Contrails: Jun '26, Week 2

Minerva Murasaki
Jun 15
5 min read

It dawned upon me this week that it's Pride month, and that I still have not covered some of my favorite songs about living your truth. 🙃 I'm sure I'll record myself singing them all someday, but maybe I'm not ready yet. Or maybe I am, but music is difficult, and my latest project turned out to be quite the learning experience:

🌙 Work as Minerva 🌙

https://youtube.com/shorts/CzXa96Jya_g

Hold on to that bunny! 🐰

I'm glad that I can finally share about what I'd been working on since deciding to change how I approach music. Looking back on my now 5 years worth of covers, I realized a few trends:

Thematically and lyrically, I resonate with songs about silent or invisible pain and suffering: The stories of people who can articulate the source of the pain, but know that society is a cruel hive mind with a fear of the unknown.
I prefer to sing in a rough, dramatic way: I want to go from just airy whispers, toneless vocal fry, to belting and screaming until my hands cramp up. Like I tell Yuraia, I think I'm more of a yeller than a singer. 🙃 If a song needs me to "tone it down", I need to REALLY love the lyrics to stay motivated. I want to convey just how deeply I feel. How deeply I hurt. How much energy I've mustered to keep it all in. I struggle to make my singing sound palatable in the hopes that people don't dismiss me immediately, giving my cover a chance to sound out somewhere.
I like a good rhythm. I want my brain to be hit with a strong down beat, tingled with cleverly placed up beats, and left to anticipate the next beat with clean rests.
Original instrumentals are nice to sing over, but when my Sing My Pleasure cover got muted, I was horrified because I had put so much of myself into it, but the system recognized me as just another copy to be to be silenced. It reminded me of when Yuraia put in so much time and effort to make instrumentals for Pretender and Kaibutsu 5 years ago, only for us to get a copyright claim anyway. Don't get me wrong -- the system was correct that we needed to pay royalties to the original composer. But it still hurt.

So I thought... why not shift my focus to covering game (and maybe anime) music? I'd have to make my own instrumentals, but most game music with vocals would be sung by a human (vs composed for a vocal synth.), and original interpretations seem to be more welcome in that genre. Besides, I really enjoyed covering Scream and Give It All from FFXIV, so that's a good sign, right? So I picked an FFXIV song to cover and started working on the arrangement in April.

But I realized that I struggled with transcribing the song as it had too many layers of instruments, so with Yuraia's approval I changed the plan to a more straightforward song: Trying hard is hard, so I try hard to try hard from Guilty Gear -Strive-. I was quite fond of the song and Jam Kuradoberi's background story, so why not?

Despite the lyrics ("As long as I don't quit, I'll be okay"), I ran out of steam after working on it for a month and decided to call it quits after getting stuck with the same road block as before: transcribing chords. Could I have commissioned musicians to help me with it? Yes. But the point of the project was to find a way to make music on my own so that I could sing the songs I wanted to sing. Clearly, I overestimated my abilities. 🙃

So I decided to publish whatever I had made as a short instead. It was fun making a video that would loop (almost) perfectly on YouTube though! 🤣 I am not giving up on finding what works for me, so stay tuned, maybe? 🥺🎵

Moving on! 🥹

Finished working on a collab, MV and sent it off! ⭐️ I had planned to spend at most 1 day on it, but ended up spending 2 full days in total working on it. 🤔 I guess I'm satisfied with what I made in 2 days? 🤔🤔🤔

Then I spent some time reviewing my project list for the rest of the year. I'm just going to try and see what sticks. No promises. 🥺💔

Ended the "work" week with recording my vocals for another collab,! I'm not sure if my takes were good enough, especially since I strained my voice a little mid-recording, but I'll find out when editing later today! 🥺🥺🥺 :prayge:

🐰 IRL 🐰

Since I've tried several new things in the past year, I figured that it was a good time to do some introspection and try to figure out if I could find my Ikigai. 🤔 Or at least, see if following this thought exercise by Ben Meer could reveal some insights.

Feeling cute, might delete later. 🙃 I didn't know how to phrase a descriptive statement for Expertise, Calling, and what I can be PAID for, so I ended up just describing roles I could think of. Might have to redo these sections in future. 🤔

I felt that it was a good exercise for trying to draw connections between different things I knew about myself. Tried my best to find things about myself that I didn't know by following the prompts for each section, and thought of a few! But I'm still stuck wondering how do I get to the cross-section in the middle. Maybe I need to be more descriptive with all the sections under "What can I be PAID for?". 🤔🤔🤔

For now, my heart is content, and my pockets are still filled, so I'll continue to keep a look out for opportunities I suppose. 🥹🥹🥹

Life goes on! 💖 Saw Oriental Magpie-Robins hopping around when I was on my way to lunch with my family! They're so cute. 🥹💜

🎮 Gaming 🎮

I bring screenshots! ✨✨✨

I'm not great at racing games, but I think I've gotten better at Forza Horizon 6 this past week! Gave my 2024 Ford Mustang Dark Horse a new coat of paint, and upgraded my Acura NSX Type S to reduce the number of times I feel the need to swap it out for a better car when doing challenges on the world map. Since my partner got the game too, I decided to wait for him to explore Legend Island and challenge the Legend races together. 💖 Playing Forza with him in Horizon Life mode (Online) forced me to get better at races because I pretty much abused the rewind function to get through a lot of the content in Horizon Solo (offline) mode. 🤣🤣🤣 Big thanks, best bud! You'll get better at the game if you believe in yourself and don't give up! 💖 (If only I could tell myself the same for doing music. lol)

Over the weekend, I played some Risk of Rain 2 with the usual company! ✨

A slab of steak on the chest to increase HP is a CRAZY concept. 🤣🤣🤣

During our last session, I couldn't figure out how to play Artificer because it felt way too slow for me. This week I learned that maybe I just needed a fire under my ass (more specifically, a boss killing me in 1 shot because my preferred job was close ranged) to make it work. 🙃 It's still not my favorite to play, but I definitely got better at it?! 🤣

Looking forward to playing it again with friends! 💜