7grandmel

[7grandmel]

On March 9th 2016, three months after the creation of the SiIvaGunner channel (when it was still known as GiIvaSunner), two articles were released covering its existence by the publications Kotaku and GameZone; This YouTube Channel Is Definitely The Best Place To Listen To Video Game Music, and Someone has taken the art of trolling to a new level with game theme songs, respectively.

The existence of these two articles, with the former in particular coming from a major publication in the sphere of video game/nerd culture, are cited as making the SiIvaGunner channel notable enough to hold its own Wikipedia page.

An additional interesting factoid is that the Kotaku article, despite its levity, was written by acclaimed journalist Jason Schreier.

Schreier is today famous for his many pieces of investigative reporting and writing covering the video game industry, detailing repeated cases of unsustainable working conditions in game development studios such as Naughty Dog and BioWare, alongside having written three full books on the subject.

[7grandmel]

Rip of the week: 09/12/2024

no more nuzzles in my skin

Season 8 Featured on: The Joke-Explainer™ 7000's Highest Quality Rips: Sunset

Ripped by UUN4

Ah yes, the humble YTPMV. A format of ripping that long precedes ripping in of itself, the process of making shit purely for the sake of making it, and perhaps in hopes of making others laugh. It may as well be classified as an entirely new genre of music at this point, made yet more interesting as it was developed just about entirely by bored teenagers on the internet. I've talked aplenty about its appeal on here before, in particularly in relation to Friday Night Funkin' rips like Satin PantE's, but it bears repeating; there's a soundscape to YTPMVs, a world of crafting just about any possible soundbyte or clip into any possible instrument for a song, that gives them a noisy yet ever-so-catchy appeal all of their own. I've discussed some of my favorites, like Going Somewhere Jerma?, A streamer's tireless effort to entertain., and Mr. 2​.​718281828459045235360287471352662497757247093699959574966967627724076630353547594571382178525166427427466391932003059921817413596629043572900334295260595630738132328627943490763233829880753195251019011573834187930702154089149934884167509244761460668082264800168477411853742345442, yet I feel as if I haven't shone enough of a spotlight toward the rips that demonstrate the genre's strengths in audio appeal. YTPMVs are fantastic as expressions of creativity, and hilarious ways to utilize recognizable sources in bizarre and out there ways. Yet its a rip like no more nuzzles in my skin, a rip balancing the tightrope between quality and insanity just as tightly as its creator, that best showcases just why the genre is so compelling.

I'll be honest, I still have no idea what exactly the "Undertale Halloween Hack" even is, but after an explosion in popularity with YTPMVers across 2021 and 2022, the song No More Nuzzles in particular from it has become a huge favorite amidst rippers on the SiIvaGunner team. I did cover Hella Pummel a while back using a different track from the same project, but No More Nuzzles is pretty unquestionably the star of the show; and, like like Stickerbush Symphony and rips like Sidelined Symphony, a frequently-ripped track only equates to fierce competition. It's almost the direct opposite to the last post I made on the blog regarding [Quiet], a rip that intentionally approached a track that the channel had never ripped before; UUN4, by contrast, tackles No More Nuzzles head-on against all its competition on the channel. Adding to the YTPMV trend of the track's origin seems like the obvious route to go down at first brush, yet I could easily imagine that its fast pace and bouncing melody would make it daunting for a lot of specific sources to work properly; Nevertheless, UUN4 chose to stick by his choice of Crawling's iconic chorus opener and shows that he had the chops to handle it.

UUN4 is a ripper I've covered on here a handful of times, but its mainly been focused on his earlier work. The duology of Despacito-themed Shovel Knight rips in the form of Plains of Des-passing-to and From the Shad-slows nevertheless highlight the running trend I've found in his work, an ability to commit to executing seemingly absurd and shitpost-y ideas with such finesse to where you question why you found them absurd to begin with. There are moments where UUN4 will show you the deepest recesses of his mind – THIS RIP WAS MADE BY TEETH GANG has visuals I'll never be able to properly suppress – and yet he executes all that he does with an expert touch reminiscent to me of toonlink and Nape Mango's work in the channel's earliest months. With YTPMV in particular I find myself very wary of these smallest details; just one part sounding off, one syllable cut or emphasized wrong, can ruin the entire listening experience in ways some may not realize. This is part of the concern that may arise when imagining the combination of No More Nuzzles and a source made most iconic not by its sound but by its lyric; "Crawling in my skin // These wounds they will not heal" is as funny as it is to hear both due to the delivery of the lines, and the lines' contents themselves.

Luckily, UUN4 already has a star-studded record of excellent YTPMVs under his belt; most notably, perhaps, being OMORIBOY the PIRATE!!!☠️☠️☠️ from his own YouTube channel. With over a million views, its popularity exceeds even the original Omoriboy video its pulling from despite using a song from a relatively underground chiptune-nerd game akin to ones discussed on Viva la Robocop. Despite using a somewhat-niche source and arranging an even nicher track, UUN4 nails that which I described worry for in the end of my last paragraph by having every syllable and spoken word of its source's hilarious vocals crisp and clear without overtaking Pirate Island's melody. Given that skrillex tribute 2023 from last year also showed me that UUN4 is well in touch with that specific period of internet culture that made Crawling so infamous online, no more nuzzles in my skin became, in a way, like stars aligning for greatness.

As not so subtly foreshadowed, the greatest quality of no more nuzzles in my skin, much like OMORIBOY the PIRATE!!!☠️☠️☠️, is its ability to make such a perfect balance of the two sources featured. It allows Crawling's iconic chorus verse to remain wholly comprehensible, without having it overtake No More Nuzzles' restless rhythm. The endeavor reminds me of rips like SUNGORE, which highlights once again just how satisfying a YTPMV-adjacent rips using sources with lyrics become when the lyrics themselves are slotted in so perfectly. The differing amounts of notes used across No More Nuzzles' repeating melody and Crawling's iconic chorus bar is accounted for in a really expertly done way, condensing the drawn-outness of the initial shout of "craaaaaw-ling" to just one syllable and ever so slightly extending the "skin" at the end, while raising its pitch in line with the main track's melody. It hits you just three seconds into the rip how well done it is, only to be reiterated at the song's break past its cold-open intro at ten seconds in; two pairs of two percussion hits are turned into "craw-ling (in) my-skin" so effortlessly as to feel downright magical.

I hope nerding out over incredibly minute detail in syllable and rhythm adjustment like this (that, given my complete lack of actual knowledge of music composition, is likely hugely incorrect) hasn't bored you half to death, but the point I'm making is that; UUN4 placed REAL care toward making sure that no more nuzzles in my skin works out. The hype and excitement of No More Nuzzles is somehow heightened magnitudes through just getting to follow this hyperactive pitch-shifted voice throughout it, be it when its left into the background of the song in its midpoint, or the climactic bridge by 0:53; a lead instrument proudly proclaiming "innn my skinnn, crawling-crawliing in my skin, crawling in my skin" with perfect clarity despite its pitch and pace. The absurdity and initial gut laughter of the opening wears off mere seconds into the rip and you're left amazed at just how well the two halves compliment one another, and before even that's been able to register you're banging the fuck out to a kind of lead instrument you never thought would be possible.

