October 31st, 2022
It's Halloween! I have no clue what to do for this occassion, so sorry for getting your hopes up.
Before I begin, I just wanted to say that I got a domain name now! I just bought it cause I realized that a domain didn't actually cost that much. I had to be in the NeoCities supporter group to make the domain route to my website. It's so cool seeing the site finally be on a domain after all these years. I am no longer restrained to being a subdomain! Thank you for reading.
I went to Round1 again! It's been a while, last time I went was in August.
It was a really poor day for IIDX (CastHour) and DrumMania. I wasn't doing too hot on either. I haven't played a lot of IIDX/BMS since Splatoon 3 came out and I have no way to play DrumMania at home, so maybe that's why. I occasionally think about buying the PS2 port of DrumMania with the drums, but I don't think it'll play nicely or will the price tag be light. Gah!
As of writing, IIDX 30 was not released yet. My store has it installed now, but I have not played it yet. I'll get on it soon! I can't wait!
I opted for Dance Around instead. I played for my entire time there. It's pretty fun. Since not many people were at the shop, I felt less embarrassed dancing.
I earned a bunch of EXC scores. It might be an easy game, but it's fun, and that's all that matters.
Goodbye, Crossbeats Sunrise! My Round1 seems to be trashing it. The screens have been removed and the PCs don't seem to be in there either. All that's left is the hollow case, the service manual, and the card reader. It'd probably be better to sell it off to a private collector (or give it to me for free) or something rather than trash it, but it's already been done.
It could also be that Round1 has to do this for cabinets they're decommisioning. It's also possible that it's in the process of shipping it to another shop. Whatever it is, I hope they're not actually throwing it out. I might not played Sunrise that much, but damn.
Since we have some extra space now, surely we can get pop'n music! Can we? Can we!?
In September, the first full Splatfest for Splatoon 3 had commenced. Gear vs. Grub vs. Fun! While Grub lost horribly, I still tried to have fun. The keyword here being 'tried'. Unfortunately, the many issues that plagued matchmaking severely hindered my experience, so I would congratulate this game for finally making me not want to play the game during a Splatfest.
My main issues were the connection issues. The update that was supposed to fix network issues really did not help at all. No matter what, I would always get hit with errors trying to find other people to play with and I had to re-queue and find another group to play with. Even when half-time occurred, I rarely got a match at all. My internet is good, my router hasn't been dying at all, my Switch reports that everything is fine, what gives!?
That's not to mention the fact that it was rare to play a non-standard match. I only got three 10x battles, no 100x/333x battles, and only two Tri-Color battles. This was during a 48-hour playing period! I get that they lowered the chances of playing a Tri-Color battle due to all the negativity from the demo, but they were not lying, they really made them trigger somewhat less frequently than before.
In the end, I did get Grub Ruler +5. I thought getting a higher Ruler rank would give you more sea snails, but that was not the case. Oh well! If the connection issues were less of a problem, I would've been even higher.
The next Splatfest is a Pokemon related one. Grass vs. Fire vs. Water. I'll be going with Fire since the starter Pokemon are pretty cool. It starts in November, so I'll try writing a post after the event is done. Hopefully by then, they make Tri-Color battles anything but a myth. The v1.1.3 update has fixed a good bit of networking issues, so I'm excited to actually play.
Outside of the Splatfest topic, I've been doing pretty well in Splatoon. I'm already level 43, in S+3, and I've already completed the Catalog twice.
Salmon Run has been really fun too. As of right now, I've already surpassed my lifetime scores from Splatoon 2. I'm nearing 200,000 total points and it's been a blast. I've also already reached VP 200 on all the stages so far, and I'm aiming to clear a Hazard MAX job so I can get the respective badge. It's been hard, but I can do it!
Outside of that, I got an Inkling Boy amiibo for Splatoon 2. I went to a few stores to see if they had any Splatoon amiibos at all, but these were the only ones in stock in the few I went to. The stores had a bunch of Zelda and Steve amiibo in stock. I hope they reprint the figures again soon.
I will say, I absolutely hate this disconnect rule. If someone disconnects within the first minute of the match, everybody else has to quit the match. You get no experience, no money, and no rank points. What's the point of wasting a whole 3 minutes just to not even play the game? Everybody does it in Anarchy Open because there's little penalty for disconnecting. There needs to be a harsher penalty to those who forcibly disconnect, all I know of is that the match is considered a loss and they might be restricted from making a new match for, at most, an hour. It should be easy to distinguish if the disconnect was intentional or not.
It is the pop'n music part of the blog.
This month's free song is GALAXY FOREST 11.6&12 by J_KANE. It sucks.
This month's ticket quest is Koi no Miracle! It's lame.
Somehow, I forgot to login during all of October, which means I miss out on the free song and I decrease a rank. I'm a little dissapointed and embarrassed that I neglected a game like this, but it was a rather busy month.
Anyways, I bought a new song pack! Konami graciously put a 50% discount for the Tune Street and Fantasia song packs. It was only a nice $20 USD for one of them! I bought the Tune Street pack as it had more songs I was familar with than the Fantasia pack.
