nick

I took this picture in the walk in closet and the light in there made the image come out super yellow. Boyfriend was poopin in the bathroom and couldn't take a selfie in there.
 

The following letter will contain a lot of developer jargon.
 
This letter will go over a couple of changes that have been made to how DS will be developed - a bit of a behind the scenes look at some of the tools we use.
 
Moving to Git

 
So one of the changes I mentioned in my last letter was the fact that the development will be more open to everyone here. While I'm not opening the code up to anyone to view/download, I have made the transition from simply running the code locally and uploading via FTP to the server, to hosting everything within a git repository - specifically Bitbucket.
 
This is an important change for many reasons. One, all my code and every single change/update I make, is all automatically backed up. If something breaks or doesn't work out, I can simply go in and revert the code back to an earlier working copy. Secondly, this opens the door to bringing on more people to help work on DS itself. They'll be able to download the code through the repository, work on things on their local computer, and push the changes back, updating everything and everyone all at once.
 
While not everyone has access to this, I have hooked it up to Twitter. Every change and update that is made to the code, is automatically tweeted to an account I created here: https://twitter.com/DS_commits. This'll also be featured in the footer of the website showing the last update that was made to the website in terms of development.
 
 
Project Management and Issue/Bug Tracking

 
Another addition I've made, is starting up a project manager / issue tracker. This will be open to the public to report issues, suggest features, and see the progress and next steps to be taken in the development process. I've settled on using Jira, which is created by the same people who run Bitbucket - so everything is nicely integrated with each other. If you're a Minecraft fan and have visited their issue tracker before, you'll notice that they're running Jira as well. Cool beans, no?
 
 
Once I've put in a little more data in the project tracker, I'll create a new thread here with links to everything if you wish to keep track of how things are going.

http://m.deadline.com/2013/10/angelina-jolie-sets-japanese-singer-miyavi-as-brutal-wwii-pow-camp-guard-the-bird-in-unbroken/

Whoa, like an actual good movie. Not the B movie nonsense that was Gackt's film.

that pedobear rilakkuma is really cute

To say that I am frustrated by this thread is a bit of an understatement.
 
The attitude of some of the members make me feel like you paid something to get this service and ended up not getting exactly what you want. This this is something that exists and you enjoy purely because the love and money of other people. The negativity is stifling. I kind of get the impression that a lot of people think the "staff" is kind of a faceless corporation, that we are in our positions for the power and the glory or some shit. The people on the staff are here because they love this site and the community. They volunteered their time to try and make this a better place, no matter the amount. 
 
We are in agreement that the staff isn't as active that we all once were in our prime. But neither is the community. Pointing fingers will get us no where fast. Throwing people out and reshuffling is purposeless if it is done to just appease a few people. Lets say that the staff posts a lot more...does that give us the active community that we want? Maybe yes, maybe no. And it will not happen at the flip of a switch, it will be a slow burn. The success of this forum rests on everyone here, and absolutely none of you are obligated to do anything. If the love isn't there, then MH will die.
 
Will the staff be redoubling our efforts to try and make this community better? For sure. Will we try to mix things up by adding another mod or two from the community? Most likely. But I am not so sure that this is something that can be forced. We will do the best we can to get things flow...there are still people that love this place over 6 years since Jake and I first started it, and while things may be massively different from now then, I plan on continuing to keep this place running for as long as possible. The only thing I ask is that you treat the staff like the hard working people they are. Pretty much everyone on the staff here is an incredible person outside of the forum as well and life can get in the way of this fun little place.
 
 
Side notes:
If we were judging you all on how much you care by the amount you donate to the site to keep it running, we would have closed down already
 
 
It costs $60 a month to keep the servers running. Every dollar you give goes DIRECTLY in to paying the server (as you will have noticed when you use paypal and notice who you are paying - dreamhost).
 
 
I hate to break it to you, but that is the way the forum has ALWAYS been. a majority of the people that visit will never post and just take the downloads. Hell, I don't even know if this forum's community would even exist if it wasn't for the download section.
 
 

A lot of you have asked what Deadeyes-star is. In short, it'll be a Japanese music database. It's purpose is to close in the gap between english speaking fans and the Japanese music scene.
 
For years I've used JaME and other related websites to try and track down bands, stay up to date on new releases, and find information on their releases. There really is no definitive place to find all this information. There's Last.FM, JaME, Visunavi, grassthreads, and even YouTube. Deadeyes-star aims to combine the best of all these resources into one, and building a community around it.
 
Above you'll find a lovely screenshot of the first sneak peek at what the website will be when its first released. One of the problems I've made, is holding everything off until I had everything complete. Well - in reality this method will never work. So the plan is to release the website in stages, with each stage building up off the other adding new features and fixing bugs as we move along.
 
