in another of my favorite tools, Sonic Visualizer. It does a lot of stuff and can be overwhelming, but is also therefore pretty powerful, and may be useful depending on how you like doing things, or may just be overwhelming, so, use it as it's useful!
But I'll give a basic walkthrough of how I use it, just in case. When you open it up it'll show an empty screen - you can open an existing audio file, or just hit record and sing your notes. From there, you can analyze this in several ways.
One of the most useful is a spectrogram, specifically the Melodic Range Spectrogram. After recording or opening some audio, click Layer->Add Melodic Range Spectrogram->All Channels Mixed:
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You'll end up with something like this, which is just from me singing "bummmmm, bummmmm, bummmm, BUM BUMMMMMM" for a bit:
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This is a visualization of the sound, where time goes left to right. Color indicates how loud a given pitch was, with low sounds on the bottom, high sounds on the top. The right-hand side gives you a bunch of options to tweak the visual - the defaults should be fine, but I recommend selecting the "Hybrid" option for the second dropdown on the Scale line - this determines how loud something has to be to be yellow vs red.
The keyboard along the left edge maps pitches to piano keys, with the C's highlighted in gray, middle C in blue-gray. If you have the compass tool (rightmost on the toolbar) selected, you can also hover over the diagram, and it will tell you the note name of the position your cursor is at.
In the screenshot above I'm hovering over the first note on the far left, which is showing as something close to B2 - this also lines up with the note below the shaded C on the piano keyboard (thus B), and it's in the second set of keys from the bottom, hence B2.
There are a bunch of squiggles above the lowest note: these are harmonics, and for your purposes, if there's only one note at a time, you only care about the lowest one. (If you're curious: when we sing a note, there are actually a bunch of notes above the note we're singing that are happening too, due to different parts of our vocal tract resonating and vibrating. The specific strengths and combinations of these harmonics is much of what gives us distinct voices, and also much of why instruments sound different from each other)
Anyway, looking at the lowest bright spots as I move across, with the compass tool, it looks like the notes I sang here are close to B2, F#3, B3, C#4, then back and forth between B2 and F2, same sequence as before, then E4, G4, G#4, A#4, D#4, E4, F#4, some messiness, then F#3, G#3, A#3, B3.
You can take that into MuseScore, and if you know how to read sheet music, you can find where those are, but if not, you can also just add a note and then use the arrow keys to move it up or down until it's the right one - MuseScore tells you in the lower-left the name of the note you have selected. You can also use View->Piano Keyboard to get a keyboard of notes you can click to add them.
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After putting all those in, you'll have something like this:
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Which is, honestly, a pretty terrible transcription of the opening to Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, but it's a start! And you can play it back in MuseScore, adjust things that don't sound right, add more things, and off you go.
Practice, Practice
Here I was focused on the quickest way to get up and running. But as with anything, as you go, you'll learn and get better at it - start recognizing intervals and notes, being able to write small bits without figuring out individual notes, starting to get an ear for chords, all that.
Things I mostly skipped over above are multiple notes at a time (chords) and note duration - MuseScore has the notes nicely arranged from shortest to longest, and they'll take up the right space in the measure, so you can mostly figure that out by playing around, but you can also look up stuff about note durations and learn about hemidemisemiquavers and the like if you want to know more!
seeking advice: can anyone suggest relatively speedy paths for turning the music I invent in my head into songs that actually exist? relevant background info:
I had a couple years of voice lessons half a lifetime (and one puberty) ago, and my singing has been described as "pretty good"
however, I cannot sightread. I can decipher music notation but I can't fluently translate sheet music to sound, or vice versa. I have nonzero knowledge of music theory but very little relative to my singing experience and creative ambitions.
I don't meaningfully play another instrument. I got a nice classical guitar years ago and was planning to teach myself, but I struggled to find free learning materials that worked for me. at the time, I had 0$ to spend and nobody helping me find stuff. the internet is a bigger place now and I can spend slightly more than $0, so I could make another attempt. intend to get lessons eventually but haven't had budget for that
would making music electronically be a reasonable place to start? I assume I could learn how to make a computer play the music in my head more quickly than I could learn how to competently play it myself on a physical instrument. the music in my head is often rather complicated, I expect that learning to play an instrument well enough to get anything close to what I had in mind would take a very long time.
for the purposes of this question, the main thing I'm after is the ability to communicate the sounds in my head to other people and my future self. producing a track that sounds good is a secondary goal, I'm fine with waiting much longer for that.
willing to spend a low-triple-digits number of dollars in pursuit of this goal, but would prefer not to as I am currently unemployed. pointers to music theory resources likely to facilitate this process very much appreciated.
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cincodenada · 17 days
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communion wafers are not cruelty free. they fucked that boy upppp
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cincodenada · 18 days
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If someone is transitioning in a feminine direction, like they're taking estrogen, growing out hair, shaving their face, wearing feminine clothing or makeup, or any number of similar things, and they may or may not be a trans woman (they might be non-binary, for example)
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cincodenada · 18 days
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anyone else seeing weird mysterious failures on Tumblr
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cincodenada · 23 days
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