Best posts made by Vorpal

So, after my mother died, I took basically half a year off from my career. No auditions, and I sang basically at the concerts I had previously signed up for and where I had a contractual obligation.

I started off April by getting new recordings to send out for pre-screening (many opera companies nowadays will ask you for pre-screening video recordings before they'll give you a live audition)- particularly for two roles I really wanted to sing: one for Handel's opera Xerxes, for the role of King Xerxes (no golden speedo, no), and Mozart's Magic Flute for the role of Prince Tamino. Tamino, I've done before and can do in my sleep. Xerxes is one of my dream baroque roles.

Well, I heard nothing for months, so I assumed I had been passed over. Today I get a double-whammy in my email: I got Xerxes. They apparently wrote down my e-mail incorrectly and have been trying to get in touch with me for a month. But I got the role!
I just have, like, a month to memorize it. Yay >_> but yay!

And I also got an audition date for next Friday. So yay, I'm actually making my comeback.

I am going to honor her wish, so-

Carrie Fisher (1956-2016): Drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra.

When you're RPing with a group of people who are all comfortable with throwing story twists and features without powergaming, and suddenly the scene you started turns into this unpredictable collaborative storytelling and you have no idea what's going to happen next.

That is awesome.

When my boss decides to surprise me on Friday by leaving my favorite coffee drink on my desk with a note thanking me for everything I do. And the fact that this finally arrived this morning in the mail and is now at my desk:

I have a theory that Sir Terry Pratchett is organizing the greatest concert of Music With Rocks In in the history of the universe.

I have to share because this was pretty funny.

Today I had a patient call in. Hispanic woman, Spanish speaker, about 20 years old.
Her name?
America Chavez.

I kid you not.

I was so tempted to ask her if she had two mothers.

@Ganymede said in Flights 'n Tights MUX:

I don't think anything I have stated has been passive-aggressive. I don't think it's passive-aggressive to point out that a game can be more-inclusive. I don't think it's passive-aggressive to say that a game can do more.

I am sorry, but it is one hell of a passive-aggressive move to tell someone that their game can do more than the actual scope they have chosen for their game. That’s like walking into a “Save Tibet” fundraiser and going “Hmm, nice fundraiser you’ve got here, but what are you doing for the Guatemalan children?” It’s utterly and thoroughly classless- it’s the the worst kind of 'I know what's best for everybody so you had better listen to me' level of entitlement.

If someone wants to open a game that focuses exclusively on lesbian superheroes , they're well within their rights to tell you to go feff yourself if you pull something like that. Let’s not hide behind the pusillanimous "Oh! I applaud it, I do, old chap, but it could do so much more!" which is so thoroughly condescending. The game is dedicated exclusively to playing gay male superheroes and their mis/adventures. As far as performing the function the game was intended for, there is no humanly possible way it could do more outside of the game being set in a 24 hour Groundhog Day loop of Fire Island with the Young Avengers fighting RuPaul’s evil stepbrother, EvilLynn.

Let's break this and call a spade a spade here. By saying "This game could do more" you are using code for "This game could do more of what I want it to do more of whether or not it is part of the stated mission and theme of the game." There. It doesn’t look so pretty and polite when it’s stripped of the false pretense and revealed for the condescension that it is. This is a case of “How dare you not cater to my preferred group” disguised as “Oh, jolly good for you!”

My workplace is still awesome. So, on Friday, Credentialing and IT are moving to a new building a mile away from here because we're growing. IT moving means relocating equipment and servers, and since we do billing and practice management for the local anesthesiologists and whatnot, the servers being offline means we can do jack shit while that move takes place.

All work stops at noon on Friday so the move can take place. So the CEO is throwing a company-wide BBQ in the parking lot for all of us and we get paid lunch during it. We were allowed to come in an hour early every day of this week, so we won't be missing any hours after the shutdown post-BBQ. This week I'm getting to leave at 1pm, have most of Friday to myself, and not taking a hit on my paycheck. Yay!

I chose team Instinct so that I could wear yellow in honor of the garb of the original Pokemon trainer, April O'Neil, who was able to find and train four Wartortles to protect her along with their Raticade mentor.

