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My favorite would be Disgaea series - japanese turn based rpg with great amount of content and crazy storylines. Definitely the most fun games i ever played. Other than that my top would be The Witcher series, Labirynth of Refrain, Nier Automata, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I used to love dnd games like neverwinter nights or baldurs gate but that was a long time ago and i haven’t played them for so long so maybe they just got old and overshadowed by new games, not sure I bought Nintendo switch last year so most new games i play are the ones released on that console. It is hard to choose my favorite as to be honest, it changes, one week i may say that nothing will top Stacked Rubbish just to claim next week that i love the direction they went with Dogma and that is their best album. So instead of deciding of favorite album here are some of my all time best songs i would recommend to other people: Filth in the beauty, Zetsu, Namaatatakai Kaze no Zaratsuita Jonetsu, Dogma, Lucy, Fadeless, Uncertain Sense, Wakaremichi, Juunanasai, Miseinen, Reila, Ganges ni akai bara, Chizuru, Invisible wall, In the middle of chaos, Falling, Cassis, Gabriel on the Gallows, Babylon’s Taboo, Silly god disco, Inside Beast. Those were the ones that came to my mind, probably forgot about some anyway. I think that gazette is in a pretty good spot considering their music quality as even the weaker songs i can’t dislike and i just like them a little less. Or maybe i just became a die hard fan and i will accept whatever they release, haha One last mention to my favorite release(physical) - Beautiful Deformity, i believe it is their best looking limited edition, just love to see it on my shelf, so much better looking than those big books, division and dogma or pretty bland Dim and Stacked Rubbish.(can’t really complain about NIL, that fur is pretty cool). The only thing that would make this release even better is if they added a concert like in Ninth. I guess cool box>photo albums(or whatever that was in division xd)

Hello, have been lurking for a few days and decided to introduce myself I am 24, from Poland and have been listening to japanese music for about 10 years. Mostly sticking with my favorites so i don’t know that many bands but i believe i will discover some new stuff here. One of the first bands i got to know and my absolute #1 for years already is The Gazette, discovered them around the time they released DIM and fell in love ever since. Currently i am on a quest to collect all of their singles, EPs and albums. It is a slow process but i am getting there Other bands i love are exist trace, girugamesh, undead corporation, sadie, nightmare, mary’s blood, dir en grey, lynch, d’espairsray, aldious, yousei teikoku, wagakki band, babymetal and versailles( Hizaki being my favorite - i usually don’t listen to instrumental only stuff but curse of virgo is a work of art). I guess some of them are not visual kei but visual part of vkei was never my main focus. As for other hobbies i enjoy fantasy books/movies and rpg games. I read some manga from time to time but not as often as i used to. Cheers 😎

4 hours ago, suji said: That person writing this really needs to work on their English. _________________________________________________________ The tone is weird, but there are only a couple of actual errors there. I've seen a lot worse English on this very forum. (Apologies for double post)

I hate sweet potatoes, yams whatever you want to call them.

Yeah, I was about to ask what percentage of people actually gets to the stage of paying off the debt. This system sounds like an outright incentive for tax fraud. I'm sure that declaring lower income to evade paying off this debt would be rampant in my country lol This entire system sounds over-complicated (at least as far as I can even understand it). I know that in my country it is said, that banks look more favourably at people who had taken at least one loan before and are paying it off all in time, than people that have never had a loan in the first place, but it's hardly a dealbreaker. Hell, when I was applying for my car loan the lady asked for a fixed amount I spend every month (on rent, bills etc.), I gave her a number and she was like "you might want to declare a bit less than that" and that was it ^^;; Credit scores in US sound like a cutthroat business~

Hate DADA all you want, but VELVET EDEN's "Double Twelve" is such a great album.

I didn't notice my tanuki pic thread was closed😂 well, I tried😑 keep enjoying those cringy pics from Kisaki still available in his thread

2019 - Year of VK store apocalypse 😧

The band will resume their activities on 2019.09.02.

incredible how misinformation can turn good intelligent people into ignorant ogres.Divide and conquer...

