| [/- Good sign on things to come.. -\] |
[15 Jul 2009|10:52am] |
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As of last night, we surpassed the pre-reg of last year's convention with still one day to go and we are way over on our hotel room block too.
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| [/- Nerdapalooza Day 3 [Day 2 Of The Fest] -\] |
[13 Jul 2009|10:50am] |
If it wasn't obvious from my constant Facebook updates, for those that read it, this has been the golden milestone of my music fan life. After last tonight I have seen a very large majority of music acts I've ever wanted to see Live. Many others on my list live over in Japan and Korea so the chances are quite slim they'll ever make it over here or I can afford to pay for the chance to see them. My third day here, the second day of Nerdapalooza 2009 kicked off and this my thoughts on who performed:
Open Mic! - A few acts jumped on to try to expose themselves to the small crowd. Some did well, some fell flat. Need to track down the last song played about Pokemon Red vs Blue rhymed in an adult matter.
mCRT - The roommate who was staying in the hotel suite. I listened to his albums beforehand and was expecting some who said crass words 300 times a minute like his lyrics in songs. While it was a crass set as expected, he warmed up the crowd quite well and for the rest of the night he was known as a phallic guy.
Emergency Pizza Party - A local Orlando group, listened to most of their albums prior so expected it to be torn up. Mostly played songs from their latest albums, didn't get to hear any from their first album which I enjoy the most but oh well, I can't dictate their playlist. It was neat for myself to see MC Wreckshin, Benjamin Bear and Funky 49 as they tore it up as I've listened to all of their solo projects.
The Great Luke Ski - A newcomer to my ears, he was boasting that he was the #1 request on the Dr. Demento Show. Like Devo Spice the day prior, this was an act that I was impressed by. A lot of humor songs based on a theme or a parody. Going to have to track down more of his stuff.
Dual Core - This is a highly respected nerdcore rapper who had great flow & control. Very good music.
ZeaLouS1 = This was an act I wanted to see. Z1 calls himself the "King of Boss Fights" and recently took a break but came out of the shadows for this show. He threw it down hard. He played a few songs then Maja jumped on stage to play some his rhymes. Z1 ended the set with a song with Benjamin Bear to sing the FPS anthem, "Headshot".
Uncle Monsterface - I kept wondering why Z hypes them and it makes sense now. When you start the show with a song called "Mashed Potatoes vs Vampires" with people actually dressed as Mashed Potatoes and Vampires, and you're not on drugs when watching this, well then, imagine They Might Be Giants on a major acid trip. MC Gigahertz came up with the term 'Absurbcore', I would call Monsterface Absurb Rock, but not in a slandering way at all as I quite amused by the spectacle.
Beefy / The Grammar Club / Shael Riley - This was a world premiere. It was the first time (and maybe only time) The Grammar Club was to perform live. The problem was that the probs with the whole show with technical issues showed its ugly head in this one. They started off great but when playing 'My Gayest Shirt', they had to stop halfway as they were off-sync and the person on drums said he couldn't get any sound in his headphones. The drummer tried a clap-along with a couple songs but just gave up into the set. While they were under the pressure of, 'The show must go on', you could see it in Shael's face about the disgust in having all of this messing up his set. To see Beefy still throw it down hard was amazing.
The Protomen - Tall Chris kept hyping this band to me and now I saw why. It was a face-melting experience. An 8 person band managed to fit on there and rock it out very, very hard.
mc chris - I always love seeing him live but it was the same exact set list when I saw him in May. Considering the large crowd who was there and knew every line from all his songs, it was like "MC Chris & the Karaoke Show." Chris kept it real even with his technical problems and fed what the crowd wanted to close the festival with some badass sweaty nerdy music.
Acts I Missed:
The House of Black & Fred Lives - Not a fan of Wizard Rock. Rob said I should see them but stomach won, went to get food during his set.
Schaffer the Darklord - I saw him Friday and even thought he played a new set at that time, I had to cut out for a bit to get some food. I know Front posted that he rocked it hard for the crowd.
When the show ended, had more whip cream on the epic experience thanks to Rob even thought I went into lurk mode. All of this, truly epic. I hope I can make it again, this was worth every dollar times 10. This is why I love nerdcore music so much.
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| [/- Nerdapalooza Day 2 [Day 1 Of Actual Festival] -\] |
[12 Jul 2009|11:15am] |
When I went to see YTCracker, MC Lars & MC Frontalot at a show last fall in Austin, I admittedly went into major fanboy mode. It was a show when I was able to see 3 artists that I think put out fantastic music. It showed to other people. Someone took notice and I got ragged on DG for showing my exuberance for the artists at that show. After that experience, I made sure that when I came down to Florida to keep my fanboy side under control. I came to see great music but I didn't want to creep out the artists afterward. Most just want to perform, shill their wares to you and then quietly leave while talking about the music with other musicians.