Indeed, like If Pazuzu Sneezes Do You Still Say Bless You?, this is the kind of YTPMV that has forever affected my psyche, its words and phrases eternally stuck repeating in my head whenever No More Nuzzles even so much as grazes my train of thought. I think a large part of that is just due to the vibe and atmosphere that the rip creates, an abstract concept I've discussed on rips like Super Ludacris JB World and Slope Dude. Through listening to as much SiIvaGunner as I have, you come to notice that a combination of sources can either shift the atmosphere of one source to fit the mold of the other in an unexpected way like the former example, or in cases like this and the latter example create something greater than the sum of its parts. Through pitching and mixing Crawling in such bizarre ways as to eliminate so much of its intensity, removing its pauses and drawn out syllables to fit No More Nuzzles' fervent pace, it hits a vibe that moreso invokes the imagery of an angry kitty than a brooding teenager; a vibe only enhanced by the out-there choice of adding audio from Jigsaw into the deeper parts of the mix.

I could likely peel back yet more layers with the aforementioned Saw audio and the ways in which Crawling bounces around and around toward the song's climax, yet I also don't know what else I could add to the discussion other than point out that it continues to all sound fucking incredible. YTPMVs like no more nuzzles in my skin are exactly why I adore the genre so dearly, such a perfect blend of listenability and melodic perfection whilst adding a genuinely funny new twist on pre-existing music. Its the embodiment of internet users – in this case, UUN4 – operating at peak efficiency, and I'm forever aboard for the ride.

[7grandmel]

Rip of the week: 02/12/2024

[Quiet]

Season 2 Featured on: The Voice's Highest Quality Video Game Rips

Ripped by Zoom

It can sometimes be easy to forget, amidst the memes, shitposts and absurdity that define the channel, that SiIvaGunner is ultimately ran by a collective of...fans. I've made a point before about how the channel serves as an outlet for pure creativity with rips like my rip :) and vibri and joke explainer open up mario party 8 and play rudder madness together, but that creativity isn't necessarily something that's always expressed through chaos or shitposting. Which might be strange to think when attached to the SiIvaGunner channel in particular, a place in large part defined by its chaos, unpredictability, its bait-and-switchiness. And yet, as you're likely well aware, the channel has found its long-lasting appeal in large part through all the *other* ways in which its able to make one smile.

And sure, most fans at this point are probably well aware that SiIvaGunner offers so much more than shitposting, in part through its ambitious collaborations and events. Think of the cumulative explosions of talent found in works like Radical Halation, Everyday Goodbyes (SiIvaGunner Band Cover), Because I Love You, and practically the entirety of the SiIvaGunner King for Another Day Tournament. Releases of that nature are all pretty well known by the community just by virtue of how much of a spotlight they receive, just how notably they break the status quo; like special episodes of a TV show, they interrupt the typical SiIvaGunner output for an event or anniversary and provide something that feels completely different from the usual routine. But if you dig just below the surface of the average day of SiIvaGunner uploads, beneath the fun experiments and bursts of creative mashups and edits, you'll find works that almost straddle that line between the commemorative and the regular. This would be where you find projects like, for instance, the Sonic CD Beta Mix rips of Season 1 as discussed on Collision Chaos Good Future JP [CD Beta Mix], wherein the entire punchline was just the rips being sincerely excellent rearrangements of old Sonic the Hedgehog music. And its in this patch of rips in particular, these understated, easily-missed tributes, works of love and passion that slip through the cracks of the channel's everyday gut-busters and genius subversions, that we find a rip like [Quiet].

Perhaps no franchise on SiIvaGunner channel has received more love than HAL Labratories' Kirby series, a game franchise with a legacy of incredible, resonant video game music spanning over 30 years at this point. The core sound team led by Hirokazu Ando and Jun Ishikawa has produced a canvas of game sounds that all feels at once unmistakably like Kirby, yet always manages to find new ways to express it per each game – and it's an energy that the SiIvaGunner team has been happy to match since the channel's very beginning. The abstract industrial samples of Kirby Canvas Curse heard on kirby will never have drip *spits out cereal*, the cozy-blanket mellowness of Kirby's Dream Land 3 heard on Plastic Love of the Stars, the sheer density of the original Kirby's Dream Land's 8-bit instrumentation heard on Akumajō Lololo, and of course the aesthetic of the SiIvaGunner channel's main storyline, Christmas Comeback Crisis, pulling heavily from 2016's Kirby Planet Robobot.

But of all these games, I'd still wager that the sound of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards in particular sits closer with rippers than any other. It is no doubt the one I have expressed the most fondness for on this blog in particular, with its lovely sound discussed in everything from Aquadial to Float Islands (Kirby 64 Arrangement). But even amidst these frequent expressions of affection sent toward Kirby and toward Kirby 64, [Quiet] stands out in a very peculiar way; as you may well have heard for yourself this far into the post, the rip falls on the opposite end of what one would expect a Kirby 64 rip to be. It foregoes using one of the game's more popular songs such as Pop Star, Aqua Star or Factory Inspection, and it more notably foregoes using any of Kirby 64's instrumentation at all; the main aspect that has made the game such a treat for rippers to leverage throughout the channel's whole life. The rip is instead, much like the aforementioned Radical Halation, a fully ground-up arrangement of the source track Quiet Forest; a quiet, understated, oft-missed piece in the game's soundtrack given new life through Zoom's delicate touch.

Zoom is a ripper I've discussed on here before on rips like YTPMV Plant Inspection, and each time I do I approach my writing with a fair bit more diligence and caution than I usually do; put simply, Zoom is someone who left the SiIvaGunner team on bad terms. She holds feelings for the team and channel's history which I should not attempt to sway or sugarcoat; yet in the time she did spend on the channel, her love for the Kirby series' music in particular was something I felt even back in my earliest days of listening. Juxtaposed with the conflicts she'd eventually undergo, I get the impression that her love for Kirby's beautifully crafted sounds, and a desire to share said love with a sizable audience, was what kept her motivated to stick with the team for as long as she did. I find there's a beauty to how all of these separate aspects coalesce in [Quiet] in particular; It's a piece with an undeniable melancholy to it through its resonant piano leads and beautiful strings, yet one that has the lingering feel of holiday cheer echoing through the bells and jingles partway through, a sound almost as if one is thinking *back* to the Christmas celebrations in a moment of stillness weeks after they've passed. It's a conflicting, yet beautiful piece; made more touching just by the knowledge that it, in the eight years since it was made, remains the only Quiet Forest rip on the entire channel, yet one more reminder of the degree of affection Zoom had for Kirby to where even its deeper cuts received such special attention.

