Special Thanks to Monica Helms for the use of her flag

Deal With It
Released: 5 October 2025
Recorded: December 2014, February 2018, November 2020, June-August 2025
Genre: Synthpop
Tracks: 10
Duration: 36:02

First of all, who is Jerry Messing, and why are we apologising to him? Jerry Messing is the man who became the face of spoilt, self-entitled men by doing nothing more than doffing his fedora for a camera. His TTRPG group posted their photos on Facebook, and someone decided to rip off Jerry's photo and turn it into the "fedora neckbeard" meme. While his likeness was employed to represent misogynistic, hotheaded, sex-starved gamers, his friends knew him to be selfless and the complete opposite of the class of person that his picture became associated with. Recently, he contracted COVID-19 and went into a coma. Though he recovered, he is now permanently disabled. His mum died and he and his father became homeless for a while, and, while they are in a relatively safe environment for the moment, they now have medical expenses that they aren't able to cover. We all treated him very badly indeed, and we need to apologise, with money if possible.

"A Match Made in Computer Heaven" is the story of a boy who finds a microblogging site and uses the porn blogs he finds on it to discover that he isn't actually as straight as he once believed. As he spends more and more time scrolling down what seems to be an endless supply of the hottest, spiciest stuff he's ever seen without needing a subscription, he feels himself going under, further and further, until he imagines that he's attained what the conservatives would call "degenerate" status.

In "Arcade Master", our hero discovers that gay guys will play with your emotions before disappearing into the night, just as if he were a girl. So many players in the arcade, so many quarters going in, so little time before coming out again. He meets a man who is so smoking hot, and just as he prepares to spend the rest of his life with him, he disappears as quickly as he came.

Feeling like less than a man, as he has to endure not only a broken heart, but also the jeers and catcalls of an intensely queerphobic society, "Artificial Human" sees our hero walking to the top of the parking deck in the middle of the night, sitting on the edge, and just looking out onto the skyline, wondering how hard it would be to simply slide his weight forward and tumble from his perch. An artificial human, that's all he is.

Returning home instead, he decides to pick up his pencil and draw a sexy fox. Why? Why not? Being a furry isn't about genuinely wanting to fuck animals, nor is it about wanting to put on a fursuit and leap into a yiff pile (thank you very much, C.S.I.:). It's about exploring the self and its sexuality through the creation of anthropomorphic animals drawn in a manga-adjacent style. As he draws, he adds more and more detail to a nascent character design as it develops in his head. And then, he thinks of something he hadn't before. What if this sexy fox of his— this unforgiveably sexy fox, with her bushy tail, dumptruck ass, and mommy milkers, wearing tennis shoes and a crop top— was born a boy? He erases the shorts he's dressed her in and draws a great thick, veiny cock, dripping with precum. As he puts his own hand into his own shorts to take in the sheer unbridled sexuality he's brought forth with his pencil, he realises that this fox is him. Shall we say, this fox is her.

Thus was the end of his old self, and the birth of her new self. After all, an artificial human can be reborn as anything it wants to be, so she chose to be reborn as a girl. T1NA 2.0. After getting her old operating system wiped and a new one installed, she began structural maintenance to become the woman she always wanted to be.

Back on the internet again, she connects with other reborn people, men and women. However, one such girl she meets suddenly takes on a new importance in her mind. First they form a friendship, then a sisterhood, then a romantic relationship, now she can't imagine how she ever lived without her. Definitely an unexpected plot twist in her life, but then, this whole adventure was unexpected!

As her imaginary horse conveys her into the sunset, we can recall the story of how one boy grew up to be a girl. She may accidentally hit herself in the boob as she performs daily tasks every so often, but she's much happier now than any other time in her life.

Perhaps this story sounds like someone you know? Perhaps it sounds like you?

Shortly after I began planning on this record, I heard that several online storefronts, including itch.io, were being pressured by a transphobic pseudo-feminist PAC, called Collective Shout, to suppress all so-called "adult content" on their platforms, and, as expected, they all fawningly agreed. "Yes, boss; right away, boss. Shall I shine your shoes, boss? Thank you, boss." This was another ham-fisted attempt by the puritanical fascist state to silence trans women, just like Mark and Matt before them, and sure enough, a few days after the initial purge, perfectly SFW non-explicit works by queer creators of all stripes started getting nicked for breach of terms. Not wanting to be a willing party to my own destruction, I quit itch.io on 7th August, so the only release venue I now have for my new music is this website right here. After a reassuring email from Ko-fi's support desk that they were not going to similarly purge queer creators, I decided it was safe to remain there for the time being. We'll see if their actions match their words, of course, but at least I can still be supported by listeners like you, thank you.

Given the bald-faced attacks on trans existence in public spaces that seems to come part-and-parcel with this new capital-fascist state, I felt it was more important than ever before to put out an entire album of strictly trans liberation anthems. Not just burying it in with other music, as in Midnight in the Garden of Grant & Enya, but having an entire album to itself. If they want us quiet, we'll get loud. If they want us to fade away, we'll get in their face. Some people have suggested that we detransition for our own safety, but that is exactly the point. That is precisely why so much money is being dumped into transphobic lobbying; that is the Final Solution to the Transgender Question: getting all trans women to go back to being men, then making it impossible for anyone to trans their gender at all.

Fun fact: the waveform in the cover image is a visual representation of me saying "I'm Tina Rosenthal, deal with it" while standing in my closet.