I feel bad that I'm not picking up as much music as I usually would and there's some music acts I'd like to support as they were quite entertaining but when I came to FL I have to choose between eating & music. Even thought I like to collect autographed CDs and tend to purchase CDs if I know I can get them autographed which every act is readily available afterward, I'm having to pick and choose.
Starting the day, I saw Maja out in the lobby just before I picked up my wristband. He recognized me since I brought him out to S.A. for SJ1.5. I went inside to see that they were still setting up even thought it was already noon. I grabbed a couple Vitaminwater, which would be my source of food for most of the day since I wouldn't have to get actual food up until late in the evening, and waited until the first went on. Here's a quick review of everyone who performed in order:
Odd Austin - First act, I would later learn he's a young kid who's trying to break in. Enjoyable but could use some work on his live performance.
My Parents Favorite Music - MPFM could have also gone as MPFS, My Parents Favorite Smurf. Tore it up, good set. They should have been later to get a bigger crowd.
Devo Spice - I was actually leaning toward skipping so I can try to get food but gave a chance when finding out they were originally Sudden Death. It was good thing I stuck around, very funny and quiet entertaining. It turns out that the guy was one of the founder of The FuMP, The Funny Music Project. Excellent set.
Captain Dan & the Scurvy Crew - This is another one that should have played later. Rapping Pirates with excellent beats even if it might be the same songs most of the time. It was still a fantastic spectacle to see.
Marc with a C - I would call it Accoustic Nerd Rock but he writes songs that most us in the room could relate to. This guy did a great set, even threw out free food & CDs during the set, which I managed to snag and get it autographed. He keeps himself low-key but I thought he wrote some excellent songs. Going to track down more of his stuff afterward.
Scrub Club Records - I've listened to most of their albums which are released free on their website. It was something you'll probably never see live as they had Sinister Six on stage and considering they live all over the US, it might be the only time you'll see them live. To appeal to the fans, they did half the songs from one of my favorite albums of there's, 8-Bit Bullsh*t. Madhatter tore it up hard but the only one who was a let down was Kabuto The Python. Don't wear a V For Vendetta/Anonymous mask and try to rap on stage until you have it figured out how.
Krondor Krew - Florida's Ninja Hip Hop Group. Dressed as ninjas, tore through their set. Managed to catch one of their prop swords that they threw to the crowd, even got it autographed. Good set, what I expected to finally see them live.
RPG Presents HDNinja and The Spork - This set I floated to sneak in some food since it was nearly 7pm at this point so only saw half the set. HDNinja wears a black mask and kept telling people he was in "Hi-Def".
Epic-1 - Another person I only caught 2nd half of his show since I was still trying to get food. This guy has great rhymes and I hope he starts to rise up more in the nerdcore scene.
The Megas - I have to admit I fanboyed HARD when I found out they were playing live. I listened to their first album 'Get Equipped' for nearly 2 months straight when I got their album as its a beautiful arrangement of Mega Man 2 done to rock music & original lyrics. When I listen to it, I can just imagine a video game rock opera going on. They rocked it hard and kept commenting during their set that they thought it was one of the best performances ever since the entire crowd, including me, knew just about all the lyrics to their songs. They rocked it hard and finallly got my CD autographed. It made my night.
I Fight Dragons - I kept wondering why Z from Hipster, please! kept going gaga over this band and now I know why. This is a band that takes rock & nintendo 8-bit chiptune to a whole new level with an amazing performance that I've never seen before. You just have to see how they can turn controllers, Nintendo Game Pad & original NES Advantage into spetacle of music. These people were very impressive and I hope they become much bigger name. Check them out if you live in the Chicago area.
YTCracker - Oh YT, I swear thsi time I've calmed down. He played a mix of old favs and new songs from an upcoming album. He said he was sick and it showed. He managed to make it through w/o vomitting but he was pushing himself. It was still a great set as expected.
MC Lars - While saying otherwise that Nerdcore is dead, the show was more like MC Lars and Featured Guests. The creator of "Post Punk Laptop Rap", I've seen Lars several times and he played just about all his well known songs from Laptop EP, Digital Gangster LP Album & his latest album This Gigantic Robot Kills. For a majority of his songs he had a lot of performers at Nerdapalooza come on stage to perform with him.
MC Frontalot - The creator of the whole genre of music that we call Nerdcore. He tore it up with a mash-up at the beginning then played through all his songs from his recent Final Boss album and other previous album. I was amused to finally see "Shame Of The Otaku" live but Black Lotus was singing the lyrics normally done by a Japanese woman. They ended the set with the anthem of "Nerdcore Rising" with Beefy & Lars performing.
