hiroki

The autotune thing isn't everyone's cup of tea i guess. Your point stands though.. I thought the whole thing was rather coherent until the weird quasi-harsh vocals in the middle. I hate this fad of inserting "mandatory" brutal sounds randomly just for the sake of having them regardless of how out of place they are (*_*) Still really like IC's vocals though (esp. when he was doing his UVER-ish stuff)

Oh. my. god.

I like Nikky, he'll be a good fit for ALSDEAD. Although that will mean GALEYD's prob going to officially disband.

lol He posted on his blog saying Miss.Tear disbanded.

Fuck. Incidentally I was listening to AQUA this morning and thinking to myself how fortunate I am to have discovered their music. I was so so happy for them too when they had their first one-man not long ago. Don't even know what to say anymore.

Normally I just "search image" a couple of times using Google. If I don't get any good results then it prob means that even if a HQ album art exists, it's not worth the time to scour the internet for it. Thankfully as more and more stuff make their way onto Amazon and iTunes it has never been easier to find HQ covers. For the rarer stuff I'm usually forced to scan the album art myself but unfortunately my scanner is pretty crap (it sure beats a 300x300 image though). Also, be careful because sometimes the dimensions can be misleading. For instance a 1200x1200 art can be upscaled from 600x600 and you're better off getting the 600x600.

I wonder if You's retiring? Won't be surprised at all but what a loss. Not sure if keta sounds good on vocals but it's still nice to see their members sticking around..

The ironic thing is that my fave BFN release is the one that's most un-BFN (空から零れ落ちる100億の光).. go figure >.<

That's the same mangaka as Tegami Bachi =D Really pretty artwork, I agree!

I prefer to travel alone as well because most people aren't interested in the same kind of things. Anyway I have a few amazing though somewhat random memories of the time I was living in Japan: 1) Cycling 20km just to see Japanese pampas grass. I was dead beat at the end of it but to witness the expanse of golden lights dancing at dusk when the grass is in season was something special. 2) I found myself in a very rural part of Ise because I had visited the shrine in the morning and didn't want to return to Kyoto so early. There, local trains run once every 2 hours. While waiting for the train I met a high school girl who approached me to ask for the train schedule, whether the next train stops at every stop, and a bunch of other strange questions (for a Japanese at least). From our conversation that followed I found out that was her very first time taking the train - she cycles to the next village for school every day but that morning her bicycle had died so she had no choice but to take the train. I remember teaching her how to pay for the train ride and the priceless look on her face when the train started moving =D 3) I wandered into this small ramen place in rural Gifu when I was in the area as a stopover between Takayama and Nagoya. They had no menu whatsoever. Apparently the shopkeeper knows every single of her customers, and she would get their orders ready the moment they step into the place. Obviously they were excited seeing someone they've never seen before, so everyone gathered around me and we chatted about random stuff from Japanese politics to the dog next door (they much preferred the latter topic). 4) Going up to the Japanese Alps was fun, but unpleasant because I forgot my jacket. 5) Among my closest friends were a freelance translator who had probably been to half the countries in the world, a Japanese with rainbow hair who had gone to Paris to study fashion, and a somewhat popular host(!) in Osaka. There were other less quirky but no less amazing people I've met as well.

This reminds me a little of early Nightmare (*_*)

Those are the defining features of BFN though, lol

From his blog entry it doesn't seem like a joke (if it is then they might be taking it a little too far lol). Anyway he supposedly got fired for lack of proficiency

Thank you for that. I agree with sai that this makes the most sense given how, like what you said, 10 uploaders want 10 different things. Again, this sounds like a good idea to me. I've always been quite unsettled by how friendly the DL section is to anonymous phantom users. At the same time Zess and 237Q have made good points about forcing people to thank just to download and the potential spam. Perhaps we can make a similar button to reveal the DL link when clicked (separate from the thanks button), and have the users who have clicked it logged in a list. This neither interferes with the whole thanks/reputation business (which isn't particularly important to me, but obviously does mean a lot to some), nor does it bump the entire thread to the 1st page when someone downloads an old file. I haven't made up my mind whether it's a good idea to disclose the list of users (e.g. append it to the first post) or keep it hidden and accessible only to the staff. If we go for the former, this button can serve a nice "post for link" function without all the hassle of spam control, bumping old threads, etc. Anyway that's just an idea I have that may or may not be feasible.

there's a ridiculous amount of sad disbandments lately ;_;

Sadly I don't have time to respond to everything. But firstly I must thank the admin for having done so much. Being somewhat new to the forum I don't really know the "history" of what had been tried etc., but I appreciate the effort. The irony though is that I've never got the sense the admin took the problem seriously (of course I've now changed my mind). The main reason for this is that there's virtually no official stance on the matter in the download rules, which presumably is the first thing most newcomers would read. Instead, we see this: "9) If you take something, and re-post it on another forum, use your own link." Can we change this? For me that's tantamount to saying "go ahead and post on blogs/trackers/whatever; we don't care as long as you use your own link". Which was of course disappointing. Imo the first thing MH can consider is to make its stance more explicit and as in-your-face as need be, whether that involves re-writing some parts of the rules, or putting a banner in the download section, etc. If the uploader happens to want his files circulated as much as possible, then by all means he can say so in his post. Another thing that can be done is to make leechers more visible and feel more conscious that they can *in principle* be tracked. I haven't tried doing this before but presently it seems to be the case that users are able to leech files while remaining anonymous, and who downloaded what isn't being tracked at all. Maybe we can do something about this. Users who are just downloading the files for themselves would be unaffected, while those who are mass-uploading the files on their blogs may think twice.

