monkeybanana4

You can order it here: http://ktai.la-edison.com/pc/0044-rel.html?rel_id=15501
 
Although, you'll need to use a proxy shopping service since Like an Edison doesn't provide international shipping.

My college let me on to the second year of my A-levels despite my pitifully low grades but told me that if I don't improve by October, they'll kick me out. By "improve", I mean write about twice as much in my class essays which for some reason is practically impossible for me. I don't know what it is but no matter how hard I try, I always fail in that regard. I think it's because I'm just not into writing essays unless it's something I'm extremely passionate about and if my heart's not in it, I'm not going to perform well (not to mention they always tell me to write slowly because of my poor handwriting). What is it about that that the education system don't understand? If someone doesn't like it, they ain't gonna do well and we should stop "pushing" them to do well in their subjects (most of which are pointless) and start "encouraging" them to do the things they like and give them a broader subject range from an earlier age. A very cynical part of me hopes they'll kick me out because I just don't want to do it anymore, especially media because that involves doing creative projects by a deadline and sharing them with people which just makes me anxious as fuck.
 
I'm going to try because I wouldn't feel right if I didn't but I almost want to fail. Getting up before 8am doesn't help either because I have insomnia during the night and it just makes me feel like a ragdoll until I can get home and nap for a few hours. I think the only reason I don't just drop out, get a job that suits me and return to my education when I feel a bit more motivated is because I know my family will be disappointed in me if I do that. I know my brother dropped out but his reason was that his course wasn't actually teaching him anything he didn't already know, not "I don't fucking like it". I also know it's technically my choice and I'm normally quite confident when it comes to doing the things I want if I have the option but I just feel kinda restricted right now.
 
My only real motivation to carry on is knowing that the only reason I got held back a year in high school and have had to drag myself through this slog for a year more than I'd like is that my mother took me out of education for a year when I was fifteen so I guess it's largely not my fault (I'd also wager that my terrible sleeping patterns back then are what brought on my insomnia to this day). My grandma even told me today that if she were me, she'd "fuckin' do it just to spite the bitch" (in those exact words, love you grandma x) but is that really right? Like dgmw that was a kick-ass thing to say but would it really be right for me to do something I don't want to do just to spite someone who'll never know about it anyways? I really would like to prove my mother wrong because she thought I was the biggest idiot on the planet but I'm never going to see her again - hell, she doesn't know I'm even at college - so what's even the point? Godfuckit.

You can order it here: http://ktai.la-edison.com/pc/0044-rel.html?rel_id=15501
 
Although, you'll need to use a proxy shopping service since Like an Edison doesn't provide international shipping.

GRIMOIRE will release a new single titled「ばけもの」(Bakemono) on 2019.10.09. It will cost 1,200 yen (+taxes).
 
Tracklist
1.ばけもの (Bakemono)
2.システムエラー (System Error)
 

 

 

 

I'm normally a tough bitch who doesn't give a fuck but today my hormones made me cry for hours and shut most of my social media because some gazeliebers I don't even know decided to gang up on me like high school bullies.
I hate being a woman. We're over 25, I'm too old for this shit.

Full Album Cover
 

 

Full Album Cover
 

 

Full Album Cover
 

 

The Godfather .....why have i been sleeping on this, omfg
 
((here's to watching the rest, I got the trilogy set on a whim))

Hello,
Just wanting to leave my introduction and hopefully greet some of you! 
 
First of all please feel welcome to talk to me anytime, I’m Jia. I’ll do my best to reply and we can talk about vkei, new releases and any other interests together.
 
