merfilly
(Man playing song, misses a note, expletive, goes on with the song)
the song is the beginning to “the entertainer” by joplin, and the “fuck” goes in time with the song
saloon piano players when someone whips out a pistol in the old west
Thanks to a pair of a bionic gloves, this 80-year-old classical pianist can finally play the piano again. The maestro, João Carlos Martins, had lost dexterity in his hands due to aging and health complications. His face at being able to play piano again says it all. 🎶
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Sometimes the future is pretty cool, actually.
urbanfantasyinspiration
Bro he’s so happy he’s crying and that’s making me cry he gets to play piano again after so long I
João Carlos Martins isn’t just any pianist, he’s one of the best pianists alive today. The dude has been playing piano for over 70 years (his career started when he was 11, but by the time he was 8 he had already won a contest playing Bach), and out of those 70, 56 years he spent playing with some kind of disability in his hands.
By the time he was 20 years old, João Carlos had already been invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to play at the Carnegie Hall, played with the biggest north american orchestras, and recorded the entire work of Bach for the piano. At the height of his skills, he could play 21 notes per second.
In 1965, at 24 years old, he suffered an accident during a soccer match which ended up causing an injury on his right elbow, damaging his ulnar nerve and atrophying 3 of his fingers. This caused him to stop playing for a year, and to play with difficulty until his 30s.
After long periods of physical therapy, but still with much difficulty, he returned to the stages and was received several positive reviews and was acclaimed by the public. However, he ended up developing a work-related musculoskeletal disorder, which forced him to stop playing again.
This wasn’t enough to make him give up on his musical career, and even with atrophied fingers and paralyzed hands, he still managed to play and record all basically of Bach’s work from 1979 to 1985, still being wildly popular despite his difficulties.
However, the worst would come in 1995: at 55 years old, during a robbery in Bulgaria, João Carlos was struck in the head with an iron bar, resulting in neurological sequelae which paralyzed his right arm. After a lot of physical and neurological therapy, he managed to move his right hand again enough to play the piano with both hands, but due to a worsening of his condition, at 58, he started to develop troubles not only moving his hand, but also speaking, so he had to go through another surgery. It didn’t seem like he would recover much movement in his hand after surgery, however, so he used the short time he had before his hand atrophied completely to record one last CD with both hands.
In 2001, at 61, he recorded the album Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, written by Maurice Ravel for Paul Wittgenstein, an austrian pianist who lost his right arm during World War 1.
His intention was to record 8 albums using only his left hand, however, his left hand developed a disease called Dupuytren’s contracture, causing his fingers to become permanently bent and contracted, as well as causing pain. He went through another surgery, this time in his left hand, but it didn’t prevent him from losing movement in his left hand, causing him to have to abandon the piano, seemingly for good.
This still didn’t keep him away from music, and after learning to conduct from a friend of his, he became a conductor in 2003, at 63 years old. Due to his paralyzed fingers, João Carlos couldn’t actually hold the baton or even turn the pages in the score (at least not fast enough to not stall the music), however, so instead the maestro simpy memorized every score note by note. He memorized, on average, 5000 score pages. (Unfortunately, he started to develop dystonia on his left arm, causing it to twitch, which caused him to have to stop conducting for a while, but he came back shortly after and has been conducting ever since.)
He went through another brain surgery in 2012, to recover the movements in his left hand, but at this point it was so atrophied he hadn’t even opened it in 10 years. He still occasionally played the piano in important events, and he even played at the opening of the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio, but his playing was very slow and he could barely use his fingers, playing only a single note per second (compare with his 21 notes per seconds back when he was young).
(João Carlos Martins playing at an event in São Bernardo do Campo, 2013)
His bionic gloves were custom made by an industrial engineer, after said engineer saw him playing live and thought he could probably come up with something to help him. After he approached João Carlos to offer his help, the bionic gloves got ready just in time for him to play at the 466 anniversary of the city of São Paulo, in 2020, where João Carlos claimed “this is the first time in 22 years I place all 10 fingers in the keyboard”. Now, in 2021, he often posts videos of himself playing, and he always gets very emotional while doing so, and he is hardly seen without his new bionic gloves.
bulwarksbrain
This means a lot to me
nunyabizni
That Buzz Lightyear one killed me
undeadwill
These are the best.
These kind of people are my favorite bless them
Sense of humor is everything
ndiecity-deactivated20241101
He forgot to switch to his blackfishing account lmaooo
it’s really important to me that people (especially young people) know how much of this goes on -- like, I have seen chat rooms full of people like this brainstorming together on how to propagate this kind of deceit. Often each will run a whole bunch of accounts as different identities. Many of them are stupid like this guy, who would be terrible at this even if he remembered to switch to his other account before posting that garbage. But SOME of them are actually really really slick.
And they will do things like start you with premises you can easily agree with, such as “I respect anyone who respects me” and “you should be able to be proud of who you are” and slowly, half step by half step, lead you places like “people who don’t respect me deserve violence” and “there’s nothing wrong with white pride”.