Not made for a punchline, an anniversary, an event or an occasion, [Quiet] is simply a sign of adoration toward one of the team's most cherished game franchises, led by one of its biggest fans aboard the team. Zoom had, ultimately, no obligation to put the piece together; no ongoing joke to continue, no deadline to meet, yet believed that Quiet Forest was worth celebrating by virtue of just being a beautiful piece in its own right. And if the end of the last paragraph wasn't enough of an indication, I believe the arrangement is absolutely stellar in a way that feels timeless even eight years later, a hauntingly thick piano sound that makes it impossible not to get the gears turning toward the past. I don't wish to psychoanalyze or investigate the lives of online strangers that I don't know nor dig up drama that's long since behind us, but...like I expressed back on BUSTER HAND, I just hope Zoom is aware of how many people her work on SiIva in particular has touched, and how evident her love for Kirby and her talent as a musician shone through in such a huge amount of her output.

Nostalgic, reverent, emotional, still, and...well, [Quiet], this rip is the kind that I'm always thinking of somewhere in the back of my mind; a rip that feels like a leakage of adoration, poured out onto the pages of SiIvaGunner's regular output for just a brief moment. These kinds of arrangements are commonplace on the internet if you know where to look, yet feel entirely different through being found where you least expect them, a cry of adoration nestled in a sea of chaos; a lone fruit of labour fallen from the tall, obstructive canopies of a never-ending forest.

[7grandmel]

[7grandmel]

Rip of the week: 25/11/2024

Slope Dude

Season 4 Episode 2 Featured on: Summer-Colored Smiles ~ The SiIvaSummer All-Star Festival Collection

Ripped by eg_9371

You may notice it's been a while since the last post, as it was with the post before it, and so on. Truth be told, the switch to weekly posting came with its own set of issues for my flow of work; mainly, that I've gotten too damn ambitious in my writing for some of these posts. I'm incredibly happy with the end results of a lot of them and feel more confident in being able to wholeheartedly recommend reading any of my post-hiatus posts than I do a majority of my pre-hiatus posts...but it also means that I'm met with self-induced hurdles on how and what to write about. I can't just cover a rip that I just find funny and neat; It has to be historical, it has to be magnificent, it has to have immaculate pathos, has to tie into the SiIvaGunner spirit or whatever else I find myself waxing on about...

No, you know what? Screw it. I'm behind on my posts anyway. We're doing a simple goodie today. Writing the same day it's posted, of a rip I just keep returning to for a good laugh, with no strings attached. Old-school style. Slope Dude.

Back on Lagplane, I mused a bit about the novelty of memes that leave us almost as quickly as they arrive, the consequences of the intensely rapid meme economy born from modern social media. It was a lot of waffling to justify writing about a flamboyant Andrew Tate impersonator, but it's hardly as if these trend-based jokes are a new occurrence on SiIva. I'm reminded of how 2016 saw a handful of rips poking fun at then-notorious online figure Keemstar, for instance – but perhaps stranger than these, are when jokes on SiIva crop up without any recent relevancy, are incredibly prominent for the length of a season or so, and then fade away just as suddenly as they appeared. Unlike Stuck Inside of FEEL SO FINE STUCK INSIDE fame, unlike the Mad Mew Mew Becoming Uncanny rips, unlike so many other jokes on the channel...the appearance of Game Dude on SiIvaGunner throughout Season 4 felt as if it came out of nowhere, made even stranger by just how limited its presence felt. We got a handful of rips, a bunch of appearances in medley rips, a cameo in a lore video, and then the tune was out just as quickly as it had entered. No relevancy, no big explosive tie to the themes or intent of Season 4 Episodes 1 or 2 in particular; just a silly theme with a handful of rippers who decided to play around with it.

Part of me wonders, akin to rips like old town ribbon race, just how much of the appeal of the joke here becomes lost without whollistic knowledge of its lore. The tale of Game Dude is one of the internet's many bizarre sidequests, long overdue for a YouTube video essay a la HBomberGuy's body of work to truly bring it all to light, yet for now still remaining obscure enough to only be spread in whispers between those who know. It was the kind of thing I myself was given the "privilege" of uncovering on my own terms after first watching a Game Grumps episode built entirely on indirectly mocking him and growing all-too-curious about what he's up to; one of many Angry Video Nerd Clones trying and failing ever so badly at being funny playing bad video games, Game Dude's last legacy online would be to be known as the guy who fled his home state when called to court over stalking his ex-girlfriend. It gives the imagery of a bumbling, somewhat pathetic figure, someone who tried and failed to find online fame through poor mimicry and wound up unable to take proper responsibility for themselves. Like the aforementioned Lagplane, it adds just that extra aura to the theme song attached to the character, the original intro to his theme songs; once a song with the levity focused on the games and show now feels as if its mocking the very person making the videos themselves. Indeed, few things are as certain as life, death, and the Nostalgia Critic effect.

All that is to say, that I get a lot of amusement from the Game Dude theme, and of all its handful of rips focusing exclusively on it I think eg_9371 hit the nail right on the head with Slope Dude. There's no gimmicks, twists or turns; its as simple as a melodyswap/arrangement rip can be, an Outertale or Jesus of the Underground that trades in the pathos and nostalgia for a complete commitment to the silliness of the bit. Slope from Super Mario RPG, like much of the game's soundtrack, already has such a bombastically silly tone to it; the buildup to the main melody finally kicking in at 0:14 in particular sells the joke so much harder, a marching band drum roll all to introduce the fucking Game Dude theme. The instrumentation feels absolutely perfect for the tune and is matched equally as perfectly by the context said tune appears in in the game, running after Booster up a slope midway through the game. The hummability of the melody, the context of Game Dude's situation and the silliness of the sound means the jokes write themselves; as one commenter says, "He is the Game Dude // He is so rude // He flees the country // when his court date is due".

As per expected of eg_9371 and his ripping prowess, Slope Dude is about as pitch perfect as it could be, an idea pursued to its logical endpoint much like Forest of Tears or dong music. Regardless of scale or time invested, the rip ends up being enjoyable in such a simple way, applying the perfect amount of levity applicable to such an absurd figure of YouTube's past. It's likely a lot of SiIva viewers completely forgot that Game Dude was at one small point considered a reoccurring meme on the channel, and he never quite got anywhere past his introduction the same way something like the similar-in-spirit Minecraft With Gadget of Season 2 got with Become as Gadget. Yet the small handful of rips featuring him were still there, all condensed all into Season 4 Episode 2 in particular; and though he's likely to remain forgotten by most fans, I'll remain a loyal Game Dude – and Slope Dude – fan until nobody else remains.

