• Saturday Listening: There is Only Love and Fear

    words and music by:

    jflatnote

    Saturday Listening: There is Only Love and Fear

    “Dawn Blessings,” the first track of Bex Burch’s “There is Only Love and Fear,” feels like the backing track for my level-up montage. So much so that when I ended up with some rare free Saturday morning time to read (all the time and spoons of Saturdays are usually eaten up by rehearsal, but I called out from rehearsal today because our gig tomorrow got canceled), I put this on and within minutes felt driven to clean my apartment, learn judo, practice my mandolin, water my plants, and do several thousand pushups. Instead of reading, I ended up doing all but the last.

    This album came to me as a digital download and the incredible orange vinyl you see here on my turntable. {which is currently covered by dust that you definitely do not see!!} Both were given as an incredibly thoughtful gift from my beautiful Collaborator. Bex Burch is pretty neat, though I will let her bio on the record label site tell you why, and I love this album. Though the A side of the vinyl has gotten a LOT more use (a problem I have in general when listening to records), the digital copy is loaded in VLC and has gotten more play this last year than any other non-physical, non-streaming album I own.

    Check out the track below, and check out Bex Burch on Bandcamp or her Website.

  • Hello, Humans!

    words and music by:

    jflatnote

    Hello, Humans!

    My name is James White, I have been running some version, iteration, or incarnation of Turtlshel since the spring of 2002. Very originally the domain name for my translating company (Turtlshel Translating Company), which was named after the legendary original of some of the Hanji/Kanji characters coming from the fire-caused crack on the turtle shells that were used by early Chinese divinators and that were eventually codified into the ancestors of the characters we know now.

    As an autistic person (undiagnosed for much of the life of this domain) with a special interest centered on knowledge and knowing, I have a very wide area of interests and hobbies. Turtlshel.com and turtlshel.org drifted over the years as the focus of my interests changed. While I was trying to build up my translating company and in the short time after, the site was filled with resources for advanced learners of Japanese, which were scarce online in those days.

    I made a move as a undergrad from Classical Japanese to geomorphology. During that period, the focus of the site was on field techniques, pedology, land-use-planning, aerial photography, surveying, stratigraphy, and hydro modeling.

    Fly tying, music, my paintings, poetry, a home for my various NaNoWriMo novels, concert reviews – this site has held a lot of things. But really only one thing at a time. Every six months or three years I would completely overhaul the site to be a home for whatever the new thing I was excited about.

    This current iteration (October 2025) is trying to unify all of those past things into one place where I can post about all and whichever of the things that are taking my interest at the moment.

    It may seem frivolous to be posting about my silly things while the long shadow of fascism plunges much of the Western World, and especially the United States, into the dark night of hatred, violence, and oppression, but I believe strongly that one of the ways we help the darkness is by stopping all of the beautiful, creative, community-building, unifying, joyful things we are doing and voluntarily extinguish our own lights. I may fight in other ways, but on this site I will be fighting one photo of my dog, and one silly poem, and one LEGO build, and one unbelievable sunset at a time.