Or I chose yellow 'cause I like yellow. Maybe.

Like sand shifting through the hourglass, these are the MUDs of our lives.

“You’re an opera singer but you still have a day job? So when do you plan to turn into a real opera singer?”

I know almost every opera singer gets asked this at some point or another. It doesn’t make it any less irritating, though. I’m honestly tempted to print out little pamphlets to carry with me so as not to waste time explaining that yes, while I am a professional and beginning to make a name for myself, unless they’re independently wealthy or come from families that are independently wealthy… or have a spouse who makes a lot of moolah (mine can’t work due to a disability, so I’m the provider and sole source of income for the household), most singers need to find a job with steady employment (and benefits don’t hurt either) because there will be seasons where you’re getting work out the wazoo…

And then there’ll be dry seasons where nobody seems to be casting for your voice type. Example: I’m a lyric tenor who specializes in Mozart and the Bel Canto tradition. Two years ago it seemed like every company in the state was doing either Puccini (which, except for two operas, always requires a heavier, bigger tenor voice) or birazzo atonal modern crap or Russian operas (Russian composers liked their tenor voices big, meaty and screamy) so there wasn’t really much worth auditioning for. You could always audition with out-of-state companies… but we’re talking hundreds of dollars in hotel costs, plane trips, audition costs (yes, that is a thing, many companies charge you to audition for them), so more often than not it is a huge gamble because there are more singers than roles floating around, and casting doesn’t go to the best singer- nowadays it tends to go to whomever the stage director thinks looks the part, even if they are not that good a singer.

The music director doesn’t get any input in casting in a lot of companies.
So what happens if you do a round of auditions but the stage directors prefer a tenor with cast-iron pecs and arms that look like they’re smuggling cantaloupes- Who cares if he sounds like he’s trying to shit a porcupine when going for the high C if he looks great in his underwear? (Because opera is clearly not about the music, how silly!)

Yup, you’ve just lost about a thou or more looking for work.

And that’s why singers get day jobs. Because until (and if) you manage to get to a certain level where you aren’t auditioning for houses but houses are asking you to come sing for them (and pay your way and housing), there is no way in hell you’re going to have a steady enough income.

Mind you, this isn’t really the fault of the profession as much as the administrative side of the profession. Most opera houses haven’t moved out of the 19th century in their thinking and the system still reflects the days when singers often depended on patrons to pay for their expenses. Most companies want to hear you auditioning live for them because of the unreliability of recordings (classically-trained voices don’t’ record well unless you’re using some top-of-the-line expensive mikes, otherwise a lot of partials are lost), which means traveling to them to get the gigs until they know you enough to recall what you sound like from memory when casting. Some companies are starting to hold joint auditions together in one location so singers don’t have to basically go broke running from one place to another… but not enough are doing it right now.

And then you have the biggest mixed bags of all, the pay-to-sing “Young Artist Programs.” Most of these programs advertise themselves as unique opportunities to work with professionals on the field under their training for x number of weeks while you put an opera or two together. You get charged tuition, room and board for these things (ranging from $2000 to $4000), but companies love to see that shit on your resume when you’re auditioning. Even if a large number of them are vanity projects that won’t teach you much that you can’t pick up by just doing productions yourself.

There are some that are worth it. One of them is a Colorado Springs program that is dirt cheap by comparison… for three weeks and the cost of $1200, and you get to work with fantastic professionals, coaches and the like (two summers ago, one of the voice teachers had just come back from Germany singing with Renee Fleming in a major production of Faust). The woman who runs it is a bona fide ex-star of the Met and the international stage, and she actually cares about the singers. So there are good programs out there, but it’s hard to find out which kind you’re in until it’s too late to get out. The opera administration side of things needs to get its ass into the 21st century… and hopefully it will before it’s the 22nd century
So… all of that is why some opera singers need day jobs.

Mind you, the money isn’t bad when it’s there- I basically got paid a nice amount for two one-hour rehearsals and two one-hour performances, but the frequency and cash flow of the gigs aren't enough yet to justify throwing caution to the wind.