I'm one of those who didn't like their last 2 singles as much as their earlier ones. Their mini album NOやんちゃ!!NOらいふ!! is one of the most awesome things that I've ever come across :'D But yeah, I can't get enough of Yuuto's vocals ><

^ I doubt that will happen because I don't think Makoto can/want to be a full-time musician anymore. Anyway I almost cried when I saw the news on Lion's twitter. I'm really happy that the band (except Kento) is getting together even if it's just for one day.

The following is my personal opinion and it isn't targeted at anyone in particular. I'm only writing this in the interest of generating more discussion. I quote: "We strictly believe in the notion of "Share openly or don't share at all" and thus we base all our decisions regarding the download forums on that." ^ May I ask what's the rationale behind that? I understand the whole argument of "regardless of what we do it's useless - anything posted is going to be distributed everywhere anyway; so why bother". But the fact is that there are tons of people who only want to share with a select group of people: I don't just mean people whom they know personally, but people who are part of a community. Whether that's rational or not is another issue, but such a preference is neither surprising nor uncommon. If the idea of "share with everyone or don't share at all" makes any sense, then we might as well have one gigantic server called Share Everything Here and have everyone use it to download music, anime, porn, culinary guides, etc. We don't; because people feel very differently towards having their rip shared with people within MH community, or those in the LJ communites, or the entire Jpopsuki community, etc. Now, here I'm speaking only for myself: I don't give a shit about credits. As far as I'm concerned, all credits for the music belong exclusively to the band. HOWEVER, I do get terribly irritated when people post my rips outside MH without my knowledge. I want to make clear that the two are not mutually exclusive, and this annoyance is more a result of the disrespect of phantom distributors who blithely thumb their noses at the uploader and ignore his wishes, rather than any "self-serving" arrogance on the part of the uploader who's obsessed with having his ego stroked. Every time I post a rip I would request for people to at least inform me if they're going to re-post; currently half my rips are already on Jpopsuki and I've received zero PM informing me of it. If I had wanted to share my rip with the people on Jpopsuki I'd imagine I could have done so myself. For me, the "doing anything is useless because x will still happen anyway" is a weak argument. I'm reminded of a recent election where the incumbent responded to the public outrage over the widening economic inequality in my country. Basically, the party officials shamelessly say, inequality is inevitable the moment we have a certain socioeconomic arrangement, with the free market and so on, and so what they've done would have been useless anyway. Of course we understand that inequality happens, but that does not mean that the government shouldn't give a shit about people who are picking up cardboard litter for a living or do more to help people who can't afford basic healthcare. The point here is that even if we acknowledge the problem cannot be solved in its entirety, there ought to be some attempt to do something about it to manage how fast the problem exacerbates, rather than just throwing our hands up in the air and demand everyone to feebly accept the unpalatable state of affairs. Clearly what happens in Jpopsuki or piratebay is outside the purview of MH - it would absurd to expect MH to "control" the spread of rips going on there - but we can definitely do something about how these get from here to there. There's some truth in Zess' point: we've tried some stuff and they didn't work, or didn't work as well as we've liked. Some livejournal communities ban people who distribute stuff shared within, Chinese forums have a system where someone has to post in a thread to view a link, etc. I'll be the first to admit that not of these all methods are equally effective, and there are obvious practical difficulties for implementing something like what LJ communities do. If there's a Perfect Solution, content industries won't be shaking their fists and lobbying for stupid things in Congress once every two days. Still, there are two things that hurt me most (and, I suspect, a good majority of other uploaders who have become highly disillusioned - I'm sure we all know who they are): 　　(i) The issue is often trivialized and there's an apparent unwillingness to condemn such behavior - there's this general sentiment that people who rage over having their rip shared across the Internet are childish and simply don't understand how the Internet works; 　　(ii) There's absolutely zero regulatory mechanism on MH, no matter how simple or bypass-able they may be, to manage/reduce the distribution because "it's all useless anyway". (By the way I do feel that the "PM for password" thing is a bad idea, but uploaders are forced to resort to these last-ditch methods precisely because MH is uninterested in limiting distribution) What we have here are then perfect conditions that not only endorse but encourage people to post everything here onto their blogs with a smug security because, hey, no one cares anyway!

Welcome to MH! ^^ I love your Juri avatar LOL (I miss DELUHI so much)..

There are tons of songs that I love and probably can't live without, but for the purposes of this I'm just gonna list 5 songs that I still have trouble listening to without losing it. BLACK CAT - MAY Clavier - Love Story (I cried the first time I heard this song) DELUHI - 星の無い夜に Kagrra, - 雫 SINCREA - RED As you can tell, all these bands have disbanded. Among them, 2 vocalists out of 5 are still around doing music that would never ever be the same for me, another 2 have vanished/retired from the scene, and the last one has passed away. Edit: I just saw Kles' list and I'm surprised... both フライト (ALSDEAD) and 紫苑 (2nd Dyz) mean a great deal to me as well.

According to Lyvia they're dissolving as a unit, but might get back together as a band. No idea whether it's going to be the same people or under the same name. Today's a very sad day.