I made a grand total of 3 memes with Jerry Messing's freebooted photograph, but even 1 was inconsiderate. The fact that people are still using his picture, now to symbolise undersexed AI techbros, is concerning. When I learned about his story on Tumblr several years ago, it did what it was supposed to: make me feel ashamed for having used his picture in memes. I don't know him, but where is it written that you need to know a person to care what happens to them? I can't donate money, having only enough to keep me out of arrears with the bank, but I hope this song will serve as at least a performative apologetic gesture.

Before carrying on with the analysis here, I should mention that the album's story, while parts of it are inspired by my own experiences, does not actually reflect my life. I kinda took bits of people's stories that I read on Tumblr and Twitter and dramatised bits and pieces here and there to come up with the final storyline.

"Computer Heaven" is the oldest song on this record, coming from around 2014. I first released it on the now-defunct record, Greetings from Tornado Alley, where it occupied track 1. Originally, this song was only an Orchestron-sounding choral riff with some limited drum machine work (just the LinnDrum bass and toms). I expanded it to include the synthbass and BOSS Dr.550 turbo drums (thank you, Phil Collins, for that particular '80s cliché). The synthbass is actually a sample of my favourite bass sound from my Casio SA76. All told, I sampled 4 sounds from that machine, but only ever used this one. The expanded version I released on Tumblr as a "B-side" to a since-deleted song I called "The American Nazi", which I released shortly after Michael Brown's murderer was exonerated and allowed back on the force. I decided I didn't like how I had mastered the A-side, and it had 0 notes after 2 years anyway, so I just deleted it.

"Recombination" started out as something else, but ended up as sort of a half-baked cover of "Going Under" from New Traditionalists. I hadn't intended to make it one, but I was fucking around with Soundcanvas-VA and decided, "hey, this actually works, doesn't it?" If the melody instrument in this sounds kind of familiar, you might recognised it from GoldenEye 007 and Diddy Kong Racing on the Nintendo 64. Well, and it has Eric Serra's GoldenEye pong in it, too, doesn't it? It feels nice, having access to the HQ versions of all my favourite sounds from '90s gaming. I released this one earlier this year on Tina's Tunes, but it had a different bass instrument and the staccato strings were softer.

"Arcade Master" is actually my girlfriend's ringtone. Not for any symbolic reason, just for its ability to carry across rooms. I have a tendency to grab my phone when it plays, just in case she actually does ring and I miss it because I think it's stereo doubling or something. Anyway, this song and the next are the reason why I decided to keep the Shout by Devo motif on the album cover. Since that record and these songs showcase the Fairlight CMI fairly heavily, why not keep the parallel? After all, the faux-feminist PAC that chased me off itch.io was called "Collective Shout" after all. Irony abounds from all angles.

"Drawing a Sexy Fox" used to be a lot shorter. When I decided to repurpose it for this record, I added a guitar and Emulator II duet to the middle of the song.

In case you wanted to hear that Emulator II patch more closely, it drives the main verse of "Artifical Human". This song contains the last of my Devo references for tonight, in that it uses a monotonal sample of a brass instrument. In this case, I used the Proteus/1 instead of the Fairlight, so it's a trombone. I owe YanAnselmo great debts for his E-MU datahoard on the Internet Archive. Finding that really revolutionised my studio on a level that hadn't been seen since I got my Fantom-X6.

The premise behind "T1NA 2.0" came from, as you might be able to guess, M3GAN 2.0. Not the film itself so much as the idea that somewhere, there's a Linux lesbian building androids shaped like pretty girls. At first, she's building herself a girlfriend, except as she adds more parts, installs more drivers, and tests more functions, it becomes pretty clear that she's actually building her daughter. Then, she builds a 2nd one, then a 3rd. Rather than selling them as commercial products and having them become weapons of mass destruction, she teaches them how to play videogames and do girl stuff.

"Unexpected Plot Twist" was a throwback to college in 2011. S, my Tetris egg roommate, loved techno and Hatsune Miku more than going to class, and she would sit in the computer lab for hours at a time, just playing Flash games and listening to her Youtube playlist of music that sounded remarkably like this song. I tried writing a techno song myself at the time, which ended up being a love song for my girlfriend, E. Well, how much do you expect someone who likes country and western would appreciate a techno song, even one that was written for her? When I found someone had archived Stick Figures on Crack 1-3 on the Internet Archive, all that just came flooding back to me like the proverbial dyke-- er, dike broke and I just had to write another techno song. You can tell I'm a new wave drummer, can't you?

"Trans-Sister-ised Rhythm" is a play on "Transistorised Rhythm", which is what the "TR" in "Roland TR-808" stands for. This song originated as a MIDI sketch that I did on my old Yamaha back in (hang onto your butts, kids) 2013. I recorded it playing back through the in-built speakers, into Easy Voice Recorder on my first-gen Samsung Galaxy. I had forgotten all about it until I went rooting around in my old files. Fortunately, I also provided myself some verbal descriptions of how I did stuff, so I was able to transfer it over to FL Studio pretty easily. In case you're wondering, my voice hasn't changed in 12 years. Well, no, actually it did change, but then I transitioned and it changed back.

"Imaginary Horse" was one of the last songs I used my Fantom-X6 for, back in 2020. This was a couple months before I got FL Studio and I was still coming to grips with the fact that I wasn't just horny, I was transgender. The title is a reference to Jericho, Tina Belcher's imaginary horse. The filename is "TVRTHEM2.SVQ", the 2nd attempt I made at writing a theme song for myself. So yeah. "Imaginary Horse" is my theme song. Interestingly, one of my friends-- A-- got onto HRT earlier this year and almost immediately became a horsegirl. That's like peak "girl" right there. She's a composer too, actually.