… well, looks like I needed to get a lot off my chest, huh?

I love some of the stories that get shared on my FB page.

This one is no exception. In fact, this may be the thing I've loved most, ever, while also being horrifying:

"So, last week, something pretty tragic happened in our household. It's taken me until now to wrap my head around it and find the words to describe the horror. It started off simple enough - something that's probably happened to most of you.

Sometime between midnight and 1:30am, our puppy Evie pooped on our rug in the living room. This is the only time she's done this, so it's probably just because we forgot to let her out before we went to bed that night. Now, if you have a detective's mind, you may be wondering how we know the poop occurred between midnight and 1:30am. We were asleep, so how do I know that time frame?

Why, friends, that's because our Roomba runs at 1:30am every night, while we sleep. And it found the poop. And so begins the Pooptastrophe. The poohpocalypse. The pooppening.

If you have a Roomba, please rid yourself of all distractions and absorb everything I'm about to tell you.

Do not, under any circumstances, let your Roomba run over dog poop. If the unthinkable does happen, and your Roomba runs over dog poop, stop it immediately and do not let it continue the cleaning cycle. Because if that happens, it will spread the dog poop over every conceivable surface within its reach, resulting in a home that closely resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting.

It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be on your carpets. It will be on your rugs. It will be on your kids' toy boxes. If it's near the floor, it will have poop on it. Those awesome wheels, which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25-foot poop trails all over the house. Our lovable Roomba, who gets a careful cleaning every night, looked like it had been mudding. Yes, mudding - like what you do with a Jeep on a pipeline road. But in poop.

Then, when your four-year-old gets up at 3am to crawl into your bed, you'll wonder why he smells like dog poop. And you'll walk into the living room. And you'll wonder why the floor feels slightly gritty. And you'll see a brown-encrusted, vaguely Roomba-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the floor with a glowing green light, like everything's okay. Like it's proud of itself. You were still half-asleep until this point, but now you wake up pretty damn quickly.

And then the horror. Oh the horror.

So, first you clean the child. You scrub the poop off his feet and put him back in bed. But you don't bother cleaning your own feet, because you know what's coming. It's inevitable, and it's coming at you like a freight train. Some folks would shrug their shoulders and get back in bed to deal with it in the morning. But you're not one of those people - you can't go to sleep with that war zone of poop in the living room.

So you clean the Roomba. You toss it in the bathtub to let it soak. You pull it apart, piece-by-piece, wondering at what point you became an adult and assumed responsibility for 3:30am-Roomba-disassembly-poop-cleanups. By this point, the poop isn't just on your hands - it's smeared up to your elbows. You already heard the Roomba make that "whirlllllllllllllllll-boop-hisssssssss" noise that sounds like electronics dying, and you realize you forgot to pull the battery before getting it wet. More on that later.

Oh, and you're not just using profanity - you're inventing new types of profanity. You're saying things that would make Satan shudder in revulsion. You hope your kid stayed in bed, because if he hears you talking like this, there's no way he's not ending up in prison.

Then you get out the carpet shampooer. When you push it up to the rug - the rug that started it all - the shampooer just laughs at you. Because that rug is going in the trash, folks. But you shampoo it anyway, because your wife loved that damn rug, and you know she'll ask if you tried to clean it first.

Then you get out the paper towel rolls, idly wondering if you should invest in paper towel stock, and you blow through three or four rolls wiping up poop. Then you get the spray bottle with bleach water and hose down the floor boards to let them soak, because the poop has already dried. Then out comes the steam mop, and you take care of those 25-ft poop trails.

And then, because it's 6am, you go to bed. Let's finish this tomorrow, right?

The next day, you finish taking the Roomba apart, scraping out all the tiny flecks of poop, and after watching a few Youtube instructional videos, you remove the motherboard to wash it with a toothbrush. Then you bake it in the oven to dry. You put it all back together, and of course it doesn't work. Because you heard the "whirlllllllllllllll-boop-hissssssss" noise when it died its poopy death in the bathtub. But you hoped that maybe the Roomba gods would have mercy on you.

