#ripper unknown

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 01/05/2024

super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont

Season 8 No Album Release (Read More) super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont

Ripper Unknown

So. It's been a month now. Has it all settled yet? Have we had the time to let SiIvaGunner's April Fools 2024 event sink in, 30 days later? Speaking personally, I don't believe I have yet. Visions of Gegagedigedagedago, Pomny (digital circus), Boykisser, Brainless Kitty and all of my other favorite memes continue to haunt me to this very day - I see one of the events' rips in my recommended, and in the blink of an eye five hours will have passed. I cannot be anything but amazed at the surgical precision that the SiIva team captured the phenomena of online internet brainrot with during this event, spanning the whole range of severity levels from bad to worse. super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont was certainly not the worst it got - yet it embodies everything the event sought to achieve through it's title alone.

But, right, the event - you'll have noticed right away that everything about the above-linked video's metadata is completely awry from typical SiIvaGunner videos. No attempt at a bait-and-switch, completely different video description, not even a thumbnail of the game used...and what the fuck is the "Buddy Holly Soundfont"???? What's going on here? Well, a lot of these traits may seem familiar to you if you've been on other corners of YouTube in the last few years - like I mentioned briefly back in we are number one but with outdated memes over it, there's been a trend in how non-SiIva audio edits are presented on YouTube as of late. There's an algorithm to appease now, after all - surprises and ambiguity only serve to ward off potential new listeners! After the explosive popularity of some of these, particularly during 2023 with videos like Nirvana's Nevermind but with the SM64 soundfont, they began feeling inescapable - often times sounding pretty low-effort to boot. I don't intend to shame anyone who's made these videos or anyone who enjoys them, of course, but...through how hard they aim to appease the algorithm that be, its difficult not to see these videos as attention-seeking first, and as creative endeavors second.

Which then brings us back to SiIvaGunner. Eight years in, and the channel's way of presenting its videos has remained thoroughly consistent, rain or shine - content in charting its own course. Narratively, this is actually playing to the channel's thematic core, something enforced all the way back in The Reboot story of Season 1, and that continues to be relevant over the years through rips like NIGHTMARESCAPE 〜Unrestrained HyperCam 2〜 (Final Boss Phase 2), and indeed through this very April Fools event. That core is simple: To never conform, to never restrict, to let the channel's team of artist continue doing what they love purely for love's sake, rather than to appease a crowd or a system. Throughout this April Fools day event, then, it was as if we were shown the twisted view on that core, the channel's rippers following the opposite creed - clickbaity titles and thumbnails, no core theme, often even lacking any regard for the tracks being remixed - several times the Wii Shop Channel theme was simply called "The Wii Theme", and of course the very notion of games having "soundfonts" is something that's woefully misinformed to begin with. Opening the entire event with Buddy Holly by Weezer but in the Mario 64 Soundfont set the stage perfectly - after all, what game more overused in "soundfont" edits than Super Mario 64, what album more trendy to playfully make fun of in 2024 than Weezer's Blue album, and what song from said album is more memed than its hit single, Buddy Holly?

Except, of course, this whole thing went one layer deeper. Throughout the four months that the season has been running for thus far, Season 8's running theme above all else has been pure silliness - everything from a Justin Bieber takeover, to an MLG day, to the currently-ongoing SpongeBob day embodies that theme perfectly. And at the helm of it all sits the Joke-Explainer 7000, the current in-universe manager of the channel. Her name doesn't lie: as we saw back in Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab she do be Explaining the Jokes, and that was initially assumed to be the bit of this very April Fools bit, the titles like super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont explaining the jokes of the event immediately. But forget not the point of April Fools as a holiday - to deceive. Indeed, though the titles suggest that the team are spending the day just explaining the joke of every rip uploaded, they're in reality just spoiling the supposed "premise". Listen to any one of them yourself, and you'll be given a bait-and-switch surprise which completely transforms the rip of choice. And as the day went on, these surprises only grew stranger and stranger...

SiIvaGunner's April Fools events have an incredible track record, as I've hopefully made clear in Our Sweet Parsley and Your Best Nightmario - but I think I can safely say this year's bit was at least the FUNNIEST one of them all. Every minute of the day felt like slipping deeper into insanity, made all the more clear the moment super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont was uploaded - in a matter of hours, the event had gone from making fun of low-effort soundfont edits that very much DO exist on YouTube, to completely making up an entirely new tier of slop through the very idea of a "Buddy Holly Soundfont". In case it needs to be explained, "soundfonts" are used to refer to video games using sequenced music, wherein individual instruments are played note-by-note through data sent by the game, rather than being streamed from a recording - it is IMPOSSIBLE to derive a "soundfont" from songs like Buddy Holly, played on live instruments and saved as masters back in the 90s. That is the gag that super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont is built on - the "instruments" used to recreate Bob-Omb Battlefield from Super Mario 64 are intentionally low-quality snippets taken from Buddy Holly, used just the same as Super Mario 64's sequenced instruments are used within soundfont edits.

