MMaker

With the release of F-Zero 99, revealed to everyone’s surprise a few weeks back during a Nintendo Direct, it marks the first time F-Zero has been relevant in nearly 20 years.

Well… except for a moment not too long ago, in comparison to those 20 years. So, it’s time for another surprise reveal, one that has remained under wraps until now.

Back in July 2020, an Internet user came across a locked account on then-Twitter (now X) with the username of “supermario35th”. This account was very limited in info. It had a default profile picture, nonsensical name (aaaaaaaaaaa), and was registered only a few months prior in March 2020. What made this account interesting was not only the username, but the account recovery email. If you had attempted to request a password reset for this account, it would display a specific email, one that looked a lot like something from Nintendo. The full story of this can be found on VGC.

Most people quickly realized this was in fact an official Nintendo account, due to a combination of the email domain (n******.**.** -> nintendo.co.jp), and other official Nintendo accounts using an email with a similar pattern of the first two letters being ml followed by the n******.**.** domain, such as @SplatoonJP and @SmashBrosJP.

I was preplexed by this at the time. My rationale was Nintendo likely has enough power to not require obtaining an account this early in advance. They could simply ask Twitter to give it to them. However, this lead me down another thought process.

s/o to Chase

I immediately jumped the gun at this idea. The thought of teasing gulible Nintendo fans like this was too much of a tempting offer to resist. Out of sheer luck, I also had an alternate Twitter account with no activity that I just so happened to also create in March 2020.

“Just rename the account to something interesting, like FZeroJP, and acquire a .co.jp domain”, I thought to myself. This was going to be so simple to pull off, right? Well…

Gaijins not allowed.

This put .co.jp as a TLD out of the question and quickly limited my options. My only hope at this point was to find an inexpensive two-letter domain with a two-letter TLD. Not exactly straightforward. Luckily, after some sleuthing around, I eventually found one that still had one available: Iceland.

‘v0’ in reference to Airmoto, of course.

With a domain in hand, the only extra prep I had to do was temporarily create an email alias via a 3rd party service so I could re-verify my alternate Twitter account, and we were in business. After that, I locked down the account, made it look identical to the @supermario35th account, and while still private, tweeted what would be the reveal of the beast.

This actually still works as of this writing!

All that remained at this point was an initial bombing ground for where to “leak” this information. Of course, we had to choose Reddit. It didn’t take long to spread. ResetEra, GoNintendo, even VGC, the original outlet that reported on the @supermario35th account, brought it to attention. Some personal friends got word of it too. Even GameXplain made a video. Twice.

All this sudden news coverage of F-Zero was also building up to a Nintendo Direct only a few days away. People really believed it too.

Of course, no announcement was actually going to happen, but neither was any Super Mario 35th anniversary news, so even after the Direct came and went, there was a belief it was still real. However, I also had a personal concern that leaving it up any longer left potential for Nintendo to take the account down sooner than we could have our fun with it.

Shortly after the Direct concluded, the account was made public.

The final reveal was simply just Bigyajue.

The tweet (thank you kindly Archive.org for preserving this nearly in full!) garnered nearly 2k likes and 90k views. It also had a brief stint of coverage in Japan. Of course, most news outlets shrugged this off as “porn”, so I believe not many ultimately saw the tweet, but those that did were in for a nice surprise, especially several friends.

This has been a closely kept secret up until this point. With F-Zero 99’s release, I felt now was the right time to bring this to the public. F-Zero is now relevant again, but the story behind @FZeroJP (later suspended in 2022) would have potentially faded away otherwise. And, frankly, I still find the story funny to this day, and hope others could see the humor in it too.

…F-Zero 99 is pretty great by the way.

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Having watched this unfold over the past several weeks, I’ve become very discontent with the direction the “general Internet community” has decided to go, so I’m going to leave some of my thoughts here, off the cuff.

If you’re not informed of recent events related to Reddit, I would suggest doing some reading, but Reddit is only a very small part of the problem that concerns me. What is more so of my concern is what is now happening due to the collapse of Reddit.

As Reddit collapses, users are now looking to other avenues to migrate. What is sad to see is how users are migrating to an even worse platform: Discord.

One site that has recently cropped up, sub.rehab, lists subreddits that have migrated, many of which are pretty large communities, and many of which have chosen Discord as their platform of choice. The problem here is tri-fold:

1. Discord is in the same stage Reddit was years ago: reliance on funding.
2. Discord is meant for real-time conversation, not async communication.
3. Most importantly: no Discord content exists on the clearnet.

The death of Discord is inevitable as point 1 suggests. What irks me more is the latter 2 points. This isn’t only the collapse of Reddit, it is the collapse of genuine, searchable user-generated content.