[7grandmel]

behold the power of sleep deprivation and being bored in siivacord

[7grandmel]

Rip of the week: 18/11/2024

vibri and joke explainer open up mario party 8 and play rudder madness together

Season 8 Featured on: The Joke​-​Explainer™ 7000's Highest Quality Rips: Sunset

Ripped by Memmy

So, the big Season 8 albums finally released - and there's a new Bandcamp up with it! You might've noticed that I've gone back to touch up a bunch of Season 8 posts as a result, and I've spent the past week listening through both albums as well. This release paired well with a recent thought of mine, that ever since I made the switch to a weekly schedule, I've wanted to increase my coverage of the current season's rips in particular. The problem there was, of course, knowing what rips to cover – which became a lot easier with proper album releases to sort them into. Funnily enough, I was also thinking about how long it'd been since I covered a no-frills meme medley along the likes of Memey Hell or Mother, Father, TechnoMan. And it was right as that thought struck me, as I was still listening to the album, that I realized that vibri and joke explainer open up mario party 8 and play rudder madness together had been playing in my ears all along. The stars aligned, and with everything the rip represents, with the ripper's own history already covered on the blog, it only felt right to use it as the blog's first celebration of the Joke-Explainer 7000 albums dropping.

Last time I wrote about today's ripper, Memmy, was on the ever-as-lovingly named Welcome to 2021! They finally invented summers that hurt motherfuckers😂 only at sonicforces​.​com; a rip I also happened to pick on a whim from having heard it on an album listen. What I wanted to emphasize with my coverage of that rip in particular was the love that rippers like Memmy express in the act of ripping for SiIvaGunner, not just through shooting for the stars and creating unbelievably impressive passion projects, but through simply making something with their own hands and having an evidently amazing time doing it. Despite my own obvious adoration for the channels' large-scale projects such as the Christmas Comeback Crisis, The Life and Times of Wade L.D., and more, Seasons 7 and 8 of SiIvaGunner in particular have been eye-opening for me for making me realize just how much I also enjoy seeing rippers simply engage in doing what they love. Running this blog as a means to highlight the "best" SiIvaGunner rips is in some ways misleading, because the channel is only as good as it is through the totality of ALL of its contributions, through the shared love that its entire team has toward the simple act of creating things for the love of the craft. With Season 7, it was RIP^2 and arrangements like The Paragoomba and the Wiggler that made that love more evident than ever before; with Season 8, however, it's all been due thanks to the presence and continued adoration of one little robot girl.

Season 8 as a whole is one I've previously on described as the "silliest" SiIvaGunner Season – as made evident through rips like slider dank version – and I think that's in huge part because of how thoroughly the team adores The Joke-Explainer 7000 as the new channel master. With Season 6 being in large part about confronting the expectations placed upon the team, with Season 7 being a full-year celebration of where those expectations came from and why we all adore the channel, Season 8 has felt like a year-long party of creative freedom, unrestrained from the past and free to play around in all sorts of ways at the drop of a hat. And of course, at the center of it all sits that one very silly little robot. As a channel host, JE-7K toys and plays with us in the audience, while the team in turn toy and plays with her own appearance at a staggering rate, seemingly just as enamored as we in the audience are by all of the Situations they put her through. As a result of all this, though the year may have been light in continental developments, it's given us some all-time classic, hyper-silly events, from April Fools 2024 covered in super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont to the Justin Bieber Baby anniversary celebration covered on Super Ludacris JB World; each one fulfilling the standard routine for SiIvaGunner takeovers, yet coming alongside new outfits and posts just having fun with the idea of the Joke-Explainer 7000 running it all herself. Put simply, this year has felt radiant and joyous in a way I'm unsure if I've felt from the channel in quite a while.

I may well be looking into things too deeply just to make a point about Season 8 in particular (the channel has ALWAYS been chaotic, after all); but no matter the year, few rippers on the channel's team embody that chaotic, individualistic silliness better than Memmy. And while on Welcome to 2021! They finally invented summers that hurt motherfuckers😂 only at sonicforces​.​com I moreso focused on her love for the simple things, hers and many other rippers' drive to do whatever they feel like doing, it's with vibri and joke explainer open up mario party 8 and play rudder madness together that we end up getting closer to highlighting her full potential, the true machinations of her twisted mind. That individualism is certainly still present in this rip; The Vib-Ribbon game itself, for one, is one with only a dozen rips on the channel, with half of them having been made by Memmy herself throughout the course of just this year, pretty plainly showing her steadfast dedication to championing what she cares for. You may also, on a separate note, recall the aptly-named Season 5 rip my rip :) that I wrote about a while back, but might well have forgotten that the request to write about it was made by Memmy herself.

And so, for vibri and joke explainer open up mario party 8 and play rudder madness together, it's as if all of these separate aspects; Season 8's penchant for hijinx, the team's adoration for the Joke-Explainer 7000, a ripper's individualistic drive to make whatever she feels like, their love and championing for games that might otherwise be left forgotten a la Violet Snow Memories, and Memmy's fascination with the soundscape of sheer insanity. Laugh & Peace from the original Vib Ribbon already has an insane, sample-heavy vibe to it, but the samples, pace and madness of vibri and joke explainer open up mario party 8 and play rudder madness together give it almost a 100gecs-ian, hyperpop vibe, a cacophony of noise that would almost CERTAINLY kill a Victorian era child upon first listen. It's not a soundscape I'm at all averse to – FEEL SO FINE STUCK INSIDE is still one of my favorite Stuck Inside rips from the year – and there's a certain additional magic to this kind of sound once you've been made familiar with the artist behind it and just where all these desperate samples come from. If you've been following the channel's uploads through this year in particular you may well recognize at least a good handful of these samples; and much like the channels' rips themselves, even if you don't recognize one it all still just adds to the beauty of the rip's totality.

The driving force of the rip's first section, if nothing else, would be the voice samples of the rip's titular character and channel's beloved host; the Joke-Explainer 7000 voice clips as recorded all the way back in Season 4 Episode 1 by infrequent contributor Jea. For as recent as the character's time in the spotlight has been, it's easy to forget just how much her performance in Welcome to SiIvaGunner! and more really do add to the charm of the character, this softspoken yet aptly mischievous voice fitting her current-Season characterization like a glove. She wants to manage and help out, but can't help herself from pulling pranks and messing around; and just as quickly as she's introduced in vibri and joke explainer open up mario party 8 and play rudder madness together, she's tucked away and replaced with samples from all over the place. Be it the Brainless Kitty fart sfx, Love Live music, or what's probably the most standout sample; a now-infamous clip of a SpongeBob reviewer yelling about THE SECURITY SYSTEM TAKING CONTROL OF SQUIDWARD'S HOUSE. It's the kind of thing that I don't think makes much sense to try and explain the comedy of – you might argue that applies to this rip as a whole probably – and yet it's just another level of deep-internet brainrot that the rip blends in with the rest of the noise so effectively. Something about hearing this absurdly angry rant over a cartoon be sampled, mixed and then pitch-shifted to the melody of the aforemention Season 8 meme Stuck Inside just feels like such a perfect bow put on the Season as a whole, so effortlessly able to not take anything seriously and twist and conform to whatever would be the funniest bit to do in the moment.