As for me; I’ve been listening to vkei and various Japanese groups since around 2008, so a little over 11 years give or take! In actuality I started through my dad who casually would listen to X-Japan but I didn’t actively look for bands or music on my own until that 2008. My friend who already listened to groups like GazettE, Lolita23q and Malice Mizer and I would essentially just go around clicking on any recommendation on YouTube and go from there; naturally I found Dir en Grey, BLOOD, Buck-Tick, SID, ViViD and of course from my username you can tell my deep love of L’arc en ciel also so i’ll leave it at that as I assume you’ll get the point from those groups. 
Unfortunately, i’ll have to say that I’ve not been the most active in social media since the past few years back so I only really kept up with bands and vkei through directly listening, buying albums and keeping an eye out for concerts and lives, from the fact I live in London it’s not too uncommon for bands to have came here so I feel I’ve been very lucky for that although of course there’s still plenty of artists i’d love to see, be it here or it’ll have to be on my own travel. As for more recent active groups from Dadaroma, ACME, Dexcore, D=OUT, Dimlim and SHIN. I’m also anticipating the upcoming Ashmaze. Whilst my personal taste often leans more towards a heavier sound i’m always open to all kinds of sounds and flavours.  Finding monochrome-heaven for me means I can be much more informed and active in the community and hopefully it’ll mean I am able to support more artists as well as find people who share my interests. I guess for me that’s my main goal here. Really I’d love to make more friends who enjoy vkei still, most of mine have moved onto various other interests as a focal point so talking about vkei and j-rock with people has become less common for me these days sadly, but like I said I’m glad I found this place because I feel hopefully I can talk with some nice people! So again please don’t feel shy to approach me. 
 
If you've read until now, thank you. 
Let’s get along! ♡ 

Monolith - Fairy Tale
Galeyd - Precious Heart
Kagrra, - Uzu
Sincrea - Garasu no Namida

Monolith - Fairy Tale
Galeyd - Precious Heart
Kagrra, - Uzu
Sincrea - Garasu no Namida

God do you ever get it when you have a project you're working on and it's all going fine and dandy and you know exactly where it's headed but then A NEW IDEA JOINS THE BATTLE but you know you gotta finish the first one before you start on the second one or else you'll never finish either

I’ve started looking for a new job now that I’ve had a bit of a break after graduating. The careers advisor working at the university I graduated from is super helpful, he fine tuned my CV and made it look really neat! 
 
Hopefully with his assistance I can get out of working nights and working retail soon! 

I honestly forget this was here, but goddamn, I need y'all. 
 
So my ex kept a good number of my possessions, including my computer and my backup, changed my passwords to my cloud storage and a lot of my social media, but by some stroke of luck, not this one.
 
I know it's been years since I've been here, but I am so thankful my account is still here. I am so thankful posts that shaped my life are still here. 
Even if no one reads this, I am thankful this hasn't been deleted. 
I've forgotten more bands/albums/songs that I think last.fm/spotify could ever imagine, but they're still here.
 
I love this. I'm gonna try to be here to preserve this bit of my life. I work alot and support myself and my wife (surprise! I'm actually a lesbian), but I want to be here. 
Please don't remove anything.
 
Love,
Bhani, aka Ana, aka Velvet.

Hi. I’m one of the really old fans. I visited Tokyo in 1995 and came back to the US (NYC) with a pile of Luna Sea CDs and VHS tapes. At that time there was nothing about Luna Sea or visual kei on the English-language internet. Actual nothing. Well, the internet barely existed, it was just transitioning to websites from bulletin boards. I made some mix cassettes and handed them out to my friends.
 
Around ’96 or maybe ’97 I checked the internet again, and now we have something: California sisters Freda and Joannie’s website Rockin’ Heaven, and the X Japan ML on cohprog. It was tiny at first, like maybe 100 people. This was the entire Western VK fandom. We had all discovered Japanese music either on a trip to Japan, or through a Japanese friend.  A few of us were so noisy about talking about other bands who were not X that the Jrock ML was formed, so we took our OT over there and it exploded. There was no file sharing or international online stores at that time. I created a page to bring something like tape-sharing classifieds online, a manually updated list of people who had stuff to trade and what they were looking for. We copied cassettes and sent them by postal mail. It’s laughably low-tech compared to nowadays, but suddenly we were all listening to multiple bands instead of just our one gateway band. The Jrock ML membership and traffic was exploding week by week. There was one loud and cynical French guy who was really into super-obscure bands and claimed that he went to Japan and was friends with bands, but nobody knew whether to believe him or not. Word of mouth was definitely a thing — I gave my little sister a few mix tapes when she went to college and she came back for break cursing me out for those tapes, because all her friends had fallen in love with them and now she had to listen to VK all the time.
 
