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• Plaptops & Hardpressers (Sincerely, Sinverity Demise) was first conceptualized as a ~6-hour sound collage under the RINGEX PLASTER name back in December of 2020, still dealing with the same themes we know it for today, but in a very drawn-out narrative form. Obviously, this didn't pan out, and only reached 2 finished tracks in this form before being abandoned.

Here's some notes I had written for this version of the album:

— 12/21/2020 6:58 PM
yell dialog why is everyone internet sop fuickin ironicbn
album abt my relationship to the internet

Plaptops & Hardpressers

mostly tts but for the irony track have my voice layered ont op as well with multople putich layers and that be the big revbewal like wow there i am now

you are now experiencing transit

33.2 Your Opening Statement, My Edited Video

Here's what this version of the tracklist looked like:

Interestingly, you can already see my aching for a more sincere emotional outlet in this early stage of development, long before I had the guts to officially kill off the irony-poisoned mess that was RINGEX PLASTER for good. The writing was on the wall for years. You can also see how "th3 f3ar" and its concepts would later be retooled for Grimdark.

Skipping ahead to the Radclyffe-era stage of this album's development, here's a version of the tracklist that's closer to the final product, but not quite there yet:

• Just like Your Character Here, this album's backdrop was assembled using ROBLOX Studio. Here's a closer look at that:

Because I'm so nice, I'll grant you the privilege of examining some other individual layers as well.

If you're wondering about the sign, the title cuts off there because the site I was using to create that image had a character limit. I kept it like that because I thought it looked interesting. You could read some symbolism into it as well; it cuts off prematurely, just as so many strange things happened to me prematurely.

• "Sinverity" is meant to be a three-way portmanteau of "Sincerity", "Severity", and "Sin".

• According to my notes, at one point I was planning for all of this album's lyrics to be displayed with mIxEd CaPiTaLiZaTiOn LiKe ThIs.

• TRACK 1's vocals were recorded over a half-speed version of the instrumental, and then sped up 2x to resynchronize with the normal version, allowing for impossibly precise timing & enunciation that creates this sort of robotic effect. There might be some other track(s) that utilized this technique, but that is the one I'm most certain of.

• TRACK 5's choice of interpolation ("Sexting" by Blood On The Dance Floor) is the most thematically significant of them all. That song was the ultimate soundtrack to my premature sexual awakening, alluring in its upbeat energy and raunchiness I couldn't yet fully comprehend, the aural expansion of a vast world I still hardly understood, introduced to me by a YTPMV fad of all things. I wasn't even hearing the lyrics correctly; I'd interpreted the "SEXT, SEXT, SEXT, ME!" chant as "SEX! SEX! SEX! YAY!", which I think is adorably emblematic of how much I had left to learn.

My feelings about that whole process have only gotten more complex with time. I'll start by saying that I'm not a fan of how this album primarily portrays The Awakening in a sinister light; for example, TRACK 5 itself contains the line "skirt by the guidelines with artistic purpose" in reference to a nude speedpaint I saw on YouTube back then, and I'm baffled by how I could've written this as someone who both firmly believes that Nudity Is Not Inherently Sexual, and makes regular use of it for artistic purposes. How was the cognitive dissonance so lost on me? The phrasing "skirt by" implies a kind of nefariousness too, as if this should have been against the rules, which again, obviously runs counter to my personal beliefs. While that painting did make my child self feel funny, it was not the painting's fault that society conditioned me to view all nudity as Scandalous and Tantalizing.