I hope you understand just why I felt this rip was such a perfect choice to write about for this Season's big album drop; and, as an extension, why this post has taken a fair bit longer to come out than usual. Like the channel itself, underneath all of vibri and joke explainer open up mario party 8 and play rudder madness together's cacophony and noise is a genuinely really fun listen, a driving rhythm from the original Laugh & Peace still carrying the track through across the finish line. It feels at once completely stupid and thoroughly fascinating, so many layers of subversion from what anyone would think an average SiIvaGunner rip would be to where this would NEVER have been released back in Season 1 or Season 2, yet feels completely at home with the outrageous rips we receive multiple times a week nowadays. It's the spirit of one ripper doing whatever the fuck she feels like, in a year where that mentality feels more encouraged than ever before, using both a song and game that already felt as if it was operating under that very same mentality; and it's a rip that I'm all too likely to cite as one of the year's hidden gems by the time it's over.

And also, like, Memmy was both one of the first rippers I was made aware of as being a fan of this blog AND one of the few rippers who are still using Maroon 5 deep cuts like Sweetest Goodbye and I Can't Lie – I HAD to shout her out on here just one more time... even if I admittedly still don't know where exactly Mario Party 8 fits into vibri and joke explainer open up mario party 8 and play rudder madness together

[7grandmel]

the sillies

[7grandmel]

As part of The Joke-Explainer™ 7000's Highest Quality Rips: Sunrise & Sunset, I put a (slightly updated) version of the 3D model I used in Main Theme - Five Nights at Freddy's 57: Freddy in Space as bonus material.

It's not perfect by any means (I am very much an amateur at 3D modeling so the model contains a lot of jank; I would like to make a second version of her eventually), but I remember some people wanting it, so here you go.

[7grandmel]

A collection of Roblox bonus images found across the duo of recently-released The Joke​-​Explainer 7000​™​'s Highest Quality Rips albums.

The files are named image (4).png, image (5).png, image (7).png, I'm always here to help (bobthetacocat).png and image.png.

Based on the fourth image's name and the Roblox setting, all five are likely to have been taken by BobTheTacocat, who made the Joke-Explainer 7000 model for their rip Main Theme - Five Nights at Freddy's 57: Freddy in Space

[7grandmel]

Blog Update - 25/11/2024

TL;DR: New posts are coming! Just managing a lot of different things right now. Writer's block sucks.

This is gonna be a pretty short one, in part because I don't have much to say, and in part due simply to the writer's block I'm currently under. Since switching to the weekly post schedule, my aim was to put out each post on Mondays, and while I do still date posts by each week's Monday, they've more often than not missed that deadline by quite a while. It's not something that particularly matters – I'm still getting a post out for every week, and I'm able to dedicate more time and thought to writing them as intended – but it has definitely irritated me personally that I haven't been able to follow the schedule I set up for myself.

Worse yet, due to a lot of things going on in my life (studies, looking for employment, personal life, the usual), I feel as if I'm doubting my writing more than usual. Rest assured, I have tons of ideas for the blog and for the blog's future posts, over 20 rips already sitting in the drafts - but I'm currently having difficulties in motivating myself to hunker down and put it all to the page.

All this to say; I'm really sorry that it's been 9 days since the last post, especially since said last post was already 5 days late itself. I'm still chipping away at it, and I want something to be up as soon as tomorrow if possible – but going forward, there's a possibility you'll see some shorter posts crop up during this busier patch.

[7grandmel]

what are some of your favorite siiva uploads? since i know its impossible to pick just one, lol

for me (at least off the top of my head, because i know i could think on this question forever and ever) its the KFAD Direct Beta Mix, What the Grox Beta Mix, and Sex - Steve Harvey ^_^

Thank you for the question! It made me realize that there's probably a good few people who also have questions like this for me to answer. Check out the latest #updates post for more!

My FAVORITE SiIva uploads...even in putting it in plural, that's going to be a very very tricky one ^^;.

Right off the top of my head though, due to how invested I've been in the channel's lore for so long, The Disappearance of Wood Man - A SiIvaGunner Christmas Comeback Crisis Side Story struck a really personal chord with me...It was like the response I'd waited years to hear, such a raw and emotional look into the team's thoughts and feelings after so much change had occured. Then, RIP^2 as a whole is also such a personal album to me on so many levels, with The Paragoomba and the Wiggler still getting me genuinely emotional even today. There's tons of rips from Season 2 in particular that I have incredible nostalgia for, such as Your Silent Reality and 【＝３】e-MUNO Disco (vs. 音MAD AGENT), and I really do treasure the emotional highs of following the King for Another Day Tournament and seeing rips like Sunday Morning drop for the first time.

Generally, though, it's those very personal projects that still sit with me and that I treasure a lot, like Everyday Goodbyes (SiIvaGunner Band Cover) all the way back in Season 1. I think my personal all-time favorite memory from following the channel, though, was the day when Prologue - The SilvaGunner Christmas Comeback Crisis first dropped: its release caught me by such surprise in the middle of study hall, that I audibly exclaimed and had to apologize to the rest of the room for being loud...

Thanks again for your question, Ovengoats!

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 06/05/2024

Wake Up! It's Friday!

Season 8 Featured on: The Joke-Explainer 7000™'s Highest Quality Rips: Sunrise

Ripped by AdamCrossing

Tentative rip name: Last Freight-train Night

Huge apologies in advance for not posting this on a Friday or even a Saturday. The joke has been completely missed. I hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me 😔.

Ah man, melody swap rips. They're always fun, right? Even in the channel's earliest days, we had stuff like SNES Mini Circulation, Earth, Wind & Bombs and Akumajō Lololo expertly showing off their inherent, obvious appeal - leveraging the instrumentation of one track to bring out a whole new vibe to another piece of music through rearrangement. But especially early on, and even nowadays, you'll notice that some games get favored above others for melody swaps. Super Mario 64, the Pokémon series, NES and Game Boy games, Plok! - granted, the reasons for a lot of these are very easily explained, but with games like Plok! in particular the recent emphasis has come from a select few rippers' absolute enthusiasm for the game and the unique soundscape it provides. Tons of Plok! rips are absolutely mindblowing as a result of this passion, and I intend to cover some of these in the future no doubt - but Wake Up! It's Friday!gave me many of those same thoughts upon first listen whilst being from a game I never would've thought would be one befit for melody swapping.

Again, to clarify: It's perfectly understandable why those aforementioned select games get so many melody swap rips made of them. Pokémon in particular has at once such a nostalgic, distinct yet versatile set of sounds that has allowed for a ton of creativity in how rips are done, with everything from the piano-driven peacefulness of Blue Mareep to the synth-heavy insanity of Plasmaseeker. The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, meanwhile, is a game I only truly associate with two instruments - the pan flute and the violin - and that paired with its relative obscurity compared to other often-ripped games made me understand why all the chips wouldn't be placed on it in particular. Clearly, I was underestimating both the game and AdamCrossing's sheer range as a ripper here - the guy has genuinely impressed me with his arrangements of the New Super Mario Bros. series' music in particular, and yet I mistakenly assumed that to be the only trump card in his deck. Then again, as both those games and Spirit Tracks work with a smaller, more quirky set of playful instruments, I suppose Wake Up! It's Friday! only makes sense for him to have tackled; nevertheless, the rip wound up positively blowing me away in its arrangement, whilst still finding a way to stay absolutely faithful to the sound of the game its taking from. It's pan flutes and strings, yes, but they're leveraged to a far greater degree than I could've ever imagined.

