platy

so i picked up belly dancing and went to my first class with my friends tonight. and, oddly enough, i love it??? i'm the most nonathletic person on this earth, i hate sports, exercise, everything, but wow. belly dancing is so easy and so much fun. i'm only in the beginner class so that may be why but you know what!!! at least i'm getting off of my ass and enjoying it

Very nice, nothing is better than trying something out and it turns out you end up really enjoying it. Very much props to you and keep it up.
 
I made a pizza today and I made it from whole ground wheat berries. The crust was a bit tough but it was very flavorful, a much healthier alternative to the typical pizza crusts made purely of purely processed white flour. I used the six cheese ragu sauce and a generous amount of part skim mozzarella and it was very delicious. Next time I'll probably add a nice helping of cooked veggies on top for more flavor and health benefits yey. 

Halloween goth lolita costume - check
 
cheap cosplay store ebay wig - check
 
outfit made from the fabric scraps - check
 
I like chickens so I'll stick around for the cool band name.
 
they dont sound bad actually. The look is cool.

basically they think they're the next -versailles- but they're actually -garbage-

FUCCCCKKKK
the bassist can lose that ratchet wig tho
vox's outfit is giving me INTENSE hizumi vibes omfg ;__;

fuk fuk me

"BUK BUK" Chicken-kei?
 
Seriously though, I adore their look. If they're half as good as DEZERT or DAMY, they'll be amazing.

Based on my own recent experience, after two weeks the withdrawal symptoms should ease. Heck, I'm even able to listen to top-40 spotify stuff for an hour without cringing.
At the end of those 2 weeks when I put on whatever vk band was suggested on my youtube as I was about to draw my last breath, it was like receiving a shot of adrenaline straight into the veins. It was worth it.

Here's what I do not like to do on mondays, and even less on the first day school is back to regular after most of the kids have been on/had a vacation: having to clean up an insane amount of piss from the floor, a chair and up the table legs. And I mean, it was A LOT. From the amount of piss out on the floor and shit I am sure he's not had a piss for a week. Jesus.Fucking.Christ.
 
What hapened though was that my little friend, an autistic boy, was back at school after a week off. And that's hard, because changes ain't too easy to handle in situations like this. His father struggled to get him up and into the classroom to begin with, but after a while it went really good and we did lots of work and shit. Way more than usual. Then came the break and time for some food. He wanted to eat along in his room which he usually does, and is allowed to do. I checked in on him 2-3 times during the first 20 minutes. Then I finnished my food and went back to look at him and there he stands: pants and underwear around his ankle's and a river of urin all over the place.
 
I'm leaning back to the table behind me, looking in the window and struggling not to break into laughter by covering my mouth with my hand. Because it's a hilarious scene no matter how fucking wrong it is.
 
He then pulls his pants back up and looks at me through the door-window, laughs, then starts to threaten to step into it. Of course, he doesn't do this and is actually far from doing it. He just wants me to give him a reaction, wich I do not. The teacher gets something to clean with and we both step into the room, ready to clean it up with him. What does he do? He fucking steps in it and I am not joking. He steps into the piss. Holy shit. Have to get his socks off and then the cleaning starts. Who knew piss could be this fucking awful? Mainly because of the amount, and the fact that it was everywhere.
 
Monday's, man. It ain't easy. Cleaning rivers of pee ain't funny. But life is fairly good, and this kid is actually amazing. Funny little boy with lots of love towards others, even though he's got a weird way of showing it at times. But that comes with autism I guess.

(Before that, I’m so sorry the length of this introduction reads like an essay but please bear with me ><)
 
I have many interests, but let’s talk about visual kei as this is the one constant that has taken up most of my life.
 
2009 was a time of change for me and visual kei. Ameba launched its virtual community Pigg, which instantly sucked the life out of me and as it turned out, so many vk bandmen had no life as well.
 
t's embarassing to talk about it now, but as teenagers with nothing better to do with our time, my friends and I would send as many friend requests as we could to band members and ‘stalk’ them whenever they logged online. Suddenly vk had become so much more intimate as we could interact with vk bandmen in real-time like never before.
 
But pigg was more than that. Some of my fondest memories have been the designated VK showroom where you could stream youtube videos to a crowd, meeting new people in the club rooms who share a common interest and of course having to witness the silly antics of some of those bandmen. I got to know a lot of bands that I would otherwise never had found out about, had conversations, learning about their personalities and interests. I also got to learn that some of the musicians in the darkest and heaviest bands have the cutest personalities behind the keyboard, fawning over the colourful array of virtual fashion items pigg had to offer. 
 
(Asanao from lynch. case in point)
 
It was a fun and unique experience. And at the same time, information was not only more accessible than ever before, but more abundant as well, and keeping up with blogs, news, forums, and playing pigg consumed every moment of my every day which back then, I had the time and youth to do so.
 
But eventually, I burnt out.
 