It all ended at 1:30am and my feet & body was killing me. I will probably never get to see something like this in my life and still got one more day to go. Need to quickly head down, first act of freestyle acts already about to go on stage so grammar & spelling will be fixed later.
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| [/- Nerdapalooza - Day 1 -\] |
[11 Jul 2009|10:37am] |
Imagine a music fest that after you saw a band live, you can have a beer with them afterward. That's exactly what Nerdapalooza has been like. Here's the sequel of events that happened.
-Got picked up by Rob (mCRT) who I met through rhymetorrents.org [RT], staying in a decent suite and he's being my taxi service in exchange for crash space.
-Went to A Comic Shop where they were having a pre-party. They had a lot bigger turn-out than expected. They had free beer & pizza on hand but that went very fast.
-We showed up a little late but the shows ran late so in the end I managed to see everyone live. Got to see Magitek, Confuscious, Funky49, MC Gigahertz and Schaffer The Darklord (the initials are on purpose), the last act, who was the most impressive. You know its a cool crowd when most of the headliners (Frontalot, YTCracker, Lars), can just be there w/o being overwhelm by fans.
-I got back spasms from standing out in a parking lot for 3+ hours. Man, getting old.. but it was worth it.
-Afterward went over to Emergency Pizza Party [EPP] house when I saw Ham-star, mCRT and the people from I Fight Dragons try to do freestyle rapping. Ham-Star kept pwning everyone.
-I met MisterB from England who has a podcast called Letters vs Numbers. He gave me a hug since he knew my nickname from the RT board. He wanted to chat it up but people wanted to leave to get food. I might be able to open when Scrub Club goes on stage if MisterB remembers me and his verbal promise.
-Headed over to Steak N Shake since I was starving. mCRT is so broke at the moment so I said I would cover for food. We saw a lot of people who were at the show sitting at a large table. I was impressing people by opening up those spicy pepper jars at the table and popping them like candy. I Fight Dragons sat next to us. They were intrigued by it so I opened mine again and was downing a half-dozen at a time. They were still scared to try it but a couple members popped one after being antagonized. They had a difficult time eating them. I just said, "I'm from Texas, this is rather tame to us."
Went back to the hotel and crashed hard since it was 3am. It all starts in a few minutes, time to head on down.
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| [/- Last Day to VOLUNTEER! 10 Days Left To Pre-Reg! -\] |
[05 Jul 2009|12:30pm] |
If you would like a free crash space, free food & a $25 dealer voucher just for helping out San Japan, then we want YOU. We are still needing as many volunteers as possible so if you would like to Volunteer at San Japan, please register TODAY.
We are also nearing the end of pre-reg for San Japan. If you want the discount price of $35 for 3 days of fun. This is a discount price of $45 for the at-door price for 3 days. We do accept credit & debit cards through Paypal.
If you plan to spend all 3 days at the convention then you'll want to get a hotel room at the El Tropicano, the official San Japan host hotel for the convention for a discount rate of $114. Click here to reserve your hotel room right now.
For more info including a rough draft event schedule, a list of the 2 dozen guests including 5 music acts, go to http://www.san-japan.org for all the information.
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| [/- Posted using TxtLJ -\] |
[03 Jul 2009|07:34pm] |
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I just got Nolan Bushnell to autograph 3 Atari 2600 cartridges. If you don't know who he is, search for him on Wikipedia.
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| [/- Yesterday & Next Two Weeks -\] |
[28 Jun 2009|07:00am] |
Thanks goes to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mdw for the free box seats at the Astro's game, we all had a great time. With eatmymithkabobs in town, I'll be going to another ballgame in a few days then Kris, PsychoChris, Lauren & I are all heading to ScrewAttack Gaming Convention next week.
The people who are working at Anime Overload, I'll be curious on the updates especially with the sudden venue change
The weekend after that, I head out to Orlando for a Nerdgasm of music at Nerdapalooza. I cashed in my credit card points to get myself a suite so I'll be living it large.
This is going to be several weekends of hella amounts of fun.
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| [/- DJ music simulation blabbering.. -\] |
[06 Jun 2009|12:09am] |
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music |
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Togo Project feat. Megu & Scotty D. - Sunshine Dance (Latino YOKAN-Mix) |
] |
I never got tremendously deep into the Beatmania & IIDX side of Bemani as while BM was fun but IIDX went from fun then later it when into ungodly difficult mode after 4th style and unless you were amazing at button smashing 1000's of notes at a time it wasn't worth getting into. So I stopped playing it after it stopped becoming fun because if you didn't play regular 7Key you wouldn't be able to pass most songs.
Frequency was fun until you got to expert mode which became frustrating. Amplitude was fun for a bit but it jumped in difficulty very quickly.
Then, Beatmania USA came out and that was a train wreck. Played it for a week then sold it.