If you presented me with a choice of song to use in a melody swap for Spirit Tracks' Overworld Adventure theme, I wouldn't have been able to give you an answer - yet had I given you one, it would've probably been incredibly far off the mark from what Wake Up! It's Friday! lands at. It's a full arrangement of Katy Perry's Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F), the absolute pop sensation released just two years after Spirit Tracks itself - yes, in other words, this is a PAN FLUTE arrangement of hit song Don't Mine At Night. Like, maybe I'm just easily impressed, maybe I'm just far too attached to Spirit Tracks' sound from playing on its stage in Smash Bros. all too much, but I have to commend Wake Up! It's Friday! just off of its concept alone. But, come on now, you've heard Thwâmpröck Desert - you KNOW that Season 8 has been delivering in far more than just concept alone.

See, the rip isn't just pleasant for its novelty, it feels as if it fully realizes itself in so many small little ways. There's of course the persisting banjo-like backing from the original keeping a playful, plucky adventuring tone, but it's in listening in close that you'll hear something truly special. You guessed it: That chuff-chuff-chuffing sound persisting through the entire track is the sound the player's train makes in Spirit Tracks when moving at the highest speed, whereupon it starts to sync up with the Overworld Adventure theme - in other words, the sound effects are a separate element from the actual music piece, yet Wake Up! It's Friday! goes the extra mile in including it just to make it all feel more...right. The cherry on top of even that is, of course, the sounds of crossing signals fading in and out of the song at various points throughout its runtime. This isn't referencing anything in particular from Last Friday Night, it's a completely original touch by AdamCrossing, but it adds SO much to the listening experience: Pair it with the other two things mentioned in this paragraph, and it starts to feel as if this track is truly taking place within Spirit Tracks itself, a sense of immersion far above what was necessary is conveyed through just these small touches alone. It stimulates the brain in ways I never thought I needed - and in terms of sheer listenability, it all just helps give the arrangement a real sense of tempo, befitting of the dance-able pop song it's an arrangement of.

Season 8 is a lot of things, and I'm still trying to ascertain what to truly make it of four months into its run. But if there's one constant I'm sure of, its that the channel's quality has basically never been higher - rips like Wake Up! It's Friday! are dropping left and right without being part of larger events, as if to just casually remind you of how good of a place the channel is in right now. And having those explosions of quality be attached to games which really haven't seen all too much action on SiIva compared to the big boys, to the channel's "hidden gem" games as it were? Be it back with Plok! in Season 6, or all the countless other examples over the years since, that always just fills me with such joy. Every game is someone's favorite, and every someone has the potential to be a SiIvaGunner contributor - it only takes one person's love for a game to get rips as carefully made as the works of AdamCrossing's, among which Wake Up! It's Friday! is easily one of the best.

[7grandmel]

A collection of Roblox bonus images found across the duo of recently-released The Joke​-​Explainer 7000​™​'s Highest Quality Rips albums.

The files are named image (4).png, image (5).png, image (7).png, I'm always here to help (bobthetacocat).png and image.png.

Based on the fourth image's name and the Roblox setting, all five are likely to have been taken by BobTheTacocat, who made the Joke-Explainer 7000 model for their rip Main Theme - Five Nights at Freddy's 57: Freddy in Space

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 09/02/2024

Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab

Season 8 Featured on: The Joke​-​Explainer 7000​™​'s Highest Quality Rips: Sunrise

Ripped by Bruh de la Boi, ChickenSuitGuy, circunflexo, Cosmic199X, Edgi, Ellie53, Jiko Music, Memmy, Pan Visuals by BobTheTacocat

Look alive, everyone - Season 8 of SiIvaGunner has now officially premiered!

It may be a bit rich to say as someone running this blog, and with such deep investment into the channel, but...Season 7 really did bring me back into SiIvaGunner in a way I never quite thought would be possible. I'd sort of just accepted with Season 4, Season 5 and Season 6 that the channel had found a new direction: one that I was still VERY much a fan of, yet not quite the one that had "sold" me on the channel the same way Season 1, Season 2 and Season 3 did. I felt as if I was missing that energy of just...sheer visceral excitement for the future of the channel as a whole from the later-year seasons. There was instead a lot of per-event excitement, tons of little events to enjoy and still fun to be had in speculation of what could happen next, yet that aforementioned optimism still felt like it...missing, for a long time. And funny enough - last I discussed that feeling in particular was with Patched Plains Fusion Collab, a rip that Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab very much seems to be intentionally aiming to evoke.

Part of the reason that Patched Plains Fusion Collab works so well for me, and indeed why Season 2 has long sat as my favorite in the channel's life, is that feeling of raw forward momentum it conveys - the excitement of the entire fanbase thankful that SiIvaGunner hadn't actually ended, distilled into an anthem of so many different styles cheerfully pushing us forward. It was that sort of progress that, back when they were airing, I felt was sort of absent from Seasons 4/5/6 - the SiIvaGunner AI was still running things, Wood Man was still off effectively doing sidequests, and though the rips had obviously gotten better the cynical side of me couldn't help but feel a bit sad at how - for a lack of a better word - "predictable" it all felt. And to be crystal clear: A lot of those feelings have obviously changed for the better over the years. I love all of SiIvaGunner's Seasons nowadays, and I realized eventually that the prior-mentioned cynicism toward the new direction wasn't as fun as just, appreciating and LOVING the stuff to come out from the new seasons for the excellence that they were. And funny enough, I feel like that exact mindset is exactly what made Season 7 work so well for me.

Wheras Season 2 is one I remember for its feeling of constantly moving things forward at a rocket-speed pace, Season 7 excels by doing the complete opposite - the Year of Grand Dad is, at almost every possible turn, defined by its sense of self-celebration, a sort of "Sonic Generations"-type of tribute to the entire channel's life. Be it with RIP² as covered in SING A SONG ABOUT HOPES AND DREAMS, the entire incredible April Fools event I've alluded to within Violet Snow Memories, a newfound sense of chaos clearly inspired by Season 1 as shown in Hidden Headtoilets (skibidi toree 2) - yet with Seasons 4/5/6s newfound touch for genuine quality arrangements as found in rips like Forest of Tears. And, atop it all, the long-awaited continuation of the storyline last progressed back in Season 2 with the Christmas Comeback Crisis' eleventh episode. With such an incredible smörgåsbord of content on offer, it feels damn near impossible for me not to consider Season 7 my all-time new favorite.