Regarding point 3: if a community is “hosted” on Discord (which the owner does not even “host” themselves, as all content is owned by Discord), they have intentionally made the decision to hide all content in that server to only Discord users, and furthermore only Discord users who have joined that server.

Why is this problematic? Search providers and indexers, such as Google, are becoming increasingly worse as more and more advertised results are lifted to the top of the results, and genuine user-generated content is valued less. One of the most popular tricks in recent years has been to filter search results to only return user-generated content. How? By using Reddit.

This trick to filter results with site:reddit.com has became more and more important over the years, as even previously self-hosted sites have begun to drift away from this and instead migrate to Discord.

As an example I can provide from personal experience: back when I was working on The Glorious Octagon of Destiny, one thing we wanted to do was invite past participants. One participant in particular, DKCPlayer (alt channel link, as main channel as been deleted), seemed to have no method of contact. Eventually we did contact him through another past participant, but this was initially a matter of tracking down some way to contact them. During my research I eventually found they were on a Lucky Star fan forum named the Lucky Star Shrine. DKCPlayer had registered on this website, and due to how forums work, users can sometimes get PM notifications sent to the email they registered with. I made an account on this website in hopes of getting in contact with him. A few months passed and I never heard back, so I decided to check on the website. At first I thought the website was in some brief downtime period, but it was not. It was permanently offline and migrated to Discord.

bye!

The Lucky Star Shrine Forums is now a relic of the past. Thousands of posts now gone, and moved to a Discord that will soon be in the same situation. What was once a community on the clearnet is now relegated to the walled garden of Discord.

And while many sites have already gone this same route, some simply started on Discord initially, but they both neglect the problem in point 2: no async communication.

Discord is real-time, in a similar vein to IRC. Realtime conversation is great because it tends to get you answers fast and you can discuss events happening in-the-moment. What’s not great is when a user comes along, days, months, or perhaps years later, and has the same question, or wants to find that same post from way back when. And worse, is this ties into point 3: you are expected to be in that Discord server, or the information is simply unobtainable to you. This is becoming more and more prevalent in the gaming community, and I only foresee this becoming worse.

Discord is fine for it’s primary purpose of messaging, but it should not be treated like a forum, let alone a replacement for the entirety of a community, which ultimately becomes closed off from the rest of the Internet.

I created my own website and other websites years ago as a means to provide some form of existence that I am primarily in control of, one that is also searchable. When somebody limits themself to centralized social media platforms, they do not own their content. Many people seem to not realize how much of an issue this is until it affects them directly. In this case, I knew this was coming, but it is not affecting me directly, and instead affecting me indirectly, along with the entire Internet.

As perhaps a sense of hope, I do not think many people just know how much impact they could have to help improve this landscape of the Internet. I have an informational page about YTPMV/音MAD on my website. How easy is it to find this? It’s on the first page of a Google search. I have never once made an attempt to improve SEO. Now consider how this could be extrapolated to all sorts of different communities, whose communities solely exist on Discord.

These recent events have genuinely made me worried for the future of the Internet. Not Reddit, the Internet. My frustration with this has reached the boiling point and I can no longer let this go without saying.

On a personal note, I really do believe some form of action has to be taken place for the communities I’m involved in. While I have had plans for a YTPMV wiki for years, and content has already been made for it, I didn’t want to publish something half-baked. In the coming months I hope to provide a more feature rich place for this, one acting as an archive, informational database, and community, similar to the likes of Danbooru. With the death of sites like YouTube to be inevitable, and a subculture like YTPMV being increasingly more word-of-mouth, something needs to be done before years upon years of media is lost, and before everything becomes relegated to a walled garden.

Excited to say I’ve been given the opportunity to work on set visuals for the upcoming MIKU EXPO Rewind+ online event!

Specifically, myself and several others have collaborated on an entirely original DJ visual set for the amazing beat_shobon, which will be premiered during the Digital Stars portion of the expo, taking place only on the official Hatsune Miku Twitch.tv channel.

The Digital Stars portion will be streamed 11/5/2022 @ 5:25 PM PST, 11/6/2022 @ 9:25 AM JST. This livestream will not be archived, so be sure to check it out live if you don’t want to miss it! We hope you enjoy!

Artwork by Mabaki

What a ride it’s been.

I originally wanted this to be a more long form post, but after reading some drafts, I think it’s simply put best as a couple notes to not dwell entirely on the past, and to continue looking to the future, to aspire to do even greater things.

I’m humbled for this past year to have participated and assist in the International Wrestling Festival, an overdue return of form for IWF.

Many things made this collaboration incredibly challenging, but it cannot be stated enough how many things also made it incredibly fun and gratifying to work on. The journey taken to complete this collaboration, like past ones I’ve worked on, is one I will never forget.