Now, I just watched gameplay videos of DJ Hero and Scratch. While I want to give the nod to Scratch after being beaten down by Blizzardvision for being the underdog, I wasn't terribly impressed. The controller looks like Beatmania 5key and the gameplay is a mix of original BM & IIDX 7th Style with Guitar Hero World Tour scratches. It also doesn't seem to have a high amount of difficulty to it.
DJ Hero impressed me. I think IMHO this is going to be the game that finally 'clicks' with American audience in making a DJ Simulation game that is crediable. You give people the chance to 'wiki-wiki' what people generally think what it takes to pretend to be a DJ along with gameplay that easier to get into along with the ability to scratch and do reverb in real time. If this game has the ability to allow people to mix their own tracks or do mashups then it'll turn into a hit as long as it also has a ramped up difficult later on in the game to give the hardcore fans what they crave.
TL;DR
Scratch = Beatmania 5key Redux + Better Graphics
DJ Hero = Frequency /w DJ Controller done right.
We'll know by the winter who wins the DJ sim game
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| [/- Call Out For Crash Space Night Before A-kon -\] |
[21 May 2009|05:15am] |
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Looking to see if anyone has some available crash space for Lauren & I on the night before A-kon. I already have a room reserved for Friday-Monday, just need a place to lay our heads down for one certain Thursday (5/27) evening.
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| [/- Look who's back in 2010.... -\] |
[19 May 2009|10:15am] |
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music |
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Super Eurobeat 195 - Non-Stop Mixed by DJ Ken-Bow - Special Mega-Mix ~Speedy~ |
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http://www.ushicon.com/
This is the convention that got me 'hooked'.
Coming back as an 18+ con.
We will be there. For sure.
Can I get a 'Hell Ya!'?
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| [/- Posted using TxtLJ -\] |
[22 Mar 2009|12:12am] |
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Mizuumi-con total attendance for just one day was 1416.
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| [/- Our Love Is Hard... -\] |
[09 Mar 2009|09:02pm] |
"I love you so hard." - Lauren
"How hard do you love me? Harder than Metal? Harder than Diamonds?" -Me
"I love you harder than Dragonforce."
Our Love: Harder Than Dragonforce.
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| [/- Infected Mushroom Texas Invasion -\] |
[27 Feb 2009|02:39pm] |
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music |
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TERIYAKI BOYZ - SERIOUS JAPANESE |
] |
Just stumbled across this:
March 5th - San Antonio
March 6th - Houston
March 7th - Dallas
April 9th - Austin
www.infected-mushroom.com
I just asked Jason and I might end up going to the S.A. one next week. This has been a group I kept missing when they would play in Dallas once a year but now I can finally see them LIVE. Majorly stoked.
ADDED: $13 including service charges for pre-sale tickets?! You bet I already bought those tickets.
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| [/- Bemanistyle now on LJ. -\] |
[25 Feb 2009|10:22am] |
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music |
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YTcracker - In My Time |
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For you bemani fans, I took advantage of LJ RSS feature and made ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) bemanistyledot so now you can keep tabs of bemanistyle[dot]com w/o having to check it everyday.
Also, give me some gold on there.
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| [/- A thru Z. -\] |
[17 Feb 2009|09:36am] |
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music |
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Jay-R - My Other Car Is A Beatle (L'Trimm vs. Armand Van Helden vs. Beatles vs. Gary Numan) |
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A-Z Meme From shewolfyouko (My GF can now stalk me elsewhere)
( A to Z )
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| [/- Grumbling.. but at least found golden nuggets.. -\] |
[01 Feb 2009|08:21am] |
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I recently discovered that for some reason Gmail was blacklisting an important email address so I wasn't getting any important emails for the past month nor was I getting the replies. I fixed it but now I have a large backlog to go through. I was wondering about this as guests and dealers now think I have this huge flake factor.
I swear I'll get to you. Sorry people!
Announcing first round of guests at Ikkicon. San Japan's panel is at 11am Saturday at the convention. We'll talk about SJ1.5, M-Con and SJ2.x.
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| [/- Tonight, Tonight - 01/28 - 7pm to 10pm. -\] |
[28 Jan 2009|02:01pm] |
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I will be on Keiichi.net tonight on the live request show. Hopefully comter shows up too. There is a chat room on the website (or if you know irc, irc.rizon.net in #keiichinetradio). See you peeps there.
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| [/- Meme Time - 34 questions, 34 words. -\] |
[26 Jan 2009|02:47pm] |
This week's meme of the week has now been answered.
You.
Can.
Only.
Type.
One.
Word.
Not as easy as you might think. Remember: one word answers to the following 34 questions.
1. Where is your mobile phone? --- Pockets
2. Your significant other? --- Soon
3. Your hair? --- Gone
( Rest Of The Meme )
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