Meteo Xavier

Like I said, I believe some of them are true, but I don't believe many of them are. With how much prices for old games are skyrocketing versus how often people are scoring and hoarding these rare finds, I feel there's a major gap. Something ain't adding up there.

A mild curiosity I've been having the last few months, but one I hadn't really seen anyone talk about. Like, I'm sure, a lot of you, I'm subscribed to several general gaming pages on Facebook. Much of the content of these pages is devoted to one of many administrators posting a picture of their recent score at a flea market, yard sale, game store, etc. and they are some pretty good hauls. This guy today posted several pictures of his score including near-mint Dracula X, two Breath of Fire IVs, Suikoden III, IV, V, near-mint complete Lunar I and II plus plushie, Earthbound with strategy guide, NES-front loader, the Miracle piano full-in set, two near-mint Growlanser games, Castlevania Chronicles, Mega Man 64, Suikoden I, Suikoden II strategy guide... and the list just goes on and on. It really is a fucking king's ransom. You'd shit yourself if you saw all these together in one place! And while this guy didn't say how much he spent on it, you've seen people post other scores like it with a final price that doesn't even realistically cover the cost of the most expensive title on the table. So my question is... am I the only one thinking these are too good to be true? I frequent game stores all the time and I used to go yard sales and flea markets as well and I can tell you the chances of finding any of that stuff these days are quite small, even smaller still for $15 total or whatever. These days if you see an Earthbound cartridge, it's going to be for $150 (I saw one go for $240 at a CM Games in Maryville), and a young gamer of this era usually does not have the insane amount of money it takes to collect. A score like the one I described above would cost someone $800 through more conventional means. I personally think it's someone getting out their already-established collections, taking pictures of them, and faking a story and price. Granted, I live in East Tennessee where the gaming market is non-existent and a slim few people actually have a real collection of any kind. In that same market, I've found some incredulous deals back in my day. Valkyrie Profile for $10. Dragon Warriors III, IV and Earthbound for $100 total, $700 worth of Turbografx stuff with boxes and instructions and even old coupons for $40. $500 (current worth) of Dracula X SNES stuff for $19 total (that was back in the late 90s before it really took off), and my list goes on. So I do believe some of these are real, but I also know they really don't happen as much as they used to. Hoarding and collecting is more prevalent now than it's ever been and everyone's wise to what games are worth and how desperate collectors are. You've seen Ebay, you know what I'm talking about. The other possibility, and one that genuinely makes me ill as a gamer, was my wife's suggestion that because yard sales are generally made by middle-aged/older people (Moms, Grandmas, etc), these parents and grandparents are actually SELLING THEIR KIDS' COLLECTIONS without their permission... a huge presumable loss. That does answer the question of why people who would amass these collections in the first place would let them go for pennies, but it's a terrifying thought all the same. ...man, I really can't make a starting post without turning it into a book, can I? I just wondered if anyone else knew anything about this trend that's going on or was as skeptical as I am. Nothing serious here, just wondering on a slow weekend.

For a guy who doesn't post much anymore, you sure is popular, Roz. Three birthday cheers for the most awesome bastard in Finland. Hip hip happy birthday!

I think it's just a bent square/accordion with a tinny-sounding melodic percussive on top of it, isn't it?

I was introduced to OCR by former member and Unmod Revolution hero JesustheDarkLord. I'm still not sure what I think about that.

Sf2 is a soundfont extension. If you have something that can load a soundfont, that should work.

You might be able to find it in here: http://www.espritduo.com/ffvii_pc/Square%20Soft,%20Inc/Final%20Fantasy%20VII/data/midi/sf2/

Offtopic, but I did want to chime in that I love this sentence structure.

I'm pretty sure as long as you're not singing about gays, muslims and single mothers burning in hell, it should be fine. Geez.

I've wanted to do a prog chiptune album rearranging well known Bible hymns and put it up for sale to raise money for my church for years. Haven't found the right time to do it yet.

Added context: this is more likely due to a general bias against remixes with vocals/lyrics anyway.

While it's true this isn't a particularly religious community (for good reason) if it's good and fits the judges' criteria, I shouldn't think the subject matter should be a problem. We're all generally accepting and mature people here and I think it would be an interesting change of pace. I personally don't know if there is a religious content policy (and I'm too lazy to look for it), but go for it. It can't possibly be as offensive as some of the auto-reject stuff they probably get.

Strange update - this morning I found a notice for my music page saying that my SNESology post, which now tops off at a whopping 19 people actually seeing it, got more views than 95% of my other posts on that page and that I should consider sponsoring it to get further notice. Umm, what? The post I made before that got 78 people seeing it, more than 4x the coverage. I'm thinking now maybe its not something Facebook is doing intentionally, maybe something's really screwy with their mathworks and programming causing bugs and such.

That's why I put a question mark in there. I almost find it difficult to think Facebook would pull a stunt like that when they're already one of the most used and most advertised websites on Earth, but then again, their actual commitment to users has always been sketchy at best. They have services for increasing page strength that have been broken for months, and they're in no hurry to fix it.