Yooo, just had one of the best hauls of material for art stuff I've ever had.. Like a good twenty books or so, as well as some extremely vintage magazines, postcards and stuff. Girlfriend and I were allowed to go into the local printing museum's storage and go crate digging for some stuff, quite a bunch of it would've been pulped otherwise.

Visual Kei Musicians: *does absolutely nothing* Some dude who only chugs Metallica riffs in his bedroom on a line 6 spider amp: "unlike you f*gs with your fancy lipstick, I play REAL music, and I come from when you had to be able to play Erruption at 50000 bpm in order to make it! I only listen to musicians with absolutely no fashion sense hygiene. If you so much as brush your hair, you're a gay f*g who plays pseudo metal. I care about the music not the looks!"

Completely unrelated to K-pop, but I don't give a shite about anything to do with the MCU except for Guardians Of The Galaxy (and even then, I only ever got around to seeing the first one). It's not that I have anything against it and I'm sure that if I saw more, I'd enjoy it; I just don't really care.

Damn! I didn't even know that got a pressing in the US!

I think part of the issue here is that they are pricing for the Japanese market. Namely, for the fans that are nostalgic and will drop that kind of money on MM merch, because they don’t really follow any bands besides M10M, or maybe one or two of Kozi’s projects. They aren’t really pricing it for our market, which are the people that might be nostalgic, but if they’re still paying attention to VK at all, then they’ve moved on to other bands (usually multiple ones). Most of us simply don’t have the dedication to pine over a band that disbanded almost 20 years ago, and be willing to shell out $150 US+ Shipping for a blu-ray. It’s a complicated situation, because this entire international fandom exists because of piracy, rather than in spite of it. Sure, we could choose to be uptight about copyright infringement, but we wouldn’t be here without it in the first place.

Ok, so is eating all that Gara does these days

I'm not an expert in finance, but I'd say that the value and prioritization in your credit score when it comes to loans and investments surely does make it feel very cutthroat here. Given that many credit card companies lure in many materialistic and ignorant youths (I was once one) like American Express and stores that have deals with VISA and MASTERCARD (think brick and mortar stores like Best Buy or Airlines/Gas Stations) with "great" intro APR rates, it's hard to assess whether owning more cards or how often you use them, will affect your score. Not paying them off on time does ding it, but sometimes never using them does the same thing lol. It also depends on how long you've had your oldest card for. I think for me its like 5 or so years now, so this has helped me maintain a steady score. If I were to suddenly say "I don't want to use this card anymore", I'd actually hurt my score more if I were to call and cancel it, as opposed to just leaving it in your bedroom drawer for a rainy day emergency. Same goes for bank accounts, ironically.

Ooh, a "how fucked are you in debt" thread. Nice. (I'm American btw) Back in Chicago, IL I was able to pay off everything for my schooling, so I owe nothing there. I never give myself credit there, but I should. I also managed to pay off 3 credit cards (while spending just as much on them) very easily, as I made a lot of money at my last job with overtime. Young kid with a nice job, why not live a little, right? I'd say I bought everything I ever wanted in my earnings range, so now I rarely buy anything if it wont stay with me for 5+ years. Here in Denver, CO (and all this year) however, life has not been so kind to me or my vehicle, and with repairs and health insurance steadily creeping to a point where it makes no sense, I'm questioning whether life here was a wise decision. Contract work may play a large part to it, but it was a decision I made, and a carefree way of earning experience and work while I focus on other things. I'd say that once I was settled in, I had a combined debt of about 9-10K, and while that may suck a bit, I always plan to handle scenarios like this with large payments and financing options that don't hurt my credit score. I think I'm down to about 4K that is not locked down in payments for the next year or so, so if I wanted to I could pay it all off in one go, but like I said, I would be screwed if something happened and I needed my cash to take care of it. $0 debt is great, but to maintain a credit score at it's highest, you need to play their stupid game here in the USA, and spend a little/pay it off soon. People were so wise a few years back to roll-over remaining debt into a balance transfer to another card, but those companies have wised-up and charge a percentage fee now lol.