Glad I did! The Tune Street pack had some great music I never listened to.
I wonder what's the next song pack. We're nearing the latest AC game, so maybe they'll do some artist packs? What about packs that fit a certain theme? They also might do packs of songs from the older games that never got revived or even old CS songs that never got an AC release. They could also do some Lively orignals. Please?
I went to Goodwill recently and I managed to find a CRT. Huh, I thought Goodwill stopped selling these things years ago. I swear they put a lot of posters up saying they're trashing these things in 2014 or so. I guess not? It was sitting on a table as a new arrival. I snatched it up for a mere $5.
It's a standard General Electric TX808A manufactured in 2003. The only input is RF, which means I get pretty poor quality. I don't have an RF modulator anymore, so I have to resort to using my old Memorex VCR. Setting the VCR up with the TV and the things I want to use get extremely messy, so I should get a dedicated modulator later.
I don't know what I'm going to do with this thing entirely. I still use my Sony Trinitron CRT for my old retro games. So far, I use it to play visualizations from a media player when I just want to unwind. The snowiness reminds me of music-only channels that TV providers like Dish Network had. It's a nostalgic thing to do, the bad mono speaker adds to the experience.
Another thing I got from Goodwill is the AverMedia AverKey iMicro box. It's a tool which converts VGA signals to composite and S-video. It's very primitive, allowing basic zoom, cropping, and smoothing functions. The box advertises some higher-end models, which support higher resolutions and more advanced zooming features, but I think what I got is perfectly fine. The video looks rather ugly when using resolutions above 640x480, so I doubt having support for higher resolutions would look better.
With this, I can finally record footage from computers which may be too weak to handle any sort of recording software. I simply hook this up to a capture device and I can record in seconds. The only issue is that there is no build-in solution to audio, so an alternative is in order. I use a 3.5mm jack which splits the audio to two audio jacks which can then be plugged into a TV. It's messy, but it works.
Here's a recording of Doom's E1M1. The game is not as choppy as I remember it, but you can still see some lag.
Anyhow, time for another tangent! I've been on a web radio thing again. I've been listening to Nectarine, which is a radio that plays demoscene music 24/7. The music they play is very high quality, I love putting this in the background when working on the site.
I went on Shoutcast's webpage on the Internet Archive. The older homepage had a dynamic list of radio stations hosted with the application. Some stations are real radio stations hosting an online stream, while some are purely digital. Clicking on an entry will lead you to the station's homepage, complete with amateur web design!
Screenshot of radioparadise.com from May 2001. The station is still alive today.
Screenshot of somafm.com from December 2001. The station is still alive today. They still get thousands of listeners in their many stations, with periodic updates still continuing 20 years later.
Screenshot of japanaradio.com from September 2002. I thought this website would be dead, but it's still alive! They still host podcasts reviewing modern anime and talking about other Japanese fan stuff.
It's so cool seeing old radio stations from the list still online. A lot of them have their own dedicated apps on the app store or also host on radio apps or YouTube. Of course, there are stations on the list that are no longer online.
Screenshot of wolffm.com from July 2004. The station is no longer online. Accessing the domain today will drop you to an incomplete page, still with the Wolf FM branding, but there is no streams anywhere. They do have a Twitter and it's rather depressing. They were anticipating the new website only to go silent for years. In 2018, they tweeted out a mysterious tweet, kinda funny I guess.
Outside of that, the current climate of online radio is far from dead. There's still a lot of web radio stations that still live with the old way of connecting, just putting a URL into a media player. I still listen to NoLife Radio from time to time, RadioSEGA has their own podcasts and that's great, and there's also lists for other web radio stations. You also can't forget that actual radio stations also have their own online streams.
A more modern station takes form of a YouTube radio live stream. I personally don't like them that much, they are really restricted of what they can play due to copyright. I am glad that some of them retain the chat feature, it shows the community better than what numbers could. I like seeing the chats and seeing people praise the current song or artist. It puts a smile on my face.
Avex Trax, a massive label in Japan, had a good endless radio stream of their own music. It was cool, they played music videos and the chat had a good number of listeners. They recently updated the stream to have some anime girl animation loop. I thought that change was lame, especially since it doesn't fit the mood of majority of what they stream. Well, atleast the chat and music are still there.
Avex also had a seperate channel where they streamed eurobeat 24/7. Sometime in June, they took it down and said they'll have it back up in 2023. It's a really weird move to make. They still have a lot of DJ live streams, which is cool, but it's not 24/7 and it happens irregularly. Atleast Toho Eurobeat has it's own 24/7 stream.
I've been writing on a laptop I had in storage for a while now. It's a Dell Latitude E4300! It reminds me of when I made my sites on a bulky IBM ThinkPad X61 with it's bloated dock. It doesn't have a battery, the hard drive cover is lost, and it can barely run Windows 7, but I think it's cool. I wish I could use that X61 again, I love the small form factor. Thinkpads seem to be pretty expensive... or I might be looking in the wrong place.