And that optimism for the Season, that optimism for the future, is why Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab struck such a chord with me, with its release just a few days ago. With Season 7's ending, the status quo of the channel has been fundamentally altered in a way it hasn't truly been in a long while. For the first time ever, the long-present side character "Joke-Explainer™ 7000" is in full charge of the channel - her most prominent role ever despite having been around since all the way back in Season 1. I'll likely be dedicating another Season 8 post in the future to talking about her in particular with the same level of detail I did back in Vote Responsibly!!, but the context I'll provide for now is that her theme song, Magolor's Shoppe, has been a familiar, comforting tune to many a SiIvaGunner viewer since way back in Season 2. To see Patched Plains Fusion Collab not only get a spiritual successor, but one building upon a character and theme we've long grown attached to, means something so much to me and so many others. The added visuals, of her doing her duty with adorable Kirby-themed artwork as textboxes, are truly the cherry on top of an amazing collab.

From referencing the very beginnings of the channel with an initial arrangement using Pokémon Ruby, to using familiar-yet-infrequent sources such as Thwomp Volcano and Snail's House (jokes "worth explaining", so to speak!), to perhaps even hinting at what jokes are to become even more frequent in Season 8, such as the GOAT of all new jokes I Show Meat - I was long anticipating what the official premiere of Season 8 would be, and Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab was everything I never knew I wanted. My excitement for Season 8 is perhaps higher than for any other Season in the channel's long history, and I can't wait to get to share that excitement with all of you.

[7grandmel]

Rip of the week: 11/11/2024

Radical Halation

Season 2 Featured on: Rips of Christmas Past Also on: Now That's What I Call Quality!

Ripped by wheel able, wolfman1405, David Morales Boroff

Birthday Special!

Anniversaries, anniversaries...how they come, how they go. This week in particular is a pretty special anniversary, not just for the release of hit game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but for the release of ME: My birthday!

It's surreal how vividly I still remember when I wrote Your Silent Reality for my last birthday, covering a SiIvaGunner rip that's sat with me long since I first heard it due to the emotional ties I have to the material it utilizes. I began this entire blog as a way to give me writing practice, and I'd like to think I've grown a fair bit as a writer in the time since; but nevertheless, even a year and a half since the blog's begun, my emotional attachment to Season 2 of SiIvaGunner remains as firm as ever. The channel's output has grown to be more impressive than ever before, and last year's Season 7 in particular has had me in a chokehold with rips like Beautiful Dreamer (late but- happy birthday Minindo!) and The Paragoomba and the Wiggler...and yet, I will always keep coming back to the rips of that second season, to the rips that defined my ride-or-die fixation to the channel, and to the season that more than any other gave me feelings for things I didn't even know I was capable of caring so deeply about. Indeed, in direct contrast to last year's birthday rip, Radical Halation was the kind of gift I never knew I needed, yet one I will never stop treasuring.

Way back when I covered the rip Eterna's Cocoon, I wrote about how special it is to me to know that rippers on the team will continue to champion the works which have long since faded from public consciousness. Sure, SiIvaGunner leverages then-current events for comedy a fair number of times; a previous post on the blog's covered one such example in Lagplane, and one of the channel's most revered events back on Your Best Nightmario only came about as a result of a viral meme from that same timeframe. Yet just as often - if not moreso - the channel operates within its own bubble of time, with no care in the world for relevance or target audiences, a team making rips in huge part just for their own enjoyment. Take, for instance, the 1999 SquareSoft JRPG Chrono Cross; a game that, six years before its remaster in 2022, still existed as nary but a memory to many. Nevertheless, it was a memory treasured by two rippers in particular, a duo who had already impressed me time and time again throughout the channel's first two years. Be it Sog-Gee Ambiance, voiceless, Kass' Theme, or their previous collaborative work on 28 Saves Later, wheel able's stellar touch for arrangement and wolfman1405's unbelievable talents as a jazz performer are both some of the absolute highlights across the channel's early run. When the time came for one of the most important anniversaries relevant to the SiIvaGunner channel, the two took the opportunity to also honor a forgotten classic they both cherished – and in doing so, Radical Halation ironically became one of the first times I ever engaged with Chrono Cross. With the game's anniversary also just two days away, and the rip lying so close to my heart, I see no better time than to reciprocate that passion all these years later.

The sheer quality of Radical Halation should be made evident just a few seconds into listening; this is, as Wolfman1405 in particular specializes in, a ground-up cover and performance of the original Radical Dreamers ~ Unstolen Jewel theme from Chrono Cross. The original theme already had a shockingly acoustic sound to it for its era, really plucking at the emotions just a few chords in; that emotional rawness in the track may well have been the core reason why it was chosen to celebrate this anniversary in particular. Indeed, the anniversary I alluded to beforehand as being one of the channel's most crucial is that of the very song the rip title alludes to, the song that sits at the very emotional core of SiIvaGunner's entire being: Snow Halation from Love Live. I wrote back on Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix) that the Grand Dad meme is like the beating heart of SiIvaGunner's creative spirit, being the core that created the entire channel; by that same logic, I feel as if Snow Halation is like SiIvaGunner's *emotional* core, its "soul" for lack of a better term. Grand Dad may be the spark that sets new rippers into action even all these years later, but Snow Halation was the first thing that people got EMOTIONALLY attached to on SiIvaGunner – it was the core behind its first story arc of SiIvaGunner: Rebooted, it continues to effectively serve as the "protagonist" to the Christmas Comeback Crisis storyline – and its use throughout the channel continues to feel like a reminder of that same attachment, the one that the channel has to all of us. It's an openly sappy, almost overbearing song, yet one that represents so much about the love of remixing and rearranging that SiIvaGunner continues to focus on all these years later.

You take that emotionally-charged melody, put it in the hands of two stellar arrangers, and inject it into an arrangement of an emotional melody the soundscape of which said aforementioned rippers already appear to hold a close attachment to, and the end result is exactly what Radical Halation shows us. Throughout 2016, throughout the entirety of Season 1 of SiIvaGunner, we as the audience had gone on such an emotional rollercoaster regarding out attachment to the channel, its creatives, and its memes, with Snow Halation at the very center of it all; with the channel returned just in time for the holidays, it also happened to return just in time for Snow Halation's anniversary on December 22nd, ever so coincidentally aligned with the time upon which we were all wholly, earnestly in love with everything the song had come to represent. Many months before Season 3 and beyond would begin feeding irony into the discussion of appreciation for these melodies, right as the Christmas Comeback Crisis was just kicking into gear, and just long enough after the channel's return had occurred to make us truly accept that it was back, Radical Halation's release window struck gold in a way only truly comparable to the rips of the Season 1 finale a la Tupac's Empty House and THANK YOU FOR RIPPING.

