Champ213

Well, the live is called "Final Sea", so I'm guessing it's the last live, or part of a series of last lives.

Here's mine.

Well. Some bands are clearly more experienced with doing silly dance moves than other bands. XD Uchuu Sentai Noiz and サウイフモノ clearly have the groove! Some bands where you wouldn't expect it were frightingly good too though, lol.

My top 3 are more or less in order, after that I find it hard to do proper ranking, so I just ordered them as they entered my mind. I also only included bands that have released a decent amount of stuff. Personally I find it kinda odd to call a band that only has a handful of songs a "favourite". There's a bunch of bands I really liked that released only 5 songs or so, but I justr don't think it's a good enough sample. 1. Raphael 2. ElDorado 3. Jils As you can see, I have a huge sweet spot for older, melodic vk of the late 90s/early 00s. 4. Aliene Ma'riage 5. Madeth Gray'll Yes, I also like the darker variant of late 90s vk. 6. LUNA SEA Luna Sea was one of my first big jrock loves, so they must be included, 7. BUCK-TICK Obviously you can argue about the vk-ness of Buck-Tick. But I decided to include them anyway. Sue me for it! 8. Metis Gretel 9. バビロン 10. Lareine Some slightly more recent bands I enjoy. (Hey! Lareine only disbanded in 2007! That's pretty recent for my standards!) Didn't quite make the cut: La'Mule Cell NightingeiL L'eprica Versailles A Malice Mizer 天照 Vasalla Denno:oblaat emmurree

WHO NEEDS STUFF HAPPENING WHEN YOU CAN LOOK AT SAKURAI-SAMA!? Seriously though, Buck-Tick's PVs are pretty hit and miss. Some are great and some are just "umm... okay?"

Okay, my reading comprehension officially sucks. XD

^ Didn't you violate your own rule by picking more than 10 songs? Or is that supposed to be a 2-disc album? I kinda would like to do a Lareine Best-of, mainly because I think the various collections they released didn't really nail it. But their discography is so huge, that I will need to spend some time on this. XD But I already know that I'm totally going to ignore "Kamijo-Solo-Lareine", as if it never existed. Yup.

Olives all the way! Especially if they are stuffed with garlic. So yummy! Do you have any artistic skills?

That tracklist looks good! Now, if they would just throw in "A Portage to the Unknown" in there somewhere for the Cologne gig. But it's quite a good mix of new and old songs, I must say. Only 4 from the new album, and I assume those will also be the ones they play here. But I'm curious to see if and how they vary with the older stuff. I still have a while to go (it's only on Feb 25 here), but I'm sure it will be awesome!

I don't remember ever thinking that Santa was real. Santa isn't really a thing where I am from anyway, presents are tradionally brought by the "Christkind" (ie. Christ Child, a strangley bastardized version of Jesus the Child that is usually represented as a young female angel). But yeah, I don't recall ever believing in that either. Is there anything on the wall in front of you and if yes, what is it?

Sorry guys, but I had to remove a few posts by different people. Please do not spam video links. There's a reason why there is a limit for YT links per post and that's because it really bloats up threads and makes them slow to load. Instead of just spamming 10 or more videos in consecuitive posts, just pick a few of your most favourite videos. Maybe add a sentence about them. If you need to post more than that, hide them in spoilers or deep links, so it won't lag down the thread, thanks.

Not bad. When they said they were recording in a green screen studio I was kinda expecting the worst (CGI in music videos tends to look kinda bad usually.) But the effects look pretty decent, and I like the desaturated look. (Desaturation makes everything 2.5 times less cheesy - it's scientifically proven.) Of course it's a video for a metal ballad, so some cheese is to be expected. Sidenote: that statue totally looks like Angelina Jolie.

I'm suprised that no one mentioned Bel Air and Bara no Konrei by Malice Mizer. Or are they considered "cheating"? XD

It would be awesome if more vk bands took the parodic approach, but I think quite a few take themselves rather serious in their PVs. XD Which can be funny in itself, I guess. Also, I do not want to start another "Old vk vs. new vk" debate, but I really love the cheesy cheapness of old vk PVs. While many new PVs still use the same motifs (band standing in some place looking pretty, deliberate overacting, wild gestures etc.) many of them are actually quite well-made from a technical perspective. Lighting, camera, post-production - all looks (semi)professional these days. But I just love the hopeless, amateurish yet try-hard crappiness of classic vk PVs. XD

Depends on what you mean by "not so good". XD There are a LOT of vk PVs that are just plain boring because the bands rely too much on their fancy outfits, so it's basically just the band standing in some location (forest/empty warehouse/white background/castle), performing the song. That can be nice to look at at times, but more often than not it's just very forgetful, unless you are a huge fan of that band. Then there are those PVs that are so bad that they are actually good, intentional or not. A famous example of non-intentional "so-crappy-it's-good" PVs is Vidoll's Occult Proposal. Cars driving in the background? = classic An example of intentional (parody-style) "so-crappy-it's good PVs" is NANDAKANDA by サウイフモ. But yeah, I consider both these videos highly entertaining. XD Sadly I cannot really contribute to the category of "Boring, forgetful PVs" - not because there aren't many of them, but because I... well, forget about them.

I have 27 songs, all by different jrock bands, that are called Maria or マリア. I think that might be the record in my music library....

