Todays rip: 17/01/2024

Because I Love You

Season 1 Featured on: GilvaSunner's Highest Quality Video Game Rips: Volume 6​.​66

Dedicated to Satoru Iwata

More than ever these recent days, I've been thinking a lot about the SiIvaGunner community - earlier this week with 2023! YEAR OF THE PORTAL RADIO! I unabashedly wrote more about that than the rip itself. Because I find it to be such an interesting fandom to be part of, due just to how...scattered, it feels, in a lot of ways. The main hub of discussion is the SiIvaGunner Fan Discord, which by the very nature of Discord servers themselves has a sort of, fleeting and temporary feel to it - its hard to get a feel of what's what around there when there's no real way to see "popular" posts or whatnot like on other social media. And even on Twitter, and the handful of people you'll find here on Tumblr like me, there's a big divide with SiIvaGunner fans, those who just like to keep up with the silly mashups, those invested in the lore, those far too invested in both like me, and so many other subfactions - it rarely feels like we're able to band together to form a unified voice.

But whenever we are, it tends to be within the one place we're all drawn to. The YouTube channel itself.

Throughout Season 1's wild lore progression with GiIvaSunner's termination, Chad Warden, Snow Halation, and The Reboot, it became clear to us in the audience that the best way to keep track of all that was happening and to share those news with others, was to simply do it in the comments of all the videos we were already watching. All the classic jokes, new jokes, sudden twists, and places with room to speculate on what it all could mean - no matter what a rip was about, there'd always be a community there, a crowd of people always awaiting what could be right around the corner. A crowd that, directly through the events of The Reboot, had now learned to actually respect one another, and to share their love of rips, music, and gaming with one another, unified as fans.

And its that knowledge of the community's growth, the way it manages to feel both bizarrely disconnected yet simultaneously unified, that makes Because I Love You hit all the harder than it already does. Because especially back then, we were all expecting SiIvaGunner to just play along as they always do, to keep making silly rips no matter the day, keep us in the community engaged in what's being made. Yet Because I Love You, neither in title nor contents holds no joke in sight - it's a beautiful, hand-played piano cover of the titular song, paying respects to the late Satoru Iwata who passed away a year prior to the video's upload. A community and channel otherwise known for its laughs, bits, and intricate lore, were suddenly faced with a piece of darkness from the real world - the lingering sorrow that followed Iwata's death.

Just a day after this post goes up, SiIvaGunner is set to appear at this year's MAGFest, represented by a bunch of its current team members. Members of the SiIvaGunner team are more recognized now than ever before, yet back during the days of following Season 1, it was quite easy to miss the fact that the channel was ran by a group of creatives to begin with - that it wasn't just an elaborate prank by some mysterious organization of employees, or just a shameless reposting page, or whatever other conspiracy floated around back in the day. For as much fun as SiIvaGunner likes to have, for all the absurdities and shitposts and takeovers - it is a channel ran by humans, humans who just like us, were brought together by a unified love for video games. A loss like Satoru Iwata's is one that was only truly felt by those who truly do love video games as an artform - to those who, for instance, have dedicated years of their life to following a channel all about celebrating all that the music of video games means to their players, old and new.

Because I Love You, much like Telling Fish Tales, is simply a beautiful reminder of all the human love, empathy, and community that exists within this silly channel. And even back in Season 1, the community knew to set their jokes and banter aside to pay their respects to Iwata, to all that he accomplished for the history of the medium, and for helping to rescue one of the most beloved, influential and downright legenary games of its time. All these years later, and as SiIvaGunner itself enters one more Season of running, I hope we can continue respecting and honoring those that craft the experiences we hold so dear.

United or scattered, those feelings remain.

[ Sonic Blast Man II (SNES) - Stage 1 (NoPlay) ]

Get ready! There's an all new episode of Shujin Academy VGM Club and we're checking out Barry Leitch's work on the Lotus and Top Gear games! It's the most Amiga music I've ever played on one episode, and some great SNES stuff too! Listen now or get left in the dust!