I think it was around ’98 that we started to see some improvements in bandwidth and webpages that let us take it to the next level. There was a guy in Singapore (Paul? maybe?) where they had better wiring, who first started putting up a few tiny RA and RV files on a site, and he had one of the early message boards too. By this time I was out of school and my circle of friends and I were working in the early internet, which gave me access to equipment, software, and bandwidth that almost nobody had at that time. My friends were installing the actual wiring and servers to build the NYC internet, and uh… while they were at it, they stashed an old computer somewhere to be our own FTP server. We put up my files (I had a ton of stuff because I’d been running the tape-exchange listing, and also I bought stuff from the Japanese stores in NYC) and allowed other people to upload their own. I added a message board which was originally supposed to be for requests or whatever but it took on a life of its own as a discussion place.
 
Maybe ’99 or 2000, CD Japan opened. The fandom was growing exponentially and everyone was trying to explore new bands, and even tiny indie bands were getting fan bases. Lots of people were putting up file sharing sites, using multiple GeoCities accounts to create these huge octopus sites. We started to have meetups IRL. Go (JrockNYC) and his friends had a cover band and put together some meetups around NYC. Cameron was in Tokyo and writing on Glam Japan, and some of us were traveling to Japan too. A few people went to that huge concert that Luna Sea did, Dir en gray had fans going, me and a bunch went to Lareine’s last tour in August 2000. (I met Cameron there for the first time)
 
By maybe 2002-ish most of the file sharing was happening on the P2P networks, and Livejournal was becoming popular. I moved to Tokyo in early 2002. Go was living in Tokyo too and documenting the scene on JrockNYC. It would be nice to read it again but I don’t think his old stuff is on line any more. This is getting to the time period where there are lots of people who were around to remember, so I’ll leave it.

Currently trying to feel happiness for couples that I see instead of jealousy and it's working pretty well. Just biding my time until things work out for me really 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
(Boy, do I miss boobs though 😅) 

Back in my days (around 2001/2) if you wanted to follow the scene you either googled (band name) + mp3 and ended in some shady page with some songs if you were lucky, or you hoped someone was sharing some of them on some peer to peer program like WinMX, every song taking at least 30 minutes to download beacuse you had 56k internet and were paying every minute of it (my random Lareine 6-7 songs selfmade CD lasted me all 3 last years of high school).
 
There was also the option to buy the CDs, but the chapest ones would cost 40-50€, if you didn't live in Paris (there was a fabled used Japanese bookstore that was all Europe weebs envy) or didn't have parents/friends working in Japan.
 
 

(Not sure where to put this topic exactly but here we are!) 
 
I was recently on meetup.com in a bid to get out the damn house and socialise but the groups look boring and OF COURSE there aren't any VK groups. It's a disgrace XD 
 
Any fellow UK dwellers here? Anyone fancy some kind of meetup/outing thing to meet new people, make new friends, and all that jazz? (jazz may or may not be included). I'm not great at this kind of thing but I thought it might be a fun idea
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
(Please be my friend XD) 

You ever just feel sick of looking at your computer or phone screen, wanna just leave it all and live it out in some cabin in the woods near a town and just garden, work on personal projects, and grow old with a pet?
 
Yeah, me too.

You can take this as a rumor I guess but it actually happened. Whether the staff person who told us all this was telling the truth or not I don't know, but I don't really see why they would lie lol. This was over 10 years ago so I might have some details wrong but this is what happened to the best of my memory. So at Oni-con in Houston, TX in 2008 Dio -distraught overlord- and Sugar played. On Friday the bands played and on Saturday the bands were supposed to have Q&A panels and the Dio one went great, but the Sugar one kept getting delayed as we all waited outside the room for ages. A friend of mine and I started asking staff what was going on and this staff person for the convention started quietly telling us about the previous night and what was going on that day. Basically the night before, after the concert, the bands got really rowdy drunk and Loki (vocalist of Sugar) started causing all kinds of shenanigans and problems. They said he was flirting with male staff (really awkwardly because they were not reciprocating) and that apparently he forgot what hotel room number was his because he started walking around and knocking on every single hotel room door on that floor trying to figure out which one was his. ... Anyway, as if the staff's control of this situation couldn't get any worse, somehow Loki escaped before they had to do the Q&A and was apparently wandering around Houston and they had yet to find him. The panel ended up getting cancelled and the rest of the band apologized as far as I can remember. Not sure what happened after that. The whole thing was a messsssss. 

I just Googled it, is this what you're referring to? https://visualkeisucks.livejournal.com/