But there's a light at the end of the tunnel. After spending a week researching how to fix this damn $400 Roomba without spending $400 again - including refurb units, new motherboards, and new batteries - you finally decide to call the place where you bought it. That place called Hammacher Schlemmer. They have a funny name, but they have an awesome warranty. They claim it's for life, and it's for any reason.

So I called them and told the truth. My Roomba found dog poop and almost precipitated World War III.

And you know what they did? They offered to replace it. Yes, folks. They are replacing the Roomba that ran over dog poop and then died a poopy, watery death in the bathtub - by no fault of their own, of course.

So, mad props to Hammacher Schlemmer. If you're buying anything expensive, and they sell it, I recommend buying it from them. And remember - don't let your Roomba run over dog poop"

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Apoopcalypse.

@saosmash said:

I dunno, I have a friend who is really nice, like sweetest, most generous guy, fun to hang with in real life but somehow on the internet he transposes into the most annoying man alive. Like, he's never a shitdick. It's like online he forgets everything there is to know about social interaction and reverts to the comparative safety of total inanity.

This sort of reminds me of Slavoj Žižek's theory of masks. Terry Pratchett sort of condensed it into Granny Weatherwax's maxim that a mask only hides the face on the outside, but how we behave when we think we're exempt of consequence is who we really are. For many, the online world provides that mask.

I guess I might as well do this, even though most of the MU*s I played on before my hiatus during college aren't around anymore. Except for Discworld- man, that place has lasted forever...

Cyndartella @ Discworld MU -she was the worst witch ever, and proud of it.
Wonder Woman @ Brave New World - The real Wonder Woman that Elsa retconned as an Earth 2 'impostor' so she could play her crappy New 52 version.
Vorpal @ HeroMUX, Brave New World, CoMUX -he's my boy, what can I say?
Sundog @ HeroMUX, -Rock stars never die, they just become mutants.
Bellatrix @ HeroMUX - Gravity-manipulating Bea Arthur tribute. What's not to love?
Miss America Chavez @ HeroMUX (past) and CoMUX (current)- because MAC rocks.

@sg said in Good or New Movies Review:

@bobotron said in Good or New Movies Review:

@vorpal

Wasn't there something about him having a moustache during filming and them having to edit it out digitally?

AHAHAHA, I want this to be true so bad. You just don't read about this kind of delusional star power anymore.

At the time of the reshoots he was filming a movie for Paramount and Paramount wouldn't allow him to shave his moustache.

The result is, of course, 50 Shades of what the fuck is going on on your face? But hey, at least Superman is back to being a beacon of hope instead of a walking advertisement for antidepressants. That's a plus.

Now we just need to hope that they line a good director for the sequel so it's not a mishmash of two different visions trying to push each other off a cliff. Maybe they should just give it to Patty. Patty knows what she's doing.

@Lithium said in The Shame Game:

@Ganymede This is a fallacy.

We can /try/ to not weigh opinions based on our feelings but that's a lot harder than it seems, and I'm willing to say that I believe most people can't do it. Not really. See Trump.

I agree with @Ganymede in this- I think you are wrong, to an extent. Rational thought and objectivity aren't automatic, they are volitional. Everybody can, in fact, do it. Most choose not to, mostly out of habit. Being rational is not something that comes automatically, it's something that has to be forced and practiced on habit consciously - excellence is not an act, but a habit.

The problem, of course, is that culturally people have come to associate rational thought with the cold Straw Vulcan and therefore not fun/a stodge/a stick in (choose your spot) and completely incompatible with having normal emotions.

The practice of rational thought isn't 'sexy' in our culture, and most people think it doesn't really apply to them. Scientists, engineers, doctors have to think rationally -we think- but the rest of us don't have to. That is usually what I encounter when I talk this over with people. But the state of the culture concerning rational thought as a practiced habit is so schizophrenic that it's a norm and not an exception for those aforementioned 'rational' professional to be perfectly rational in their professions, but completely fail to apply that level of introspection to their own private lives and therefore are holy messes at home.