The end result feels like getting splashed with cold water at every part of listening. Rivers' repeating "Whut" voiceline being used as the main melody for the first 40 seconds, for instance, is the kind of obviously "wrong" thing one would never seriously do in this sort of arrangement, yet it only serves to add to the joke here, of just how far we've fallen so deep into the event. The tinny guitar shredding, the low-effort thumbnail edit, the vocals suddenly being added onto the track, the bass being far deeper in the mix than it reasonably should be...it's an experience to behold, and just as you're letting it all sink in, the vocals are suddenly pitch-shifted to the quintessential SiIva meme, Grand Dad himself The Flintstones - its like the rip is poking fun at your misery, as to remind you that this IS indeed still SiIvaGunner, the bit is still going, you are merely along for SiIva's wild ride.

The entire event was RELENTLESSLY funny to see unfold from every angle. Be it experiencing every rip as it was uploaded, or seeing the comments' reactions to the gradual spiral of rot we were being taken on, or most importantly - realizing just how much fun the team must've still had finding ways to subvert expectations at every turn. Season 8 has been an absolute blast so far, and I cannot wait to see where its patented silliness takes us next - even if it'll be hard to surpass the shit we saw on this day, and the absolute state of things that super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont represents. Truly one of the SiIvaGunner rips of all time.

[7grandmel]

Rip of the week: 27/01/2025

Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix)

Season 5 No Album Release (Read More) Concrete Jungle (Concrete Man Stage) (Alpha Mix) - Mega Man 9

Ripper Unknown

Requested by fezaki! (Discord)

The big appeal of Season 5 of SiIvaGunner for me, four years after the fact, is that it contains so many gems that I'm yet to discover, due to my detachment from the channel during 2021. I've been the song and dance a number of times; despite a handful of cool happenings like the Masked Wolf / Yankin' rivalry covered on Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier, and the neat audio drama stories like what I discussed on Knowledge of the Depths, this was the year where the channel felt rather aimless in overall direction going forward. Without a huge investment in the ongoing story, I myself felt less engaged to want to investigate every uploaded rip as closely as I otherwise would have wanted to; yet despite lacking in overall direction, the production quality of rips had begun reaching previously unseen highs. Though the King for Another Day Tournament had ended two years prior, it felt to me as if the quality that said event promised had begun seeping into the channel's everyday uploads, as if the team had understood that layered, ambitious arrangements and mashups were just as appealing outside of events as they were as part of them. As a result of all this, Season 5 saw TONS of rips just like Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix); tragically underrated, largely divorced from the channel's goings-ons, yet OH so deliciously quality.

Sometimes, the great appeal of a rip is understood right from just hearing the concept. Joke lists on wikis can't always communicate immediately the effectiveness of a YTPMV, mashup or arrangement, be it the inherent comedic sound to Slope Dude's mix of sources, the sheer audacity and polish of no more nuzzles in my skin, or the context that surrounds a meme as dense in history as Bottom G and Lagplane. Yet with Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix), after seeing it amidst my requests and searching for it on the wiki, it clicked IMMEDIATELY just why this rip was worth discussing. Soulja Boy is a character who's been around in ripping circles since the channel's earliest days, an icon prominent in the SoundClown shitposting scene that SiIvaGunner grew out of; and a single glance at Dr. Soulja should be enough to immediately tell you why. From the listener's perspective, its an immediately charming and funny source, be it from the iconic steel drums and finger-snapping percussion or how its paired with the dorky, almost pathetic attempt at coolness that Soulja Boy's performance in Crank That evokes. From the perspective of the ripper, Crank That is in the same category as songs like Space Jam discussed on Hoopache and the yet-to-be-covered Chip tha Ripper freestyle; As comedic rap music with 4/4 time signatures andimmediately recognizable, funny-sounding beats, they're almost comically easy to just drag-and-drop on top of existing 4/4 video game music with little to no tweaking. It was their ease of production, and how it led to an absolute overabundance of low-effort rips throughout Season 1, that resulted in the entire Mr. Rental storyline covered on Mr. Rental [B Side] ~ Out of Options; its this entry-level skill floor that makes rips like The Jamminest of All stand out immediately in quality; and, indeed, it's the knowledge that all Soulja Boy is good for is his funny sound on Crank That that makes Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix) such an immediate stand-out.