To all of those who I worked with on this collaboration: thank you. You are some of the best friends I could ask for and I am incredibly grateful for you. It is impossible for me to describe how much joy each of you have brought into my life. I hope you all continue to do amazing things in your lifetime and I will always be here to support you.

To the viewers: thank you for watching. You enthusiasm towards these videos is something that is always greatly recognized and appreciated, and I hope for as silly as these videos are they inspire you in some form.

And to Danny Resko: thank you for everything. Thank you for embracing the Wrestling Series culture and to have had such a positive influence as you’ve had. It was an honor to meet you and I wish you the best and many more 歪みねぇな years to come.

Earlier this year, my friend Dylan James, who I was familiar with for his YTPMVs in the past and more recently having been able to work with him on the last Octagon collaboration, had made a tweet where he shared a link to a selection of music he had made for #mod_shrine on EsperNet, an IRC channel for tracker and .mod file discussion, along with one hour compos (OHC). From what I gather, in recent years it’s transitioned more into being only the latter, with OHCs being held every week, and not only limited to music made in trackers such as OpenMPT, but open to anyone using any DAW. Lots of amazing artists and musicians have joined these, such as Tee Lopes, Frums, and coda.

I was really impressed by seeing how many good tunes Dylan had put out in these OHCs, and even made an unintentional “everyday” with one of the songs. I decided I might as well idle in the IRC channel to keep up with the OHCs, though at the time I never had even considered making some my own.

Fast forward to a few months later, Dylan randomly notices I’m in the user list and starts (nicely) bugging me about trying to join an OHC sometime. Despite having made a good chunk of YTPMVs and having attempted playing a couple instruments in the past, I still to this day wouldn’t consider to be versed in any sort of music production, especially compared to everyone in #mod_shrine. Regardless, I decided to take up the challenge and give it a shot.

Half-jokingly, Dylan suggested that along with making a song, I make some visuals for it in that time as well. I figured this may be my best way to make a good first impression, since to both our knowledge nobody had ever made an “.mp4” entry before. My first entry, simply titled “do”, was made for the compo held on June 28th this year, and I think judging from the reaction it made… some sort of first impression.

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23:02:03	@rogerclark	play do
23:02:12	ashastral	Wha
23:02:12	Frums		?????????
23:02:13	dylanjames	music 2
23:02:14	@rogerclark	its a video
23:02:15	Snooze		W
23:02:19	Frums		WHY BATTLEDOME
23:02:19	Snooze		wha
23:02:20	dylanjames	lmao
23:02:20	ashastral	WHAT
23:02:27	Telperion	w h a t
23:02:28	@coda		oh wtf
23:02:31	@coda		i just opened it in chrome
23:02:46	dylanjames	opening mp4 in chrome
23:02:46	@rogerclark	sick

Despite placing 8 out of 11, I really had fun with the compo and interacting with everyone during it! I’ve joined several more since then, one of which I made live, and am still participating to the current date. It’s been a nice way to stay in a creative groove and get inspiration for not only music but other creative projects, and has gotten me a lot more interested in music production overall. Everyone who participates is super nice and encouraging, and they all make really good stuff, so I’d highly recommend giving it a shot at least once sometime, because I’m almost very certain anyone who joins once will want to a second time. We’ve since gotten other previous YTPMVers involved and I even convinced my longtime friend KP to join — so go ahead and give it a shot!

From #mod_shrine is where I ended up having the opportunity to participate in what is the second topic of this article: Club Fantastic, a completely free-to-play and high quality set of tracks for play with StepMania, intended for new players and even experienced, featuring several artists from the #mod_shrine IRC channel. It has a self-contained, hassle-free setup, so you can download it right now and get started playing right away!

Dylan approached me about Club Fantastic not long after participating in a few #mod_shrine compos, where I had the opportunity to work with a lot of great people, including Roger Clark, who currently hosts majority of the #mod_shrine compos nowadays and who I previously only knew for his programming streams and, very fitting now, a DDR documentary he had helped produce. Along with producing a trailer for the project with Dylan (which you can view below), I made some art for Can’t You Bounce!?, a song produced by Dylan under the alias team BOUNCE. The first season of the project was released last week to high acclaim from many DDR players, including iamchris4life, the subject of the aforementioned documentary.

A strange string of events brought me to having participated in both of these communities I really wouldn’t have considered before, but like most things I have gotten interested in, I think seeing a friend’s passion in the work they do and then sharing that passion and encouraging me really inspires me to try it out, and eventually it ends up being a new interest. So, along with the whole Club Fantastic crew, I’d also just like to give a special thank you to Dylan and Roger who were both super encouraging through the whole project, especially Dylan for reaching out who without I would’ve not had this opportunity.