I take similar issue with TRACK 14 and its lyric "imagine feeling nostalgic for harmful content of this caliber"; since when was I of the mind that pornography is categorically "harmful content"? I guess I probably just meant Harmful To My Underage Eyes Specifically, but even then, I don't necessarily believe that me having browsed erotic material on the internet as a minor was majorly detrimental to my development all on its own. What actually bothers me about that is the context I was missing; I wish I hadn't been alone in my experimentation, and I wish any of the world's grownups were willing to have a down-to-earth conversation about what this all means beforehand. Like, okay, here's Nudity, here's Sex, here's the meaningful difference between those things, here's why porn should be for fun and not taken too literally, etc... Again, the root problem here is education (or lack thereof), not the simple fact of Having Access To Sexuality, and I really don't buy into the idea that restricting porn access until The Magic Number 18 does anything to solve this. I feel like these tracks show me almost wanting to be 'traumatized' because it makes for a better story, and thus uncritically adopting anti-porn rhetoric in the process. Admittedly that's a very cynical reading of it, but I wouldn't be saying that if I didn't think it to be true on at least some level. Just goes to show how much I've grown since then, I suppose!

• Back on the subject of song titles, I'd say this album's finalized tracklist is semantically denser than any other in my discography up to this point. Practically every little detail has an extremely specific meaning, most of which only I would find immediately decipherable. To illustrate this, I'll break down a couple of these titles piece by piece, starting with TRACK 5:

S:☯F. no☺question.

When signing up for a Facebook account in 2010, I initially set my "Sex" to "F", because I hadn't yet heard the word "sex" in the context of That Thing You're Assigned At Birth, so I incorrectly assumed I was supposed to input which gender I as a ""straight"" ""boy"" would want to Have Sex with, which clearly should have been Female.

thx⬊titanic┼speedpaint

This refers to the aforementioned "nude speedpaint" I found on YouTube as a child, which I recall being based on that one scene from Titanic. I say "thanks" to it here because it's one of the primary things I could attribute my budding sexual curiosity to.

sux⮌to be⮎lux at⭾7or8.

Essentially, this was me lamenting how early I had stumbled into sexuality via the internet, though as I've clarified above, I don't believe that alone is The Problem per se, it's just that the world left me woefully underprepared for it. The reason I use "lux" as a stand-in for this concept requires some background; my first time "dating" was with a girl on ROBLOX whose username contained the pokemon Luxray, which I would shorten to "lux" when referring to her, and I took that relationship seriously enough that I'd even had Something Vaguely Resembling Sexual Fantasies about her at some point, which in practice pretty much just entailed hugging on the floor while naked, because I was still fairly clueless. Also, I remember that mental image took place in my grandma's dining room for some inexplicable reason, but that's beside the point. Your main takeaway from this should be that The 2011 ROBLOX Girlfriend is key to understanding a decent chunk of the lore behind my music. Her voice is a recurring element in the KINREK album "the following vol. I: recotru thencr", for instance. Fitting to mention here, because that album is almost on par with this one in terms of Semantic Tracklist Density.

today⮔we're⚩gonna be talking about****UNBANNED⯌DAILY

The first chunk here quotes a joke from this YouTube Poop, where the character Cheerilee is edited to say "Today we are going to be talking about Pony Porn", and that leads us the second chunk, which references the pornographic MLP:FiM fangame Banned From Equestria (Daily), another major point of curiosity for my child self.

(splitting⬓fandling

A light abstraction of "spitting handling", which refers to how back then I would sometimes use my own saliva as makeshift lubricant when attempting to masturbate, because I knew of no better way. Yuck.

&free⭖spelling.

I think this is about the time I overheard my parents spell out "S.E.X" in an attempt to stop their Precious Innocent Child from understanding, prompting me to taunt them out loud by remarking "Hmmm, S.E.X... What does that spell... Oh, I know! SEX!"

⭚welcome⭞2the⭝waning⭜room.)

This refers to The Naked Room, a transient place I invented as a kid which was defined as What Happens When I Hide Behind The Shower Curtain While Waiting For My Mom To Fill Up The Bathtub For Me. I was naked in preparation for the bath, and had just a few spare moments to stand like that in seclusion, perhaps doing a little dance too, appreciating this feeling however I could, because deep down I've always been a nudist, and I weep for that little me being trained to feel shame for this.