Indeed, as you may well hear from just a few seconds of listening; Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix) is far from your everyday Soulja Boy rip, reinventing the scene even after Season 4 Episode 2 had already done so a year prior through the Crank That revitalization covered on Koopa Street. It is, paradoxical as it may sound, a Soulja Boy rip *without* Crank That in focus; still filled with Soulja Boy's immediately identifiable, half-hearted attempts at self-confidence, but notably lacking in those immediately identifiable steel drums. They're still there, to be clear - they make an absolutely triumphant appearance midway through the song playing whats best described as a backing-instrumental solo at 0:44 - but a majority of the rip is instead spent covering the separate Soulja Boy hit Bird Walk. Comparatively, it's notably quite a louder song than Crank That; the vocals layered and reverberating make Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix) sound almost oppressively excited, like you're listening to a group of cheering Soulja Boys in the stands, their cheering given amazing melodic direction through Concrete Jungle's fast-paced melody. Deeper in the mix, you can indeed hear that Bird Walk's lead vocals are pitched to follow along said melody in a way similar to rips like I will Never be a Redneck, yet its fittingly buried underneath the loudness of Bird Walk's vocals mashed up with the melody, the chiptune lead still also playing entirely unaltered right alongside it.

As someone completely unengaged in the larger Soulja Boy discography, the rip is a genuinely super fun listen in large part due to how familiar-yet-unfamiliar it sounds throughout. You hear bits and pieces of Crank That, you can identify Soulja Boy's unmistakeable swagger, and yet it never *quite* sounds like something you've heard before; which, honestly, makes it pretty funny that the rip is using music from Mega Man 9 in particular. The game Aiming to more or less be a spiritual throwback to Mega Man 2 in every way but name, the Concrete Jungle theme can pretty easily be compared directly to Wood Man's Stage theme in structure and the level it's used within; a comparison only made funnier given Wood Man's own high importance on SiIvaGunner itself as written about back on Nice, Slick, Blackness. In that sense, intentional as it may or may not have been, Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix) is almost like a bizarre, alternate-reality version of the kind of rip you'd expect to hear during Season 1 or Season 2; Soulja Boy and Wood Man, but it's not quite Soulja Boy, and it's not quite Wood Man, and yet its an absolute indisputable banger despite those restrictions. The, pardon the choice of words, uncanny feel of the rip is only emphasized by how, per the Wiki, two of the songs of which pieces of are used in the mix remain completely unidentified; nevertheless, they add to the cacophony in a way that still feels composed just enough to stay on track. Variety and escalation, like I've discussed on rips like Be Cool, Be Wild and Be My Girl, is the secret spice to making a SiIvaGunner rip truly memorable, and these little sprinkles keep the rip's energy topped up throughout its 3-minute runtime.

It's a damn shame that the rip's author remains completely unidentified, as there is tons of small little details in execution that I feel the need to commend. There's so much fun had throughout the rip, combining Bird Walk with whatever additional sources join the mix in ways both subtle and blatant, the aforementioned occasional but understated appearances of Crank That's steel drums, or, as also mentioned briefly before, how the rip still insists on having a quiet vocal lead pitch-shifted to Concrete Jungle's melody despite ultimately being secondary to the mashup playing above it. In particular, though, there's a moment right around 01:11, just a few seconds after the first unidentified source is added to the mix, where the progression of the song - its percussion, backing, melody, etc. - is halted for a split second, just to recapture a vocal quirk of the newly-added source. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, the kind of subtle tweak for flavor I otherwise associate with rips by recognized rippers like Eazystep or Sweatpants Select; and yet here it is within Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix), an album-less, less-than-20K-views, 4-years old uncredited rip that I only found out about from a chance encounter on my submission spreadsheet. And it's a rip that's not just well made, but one that takes perhaps the most played out concept in all of SoundClown history - 4/4ths rap mashups - and twists and subverts your every expectation on them in ways you never thought SiIvaGunner could do five whole years into its run. That right there is, once again, the absolute magic of Season 5 SiIvaGunner for me in action; that classics on the level of Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix), rips waiting to showcase the ground they've secretly broken in being conceptually genius and filled with quality in execution, could just be waiting around every corner.

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 12/02/2024

V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​a​-​V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​r

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

Rip credited to "Green Monika Takeover"

Requested by crickqt! (Discord)

If you're truly deep in the trenches of SiIvaGunner like I am, then over the course of reading all of these blog posts, you may have noticed a rather...curious omission from my coverage. I've covered jokes both obscure and relevant, storylines big and small, rips of every part of the spectrum from Outertale to Loopdeloop Griddy to Sex - Steve Harvey. Yet all of these have one thing in common: They're all from within the SiIvaGunner channel. And as should perhaps be expected, SiIvaGunner is far from the only place where high quality ripping occurs nowadays.

