What happened to that modified Broshk font you were working on?
Thank you for the question!
The font is pretty much done, hehe. You might have seen the showcases for it on both Bluesky and Twitter, but I've also provided a download link within those threads.
For your convenience, here you go! :D
On Monday, September 9th, my girlfriend Marin, aka "Emm Bee Sea" i… Lily Blue needs your support for Help Emm Bee Sea through Car Crash and
Three days ago, on September 9th, the SiIvaGunner ripper Emm Bee Sea suffered injuries in a car accident, and is currently seeking further medical aid. Emm Bee Sea is a close friend to many in the community and behind several beloved rips across both SiIvaGunner and TTGD, including works I've written about on this very blog in A Balcony atop the Labyrinth of Lights and Staff Roll (SM64) Fusion. Needless to say, she means a lot to us, and deserves our help.
If you're able to, please chip in with a donation, or consider sharing the fundraiser within your own circles. Any amount and any attention helps!
A big part of why I opened up the Request Form, and why I continue to use it for ideas for the blog, is to give me inspiration in areas of SiIvaGunner to which I'm less well versed. There are some games and some rips by extension where I feel completely unable to write anything of substance, because I just lack the needed context for the rip to hit for me - but other times, the form opens my eyes to rabbitholes which I'm all too happy to delve into, through rips like Plantasia 2, mlp racism anthem (comix zone arrange), guess what???????? and more. I've learned to trust eg_9371's judgement on quality as a requestee, and many parts of his massive catalogue of contributions have shown me quality in areas I'd never thought to look, through rips like kris gaming and Light! (Potentialseeker Colress). And so, I said, you know what? Let's give his endorsement one more shake, and approach a rip I'd initially looked past as not being for me. With that, I hit play on Apotheosis to Heaven - and was met with one of the biggest surprise hits I'd yet heard in the season.
Journey is a game that hits home for a lot of people, yet it was just outside of my periphery when it originally released back in 2012 - I was an 11-year old without a PS3. But even without attachment to Journey, Apotheosis as an ending theme to the game hits home to a degree I wasn't expecting, a swelling orchestral piece going through feelings of anticipation, sorrow, bittersweetness, acceptance, all throughout the span of a 7-minute long composition. The overall word to describe it, of course, would be grand. Yet much the same can be said, on the complete opposite end method, for the song with which Apotheosis to Heaven is being mashed up with, Ascension to Heaven by independant artist Xi. Like with the aforementioned Light! (Potentialseeker Colress), this is a song I know damn near nothing about, most prominently being featured in various Japanese rhythm games but seemingly also having a presence within the Geometry Dash community. Yet despite holding even less of an emotional connection to me than Journey did, it cannot be denied just how impressive of a piece Ascension to Heaven truly is, pairing a pounding electronic percussion with mellow strings and absolutely off-the-rails piano rolls - what feels like three entirely different forms of music and speed, mesh together for a piece with a sound I can only describe with the imagery of a lone bird flying toward the sun.
Loneliness, bittersweetness, strife, failure, perseverance - the emotions distilled into me through these two tracks are ones that were no doubt eons stronger for someone with attachment to either of the works from beforehand, and most definitely strong within ripper Neofall upon creating Apotheosis to Heaven. These are two songs that are both pulsing with emotion, yet accomplish it through very sonically different methods, one through swelling orchestral resonance, and the other through a pounding piano-driven rhythm. Yet that emotional core remains, and through some miracle and no doubt tons of love for the pieces featured, Neofall found a way to blend the two pieces into one grand feature - leveraging Apotheosis' atmosphere and grandure in order to use it as background scoring to Ascension to Heaven's insane melody. Even with one piece falling to the background and another to the foreground, however, it never feels as if one is overpowering the other - the two leverage one another's strengths seamlessly for a listen that manages to hit harder than just the sum of both's parts.
Without a thorough understanding of music creation or of either track's true sonic makeup, part of me does still feel uneducated, in a sense, to be writing about a rip of this quality in sound and scale - it's a mashup like many others, yes, yet every part of it feels ironed out and sandpapered to sheer seamless perfection between two tracks that would otherwise feel borderline incompatible. Yet...seeing such quality persist within areas of the channel that I remain uneducated on, feels like part of the magic of the SiIvaGunner channel. We are currently on SiIvaGunner's 8th year in the running, with its rippers having grown all the more able to express their passions and interests than ever before - and Season 7 and Season 8 have, in turn, given us some of the most ambitious, personal rips we've yet seen on the channel. Be it Luna, mi Amor, A Balcony atop the Labyrinth of Lights, The Paragoomba and the Wiggler, or so many more, we've had an onslaught of rips still only made by one to three people that feel creatively driven and magical enough to be justifiably mistaken for months-in-the-making passion projects. And even without a direct tie to its source material, Apotheosis to Heaven gives me that very same vibe: Of one ripper seeing what can be done through utilization of two tracks close to their heart, and going absolutely hog-wild in ensuring the execution be up to the standards raised by so many other parts of the SiIvaGunner team.
It is a blessing that we can be eight years into this channel's life, and still have rips of this caliber slip entirely through the cracks as if they're nothing but everyday, average rips. Today, the hearts of the SiIvaGunner team is on full display at just about every day of its operation - and I am eternally grateful that such seemingly niche pursuits like Apotheosis to Heaven remain part of that.
I am downright flattered to see that a rip of mine has been featured in your blog, and as someone who has an avid interest of occasionally checking the blog to see a new featured rip of the day/week, this was an unexpected surprise, but is one that I am very, very glad and grateful for.
A big big thank you, Mel! And definitely a lovely write-up! I was beaming wide as I read about your thoughts on the rip, and it means a lot that you enjoyed it! And also a big big thank you as well to eg_9371 for the rip request! Keep up with all the amazing rips and the musical material you love to do! They have been the highest of quality as always! :D
And now to give a #rippers commentary, art games and (somewhat niche, in a way) rhythm game music have been my favorite things to play/listen to during my free time, and this idea came to me as I was watching a YouTube video of the ending of Journey for the nth time (lol).
I figured that both tracks would mash together well, since musical-wise, they are both in the same key and in terms of joke context, Ascension to Heaven is perfectly (and literally, haha) describing your actions in the Journey level where the advertised track, Apotheosis plays.
I divided the track into three parts while making the rip, the intro and ending are at their original tempo while the middle part was slowed down matching that of Ascension to Heaven's BPM (100), and where the mashing was present at its most. I was actually surprised to see from this video, that Apotheosis originally maintains a 108 BPM for the majority of the composition. I always thought orchestral music had decimal BPMs or having a freeform tempo, but not the case for this one! It was a big help to finally see the actual tempo, and it served as my guide as I assembled the middle part's audio files.
I think my favorite thing about this track is the piano arpeggio starting at 3:29! To map it out in the piano roll, I first had the assembled piano audio reference from Ascension to Heaven's BMS sample files, slow it down at half speed then listen and add in the notes one-by-one from there. It took me quite a while, but nearing the end where I adapted the notes to fit that of the chords/scales from Apotheosis was a fun part! I was just dragging notes up/down to make a scale since I didn't delve much into music theory lol. The process was that I modify the notes and then play the scale section with them, repeating until I got to the end of the track. :)
Overall, I am very happy with how it turned out! It took quite some time to make, but its process has been delightful in all the ways possible, kind of like a passion project, haha.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you very much again for your wonderful expression of account, Mel. And to you, eg_9371 for being and making the best in everything you do. Thank you all again, and I hope you all are having a very wonderful day/night! :D
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