I attributed my losing touch with vk to information overload. It’s been more than 4 years since I stopped going on pigg and ameblo for good, but those few years of intense dedication, even today, felt like an aeon. 
 
I used to make a lot of parodies of bandmen, and loved deduction and connecting the dots - which bands had photoshoots at which set and making 6-degrees of separation connections between members of different bands and loved hearing stories from the past.
 
I also had a enthusiasm for drawing, having drawn over a ton bands over the course of 2 years between 2011 and 2012, but suddenly it’s 2016 and all I have are 3-year-old drafts and unfinished sketches. 
 
Everything had been halted because life kinda got in the way… shattered-tranquility had long stopped being my home page and my internet’s search history doesn’t remember vkdb.jp anymore.
 
Hmm.
 
So in that gap between about 2012 and now, I had the mother of existential crises, questioning whether I was really going to follow vk for life.
 
But my passion in the music is genuine and still alive.
 
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve been disconnected from the community that I love for far too long, and I don’t want that. I don’t want to forget the memories I’ve made, the bands that I’ve followed, the stories I’ve heard and the things I’ve learned along the way - be they good or bad. I don’t want my interest of VK to die, and I don’t want to stop making funny content about VK forever.  
 
(And most importantly, I don’t want to be the only VK fan in Australia that I know. So if you’re from Sydney, please hit me up so I don’t feel lonely :3)
 
I want this to be the place where I can share my knowledge about vk so ask me anything and I hope to relearn what I’ve lost these past few years. And once again, I’m astronomically sorry about the length of this introduction (I hope it was bearable).
 
Merry Xmas btw

Chef - I decided to watch something lighter for a change and ended up watching Chef, which, as the title suggests is a food porn movie flavored with some family "drama". I didn't expect to be blown away by this film and I wasn't but I enjoyed it. The music was pretty great:  soul, funk, blues and so on. And Sofia Vergara (who's in a side role), what a babe! She stole every scene she was in. 7/10

My vote goes to Aicle. They took the oshare sound championed by the likes of Lolita23q and ramped up the technicality to levels rarely seen in "pop rock" or whatever genre you might think they are. Maybe we can consider Dog In The PWO as spiritual sucessors of their sound, but it certainly isn't the same. Come on, just listen to this math-y rock clusterfuck and try to tell me it isn't perfect:
 
 

MEJIBRAY disbands MiA and Hizaki join forces to release a super guitar battle single to see who loves themselves more MiA gets even more plastic surgery Koichi releases a clothing label DADAROMA's Yoshiatsu will go back to being a clown/ or wear something so ridiculous we'll forget the strand of hair glued under his eye in their December2016 release GazettE will go darker, deeper and edgier than before. GazettE will release a fine art movie directed by riku Takeru (SuG) will get a mohawk and Yuji will gain 30kg, showing off his beer belly in the next PV / Or SuG will suprise us and go back to being oshare Ryo's (ex- 9GBO) projects will all disband LACK-CO will disband

it's for Asians and white girls who listen to top-40 music anyway, except in a fancy exotique language with visibly hetsex men flaunting nice hair.
 
they can release that shit for free lbr and get reimbursed with skincare collabs & live gigs
 
slipknot did the very same thing tho
 
I'm actually pretty curious regarding what the trans-othersex people who use "it" and "zir" as their pronouns listen to on the reg. (like I really would like someone in the know to chime in on this)
 
and that being said, there will be a spike in western trans-music acts getting signed/promoted/recognized before vk will have its hypothetical 2nd chance if we're using gender expression as a reference point.

Good topic. 
 
This is definitely a contributing factor, I think. I know there's a thread floating somewhere around here talking about the way that a lot of fans of VK seemed to have transitioned over to K-Pop over the years. I think a lot of it has to do with the the whole 'pretty Asian boys' fetish (maybe 'fetish' is a slightly strong word, but you guys know what I mean). K-Pop in general takes the whole cute Asian boy thing and ramps the production values up to to 11, whilst also presenting itself as a more mainstream and socially acceptable thing to be into. It's no surprise that a lot of foreigners mostly looking for their cute Asian boy fix would slowly have migrated over to the K-Pop scene once that started getting popular in the early 2010's, which coincidentally just so happens to be when VK's decline took hold according to that Google trends result. 
 
Also a very good point. I'd say this combined with the previous point definitely contributed to some degree.
 
I find this graph particularly interesting. I have to second what @Zeus said previously; the so-called decline of VK does seem, in many ways, more to be a simple case of its western popularity declining after a short boom. In that respect it's really nothing too surprising, a lot of rapid booms in the popularity of a concept or thing tend to be associated with equally as rapid declines. The real thing to note is that its prevalence in Japan has remained relatively stable, so the scene itself probably hasn't changed all that much in domestic terms.
 