SiIvaGunner was, of course, not an entirely original concept to begin with - mashups using video game music have existed for ages, and Chaze the Chat himself has made it no secret that the channel was an evolution of a subculture from SoundCloud, inspired heavily by the works of toonlink, as I mentioned back in Aphex. Yet the channel certainly carved out its own niche and style: its presentation as bait-and-switch mimicry of the actual GilvaSunner channel, paired with the mysterious insistence on full anonymity of each rip's creator, gave SiIvaGunner its own feel, one that it would only further refine as the fanbase grew and lore began to develop. For those first nine months, there was nothing else on YouTube like SiIvaGunner.

Yet when the channel's true "ending" was announced in the last quarter of 2016, near the end of Season 1, several people were distraught to see it go after just a few months. And keep in mind, it took until February of 2017 to get any sort of confirmation that SiIvaGunner was actually going to be sticking around beyond occasional events - and before November 2016, we didn't even know if the channel would return at all. So it comes as no surprise that, on October 1st 2016, we'd see the birth of the first true "fan channel" aiming to continue SiIvaGunner's legacy - TimmyTurnersGrandDad. And even as SiIva returned, TTGD grew to form a fanbase of its own, its own smaller community, with many of SiIva's rippers even contributing different things to both channels in parallel.

I'll be completely earnest with you all - the reason I haven't covered fan channels on this blog before is due purely to my own lack of experience with them. I've been glued stuck to SiIva alone since 2016, and the rabbitholes of the various fan channels simply appear too vast and deep to go down the same way I myself do here on this blog for the main channel. But, TTGD aside, there is one fan channel that deserves special mention, one that has quite often intermingled with SiIvaGunner itself and has such an immediately recognizable identity from all others - the namesake of V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​a​-​V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​r itself, Vvvvvavvvvvvr.

To put it concisely, while TTGD aimed to initially be a SiIvaGunner successor, then moved to be more of a SiIvaGunner alternative, the nature of the Vvvvvavvvvvvr channel has always been a fair bit more...dubious. You'll notice it just from clicking on the channel yourself - everything from the profile picture, to the header, to the titles and thumbnails of the videos uploaded to the channel have a far more chaotic, unpolished, almost "trashy" feel to them. This is because, with little exception, Vvvvvavvvvvvr aims to be almost entirely unfiltered - with minimal quality control and a submission process open to anyone, its effectively a big sandbox for rippers of all skill levels to submit to, the output almost best described as the SiIvaGunner equivalent Twitch Plays Pokémon. And much like that phenomenon, Vvvvvavvvvvvr somehow, through the unfiltered voices of hundreds of contributors, managed to find its own voice, its own set of recurring jokes, and eventually develop its own lore to tie it all together.

References to Vvvvvavvvvvvr aren't exactly a rarity on SiIvaGunner, either. The YTPMV Rock my Forum, as featured on LAST YTPMV^2 OF 2016 by ripper Xarlable, eventually took off as Vvvvvavvvvvvr's primary channel meme; almost every time the meme has been referenced on SiIvaGunner since, has been in tribute of the fan channel. V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​a​-​V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​r, then, is no exception - uploaded during the period of which the Vvvvvavvvvvvr had supposedly ended for good, its a loving tribute to just about every joke featured prominently on the channel, in the form of an incredibly varied medley rip. Scatman John, Reese's Puffs Rap, The Michael Rosen Rap, Chadtronic, Rock My Forum - its not as if these memes have never been featured on SiIvaGunner before, but they're (to my understanding!) such core parts of Vvvvvavvvvvvr in particular, that their usage in combination here makes the tribute's intentions clear.

As if that wasn't clear enough, certain segments of the fast-paced C-R-O-W-N-E-D are dedicated to referencing specific Vvvvvavvvvvvr rips (formally "vips") on an individual basis. A section using sentence-mixed AVGN clips, for instance, uses the same clips, sentence mixed in a similar fashion, as Crazy Bus Tylenol. There's references like this strewn all about this dense medley, yet as many in the comments have made clear - none of them get in the way of V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​a​-​V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​r just being a fantastic rip on its own, without any context or knowledge of the fan channel itself.

While I don't fall into that category in particular, as I'm of course aware of the fan channels that are more active now than ever - I am still very much an outsider. Yet I've once again been privy to take a peek down the rabbithole through this request, and I learned a lot about Vvvvvavvvvvvr as a result: Its a genuinely valuable platform with a fun and zany community, however small it may appear from the outside looking in. The near complete lack of filter or quality control means that anyone, even you reading, could submit something to the channel, a first step toward a great ripper's journey - a good number of SiIvaGunner's members who first joined around 2018-2021 got their start by contributing things to fan channels just like Vvvvvavvvvvvr. And though I may never become a full-on fan to the same degree I am SiIva itself, I'm of course eternally grateful and happy for their existence - through collaboration and teamwork, these channels help keep the art of high quality ripping alive.

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 17/01/2024

Because I Love You

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

Dedicated to Satoru Iwata

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

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

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

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

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

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

United or scattered, those feelings remain.

