Posts

One year on: Anniversary of Soundwaves

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 Hey everyone, it’s Jack/Noodle here with a very special post. I decided today instead of a regular post where I deep dive or relate sparks to autism, I celebrate one year, or one trip around the sun of this blog. To celebrate I thought I’d share some of my art and behind the scenes and thank yous to people i haven’t openly thanked but feel like they’re so important to me.  (Me and my besties getting a sweet treat to celebrate) I began this blog October 2023, with the intention of sharing my love of Sparks and connecting it to me understanding my autism and its hopeful diagnosis. Growing up, I’ve always ventured far to share my point of view and often had people ignore me because I was too different. I chose a blog over a video format because I have days where physical speech is overwhelming as I know what to say but it’s an ocean of words. Some days I want to say so much but my stomach aches trying to make sense of everything, so when I write I feel a lot better.  Behind the scenes, I
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High Justice Complex and Change (A Sparks Deep Dive)

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 Hey everyone, it is Jack/Noodle here again. I was planning this episode for the past few days as I have been using this blog as example of me sharing my work/behind the scenes as part of my university work and it’s my proudest work in terms of my writing. Before I begin todays deep dive I thought I’d like to say this episode I created around a sparks song that I feel gets often overlooked, many know it for the infamous UK interview where the Mael brothers (Ron especially) expressed their anger for a low budget which was only enough to record the song and get a bit of cardboard. Yes that song is Change. A standalone song (it’s on compilation albums and I believe it’s sometimes bundled with Music You Can Dance To). So feel free to get a tea, coffee, water or whatever and feel free to add and contribute in comments your own viewpoints, I’m more than happy whenever I share these ideas/concepts and someone understands them or adds their spin on it; I got suggested I make more deep dive epi
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Sparks and Socialising (as an autistic queer person)

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 Hey everyone, it’s Jack/Noodle here. I’m 2 weeks into my final year of university and I’m already exhausted and feeling sleepy from hearing the assignments for this year. I decided to take a step back from this and update my blog with a deeply personal post which I wasn’t sure how to write, but since today felt particularly awful and it rained this afternoon and now I’m well fed, had a milkshake and have a plan for a load of jobs over the next few days I thought today would be perfect for a deep post around something many neurodivergent people struggle with and that is socialising and I thought I’d use sparks to show the positives in my “social” life and also share the negatives in my life (not blaming sparks for this, the positives of this band hugely outweigh any bad things)  Me and my fellow nuerodiverse friends, not real as I’m respectful of privacy  So to begin I will say it is very common to find an autistic person who struggles in socialising or keeping friendships. Whether it’
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Sparks: the healing from a shutdown/meltdown

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 Hey everyone, it’s Jack here with another installation of my blog. I blinked last month and suddenly it’s a day after my first day of final year of university. Before I start this I believe I need to write a beautiful blog about something the neurotypical world doesn’t fully understand and that is meltdowns and shutdowns. I also use Sparks to prevent these but also healing from them, so today I’ll cover and define these terms and also discuss how this amazing band help in these situations.  What I’ve being doing, on holiday taking photos of anything pretty  To begin, I will define what a meltdown is and what a shutdown is to help my fellow allistic readers aware of their differences and signs to look out for.  A meltdown is an extreme reaction to the overwhelming stimulation around them, it could be because you’re in a busy supermarket and you’re being overloaded by smells, noises, textures and tastes all at once or because your routine changed last minute so you ended up on a busy tr
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I Married Myself - an analogy as an asexual person

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 Hey everyone it is Jack/Noodle here once again, in recent days I’ve been not as busy but in two weeks time I’ll be in Scotland doing my favourite things; exploring and doodling and being with my other sparks fan, my dog Esme. Todays episode is an analysis of a song from the Lil Beethoven record which I relate very heavily to as a queer individual and I thought I’d put my brains thoughts on this song into words at long last. Today we are discussing the song “I Married Myself” and what is interesting about this album is that it is 2 days younger than me, so on the release date I was a tiny baby barely aware of anything but my dad was out every night celebrating my birth. But I thought since I’m currently really enjoying the Lil Beethoven album (this is me asking people to buy me the album physically) I thought now would be the perfect time to share my analysis.  Ron by himself Before I get into my analysis I thought I’d explain what asexual means. Asexual is where one feels no to little
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Sparks and Stimming

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 Hey everyone, Jack here and today’s episode comes out on Ron's birthday, I can’t believe the man is 79 years old!?!? Anyways, before getting into today’s episode I would like to say a huge happy birthday to the man himself, he has many times made me happy and feel safe in being a writer. Before starting this blog, I was very self conscious of my writings, often I hid them well away asides the odd bit of poetry or funny lists I made about what man was attractive. When I began getting into this band I soon quickly fell in love with how Ron wrote music, it’s almost like a short film or a diary window into Ron’s mind. Before I properly begin, I’d like to add I’m not a writer by trade, my main trade is illustration and writing for me just helps me explore more of my creative brain juices as often times I find myself overwhelmed by so many ideas and thoughts I just know some can’t be drawn. In this episode I’ve tried to illustrate these feelings and examples I discuss but it’s incredibl
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My life as a trans sparks fan

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 Hello everyone it’s Noodle or Jack here with a new episode of this blog. I do apologise before starting my little episode off with an apology. I can see it’s been nearly a month and to be very honest I’ve been procrastinating on any writing. My dad recently broke his foot which means I’ve had to deal with chores but also my arty career and trying to do anything I can for others. I hope I don’t need my non existent ukulele to say how deeply sorry I am for this delay but in the next few weeks I’ll try and resume a regular schedule with some hopefully fun posts and interviews coming up. Until then I thought I’d share a personal post. I tried writing this for an entire month before deleting it as it was way too detailed so I’m going to name this: my trans identity and sparks. I hope everyone enjoys.  Before I begin, I’ll share this funny image of Ron Mael in drag. This is to define what transgender means and educate everyone who is unaware or unsure what this means. Transgender is where o
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