Another theory I'll put forward though, and I'll admit not everyone with agree with me as this is a pretty subjective viewpoint, is that the quality of Visual Kei music simply hasn't been good enough in recent years. It feels like there are still shittons of bands out there, but almost no truly great ones; ones that you just feel you HAVE to pay attention to. Once upon a time you had the likes of D'espairsRay, Kagrra, Miyavi (still around but not VK), the GazettE (still around but a shadow of their former selves IMO), Rentrer en Soi, 9GBO, etc. Nowadays there are very few bands, if any, that are on levels similar to those groups. I'm sure there will be quite a few people that disagree with me here, but I've seen similar sentiments expressed by other members too, so I know I'm not the only one who thinks this way.
 
Silly tl;dr - The popularity of Visual Kei internationally reached its peak when the GazettE reached their creative peak in mid 2009; since then the band's creative quality has fallen into oblivion. To cope with the disappointment, western VK fans began listening to K-Pop after hearing BIGBANG's FANTASTIC BABY around the same time Gazetto released that garbage DIVISION album, and decided that G-Dragon oppa was the new saviour of cute Asian boy music. Thus VK died an agonizing death. Also, MEJIBRAY.

Inb4 rabid gyas start cutting wristbands so they can be the only audience members 

- Phantasmagoria, Vidoll and 12012 holds a revival event sometime during spring of 2017
 
Remember where you heard it first kids.

* Kaoru has plastic surgery to change his entire hand into a giant guitar pick

- The GazettE will release a 30 second teaser with no music foreshadowing a mysterious announcement for mid-2018.
- Dir en grey will disband after Kaoru is diagnosed with a form of reactive arthritis that prevents him from playing guitar, thus losing the main composition inspiration for the band in its current era; Kyo will stay in sukekiyo; Die - Decays; Toshiya will start a clothing line; Shinya will fade into the distance
- Akane from D.I.D, shocking the VK World, will commit suicide.
- Dadaroma will release a follow up EP that is mediocre and mostly compiled pre-released A-Sides
- lynch. will release an EP, after taking some time to resolve the Akinori situation,  a month after they announce their new support bassit in Q3 2017, and it will be solid.
- Ryo will will front a new band with Nii, Katsuya (Ex-CodeRebirth -> Misanthropist) and support members and it will be the most hype of 2017
 
Some of these sound very depressing, but I genuinely think they will happen.
 

I should clarify that I don't want any of these bands to return. I want new bands to pick up the slack and start taking notes from good bands of yore. There's so much untapped creative potential left in the five bands I highlighted and I would love for the scene to make a resurgence by emulating the sounds of the boom days. This new stuff isn't doing it for the old heads or the new and it needs to change sooner rather than later.
 
In the case of D'espairsRay, RES, and A things wouldn't be the same no matter how much they forced it to. I don't think HIZUMI will ever recover from his vocal condition enough to sing like he used to. Also their direction post-MIRRORS lacked serious focus and if they can't be dark anymore I'd rather they not force it. Rentrer en Soi just...quit? They mumbled excuses about reaching their creative apex but I think the real reason was that Satsuki thought he could do better with a solo career. They can stay dead since sukekiyo is a very interesting project I wouldn't want sacrificed for a reunion that's not going to target their earlier sound. No shade to anything post Sphire-Croid, but it's the run-of-the-mill 2008 JAY-RAWK sound every other band and their grandmother was pounding out riffs for in the basement. They did it a little better than their competition, but Satsuki's harsh vocals ruins a lot of THE BOTTOM OF CHAOS for me (still a good album). Also, MEGIDDO is a very unsatisfying send-off and years later I still can't shake the feeling the band never reached the new incarnation of their sound before calling it quits.
 
Something similar happened with A; if I recall it was the violinist Rookie Fiddler who composed the majority of the tunes for the band and when he walked away the band was done. With all the member difficulties and low funds I don't see this band coming back, but they were very much loved and I don't know why other bands haven't been leaning on cultures for ideas. I loved what Royz did with Vishnu on their latest album. More bands need to do that.
 
Kagrra, will never come back for obvious reasons but there's a dearth of visual kei bands using specifically Japanese elements in their rock and metal. Wagakki-Band comes close but it's not the same. Unforgivable, really.

For 2017 I want less riffs like this and this and this too. 
 
In this climate I think we are liable to get a decent success to mid-period Aicle. The sort of juxtapositions that they did have started to make more than just cursory appearances in a lot of band's styles. We're seeing good interplay of color and extravagance lately in the outfits too. I don't think I'm crazy for holding my breath for such a band to appear. 
 
What I'm realistically hoping for is that all those Amber Gris, Moran and etc. arCOUGH kei  members settle down into projects that could, please, be around a couple of years and develop in peace. While at it, I'm hoping for more indie rock influence to leak over to subvert all the core. In a perfect world they'd look toward the early period of Rentrer en soi for influence too. 

i am VERY interested in high-def 枯詩(KAREUTA)

Why are they ignoring Hana Kotoba?