I'm of course not aiming to frame Radical Halation as just being "the right thing at the right time"; beyond that emotional attachment, the simple fact of the matter still remains that its a hauntingly beautiful arrangement, even close to 8 years later. Radical Dreamers ~ Unstolen Jewel's beauty sinks in just from the acoustic guitar lead-in, and is only emphasized by the time the rip's true "twist" sets in, of its lead melody being that of a Snow Halation arrangement played on violin. The two halves form an incredible, inseperable whole; not confined by the restrictions of a mashup, the hand-made nature of this arrangement means that both the guitar and violin segments are free to fill in for one another, to emphasize the sounds of Radical Dreamers ~ Unstolen Jewel or the melody of Snow Halation to different degrees on a moment-to-moment basis. I particularly love the section after the Snow Halation melody first plays - at around 0:47, the violin seamlessly leaves the Snow Halation melody and instead takes cues from the source track, yet never stops feeling as if its all from the same arrangement, even upon returning to Snow Halation at 01:10. The rip throughout has the same feeling as the best and most carefully-constructed mashups of today a la Eazystep or Maroonbound whilst in reality being a completely new arrangement and performance.

The visuals of the rip are of course just the cherry on top of it all. Viewers are made immediately aware that the rip is going to be something special not just through its audio, but from the cold-open visuals of pitch blackness fading into a view of the ocean from underneath the surface, the logo fading in just as the melody's played its first few notes. These visuals only change once Snow Halation is first quoted in the audio, changing from the undersea depths to the view of a beachside in winter, a quite literal mash-up of Chrono Cross' dreamy seasides and the snow-covered comfort of Snow Halation. None of this visual detail is particularly "necessary", it's not here to further a punchline; rather, in the spirit of rips like i love(d) you, the visuals serve to punctuate the emotional core of the rip. Visuals in any rip are a surprise, an often-time momentous occasion, and Radical Halation combines that knowledge with its purpose of celebrating Snow Halation's first-ever anniversary celebration on the SiIvaGunner channel to create a rip that, even with no ties to Chrono Cross at the time of watching, I just KNEW would be special back in 2016 just three seconds in.

All these years later, and a rip as special, profound and heartfelt as Radical Halation still manages to feel...forgotten about, in many ways, sitting at less than 25K views as of writing. In that sense, Chrono Cross may have been a more apt game to use for this tribute than its rippers initially thought; all these years later, despite its clear emotional core, the passion that went into it and the release of its remaster, the game remains a jewel swept away by the tides of the industry. We're soon nearing nine whole years of the SiIvaGunner channel's run, and with every day I run this blog I'm made all the more aware of how many gems just like Radical Halation continue to slip by the cracks, how much joy and love the channel's team crams into so much of its output despite never having any sort of guarantee that its audience will reciprocate that love.

But, even all those years ago, Radical Halation did reach me. And even so many years before the idea of this blog was even a consideration, before I was knee-deep in thought about the channel's existence and the people involved in its upkeep...I knew that I wanted to thank its creators. I knew that it was a rip that could only have been made out of outpouring love; love for a game years old, love for a channel that was still standing shakily, love for a leitmotif and its impact on an audience...and most of all, the love of creating and performing music outright.

I held onto those thoughts, kept them stashed away in the back of my mind – yet I feel as if subconsciously, they were part of why wolfman1405's arrangement and performance of Sunday Morning, three years later, hit me as hard as it did. The song was different, the subject was different, the context was different, the "joke" was no longer there; and yet it was as if Wolfman1405's creative, emotional spirit, that I'd felt so prominently years past, had never left. Put simply, beyond its inherent qualities that I'll forever applaud wheel able and wolfman1405 for, I feel...indebted to Radical Halation: it may well just be one rip, but its one of the most core pieces I can think of for why my love for the channel continues to this very day.

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 08/01/2024

You Are Book Smart

Season 7 Featured on: Rips of Christmas Present

Ripped by circunflexo

Tentative rip name: You Are Book Smart

I'd like to wish a late happy Jay Eazy day to all who celebrate, I hope you spent your time together with your dogs like Mega Man fr fr

Okay, but, like, sincerely, I like many others have over the last year been completely enamored with all the edits and attention given to Jay Eazy, and the frankly hilarious promotions he does for his music. The guy's a rapper in a sea of others but is frankly a marketing genius - he attaches popular games and anime to his songs, such as Grand Theft Auto, Demon Slayer, or indeed Mega Man, and promotes them through TikToks that are so absurdly strange that your only logical reaction is to laugh. In 2023, he struck absolute gold, and Mega Man went absolutely viral - after, of course, it dropped on January 7th.

There's just something so inherently funny about Jay Eazy that's...hard to describe, especially if you haven't been down the rabbithole of edits people have done of the Mega Man promo video. Be it the setup of Jay Eazy dropping in on someone else's grief to promote his music whilst running away from them, The Very Perculiar Way That His Captions And Tweets Are Written‼️, or just the corny sound to the songs themselves - Jay Eazy is immensely fun to post about, and post about him SiIva did, just one day ago. January 7th, 2024, was dedicated entirely to the king of money smarts himself - and of all rips posted, You Are Book Smart became my favorite just about immediately.

The thing is, we've had a lot of rips, and even some events, kind of similar to Jay Eazy Day already. Rap mashup rips, from Yoshi's Cookie World to Loopdeloop Griddy, aren't exactly a rare sight on SiIvaGunner, and just earlier in Season 7 we received a sequel to Whip & Nae Nae Day, with amazing rips like Whip Fortress (coincidentally ALSO by circunflexo!). There's of course uniqueness to all of these rips due to the sheer personality and expressiveness inherent to rap as a music genre, but it does still mean that the rips that try to truly stand out from the crowd are the ones that end up sticking with me the most. And compared to a lot of the other hip hop rips on SiIva, the big benefit that Jay Eazy has enjoyed for me is that he's had a whole year to simmer in my mind - I know the bars to Mega Man completely off the top of my head through no choice of my own, at this point.

All that is to say, that Circunflexo's call to make a rip that specifically plays with the lyrics and flow of Mega Man, sentence mixing it into new bars entirely - is absolutely damn brilliant. You Are Book Smart, through the edits in the lyrics and the sheer whimsy in the original song's beat, transforms a song originally about bragging over riches and dames, into Jay Eazy proudly boasting about his intelligence in perhaps the funniest ways you'll have ever heard. The kind of monotone quality that Jay Eazy's vocals have lend themselves to absolutely fantastic, near seamless sentence mixing, and the jokes just write themselves from there.

"I'm book smart, I'm money smart - I'm more intelligent, Call me Mr. Smart Festival, I got hella books"

It has no right to work as well as it does - and yet, Jay Eazy, the king himself, pulls through. Even if I wasn't blown away by every rip of the event, it was absolutely fun the entire way through, and you can really tell the SiIvaGunner team loves Jay Eazy as much as the rest of us: the cherry on top being the edited opening, that persists in almost all rips of the event. Jay Eazy's typical introduction of spelling out "S-R-G", was across the entire event edited across all rips to say "S-G" - SiIvaGunner. Even for a meme this silly and dumb, the amount of effort put in was, frankly, admirable. What a start to 2024: and Season 8 is just around the corner!!