The second problem we made, was trying to keep everything a secret. From now on, everything will be announced publicly. I've even come to terms that this is a project I can't pull off by myself. Right now the team consists of me and Manda. I work on the actual develop and coding of the website, where manda focuses on the design and graphics. We'd like this to grow to help in development.
 
Soon, I'll make another post to recruit for help if you think you or anyone you know may want to join in on the development side of this.
 
 
For the time being, if you have any questions or anything, feel free to ask away!
 
Kai

I don't think changing the staff will change the state of the forum in itself, but I think it could be a step in the right direction and it's a visible change that will improve the forum's morale.
 
Speaking of visible changes, perhaps changing or improving the current forum theme and the forum banner would help to refresh MH and revive moral. (Personally, I've always been a fan of rotating banners).
 
 
However, we can sit here and talk about cosmetics all day, but visible changes aren't truly substantial changes. I think what this forum needs most of all is a solitary purpose. I feel as if everyone wants mh to change, but every seems to have different ideas (or no ideas at all) on what they want MH to be. If we establish a clear identity and singular goal, then we can proceed from there.
 
Ask yourselves this, what do you consider MH to be? A VK forum? A J-rock forum? A Japanese music forum? A forum for kpop and VK? What are we exactly?
 
 
Personally, I've always viewed MH as a Japanese rock forum. Sure, we've always had an abundance of visual kei fans here. So with that in mind, I've tried to do my part to share, discuss, and promote non-visual bands with the hopes of cultivating appreciation for Japanese rock as a whole and not just one scene in particular. That's what I've been trying to do personally, but to be completely honest, I have no idea if the rest of the staff shares my sentiments.
 
That's why I ask you all, before you jump and try to change the staff, I urge you all to come up with a goal, a singular purpose that you all can devote yourselves to as part of the staff. If you guys have no goal, then you're not going to get very far. I think that's the problem with the current staff. Everyone means well, but we've kind of lost sight of what our goal(s) should be.
 
When you guys come up with a purpose, a goal, or some kind of mission, then I will gladly abdicate my position to anyone you deem worthy. But as of now, with no goal in mind, we don't really have much of a standard to judge the current staff by other than their activity level - to which you guys have stated will take much more to be a mod.
 
So, once again. I'll charge you all with this task. Decide where you want to go with MH. Decide what you'd like MH to be. And from there, develop a criteria that you think the staff should be able to meet. If I don't meet the criteria, I will gladly step down.
 
I'm all for reconstruction. But before you guys start detaching pieces and putting them back together, have a clear vision of what you want to build first. Let's see a blueprint and then go from there.
 
At the end of the day, I'll do whatever is best for MH.

Being one of the people who's been here for years, and being one who listens to kpop at that, I still think this isn't a good idea.
 
This forum is supposed to be about Japanese music, right? We already have a section where we upload rock music that isn't necessarily Japanese, but it still is Asian. Isn't that good enough? Also, it's been years since this forum was only about all the VK. I get most of my Japanese rock music from this place, and I haven't been really listening to VK in years.
 
There are a lot of blogs and websites out there sharing Kpop music. Now I'm not against listening to kpop, but it would result in a surge of kpop kids who, if you've seen anything at all, are pretty much brain dead (not everyone, but I'm sure you know what I mean) and you'd get threads full of oppa oppa ooppppaaaaaaa. Aren't there already enough websites for this? Call me narrowminded or ignorant or anything you'd want for that opinion, but as someone who's seen enough of the kpop world, I'd like to see Monochrome as some kind of website that still keeps to its original idea.
 
Besides, how could we have split forums for every genre for instance, when so many rock bands are such a mix of thousands at once?

There is a small weakness in the current mod team from my perspective not mentioning what being said above. None of them live in Asia which means there will be no mods active for 24/7 or at least in Asian daytime. Sometimes I see a misplaced topic or something that is not right on MH (including my own mistakes), but I can't report it to the mod team immediately.

There is a small weakness in the current mod team from my perspective not mentioning what being said above. None of them live in Asia which means there will be no mods active for 24/7 or at least in Asian daytime. Sometimes I see a misplaced topic or something that is not right on MH (including my own mistakes), but I can't report it to the mod team immediately.

In order to motivate my ass to work on this, I've created the following DS category/suforums here on the forum. The intention behind this, at least for the moment, is to continuously post updates on the development of DS as well as get feedback from every one here.
 
I want this to be a fairly open project moving forward - and am even open to anyone actually helping me develop DS. I've moved from using a custom developed CMS to using PyroCMS - which frees me up from having to code out core features which was eating up most of my development time.
 
Some of you may ask "Why not just use WordPress or Wikimedia?", and the simple answer is - control. DS will be more than just a database of Japanese bands and music. It'll be a community that revolves around you - the user. There are a ton of features and ideas that I'd like to push out that would be very difficult to do with WordPress (and especially Wikimedia, which I honestly feel is a horribly outdated platform).
 
