MMaker

Back in late October 2024, Niconico put in place access restrictions to prevent any device-restricted videos (likely containing sensitive content) from being viewed outside of Japan. The full announcement can be read here.

However, in practice, because much of the Internet’s infrastructure is grounded in the US, this ended up breaking functionality even for users from Japan. One such example of this are Open Graph embeds.

Because most social networking services proxy and cache their embeds via a web crawler, and most of these crawlers originate from an IP address located in the US, this causes embeds to break on almost every site. Niconico has no interest in fixing this, so I decided to look into creating a service to resolve this myself, much like other “embed fixer” projects that have popped up for Discord such as FxTwitter.

This service is available at https://www.nicovideo.gay/ — the root URL will redirect to my own site, but any other link, such as one to a video, will directly send you to Niconico’s site. Here’s an example: https://www.nicovideo.gay/watch/sm29250555

Currently, this service only fixes the thumbnail and nothing more. No new functionality is added, but I may consider it later. The goal for now was just to fix what previously worked.

The thumbnail fix was pretty simple: in the initial HTTP response of a Niconico video’s watch page, a JSON payload contained in a <meta> tag with the name server-response stores a bunch of data about the video, including the thumbnail URL. If you try to access a device-restricted video from a foreign IP, this data is absent. With a Japanese IP address, it is available.

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Initially, I was under the assumption that true geo-blocking was implemented and I would in fact have to host this service in Japan and access Niconico with a IP address originating from Japan. It turns out, Niconico was extremely lazy implementing this. By simply spoofing the User-Agent header with a common web crawler, i.e. Googlebot/2.1, it completely bypasses the geo-block. This returns the JSON payload contained in the initial HTTP request.

What’s even more insane about this though… is this works in any standard web browser. No VPN is necessary. Niconico geo-blocking can be defeated entirely by simply setting your user agent to that of a common web crawler.

That server-response payload mentioned earlier? It doesn’t contain only the thumbnail — it contains everything. Right now, you can watch any device-resticted Niconico video directly from an IP address originating outside of Japan.

Who knows how long this will last. Or if Niconico even cares. But for now… go watch American Gay Wrestling 2 from America while you still can!

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.

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…

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

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.