⛈exitwet w/ flipphone held,▟find new relieved░dissolvefx.▒Shaken⛐ or✈piloted? something⛆explained

This recounts a time around 2009 where shortly after a bath, I grabbed my little flipphone and tried taking a picture of myself while still naked, for which my mom immediately scolded me, because despite my innocent intentions, this would be legally classified as CSEM. The photo turned out blurry anyway, which disappointed me but relieved my mother, and I wondered if this was the result of my hands being too shaky, or some kind of Automatic Child Censorship technology.

The other title I'll be breaking down is TRACK 9's:

"monscare1;

A "monscare" is an event in which I was led to believe my parents were going to start monitoring my computer activity 24/7 using commercially-available spyware, which thankfully never fully came to fruition, though it did come very close, and I still had plenty of other digital privacy invasions to deal with after getting in trouble enough times.

growth⬯observation assuming this⯎taken. fake╩run follows, never╳bought.

This recounts a time in 2012 or so where I was sitting on the edge of my bed with my pants pulled down and trying to observe an erection forming in real time, purely out of curiosity for how that works, until I noticed my mom approaching, at which point I panicked and ran out of the room, exclaiming something like "OOOOOH I NEED TO PEE SO BAD!!" as a thinly-veiled excuse for why I would've had my pants pulled down. She did not buy it, and began interrogating me, wrongly assuming that I was trying to take nude photos of myself again since my iPad had been laying next to me, but I literally could not have been using it for that even if I wanted to, because it was a first-generation iPad which had no camera. Presumably I tried explaining that to her, but I believe this exchange still ended with her threatening to start monitoring me. It's fucking depressing how paranoid I had to be about trying to better understand my own body.

monscare 2; btools⚒abused, and⬿the misdirection⯮elsewhere to⭼self-destruction, both◬boasted of.

This segment documents two separate incidents, in reverse chronological order for some reason, so I'll start with the second part. The "misdirection" recalls a time in either 2013 or 2014 where I tried convincing some kid in a ROBLOX game to delete System32, one of the oldest tricks in the book, and supposedly succeeded, but I don't remember what exactly gave me that impression, and it's entirely possible this other user was just playing along with the joke. In any case, I once bragged about this to some friends in a Skype call, which my parents overheard, and thus I was threatened yet again.

Meanwhile, "btools abused" recalls a time in 2015 where some friends and I were using Cheat Engine exploits to do a little griefing in the ROBLOX game Frappe (a Starbucks simulator that rebranded for copyright reasons), giving ourselves building tools with the "btools" command, and then wrecking the place. But the thing is, the damage was always going to be impermanent; you could not literally destroy an entire ROBLOX game by griefing in an individual server. With a quick restart or server-hop, everything would be back to normal. The fun of it was just seeing people's reactions. Unfortunately, that crucial context didn't translate through whatever my parents were overhearing, and this of all things was what finally convinced them to actually try installing parental spyware on my computer, using a program called something like WatchDog. The following few days were paranoia-inducing in a way I'm not sure I've ever fully recovered from. I micromanaged my every move, tabbing in and out of windows as quickly as possible, never leaving TweetDeck open for too long, lest something risque appear in one of the many columns, never leaving Skype open for too long, lest one of my friends make a less-than-appropriate joke. And the most terrifying part? I would later find out those efforts were completely in vain, as I caught a glimpse of how the WatchDog controls actually work, witnessing my mom manually pull up a window I was not currently tabbed into. How the fuck was that even possible? The only reason I wriggled out of this one was that the software ended up being too expensive or some shit. Some kind of financial issue. I regained some semblance of privacy by pure chance and nothing more. I dodged a bullet and it took no skill.

That concludes the title breakdown demonstration. Imagine how fucking long this page would've been if I did that with every single one of them... I'm honestly amazed that I managed to condense so much of my childhood into these 300-character chunks.

• TRACK 16 self-samples the instrumental of TRACK 1, bringing everything full circle.