[7grandmel]

Todays rips: 02/04/2024

Our Sweet Parsley and .​.​.​of 2023 and Christmas Spirit [FILE-07] (Beta Mix)

Season 7 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume Sapphire

Ripped by cookiefonster

Season 7 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume Sapphire

Rip credited to "Kai Cenaze the Evil Gyat"

Season 7 Part of: Haltmann's Archives

Ripped by Mitchell

Did everyone enjoy yesterday's April Fools bit? I hope you did, it was a ton of fun - and if you missed it, you can use Raft Ride ~ The Story So Far to get yourself up to speed. But now its time to move past my own silly April Fools joke and back to the SiIvaGunner channel's bit - for the one event I've wanted to cover on this day for months now. In terms of these events, its hard to top just how excellently executed and well-rounded Mario's death event in Season 5 with Your Best Nightmario was - but for me, the event held last year just narrowly takes the crown for me. April Fools of 2023, the Season 7 event held 367 days ago (leap year!), is one of the most heartfelt, silly, and outright fun events the channel has ever had. And yes, I couldn't narrow it down - I HAD to feature three rips from it. Hopefully, you'll understand why.

To start, I think it needs to be established just how BIG this event was. There have been far larger in scope events on SiIva before - the King for Another Day tournament basically lasted from September to Thank You, Everybody! across several months and over a thousand videos - but April Fools 2023 is different. All 248 rips uploaded were done so not across months, not across weeks - but ALL DURING April 1st itself, within a 24 hour timespan. Now granted, 21 of those were Trailer Stringers for Garten of Banban (don't worry about it) - but it still speaks to the sheer bredth of the event itself. It was downright agonizing to think of just three, two, let alone one rip to feature on the blog to cover this event, because unlike with Your Best Nightmario or Grand Dad Metropolis - there's not truly one set of rips that best encapsulate everything about it.

Which, then, brings us to the event's theme, the main hook, one that compared to the above mentioned April Fools events from prior years, is quite subtle. You may have noticed that each of the three featured rips share a quirk in common in their title - a (Beta Mix), or in the case of .​.​.​of 2023, (Beta Mix) (Beta Mix). What's that all about? Well, Season 7 as a whole can be best described as a loveletter and celebration to the *entire* SiIvaGunner channel - this is a large part of what RIP² was about as I covered in SING A SONG ABOUT HOPES AND DREAMS and Return to Collision Clouds. It wasn't just cheering for KFAD, wasn't just remembering The Reboot, wasn't just being nostalgic for Season 1 - every inch of SiIvaGunner's history, obscure or popular, was brought up, remixed, paid tribute to, and so much more throughout the whole year, and the year's April Fools event was the greatest testament to it. We all slowly realized what that (Beta Mix) suffix meant - that each of the many, many rips uploaded that day, were *direct tributes* to the rips uploaded in the channel's past, elaborations upon or spoofs or alternate takes on these classic - or obscure! - rips.

And that side of the coin is what I think Our Sweet Parsley in particular captures brilliantly. Sonic Adventure's My Sweet Passion saw two absolutely classic rips be made of it during Season 1: The first, Our Sweet Passion, is made in the channel's earliest months and is one of the most concise examples of a truly good bait and switch, playing the track's instrumentals but having its lyrics be read aloud, dramatically yet with a confused inflection, by ripper How2BeEpic, emphasizing the bizarre word choices and writing to comedic effect. In the season's final months, Harmony Friends of Coconut Gun fame mentioned back in CG Man HD Remastered Edition, gave us My Sweet Parsley, a rip that sentence-mixes these same bizarre lyrics in YouTube Poop-esque fashion whilst still playing the original instrumental behind it all. Our Sweet Parsley, then, sees cookiefonster pay tribute to both at the same time in a rip I'm sure many of us thought possible, yet had likely forgotten about by the time Season 7 was upon us seven whole years later: a perfect fusion of the two. That's right - the lyrics of the YouTube Poop-ified My Sweet Parsley are read out with the same dramatic, quite-unfitting voice as Our Sweet Passion, and its arguably even funnier: Since there's no sentence mixing done, we get to hear first-hand cookiefonster's descent into madness reading off how Amy "had to shave it". And to really bring the point home of how much of a loveletter this entire event was, the aforementioned descent into madness is immediately followed by a bait-and-switch performance of the DK Rap with changed lyrics, directly paying tribute to Harmony Friends' Coconut Gun Rap. And then there's a sly reference to Thunder, Rain, and Lightning just after that - ANOTHER Harmony Friends rip from Season 1!!