Hey now, that's not a bad idea. It might be that the attachment part itself is whats dragging it down. Have you tried that on your page to see if that works?

I figured this was relevant enough to post in Community, since a huge majority of us post our music links and others to Facebook. I'm an administrator for several pages on Facebook and I've been noticing for the last couple weeks in analytics that posts with links to media, like pictures, websites, Youtube, Soundcloud, etc. have been receiving markedly low numbers in just how many people actually saw the post - whereas posts with nothing but paragraphs of text are receiving the correct or even considerably higher percentages of viewing. It is well known, by now, that Facebook has rigged their posting system so that unsponsored posts only get posted on 10-15% of your fanbase's walls, with slightly higher percentages given how much feedback you receive from your fanbase (and it obviously factors in that some people just don't see your post from 10 hours ago with everyone else's jamming their walls too). But some of the numbers I've been seeing lately have been DRASTICALLY reduced from even that bullshit. As such, I had a track released on SNESology yesterday (I won't post it here because I did elsewhere, and I don't want to look like I'm just ranting to get more views on it) and I even donated a bit of money to the SNESology Facebook page to make it a sponsored post, which was supposed to get me about 3000-7000 views for what I paid. The post went out and didn't even say it was sponsored! The feedback was certainly not what I would reasonably expect if 3000-7000 people saw it. I posted it, unsponsored, on my own page (which has a paltry 181 fans on it) and only 5 people saw it. 5 damn people out of 181. That's not even 3%. My best guess is Facebook changed their algorithms and such around to cut down on stupid musicians spamming their links out anywhere and everywhere, but in their classic lack of infinite wisdom, they just made it 3x harder for small musicians who can't afford $300 ad campaigns for every track they want to post to get any attention whatsoever. Has anyone else seen or read anything on this lately? I wanted to look it up, but I haven't seen anything on it and I'm not sure how I would even search that in Google. If you haven't, word of warning, your media posts may start seeing much smaller traffic than you were accustomed to. Edit: I just now saw the sponsored thing on it, which is good but I swear it wasn't on there before.

Howdy. For the Autumn and Halloween season, I did a SNESology track out of Secret of Evermore samples to honor the mountain town I live in for the season. I wanted to do something like all the haunting Secret of Evermore and Chrono Trigger type tracks and I think it turned out rather well. Please do share it around if'n you can spare a few moments. Thank you!

YOU'D SHUT YOUR HARLOT'S MOUTH IF'N YOU KNEW WHAT WAS GOOD FOR YA. Seriously, I lol'd.

Sometimes they have been too broad or vague, but most of the time it's a communication barrier or the other person just can't be arsed to be more specific. Half the time, they're not even trying to answer it, focusing more on why I can't just absorb things by osmosis like they did, then I end up having to explain my bizarre brain makeup, then others groan because I'm playing the aspie card again, and only half the topics ever produce anything useful to me. Sorry to go on ranting about this, but this is a constant source of irritation and I've yet to truly pinpoint what the problem is.

I wish people would actually explain these principles out better instead of just saying, "Derp, just listen to a shitload of music and fiddle with stuff and you'll get it." Yeah, well, you can't learn to build a house right just by staying in one for a few weeks and banging your tools everywhere. Every time I ask for advice or how to do something (because MIDIs and tutorials currently available only go so far for the most part), that's by and large the first and often only answer I ever get. Drives me nuts.

I did, and now I keep getting asked why I can't do it myself or why I don't just buy a new controller. See the spiral here?

Unlike most people posting, I do actually feel like I gain "levels" at points. My baptism by fire was my Espers album - the production on that was nothing short of a ***damn nightmare made flesh. I actually had a fucking out of body experience during one stress filled day of production with a result I still can't explain. After months and months of putting that sumbitch together, my computer crashed in post-production, meaning I wasn't able to get instruments to sound more realistic or mix it down properly - it had to go straight to mastering, and even THAT was a problem because somehow Zircon (who was mastering it and saved the whole product) only received half the instruments from one or two tracks and I had to recreate them WITHOUT the original samples and synths I had on my computer at the time. It was like, let's say to win a bet, these high school nerds literally Frankenstein'd a homecoming queen out of what they could get from the local graveyard and somehow ended up winning that bet... and everyone's thinking, "Well, all said and done, she actually really doesn't look that bad." despite it being very obvious to everyone, at the same time, that a patchwork corpse just walked away with the homecoming crown. And yet, after that, I felt like I'd just graduated high school and got accepted into college. I "passed the test", so to speak, and now had real room to grow and improve - and I have ever since.

Day? January? Its in March and a specific date hasn't been set yet (or not revealed to me that I can find somewhere yet). I hope I'm not giving the wrong information out somewhere somehow. That would not reflect well on a potential career in promotion.

It's not in Nashville, it's Pigeon Forge on the other end of an extremely wide state. We border North Carolina.

That makes two of us...