In Finland if you take a student loan and you graduate on time, you may get a student loan compensation which basically means the state pays off 40% of your student debt. I think that's kinda cool. I myself don't have any debts, I'm halfway through university and I have enough savings so I can do fine without any loans. And even though I don't really need to worry about money, I still keep track of all my expenses. I write everything down in an Excel spreadsheet and if it seems like I've spent a lot of money on some useless stuff in the previous month I'll try to be more careful the next month. So I don't have any strict budgets but I still always watch how much money I spend.

Mine are pretty similar. Favorite one would be Withering to death, right below are Dum Spiro Spero, Uroboros and Gauze. Somehow Kisou never won me over, probably one of the albums i like the least(i like mushi though) Haha, thanks, if anyone wonders, it is prinny from disgaea games i mentioned before.

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I thought I was going to dislike the album given that I've been really tired of the sound he's been doing for the past few years. There have been a few tracks here and there that I've liked from his recent output, but the last album I enjoyed as a whole was the 2013 self-title release. Well, that's no longer the case as I actually enjoyed listening to this in its entirety despite the compositions and his guitar tone sounding basically like everything he's released over the last 5 years. The same uptempo dance music with a squealing guitar... And yet, I really enjoyed it whereas the last few releases left me bummed out. I'm still hoping for a return to the acoustic stuff or something different, but if you like Miyavi at all it's worth listening to.

I don't have any debt, never had. But I don't own a house, don't own a car and I don't have a college degree. Never took a loan or used credit. What I do have is a current job position in banking. So about this: People spend money they don't have because either they don't have enough money to tackle whatever they are pursuing (i.e. real state, business, being able to pay for education, taxes, etc), or they don't have any other money period. In the first case people can struggle in different degrees to meet their payments depending on a lot on stuff. Most people are able to pay what they own when they are asking for money for a single focused thing. But when we're talking about the second case, people who ask for money in order to get by, pay basic bills or are on a rough spot most people fail. Even if they get are successful in having income or in adquiring income sources like the second job mentioned, the money being lended to this people is more expensinve because the risk the institution is taking lending money to people in this circumstance is bigger. So, if it was hard for someone in this position to just pay someone, it got even harder because the lender will charge more money for each $ they lend you. They also usually have fixed penalties when you fail to meet conditions. That may sound like "if it's fixed it's fair for everyone and makes everything simpler on the consumer end wich is a new thing in finance". Wrong. If two people ask for money and one ask for $120 to pay bills and other one ask for $5000 to buy furniture and both people miss a deadline both will have to pay the same penalty, let's say $20. If both miss the first two payments the first one sees his debt increased by 33% and the second one by 0,8%. If the first person struggles so much that they have to ask for such low ammount to make ends meet seeing such increase in debt is a death blow (specially when this happens because they where broke; they had no money so now they own more money... so even though they have no momey they have even less money). TL;DR being poor is actually more expensive because people don't think you'll actually be able to give the money back so they squeeze you so you hardly could pay anything back actually making the prediction you couldn't pay back true and therefore validating it. If you are very very poor try to earn money. Asking for a loan is a very brief relief that will very surely bring hell upon you sooner than you think. There's also people who will ask for money and blow it instantly. We were doing risk assertion for a customer that asked for a credit yesterday. When looking into his movements we saw he already asked for a 1500€ elsewhere and got it just as this month started. Then, last THURSDAY he blew 500€ on Bingo (and he either didn't win shit ot the didn't put it back into his account). There's a neverending ammount of people like this. Or that think that they bank will straight un gift you money. Or that don't understand what a debit card is. Or that they can pay off their current debt with a cheaper debt. If you don't have those kind of problems you should be very grateful you got an education as basic as it may be. When dealing with this stuff it could literally save you for ruining your family's life forever.

oh right! Ian Martin's Quit Your Band! is pretty great too. he also did a list of recommended books on the same subject, Japrocksampler and Dokkiri of which are included https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2016/11/27/music/reading-list-japans-music-scene/#.XTlUOJNKho5

Great book, super informative with tons of reaaaaally underground stuff and a very thorough historical angle. For (mostly) visual kei fans there's also the book Jrock, Ink., although I don't know how good or accurate it is. But it has pretty illustrations of bands at least, lol.