So, I'll keep this first post short. I'll post more threads going over DS, provide screenshots of its current progress, and so on and so forth.
 
See you in the next post!
 
Kai

Oh, we have the same wallpaper
 

Trying to code a CMS in OOP. Pretty a humble beginning, though.
 

Show yourself again ( and again )

I don't know why people are complaining about this... This is a perfect place for Satoshi to vent all of his pop, vkei songs that he wants to do and leave the heavy stuff for girugamesh

I decided to make a quick guide on how to pick up a date! Showing everyone the lolis secrets to life <3
 

I took this photo a few days ago,  with my tired, little & sweet cat. ♥  

It does kinda look like it.

 
The title song is so-so. But the video is pretty boring and the WTF Wataru moments made me laugh. Clearly they need some art direction
I hope there are better songs on that mini-album.

Thank you a lot for what you've shared so far, and have a good moment living in Japan.

I guess the best way to think of it would be that without any downloads there would be a total of like 5 international VK fans as the only ones who would ever know about it would be those who were in Japan and stumbled upon it. So even if 100 people download a CD from some tiny VK band where only 1-5 people actually bought the CD, that's still a net gain of 1-5 sales where there would be 0 otherwise. Especially for Japanese bands, I think downloading is an important tool to enable international touring. How many people would really be willing to throw down $30 for a ticket to go see a band they've never heard of in a music scene that they've never heard of?
 
Now that being said, I still support legal methods of getting music when and where you can, but some effort does need to be put in by the bands as well. I don't think it should really be expected of us as fans to have to jump through hoops just to be able to support our favorite artists, especially in today's world which is so global and digital. Yet there the bands are, sometimes outright denying international fans when they sell things through mail-order because Japanese people are apparently terrified of writing non-Japanese addresses and generally refuse to send things overseas.

As a former vkei blog updater (which is actually how I met Sai ) , I reuploaded everything 85% of the time. At one point, I stopped because I wanted more traffic and to seem like a ~visual-cool~ contributer, but that was a very shortlived phase. When uploading a discography, I even took the time to write a description of the band and what kind of music they made to get people more interested in trying them out instead of blinding posting everything I found.
 
From what I've seen, I was a pretty rare case. Today, very few people really write much about what they're sharing (assuming it's something they like. When I uploaded new, popular stuff that I didn't care about whatsoever [like ViViD at the time], I wouldn't give a description) and fewer people upload things themselves. This leads to dozens of blogs with dead links for the same thing and makes things that should be really easy to come across impossible to find. At least Jrockvisualkei dot com (I think that's their name) took the time to reupload everything to several different hosting sites.
 
I'm not saying people should always write a synopsis of what they're uploading, but it certainly does help get me interested and it shows that you're passionate about this release instead of just sharing to share. I am saying that blogs should at least upload everything to their own direct download sites in addition to copying and pasting someone else's links so we don't have the same dead link all over the place.
 
UNRELATED BUT THIS SHIT NEEDS TO STOP
 
Uploading singles / demos from older discographies and filling in the tracks with album versions. This warps history and is completely wrong. I used to do it as a shortcut myself, but then I realized what it was doing. It's better to say "track missing" or not even mention that this demo or single was released on your post if you don't have the real version. I cannot tell you how it pisses me off when I like the way a song sounds in a music video, but when I download it the uploader put the album version (which is usually stripped of some sort of intro or remastered in some way unless you're on UCP) instead. Latest example (from like a year ago, huehue) was Dir en Gray's "Myaku." I don't believe the single I got even had the B-sides, and the title track even had Macabre tags. Really?

シリアル⇔NUMBER(serial NUMBER) new mini album "琉海WahLD!(ryuukai WahLD!)" will be released at 2013/10/23 (2,800yen), which will include CD+DVD (including "琉海道夢(ryuukaidoumu)" PV, making & tour documentary) and will be sold in advance at 佐々木 仁(sasaki jin) birthday one-man live at Ikebukuro BLACK HOLE at 2013/10/15
 
[CD track list]
01.キミペディア(kimi-pedia)
02.琉海道夢(ryuukaidoumu)
03.DENKI GIRL
04.Fre×③sh!!
05.怪盗JET'S(kaitou JET'S)〜lost lonely night〜
06.ハイサイワールド(haisai world)
07.Wahhhh!

Skip to 0:59 to avoid hearing the weird guy talking about the PV, I gotta say this "Fuck everything before, this is the Girugamesh I want to root for" Nii adding some Djent in there was excellent~
 
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=536478419739673&set=vb.121523861195422&type=2&theater

Just saw the thread. Welcome back to MH, gekijou! We missed you.