The failwhale is displeased.

The goal of twitter is for its users to answer the simple question of “What happening?”. Some answer simply with direct responses: “going to pick up groceries” or “eating lunch”. Others use it as a way to advertise themselves or things they find interesting: a website like Destructoid.com (@dtoid) would tweet every time a new post is up.

A feature of twitter is the ability to discuss. A tweet can be directed to a specific user by using the at symbol (@) and typing their username, no spaces. When logged into the service, if you visit http://twitter.com/#replies, you can see all of the tweets that mention you, even if you don’t follow the person mentioning you.

As with all things overrun by the general public, some choose to defy what the creators had planned for the service and turn it into their own thing. Some of these deviant actions actually increased productivity and functionality. The Hashtag (#) and, more importantly, the Retweet (RT) are two of the results of these actions.

Retweets (only officially supported in late 2009) are when people tweet tweets that are not originally written by them. This is usually done when another person shares news that other people feel their followers should read. For example, if someone you follow tweets about a funny YouTube video to you and you think it’s worth sharing to your followers, retweet it! The first and unofficial (but still used) retweet method was to prepend tweets with [RT @username-of-original-tweeter:] and the original message. Freehanding retweets like that allowed for edits to be made to the original tweet and personal messages to be attached.

This is where my beef starts.

I’m not the biggest fan of when people use the Retweet function when a simple mention would work just as well and even work more to the tweeter’s advantage. The situation specific to my beef is when a conversation between two people becomes a conversation between 2 people and all of the followers of the person retweeting. There a number of things wrong with the above situation.

1. That’s not the Retweet’s function.

Officially, a retweet is a relay of a person’s tweet verbatim.

2. It undermines the original tweeter’s privacy.

Retweets show up as public tweets. Mentions to users with locked twitter accounts don’t show up in your friend’s dashboards. One can argue that someone that doesn’t want the world to know things shouldn’t be on twitter but that’s why there are locked accounts. The list of followers is there for a reason and if someone isn’t on another person’s followers list, there’s probably a reason for that too.

3. Twitter functionality actually makes it easier to follow conversations through replies

If you reply to a tweet, twitter keeps track of the tweet that you replied to. If you’ve properly replied to a tweet, it should say “in reply to [username]” in the tweet meta which is a link to the original tweet by the original tweeter. Using a client like TweetDeck, clicking the “in reply to…” opens a side window which lists the chain of corresponding tweets between the tweeters involved.

However, I’m not totally against it. A good example of using Retweets as replies would be if you’re somebody important and someone asks you a question you think that your followers would be curious to know the answer to, be my guest. This is especially useful for when people play trivia/word games or when running contests and the people running it don’t want to reply to repeated questions.

Some tweeters use the retweet like the reply-all button in e-mails mass emails. Some conversations were meant to be private and people don’t want to hear about it but others just don’t care. You can ask me why I’m still following people like that. I’ll say it’s complicated.

I’d like to announce the grand opening of my new worship blog named “OSHIAMINA” for Satou Amina of AKB48’s Team B. You can find it over at johpan.com/oshiamina. In other news, I just finished writing a piece about Twitter. It’ll be up shortly.

I still have a few more piece ideas in draft. Those’ll come up when they come up. I might have another remix in the works but it’s kinda not working out as planned. I might need to find a new way to go about it. For the same song I’m remixing, I’d like to make a stepchart for it but I’ll put it on the back burner for now. I’m not sure when I’ll continue the stepcharting tutorial videos. I’ll be sure to announce when the next set is coming out.

I’ve really been in an AKB48 mood. I’ve been getting my hands on anything I can since I’ve found out about their variety shows and how awesome they are. Fridays are win because of new Majisuka Gakuen episodes. Also, learning about new people is always fun. That’s why I started the worship blog. But anyway, I hope I have more for you guys for the next update!

Yay! New remix and stepchart as promised! The remix is of NaengMyeon by Jessica and Park Myeong Soo, done in a hardcore styling. The stepchart is of 4minute’s “Muzik”. Please enjoy the short write ups on both as well as the end products themselves. That’s all the changes made so far.

I’d very much like to have one of those commentary posts up by the end of the week but I doubt I’ll get around to it with my schedule. I’m actually thinking of revising “Part 3″ of the stepchart tutorial. Instead of one BIG update with how do to a bunch of things, why not just smaller video guides on how to achieve the gimmicks? I think that’d work much better and be easier on me who won’t have much time for updates in the next few days. We’ll see how those turn out.

But anyway, I’ll be helping my cousin move into his new condo on Friday, thus, I’ll have to work more this week to reach my quota. I might need some help focusing this week. Heaven help me.

lol KPop.

So 4minute might be my 2nd favourite KPop girl group… they’re duking it out with T-ara and Kara right now. Anyway, if you’ve watched my stepcharting tutorial videos, this is the song I cut up. I added the use of For Muzik at the start like how they did in the MV. Ripping the audio from the YouTube video was horrible so I used the audio from my legit 4minute “For Muzik” CD and just used the thunder sound effect from the MV and layered it during the transition between the two songs. Add in a few volume automation channels and bam.

As for the charting technique, from when I first watched the MV, I wanted to chart For Muzik (0:22 – 0:59), and I wanted to make it lulzy. It’s 75 BPM of fun! Anyway, outside of that, Muzik is an awesome 126 BPM tune. The vocal line is what I followed for the most part. As for the chorus gimmick (1:43), I don’t really like using it but it just fit so perfectly for this song. Shoutouts to Exrave. The rolls for the 2nd half of the chorus fit the stutter of the lyrics. HyunA’s rap was too easy without the stop gimmicks. The rest of the song just followed along as regular. It’s one of my favourite charts.

Hope you enjoy!
Download here!

As you may or may not know, Jessica is my favourite member of my favourite KPop girl group, 소녀시대, or So Nyeo Shi Dae, or soshi, or SNSD, or Girls’ Generation. I don’t remember what exactly I was searching for but I found the original of this song from a live perf the two, Jessica and Park Myeong Soo, did during an award show (see right). I’m not very deep into Korean entertainment outside of the girl groups (and even still I’m not that deep into them other than listening to their music) so my initial thoughts to the video were “this is fkn adorable” and “who the hell is that guy and why is he laughing mid perf?” What I can gather is that Park Myeong Soo is a comedian / tv personality? and the two (along with other unlikely duets/groups) were part of a challenge for a music variety show and this song is the end result of it. It’s not that I can’t be bothered about the history of the song and how it came to be, it’s just other than piecing together the clips I’ve seen, I don’t know where else to get information on it.

This is what the finished product looks like.

Give it a download!

First and foremost, I’ve updated the layout using the 960 Grid System CSS Framework. It’s really cleaned up the spacing with zero effort.

A bunch of things have been going on which have prevented me from updating the stepcharting tutorial series. I’m not sure when Part 3 will come up but I haven’t forgotten about it, and you guys, so hang tight for now and it’ll be up sooner or later. I’ve got 3 semi-long commentary posts I want to put up but haven’t gotten around to write yet. I’ve also finished another remix and a stepchart. Those will be posted soon.

It’s been a crazy few weeks here at home with it being for sale sold and all. The initial upkeep with the room painting and overall cleanup was nightmarish. Over the last week, I’ve been kicked out of the house so many times due to showings and what not. It’s all over now though. Work is all I really have to worry about. Also, I’m hosting my first stepchart competition with a small group of friends. We’re going to invade the XScape arcade in Newmarket, Ontario. Our victim is Girls’ Generation’s Oh!. I’ll probably let you know how that went in the next quick hits post.