Sampling Chrono Trigger, epic

2023 Album A Day: Day 69/365

Super Rite of Spring • Shnabubula

Favorite Track: Battle Against an Ancestral Opponent

Thoughts: While the focus isn’t really on Mario with this album, I thought Super Rite of Spring would be a fitting album to listen to on Mar 10, AKA MAR10 Day. This is a passion project by Shnabubula, reimagining the classic Stravinsky ballet score using the soundscapes of Super Nintendo soundtracks. While the arrangements faithfully recontextualize the original orchestral work, what’s more impressive to me is how this project showcases just how iconic those SNES soundtracks are. Shnabubula is very clever with weaving in plenty of recognizable motifs and smaller sound bites from the games he draws inspiration from, but even without any integrated game melodies, you can tell what SNES title was used for every track within seconds of hearing what MIDI instruments were used. Being able to recognize the sonic differences between the futuristic sci-fi evoking synths used for Super Metroid compared to Star Fox compared to F Zero is wild, and then you realize that it’s all being used to perform Stravinsky. It’s an absurd premise for a crossover musical project, but it is executed phenomenally and the end result is nothing short of exhilarating for those who appreciate both pieces of source material.

Watch "Megaman X SNES - So Ashamed - That's Never Happened To Me Before, I Swear - 2 Mavericks At A Time" on YouTube

Megaman X, pinnacle of the series. Well x2 and x3 too lol

If you’re looking for where to find retro games in Osaka, this is the video for you! Come on a fun walk with me through one of Japan’s geek capitals

NintenDoes

Cave / Underground (Yoshi's Island) - Arrangement https://youtu.be/9NW4wjegIw8

Not the most obscure game, but I haven't heard this track in other Yoshi games or crossovers.

Todays rip: 15/02/2024

Corridors of Vine

Season 6 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume FF

Ripped by Heboyi

Right, okay, we've had a good streak recently of covering more "traditionally good" rips for the blog - arrangements and remixes like NIGHTMARESCAPE 〜Unrestrained HyperCam 2〜 (Final Boss Phase 2), genuinely good arrangements like mlp racism anthem (comix zone arrange), even the premiere of a new Season with the Joke-Explainer™ 7000 Fusion Collab. I think its about high time we change the clock to something "stupider" - the kind of rip that reminds you just how much SiIva is driven by the wild imagination, skill, and commitment-to-the-bit of its contributors. Only within a community like SiIvaGunner's will you get something like Corridors of Vine.

With memes as a whole, there seems to exist some sort of...invisible hierarchy that defines their public perception, that I've always found really fascinating. It's not impossible to understand why this hierarchy exists: Memes like the Hampsterdance in Wario's Hampster Mine, the Sparta Remix in THIS. IS. SOLEANNA. and more call back to a different, more innocent time in internet history, wheras memes like Despacito in Plains of Des-passing-to and It's Everyday Bro in It's Everyday Lake are oft met with comments like "I hate that I love this", or other similar sentiments. Memes generally follow a trend where, once one has worn out its period of inferred relevance - typically once it stops being a niche internet activity and spreads to marketing teams and unfunny people in general - its labeled as "dead" and unwanted, left as a relic of a smaller period of internet activity. That is, of course, unless it gets brought back into fashion by virtue of nostalgia and given some sort of new spin, as we've seen happen with Doge as of late - until that then too becomes co-opted by unfunny people (this time crypto-grifters) and the cycle begins anew. Yet part of what makes SiIvaGunner as a channel so great, is that very few of the memes it uses ever reach that state of abandonment: the team is so good at finding new, inventive ways to use memes as old as from Season 1, to where they rarely feel stale. And if they do feel stale - well, then that can ironically become part of the joke, playing into just how samey and played-out the joke is for a sort of ironic appeal.