Japrocksampler by Julian Cope is probably essential

idk what it is either. they’re just really gross and make the back of my throat feel weird.

I remember actually trying Sweet Potato fries and I didn’t like em. My dad asked why and I couldn’t come up with an answer so I said “there too...sweet?” I honestly didn’t know what to say lol

The video for Yokan is so fucking blue

Dokkiri! Japanese Indies Music 1976-1989 A History and Guide is close, but either way really quite essential; Public Bath Press in general. they're only available physically, not digitally FWIW.

That person writing this really needs to work on their English.

If anyone can find the full series in Japanese, please let me know.

Gorillaz were one of the first bands I have ever became obsessed with lol

It’s kind of sad that the more experimental and intriguing groups are put aside for the more bland and generic ones. Like we get it that every teenage girl likes EXO or BTS or whatever, but give some more newer and fresh groups a chance

That’s fine and all but I hate the ones who just hate it because they find it nerdy and the audacity to hate on others for enjoying it. Like stop being an asshole. One kid in my history class always found a way to insult me and my friends interest in the MCU and was all like “WHY DO YOU LIKE THIS!!?? I ONLY LIKE MOVIES WITH GUNS AND SEX IN IT” Bro, stfu Like honestly if you just watch shows just for those reasons then 1. your already a really boring person and 2. maybe you should find a show or a movie with a GOOD story, not just how many times a hot girl shows her tits. I think he’ll love Nymphomanic then lol

Yes................

it’s honestly such a shame. no one is really willing to take risks anymore. every once in a while, someone releases smth really cool and unique...did you hear key’s solo album? 😱 like that is exactly the kind of thing kpop needs rn. give us variety again. 😔

Because it's full of pretty men and most men ain't into that would be my answer in a nutshell, but I'll elaborate some. I agree with the people who commented on the first page that if you look at the audience of an all-female band's lives, visual kei or nah, it's more likely that you'll see more men in the audience. I disagree, however, with the idea that "it's all about the money". I mean... yeah, that is a part of it, and it would be naïve to assume that it's not at least a small motivation for anyone who charges for anything, but there is definitely some art in there too. I would argue it's all about the money for the more uninspired, cookie-cutter bands, but to say it's all about the money as a rule of thumb is to exclude the more creative and imaginative bands who really care about what they're doing and actually make an artform out of it. Japan is, generally speaking, still pretty collectivist, so I don't think the foundation of individualistic rebellion is completely gone yet and I think there are some bands who are still seeking to "stick it to the man", as it were, and that is definitely a motivation besides money. If not that, they're at least seeking to, as I said, make an artform out of it. Compare any of the recent bland-kei projects (not saying all the recent bands are like that but yanno what I mean) to something like Moran. The former just want to make money and a meaningless statement for their fifteen minutes of fame, whereas the latter have passion and soul. I didn't name a particular bland-kei band but I'm sure you thought of one or two and were easily able to distinguish them in terms of visuals, music, talent and theme, so I think it's a bit too broad to assume they all have the exact same motivation. Whatever, that was somewhat off-topic. I just thought I'd mention that because I saw a few people bring up the subject of getting money from bangya, although talking about this does make me wonder what the male-female ratio of fans for certain bands are in terms of their originality. Do more men like the more inspired bands? Conversely, do more women like the more inspired all-female bands?

Well, Chizuru said that the band did not think that they would be able to live up to the band's growing reputation. He was also having trouble with the musical direction he wanted to take. The other members also had their own thoughts and that's how they first talked about disbanding in the winter of 2017. But he reached the conclusion that the band could still keep going. However, at the end of 2018, the band and the label talked again about it and came to the conclusion that it would be the best solution as each member's own musical direction and desires had changed since they formed.

The band have just revealed a new look.

This has turned into People Weirdly Obsessed with Japanese Paper: The Thread

Interesting...tastes I see 😏

Cover art

illuminati confirmed

Expected great things from this band since their debut. Don't know about the others, but the vocalist definitely deserves to be in a good band, his vocals are very distinct