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Emily Cogsdill
*jazz hands*

11 Aug 2025 ~ 7 min read

The Magic Flute: a recap

Tonight is my seventh consecutive night of having watched an entire opera. In order they have been: Carmen, La Traviata, La bohème, Madama Butterfly, Turandot, Nixon in China, and tonight: The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

this shit is already so funny and we're only 10 minutes in and I have no idea what the snake is doing here
a man dressed as a bird sings to literal actual physical birds. this is not a drill
"Hmm. the birds stopped working"
A conundrum!
Oh thank god you're here. These birds stopped working and
We have a wife for you. She is on a plate lmao
this plate on the ground has a pretty girl on it. Time to go kill God. What is the serpent still doing here
I love her
She is a LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL
anyway good luck with that
hi it's me her mom lmao
they locked my mouth shut for being a little shit
you know what girls like? flutes
heh, I bet they do
(I got nothing)
are you my mommy?
The fuck?
What kinda likeness is that???

These little boys arrive on a hot air balloon to prevent characters from killing themselves. I'm not making this up
I really had different plans for this flute
oh well
I heard someone had a flute
I think the joke is literally that they are French
🎵 Join the Freemasons 🎵
Somehow, Rita Repulsa returned
DON'T DO IT PAMINA
You're right, children. I just had to think positive
Eat your vegetables
Papagano what are you doing
PAPAGANO NO
OH THANK GOD YOU BOYS GOT HERE IN TIME
You're right kids, this isn't the answer.
I just need to summon a wife
The male loneliness epidemic is SOLVED!
Join us on Jan 6. Will be wild!

Well, that about covers it. Tomorrow I think I will watch Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, which is about a nose that gets arrested.

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Hello! I'm Emily, a software engineer who builds web applications.

Hello! I'm Emily, an engineering type who discovered coding and never looked back. I build things on the web and try to make them not terrible.

Hello! I'm Emily, an engineering type just trying to have a good time. GOD FORBID. Check out my GitHub or LinkedIn, I guess.

Hello! I'm Emily, an engineering type just trying to have a good time. GOD FORBID. I spend my days wrestling with TypeScript, building web applications, and pretending I understand how databases work. When I'm not debugging someone else's "temporary" solution from 2019, you can find me on GitHub committing crimes against clean code, or on LinkedIn maintaining the professional facade.

Hello! I'm Emily, an engineering type just trying to have a good time. GOD FORBID. I spend my days wrestling with TypeScript, building web applications, and pretending I understand how databases work. When I'm not debugging someone else's "temporary" solution from 2019, you can find me questioning my life choices while staring at a screen full of red squiggly lines. I have strong opinions about semicolons, an unhealthy relationship with CSS, and I once spent three hours debugging a problem that was solved by turning it off and on again. My GitHub (emily-flambe) is a monument to my hubris, and my LinkedIn (profile) is a carefully curated lie about how together I have it all. I believe in the Oxford comma, tabs over spaces (fight me), and that there are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.