All of this is to say, that I always find it immensely funny whenever the team decides - seemingly at the drop of a hat - to begin using memes that have been thoroughly labeled as dead for years by that point. A meme like the Harlem Shake didn't have so much as a pulse by the time Season 6 rolled around even past its sole revival to relevancy a few years back from being attached to Ajit Pai - yet The Harlem Shakeover of that very season was one containing over THREE HUNDRED rips utilizing the joke, next to none of which were made with the intention of sounding bad. Funny enough, then, that one of the first events we'd see during that same Season would be doing the exact same thing to a meme that's likely far more loathed than the Harlem Shake ever was - Damn Daniel, the core joke to Corridors of Vine.

Damn Daniel is perhaps the closest we've ever gotten to having a meme that felt like a social experiment - a complete non-sequitor of a joke starring an average, marketable teen and his immaculate footwear. At the peak of Vine's age of randomness humor, the series of various videos on Daniel's Vans absolutely blew up - and immediately, there were cynics from outside of Vine, older internet dwellers mainly, who made a big point about how lacking-in-funny the videos were. Yet the guy, Daniel, made it onto the damn Ellen Show of all things within mere weeks after his debut, and in a way it kind of made Damn Daniel a symbol for everything considered wrong about Vine: its mainstream appeal and focus on short, memeable videos had created a form of shitposting that...no longer felt like they were part of a community.

That is, of course, just my summary of the opinions I gathered from all the way back in 2016 - back when SiIvaGunner itself was first revving up into gear. And I find it so incredibly befitting that it was during Season 6 that the Damn Daniel event occurred on SiIvaGunner - the Season all about letting go of the past. To have it begin with SiIvaGunner, itself a 2016 meme, acknowledging its near polar opposite made around the same time: A meme that was, for a solid while, one of the most wanted-dead memes of all, one that the internet as a whole frankly felt a kind of hatred toward during what would come to be a rather cynical, hateful year in general.

There's definitely an overarching aura of irony applied to the anniversary celebration's rips regardless, of course - part of the joke with Corridors of Vine is that its using a song otherwise so closely enveloped in emotion and vulnerability (one SiIva itself used to similar effect with 時の回廊 ＜ver. CCC＞), alongside a joke that's so bitterly remembered that its mere inclusion makes it difficult to take seriously. Yet Corridors of Vine takes itself as seriously as the concept could be, it is a genuinely fantastic YTPMV using several of the famous Damn Daniel Vines in conjunction with one another, resulting in an infectiously catchy combination of lead- and backing melody instrumentation. I do think the commitment to the bit worked excellently, and the comments of the video itself appear to agree with me - despite how beloathed Damn Daniel itself was, the time to properly acknowledge and accept it had arrived, and we were for once actually...enjoying the meme?

To circle back to the point made in the second paragraph here - the truth is, there are very few memes that wind up actually full-on dead for long. Dead memes as a concept are a label we put upon jokes we feel have ran their course, yet especially in the world of YTPMV there will always be people out there able to prove the naysayers wrong, even if the intentions are purely ironic. Ironic or affectionate, the end result is the same, isn't it? You've got a smile out of your audience through your work in adapting the meme! And through all the comments expressing their concerns over returning to the hellscape that was 2016s meme culture, those smiles - even through the barrier of the internet, felt as if they were shared by all of us. The entire event - and Corridors of Vine in particular - showed Damn Daniel a sense of affection it likely hasn't had since the days when the SiIvaGunner channel's name began with a G.

Here's to 8 years, Daniel.

...Stussy man, Damn.

Hajime Hirasawa: Star Fox (SNES) - Controls (Extended)

I always find these incredibly relaxing to watch. Something just super entrancing about seeing a literal visualization of the soundwaves.

The NES ones are great as well and really show how amazing some of the composers for that system were with limited sound channels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZAnUDAj94Y

Some flashing lights with these, not sure if it would be enough to bother anyone who is photo sensitive but I’d rather call it out than not

Today, ten years ago, I started a playlist on YouTube for SNES music. I have always been fascinated by the atmosphere of oldskool video game music, so releasing an Album influenced by that really makes things come full circle :U

Pardoner Fennel Fight | CASIO MARIO WORLD

New Game?