And then you have careers such as mine in opera, where a large number of its practitioners are an irrational mess on and off the clock...

@silentsophia said:

I hate being sick.

And I hate coughs that linger for months after I've been sick.

I know exactly how you feel. The woman singing my love interest in rehearsals apparently was sick, didn't tell anyone, and bitch didn't wear a mask. And she was singing in my face half of the time. Today I woke up with a cough and that feeling in my chest that says "you're going to be sick, mwahahah!"

So much hate right now >_<

@Auspice said in There's Nothing to Do Here:

But in the cases I've seen where Staff is running 1-2 +events every week... and people still complain there's 'nothing to do'? That is entirely and completely on those players.

Pretty much. I am a very big proponent of Granny Weatherwax's Making Your Own Entertainment.

Well... a wobble is a very slow vibration in the voice. Like, almost siren-like, it is so slow. That’s usually indicative of bad technique that has basically abused your voice for years. Think of your vocal cords as coming together an incredible amount of times per second as air passes between them… healthy vocal cords do so at a certain rate- 6 to 6.5 cycles per second. If you abuse your voice, ‘push’ and scream as substitutes for good technique, the muscles and cartilages involved start to lose their flexibility (in fact, in some cases, they become ‘bowed’ after years of pressure) – which results in 4 or less cycles per second. The voice is also robbed of its natural beauty after years of being savaged.

It’s not a pretty sound, and outside of potential recurring health issues being the cause, it can indicate a bad singer with a very bad and unhealthy technique.

As for “Heldentenor”- we know that there are seven voice types: tenor and soprano (high male and female voices), bassos and altos (low male and female voices) and mezzosopranos, baritones and countertenors (mid-range female voices, mid-range male voices, and men whose falsetto is so strong that they sing in the mezzosoprano range.)

Each voice type also has sub-types. Think of the sub-types as being like weight designations in Boxing, from lightweight to heavyweight. The roles written for each sub-type are written with what that voice sub-type can and can’t do: huge voices (dramatic sopranos, heldentenors, Verdian/Wagnerian baritones and sopranos, etc) are very large, very powerful, not very agile and they usually sing over very large orchestras and can cut through them like a knife through butter.

Middle-strength voices are usually called ‘lyric’ and they usually strike a balance between power and beauty- they sing over smaller orchestras and have moderate agility. They’re usually the romantic leads. The light voices are incredibly agile though not very powerful and so they often sing over much smaller orchestras.

A larger voice trying to sing repertoire meant for a smaller voice is possible. Singing the role of a –much—smaller voice can be incredibly awkward and not very good for your vocal health. However, a smaller voice trying to sing the repertoire of a much larger voice will kill it. To sing over an orchestra size that is twice (or more) the size that is meant for your voice means you will either a) not be heard at all if you’re trying to sing with your usual size or b) you are going to push like hell and that’s going to damage your voice over the long term.

The damage can range from nodules, bowed cords (and wobble), to vocal hemorrhage and worse.

In the end, operatic singing is a fine-motor athletic endeavor on par with the kind of stress and coordination required of Olympic athletics for other parts of the body. And doing it wrong, just like training other parts of your body, is going to fuck you up. And if you’ve done it wrong for too long, then you’ll get fucked up in irreversible ways.
--- so, long story short

… someone who does that is the last person you want vocal technical advice from.

Sorry. It's a very slow day at work today.

@Three-Eyed-Crow A note on Ecuadorean donations: Make sure that if you're going to make a donation, make it to one of the groups outside of Ecuador who are coming in to help. As a native from that country, I can tell you that the Ecuadorean government will not think twice about finding ways to pocket a chunk of the donations. It is exceptionally corrupt- far beyond what most people can imagine, the lack of shame is almost surrealist.

The government allegedly had something close to a billion dollars that they currently can't account for (and the scandal is being hushed thanks to the country's gag laws), which is why the president is talking about opening a credit line for 600 million dollars for emergency relief. So... try to donate to something like the Colombian rescue teams or something of that sort.

(You might want to spread the word about this, too)