Since 90% of news is posted by Trombe I'm inclined to think that he should decide if he wants those prefixes. He practically owns that section. XD But as has been pointed out, the way Trombe posts news, it's not uncommon to contain more than one kind of news (for example one-man announcement plus release), or he updates them with other info kinds of later. Which is totally fine, especially for smaller bands it doesn't make sense to create a new topic for every little event. Personally I always thought having topic prefixes for downloads only is a very neat way to spot downloads wuickly on the "New Content" page. Also, am I the only one to think that having a special topic prefix for "death/deceases" is kinda, umm.... morbid? XD By design you can only ever add one prefix to a thread. You can change it as often as you like, but that seems pretty bothersome to change it every time you add new information to a thread. There already is the option to add topic tags for news threads, including multiple tags. (A topic prefix is basically just a regular topic tag that's visibly added in the thread title.) We have never expressively forbidden to use of normal topic tags outside of the download section, but we haven't encouraged it either. So far Trombe has chosen not to use tags for his news threads anyway. We could define a set of predefined tags to use in the news forum and encourage their usage. They would pretty soon overpower the tag cloud though, so that would be the downside.

(I assume that's "opinion on religions" not "or") To each their own. I leave them alone if they leave me alone. If they don't leave me alone and want to push their world view on me, I can get rather unpleasant. I have my own view on spiritual matters, but I don't really discuss it with others or try to convince them of my view. My beliefs are my own. What's the last thing you ate and was it tasty?

Winter. Although the current winter totally sucks with no snow whatsoever at my place so far. I love snow. One thing you want to archieve before you die?

As has been pointed out, if you want to trade for rarez, you need rarez. Also, if you want to trade with japanese traders, you better have a grasp of basic japanese, or at least the most common phrases used for trading, so you can pass off as japanese. (I know that japanese traders have a terrible reputation, but if you get to know them they are actually pretty nice. I manged to befriend a few during my p2p days, and then they would give me all their rarez for free, even though I could rarely return the favor, and even though they sooner or later realized I wasn't actually Japanese. They are harsh against outsiders, but very generous to their friends.) I stopped trading years ago, because it was more hassle than worth the effort, but I had two primary ways of trading: p2p in specialized rooms like on Utatane, and trade lists. I'm guessing that p2p vk-trading is pretty much dead, and I'm actually not sure if list trading is still a thing. Most of my contacts seem to have stopped with it anyway. Basically, you will sometimes encounter trade lists on the internet that will usually look like this. It lists the stuff they have, the stuff they want, their eMail and other requirements. You can contact them with a list of your own stuff, and if you are lucky they will reply. I have never once gotten a "rude" reply, the worst (and not uncommon thing) to happen is no reply at all. But again, you should have some knowledge of japanese so you can read their rules and communicate with them. And, to get really rare stuff, you better have some damn rare stuff yourself. Most list traders have a hierachy of "rareness", usually indicated by stars or similar. They will not trade some COCKROACH release for just any random Alice Nine release, obviously. If you don't want to bother with that, trying to find stuff on auctions is probably the easier, albeit more expensive way.

Exactly. It's subjective. I find 128k and 192k rips completely acceptable for something I get FOR FREE. And people uploading stuff below 128k happens once in a blue moon, so that's hardly a rampant problem. The bottom line is: I pirate it. I'm ripping off the artist. It's illegal. I just don't feel I have any right to demand higher bitrates for something I technically shouldn't own in the first place. And I would never dare to call the people that willingly perform an illegal act just so I can get free music "assholes" just because the file isn't at least 320k. Sorry, we have to agree to disagree here.

Well, I don't really care about people's "e-peen", that they may or not get from sharing. Also, I'm sure that many people sharing high bitrates also do it for status, but nobody really cares about that. As a matter of fact, seeing the hatred that lower bitrates sometimes tend to get I am not sure if sharing them is the best way to enlarge your e-peen at all. I think that's what originally started the trend to upload transcodes - people think that they can earn more internet points by uploading 320k files. And if they can't provide that, they just fake them. That being said, I rarely encounter it these days that people uplaod their own rips in low bitrates with the reasoning that people should buy the CD themselves. It may happen, but it doesn't seem to be so frequent that I consider it a problem. Overall I just feel that people have become too obsessed with bitrates in general. I say: relax, folks. Your heads won't explode from listening to a 128k file. Good music is still good music if it's 192k instead of 320k. And in the end the price of having an obcenely large music collection of tens of thousands of songs is the fact that not all of them will be a perfect 320. But it's still music.

People feel too entitled these days. I remember a time when I was downloading jrock from WinMX - one song at a time, because queing up entire albums was considered rude and practically unheard of before people started sharing zipped versions of albums. No one cared about bitrates. Later I would assemble those single songs into albums again - sometimes with songs of varying bitrates. Was it very messy? Yes. And you know what? It didn't matter. It didn't decrease my enjoyment of the music in the slightest. It still made me fall in love with those jrock bands that I still love today. Nowadays, with more people having access to high-speed internet, sharing high bitrates or losless rips is much easier. But I still respect the uploaders privilege to choose their own bitrate. Their CD. Their rip. Their decision. If we go by the "share to the fullest or don't share at all"-logic everybody would have to start uploading lossless rips and nothing else anyway. But complaining that a file you get for free is 192k instead of 320k is just spoiled whining, whatever way you look at it.

Well, presumably other people don't have the time to listen through 7 videos just to find the breakdowns. If you want other people to listen to them and discuss them, maybe you should take the time. Or, instead of posting a bunch of videos at once, just post 1 or 2 and give some info on them, like you did in your first post. Then other people will actually be able to do something with your post and you will get some feedback.