You see what I mean, right? This was just one of the 240+ rips uploaded this day, but a ton of them had this same sort of love and care poured into them, no matter how shitpost-y they may seem from the outside. For me, the entire day was like being continuously rewarded for having kept up with SiIvaGunner so closely since its inception - yet more than the average use of the term "fanservice" implies, it all felt like it was done with the most genuine and wholesome, mutual respect between rippers behind-the-scenes. And, well, I say rippers - but part of the fun with the event was that it extended far past just rips! .​.​.​of 2023 is a (Beta Mix) version of a fucking *VLOG* of all things, the Vlog that channel founder Chaze the Chat recorded to announce the end of SiIvaGunner Season 2 and the beginning of SiIvaGunner Season 3. In other words, the equivalent of an update video, not anything actually core to the channel - yet still a video that die-hard fans like myself have long kept in mind since it was made.

I have no clue who "Kai Cenaze the Evil Gyat" is, but I want to thank them sincerely for creating the funniest rip I've ever seen out of one of SiIvaGunner's few completely-straightfaced videos, one that I mostly remembered for its very funny thumbnail. In some ways, it's the most classic of YouTube Poop, with sentence mixing and edits done purely for the silliness of "he's not saying what he's supposed to!!". But there's little nods to the fanbase's running jokes in the background - The Christmas Comeback Crisis development hell, the Rave.DJ sticker in the bottom right of the whole video, and so on - all the while, prominently, the entire video is coated in modern-day-YouTube content mill slop from top to bottom. A reaction video cam of Chaze the Chat, based on the Season 1 ending announcement The nutshack theme but the first nutshack is replaced with me ending the channel but edited to basically do nothing but say "uhm", constant reminders to like and subscribe, sensory-video sound effects - its genuinely absurd in a hysterical way to see such a tranquil, normal "olden days" YouTube video be slathered top to bottom in this kind of stuff - and it shows just how far this event went to fuck around with our past knowledge of the channel's history.

But, you know me - I'm a lorehead - and alongside all these videos, we also got the very special morsel of Christmas Spirit [FILE-07] (Beta Mix). I've long since accepted that a lot of things that happen on SiIvaGunner, especially nowadays, don't really have any direct ties to greater channel lore - that's completely fine, and its allowed the team to flex their creativity and individual skills in ways they couldn't whilst being ran under Chaze the Chat's administration in the first four seasons. Yet for this silly, downright pure-fun holiday event, Mitchell goes back to (Beta Mix) up one of the old Haltmann's Archives videos, the videos made during Season 2 and Season 3 specifically to condense and help convey old and new lore to the audience. It is, admittedly, not very serious, likely not even meant to be taken *seriously* - but it depicts a sort of glitch in the system, with the log changing from a researcher team's findings regarding "Christmas Spirit", to suddenly focus on a new, unknown substance called Fools' Spirit, a substance that appeared out of nowhere yet able to "warp and corrupt the space around itself". The testing is described as fruitless, yet as the log ends, we're shown a peek into the elusive testing grounds previously only described verbally - now covered in mist as pink as the Fools' Spirit, and evidently causing glitches to the actively-running SiIvaGunner experiments.

The rip is far simpler and straightforward than the abovementioned two - its less rip and more textbox - but I think its the initiative and attention to detail that really speaks to me here. The original Christmas Spirit [FILE-07] was well over five years old by the time this event rolled around, covering lore that hadn't been touched upon since the last main Christmas Comeback Crisis episode from just about as long ago - lore that, compared to stuff like Figments as covered in Bowser's Finale, is far less relevant to the channel's status quo. To find a way to bring back that old lore, repurpose it for the intents of this new event, and all the while having it tie together with the current state of the lore as well!!! You can see at the end, the laptop screen describes "Illucidity Active", describing the dream environment in which SiIvaGunner exists within during the entirety of Season 7 in particular. This Fools' Spirit then infests the laptop, and by extension SiIvaGunner's own dreams - giving us the entire April Fools events' gimmick to begin with! And hell, depending on how you read into things, it could even be viewed as - unintentional or not - foreshadowing for some of the great reveals made during the Season 7 finale, One Last Chance [Episode 11] of the Christmas Comeback Crisis.

Do you see why this event was like heaven on earth for me, the notorious overthinker of SiIvaGunner lore? This channel is my autism fuel, it is my Pokédex - and the entirety of April Fools 2023 was like being personally thanked for 24 hours straight for my commitment and love for the channel. No, you silly doofuses - thank YOU for running the channel to begin with, for keeping it so incredibly fresh for eight years and running!! I could do this sort of breakdown for far more than three rips from this event - if you gave me infinite time, I would GLADLY repeat Raft Ride ~ The Story So Far but for April Fools 2023 -, but I think its best I leave you all to explore the event on your own. It needs to be emphasized just how magical Season 7 was for me - it was the thing that made me start this damn blog to begin with!! - and it fills my heart with such joy to see that so much of the SiIvaGunner team loves this channel in its entirety. Be it the love for rips, like with Our Sweet Parsley, love for lore like with Christmas Spirit [FILE-07] (Beta Mix), or love for quite literally everything inbetween like with .​.​.​of 2023 - I'm forever assured that SiIvaGunner will stay in good hands in the years to come. Godspeed, you beautiful bastards. April Fools.