Or they’ll start infighting among groups... they might have an account pretending to be black and keep re-posting a couple of pictures of mexican business owners making sure their businesses don’t get damaged during BLM protests... trying to make it look like mexican americans are “on the other side” to drive a wedge and overshadow the reality that uncountable mexican american protesters stood in solidarity with the BLM movement.
They might get real sneaky and have an account pretending to be bi, and then use that account to advocate for the inclusion of pedophiles in the LGBTQ community, using false equivalencies specifically to create a backlash against bi people or make people associate bi folk with pedophilia. Some 37 year old cishet dude might pretend to be a 23 year old lesbian and start blogging untrue fear mongering about how ace people use up resources meant to protect lesbian and gay people... because if they can get real gay and lesbian people arguing about it, that fractures a group that should be strong together, and alienates people who should be adding their strength to that group.
These are all the kind of thing that happen every day here on social media. ALWAYS do your best to talk to real life members of a community in person to round out your world view, and lean toward inclusion, compassion, and support when faced with someone online presenting a point of view that is trying to convince you of negative things about specific kinds of people -- especially people you would naturally identify or ally with.
Be suspicious of accounts that seem to be saying your enemy is the person next to you. Even if that account is who they say they are, who is the account next to them, whispering propaganda and rhetoric into their DMs?
Anyway, stay safe out here kids
muppethole-deactivated20240312
It's a fantastic point, but John Boyega's net worth also puts him at $6 million. When he says eat the rich, he isn't safe either...
There’s a pretty big fucking difference between six million and one trillion lmao
Not to mention the way the money was made
An actor being paid for a role / doing some advertising is a world away form a man setting up a cooperate money machine that horrendously exploits workers
This is something I hate SO MUCH about how tumblr talks about money.
Like, I get that famous actors have large amounts of money, some of them are even probably overpaid (I have complicated thoughts about how actors are paid because of the nature of acting as a career), but they are exchanging labor for money, and their salaries are an expense involved in making a movie.
But like... an actor is paid for a job. They’re a worker like the rest of us. Bezos isn’t paid for a job, he’s paid for being the person who owns Amazon and despite being obscenely wealthy, he does all sorts of shitty things and to underpay and exploit his workers, and avoid paying taxes, so that more of the money Amazon generates will be profit (worker’s salaries are not profit, they’re a business expense).
These two mechanisms of acquiring money are fundamentally very different.
The reason why billionaires are evil aren’t because having money is bad, its because to get a billion dollars you have to cheat. You have to take it from someone else. If Bezos paid all his workers and suppliers fairly and treated them well, and paid his fair amount of taxes, and etc, then it literally wouldn’t matter how much money he earned, because he wouldn’t be doing anyone any harm. But its not actually possible to amass a billion dollars (a full order of magnitude bigger than a million) while behaving in an ethical manner.
Just in case you, like me, have a difficult time conceptualizing the differences between really big numbers:
You were a million seconds old after being alive 11.5 days.
You were (or will be) a billion seconds old after being alive for 31.7 years.
But to reach a trillion seconds of age, you’d have to somehow survive to be 31,710 years old.
So comparing someone with a net worth of 6 million to someone with a net worth of a trillion is like comparing someone who is a little over two months old to a freaking immortal wizard who has been around since Europe was covered in sheets of ice and homo sapiens were working on domesticating dogs.
To be in the 1% you need to be making around $500,000. That’s not an insignificant amount of money, but that’s a household with two doctors or two corporate lawyers. Billionaires are NOT the 1%, they are people with a THOUSAND TIMES the wealth of the 1%.
So people are making different videos for you to use in uncomfortable situations!
The majority of the Uber ones mention in some way that they have your location on. Some you would pretend are messages someone left on your phone. Some have a script for you to follow along to on screen! Some are specific to who are calling you!
justyouraveragebloog-deactivate
THIS IS VERY VERY IMPORTANT
Follow @this-is-life-actually
Hit reblog on this so hard
Important question: Has the wizarding world discovered vaccines and is Hogwarts vaccinated?
Circa Seventh Book
Hermione: Has the wizarding world discovered vaccines?
Ron: A wax what?
Hermione: hmmmm
Harry: Hermione, we cant take out the death eaters with a genetically magicked disease
Hermione: No I know that. Of course I know that.
*Uncomfortably long silence*
Harry: What if we gave them all smallpox
Hermione: HARRY NO! We already eradicated it once, let's not make the world do it again
Harry: Oh yeah, I guess you're right
Hermione: Now tuberculosis, on the other hand...
Hermione: If Voldemort likes the good ole' days so much, why don't we bring them back? Old society, old war tricks
Hermione, putting on a gas mask: New plan. We take them out with consumption and mustard gas
Hermione, to Voldemort: Did you know, historically, a majority of war deaths come from disease?
Harry Potter and the Violation of the Geneva Convention
this video always cheers me up