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 24/04/2024

Guardian of the Ride Chasers

Season 4 Episode 1 No Album Release (Read More) Overdrive Ostrich Stage - Mega Man X2

Ripper Unknown

I really don't know what it is, but I woke up earlier this week with Black Parade (MMX Remix) specifically stuck in my head. I guess that's a disadvantage to running this blog - in writing, I tend to listen to the rip in question on repeat to get a good feel of the tone I want to go for, and in the process get tunes stuck in my head (Raft Ride, for instance, has still not left my innermost thoughts ever since The Incident.) But althesame, getting a Mega Man X arrangement rip stuck in my head got me fervently looking for more like it - because really, I think it was just my brain's way of telling me that it misses listening to Mega Man X music. It was through this that I wound up stumbling onto something big, a rip I'd entirely forgotten about and one that's STILL lacking a ripper credit even five years later - Guardian of the Ride Chasers, with no attachment to its origin or its ripper, fucking OWNS.

Mega Man X2 has a pretty different sound to the original Mega Man X in a way that's controversial in a lot of ways, yet the ripper has leveraged those differences to absolutely incredible lengths here. You can TELL that the guitar samples used are different, in some's eyes "whinier" - yet they lend themselves to the dramatic flair of the arranged track ever so well. So then...what is that arranged track? Funny enough, it's a source of music I was only made aware of through a SiIvaGunner project later in the same season - Guardian of the Former Sea, or the theme of the Desert Scourge boss, from the Terraria Calamity Mod. The game is as far away from my area of knowledge as you could come - I've hardly ever even touched the BASEGAME Terraria - but its legendary composer, DM DOKURO, was a name I got very familiar with entirely thanks to SiIvaGunner. Remember the King for Another Day Tournament? Yeah - amidst many other guest arrangers, DM DOKURO lent his incredible skills to a bevvy of arrangements for the event, including one I've covered on here before - September!

And like, that was how I was initially introduced to the Terraria Calamity mod as a whole! I've talked numerous times about how following SiIvaGunner has given me exposure to so many things I wouldn't have checked out otherwise, be it with Aphex Twin Snakes, Plantasia 2, Owner of a Mahjong Board or countless more, but its an entirely new level of cool to discover a composer through their guest contributions on the channel. As I mentioned before, Guardian of the Ride Chasers was already bound to work for me as someone hopelessly attached to the specific sound of the SNES Mega Man X games, but the rip only works as WELL as it does due to DM DOKURO's incredible work with the original track. I love how Mega Man X2's more varied sound in particular compared to the former and latter game resulted in the track being adapted pretty differently, in particular using the particular plink-plonk sounds from Bubble Crab's theme for a lot of the track to give the rip some really nice texture. It can be easy for a banger melody to be lost amidst samey instrumentation, a lot of lower-quality "but in the (blank) soundfont" have shown me just how bad it can really get - but the ripper went above and beyond in making the entire track sound absolutely brilliant in the conversion here.

All in all, Guardian of the Ride Chasers was a two-for-one kind of rip - both being an incredibly cool rip to listen to in its own right, and helping spread DM DOKURO's exceptional work outside of his target audience. Hopefully in making this post, you as the readers will now ALSO be reminded to go check out the other music from the Terraria Calamity Mod, or the other stuff by DM DOKURO in general - this rip is truly only scratching the surface.

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 06/01/2024

Wario's Hampster Mine

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

Credited to Wario

Requested by MtH! (@mth-emma)

It really has been fascinating to follow SiIva's timeline of events, and in the process also follow the timeline of what comes in and out of fashion with that certain demographic of internet users. During Season 3, with the original King for a Day Tournament, the clear breakout star was Unregistered Hypercam 2, and his setlist of immensely charming sources all meant to evoke the earliest of times on YouTube. I've covered my affection for plenty of these on the blog already - YACKER TOILET, Never Gonna Give Up Mahjong, Unregistered CyberSpace 4-5: Arrow of 2009 and THIS. IS. SOLEANNA. have together pretty much covered most bases of Hypercam's particular brand of rips.

Yet...there was one song that was suspiciously missing - one that, even in my time exploring this old age of the internet that I was just shy of participating in, I hadn't really heard before. This is the Hampster Dance, and Wario's Hampster Mine.

It's kind of nuts to think that The Hampster Dance's origins as a meme precede the shift of the millennium - its often cited as one of the earliest memes ever made, and was originally just a joke website playing a sped-up Disney song with a bunch of Hamsters. But, that was enough to grab people's attention, the sheer force of "SO RANDOM!!" humor turned the site into an internet-wide in-joke, and in the year 2000 we'd get an official Hampsterdance theme, based on the site's original 7-second looping music. A meme had officially been born, and exploded in popularity.

The King for a Day Tournament was over five years ago at this point, yet it to me was the first sign that nostalgia for the old internet was going to become a very real thing - the novelty that Hypercam introduced has now become an immensely popular aesthetic, and its one that I'm very much a fan of. Hell, it was thanks to this new uptick in popularity - thanks to rips like Wario's Hampster Mine - that I even learned what the Hampster Dance meme was. Despite being such a crucial piece of early internet history, it had completely slipped me by until Season 6, and the 22nd anniversary of the official theme's creation. SiIva celebrated the occasion with an event filled with rips like this one, and it was an immensely fun time.

Of course, I mainly covered this one for being a request, but I'd probably have picked this rip from the event as well due purely to my Mario Kart Wii bias. Wario's Gold Mine is an absolute banger of a track in every sense of the word and already has such an inherently silly energy to it, that it only made sense to be arranged in this fashion. And, yeah - though I don't know who exactly to thank to it, the arrangement is very well done, in line with the spirit of the original meme whilst still following every part of Wario's Gold Mine seamlessly. Its a truly excellent tribute to perhaps the oldest of internet shitposting culture, the seed that would eventually bloom into the random, zany, silly internet culture of the early 2000s. The one that helped start it all.

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 29/10/2023

If Pazuzu Sneezes Do You Still Say Bless You?

Season 6 Featured on: The SiIvaGunner Party Pack 7

Credited to "Anonymous Andy"

Part of Spooktacular Week!

Would you believe me if I said, for all that I've posted this week (and for the two rips still to be posted) - THIS was the one I was the most excited about? And, as you may have noticed - nobody submitted it as a request beforehand either! Somehow this absolute gem of a rip, one I only discovered earlier this month, and partially inspired me to even DO a spooky week, still sits at barely 15K views! Anonymous Andy, whoever you are, it's time I make you proud.

Yesterday, I talked about Sidelined Symphony and mentioned briefly about how it creatively tied itself to Halloween through using a song by YouTuber Chills (who, i forgot to mention anywhere in that post - reads scary stories on his YouTube channel). If Pazuzu Sneezes Do You Still Say Bless You?, then, sits at the complete opposite end of the table - it celebrates everything thats LOUDLY and proudly scary on YouTube, in particular one of the cornerstones of old YouTube - screamer videos.

You've all seen them at one point or another, right? Innocent looking, obscure, weird videos or even flash games that, just as you try to get invested, slam the door on you with a loud jumpscare and some sort of grotesque or scary imagery. These came in all sorts of forms - I remember my first exposure to them came in the form of a fake Mario Kart Wii shortcut video on Daisy Circuit. But there were loads of more popular ones: The "Scary Maze Game", "Ghost Car", the fake game of "Where's Waldo", and so much more. With the internet and many of its users still in its infancy, online horror media had this sense of complete mystery to them, that caught so many young kids off guard. If Pazuzu Sneezes Do You Still Say Bless You? is a YTPMV, or more accurately a 音MAD, that boldly celebrates this culture of online horror screamers - sampling several of the above-mentioned sources and more into a tune I cannot get enough of.

And part of that is just the Yousuke Yasui magic, right? I've covered it already on here with Siiva Lining and 【＝３】e-MUNO Disco (vs. 音MAD AGENT), the latter similarly being a YTPMV/音MAD of another song from the very same game as today's rip. The guy's music is just so infectiously catchy, and has had a long history of being remixed on NicoNico Douga in particular - something I obviously can't quite speak to as someone who hasn't ever really explored the site's history. Althesame, the Japanese-internet roots of If Pazuzu Sneezes Do You Still Say Bless You? are inescapable - one of the pieces of media most prominently featured in its visuals is the Japanese browser-based horror game Lomando.com, a rabbithole I would love to fall into someday, yet one that simple oozes the charm of early-internet horror much like all the screamers of young YouTube.

And really, that charm is what sells me on this rip as a whole. Screamers of this type are a relic of a bygone age, yet one that I was part of - a piece of internet history that I got to see be born and slowly fade away, as the internet became more closely moderated and people learned to watch for warning signs throughout. For as many nightmares as the ones I saw instilled in me, there's something oddly nostalgic about them in hindsight - and that nostalgia just turns to full-on warmth seeing them arranged to such a cheerful tune as Bless You! boy. If Pazuzu Sneezes Do You Still Say Bless You? is, on all fronts, a TOP-tier YTPMV/音MAD, right alongside the best the channel has to offer like those by Robomi and GramBam36.