tfw a bandman is apparently up to date on lolcow drama lmfao
he’s been liking my retweets about this dude all day
I really wish Noir Du’Soleil still made music 
How is the forum getting funding?
Are you hoarding our data and selling it for ads???
Cuz it is not working. I barely see any Kawaii J-Rock boys in my feed. All I get are rotten toe nail and foot fungus ads -.-
That’s a good question!
A community getting funding doesn’t mean it will last long as much as the amount of the money you donated. Most of the donated money goes to the owner’s wallet and a little is spent on the hosting provider and the domain name. And the site can still shut down on the next day if the owner loses the passion to run it, or they run into an issue that leads to the site shutting down, such as data loss.
Look at Tainted World. They ran ads and had a donate via PayPal button at the top most of every single page, but the site lasted only around 3 years. It clearly wasn’t a financial issue but something else.
Similarly, MH shutting down wasn’t a financial issue either. Sure, it shut down due to lacking of financial and technical support. But I believe that the MH staff then could have paid for the forum software license and the server for another decade just fine. But lacking of a SysOp who was pretty much everything in the team was one thing.
However, JROCK ONE is different. The community has both financial and technical support from me. I’m a full-stack web developer and also a SysAdmin who uses Linux on a daily basis, so I know what to do to keep the community running technically.
Other than me, Zeus and Kai are skilled SysAdmins who are capable of doing this kind of stuff as well. Yeah, all the 3 MH SysOps are here on JROCK ONE, so you can rest assured about the technical support.
The servers, domain names, CDN, email hosting, and more are paid by me. There won’t be ads and donations because JROCK ONE is supposed to be a non-commercial J-rock community since day one, and it’s good financially for its lifetime.
In addition, non-commercial doesn’t mean cheap. JROCK ONE is not a cheap J-rock community. Everything is in the same tier as or even better than a tech community. You get the best things we can offer whether it be the platforms, the staff team, or the content. Thanks to everyone who helps build it.
Lastly, I have been a J-rock fan since 2001. It’s become a huge part of my life. But don’t take my words for it. Anyone can say they are passionate about something and quit it later on. You should judge me from my contributions to MH and JROCK ONE in the past years instead. I would like JROCK ONE to last as long as possible until no one helps me run it. I do hope you all will stick together for a decade and more.
Love you all.
I’ve been waiting forever to add my two cents in to this topic!
There’s a bit of history I wanna clear up here. Tainted World existed in two stages in my mind. I came in somewhere around the middle of the first stage, circa 2008. This era of Tainted World ended because of exactly what @nick said. The forum admin at the time, Dai, lost his passion for keeping the forum running. There was a simple error that could have been fixed in just a few minutes, but without a) the access to the server and b) the knowledge of where things were, how it was set up, and what was needed to be done to fix it meant that the server…didn’t get fixed. The site was out for a week before the administration (which I wasn’t a part of at the time) revived an old InvisionFree forum and rebranded it as Tainted World. The community had to rebuild from scratch, and I watched it happen, but it worked out in the end.
Somewhere between the last paragraph and the next paragraph, truthfully a week before the next paragraph, @CAT5 promoted me to mod. So the rest of this I’ve witnessed from “the inside”.
About half a year later, Dai reappears, “apologizes”, offers to spin up the old server and provide “Joomla services”, which you could think of as a budget-tier offering of what vk.gy has become. The administration (mostly) laughed and said no - one does not simply “go ghost” and expect to be welcomed back with open arms. I say mostly because one admin, Spike, decided to team up with Dai and use the old backup as “Tainted World Re:Birth” and immediately began competing with us.
So all the people that felt unwelcome on our site went to join their site…and the staff let them! We had the community, we had the downloads, we had the head start, and we were banking on Dai burning out again, which totally happened way sooner than we thought. That site lasted no more than a few months before becoming overwhelmed with bots and spam, with a mod team that couldn’t or wouldn’t take control, and Dai lost his passion again and disappeared for good. Since Spike joined up with him and turned his back on us, we kicked him off the team.
At that point, we felt the name Tainted World was, well, tainted, and went to the community to source a new name. The community gave us a ton of names, and in the end I think we ended up combining two submissions together to form one name: Monochrome Heaven.
Fun fact: the site name is an unintentional mashup of two NoGoD songs - Monokuro and Mr. HEAVEN. However, we did not explicitly choose these words for that reason.
So for those who weren’t around to see it happen, Tainted World Phase 2 = Monochrome Heaven. Most people just use MH to refer to Phase 2, since it was only Tainted World for about six months. Tainted World Phase 1 was 2007-2009. Phase 2 was 2009-2020.
Cool history lesson bro, but what’s the point?
I mentioned Dai losing passion before, but I tried to go out of my way to not be hard on him (for that). Losing passion isn’t something that anyone can be blamed for. Failing to have a contingency plan, hand over the reigns, or do the bare minimum to keep the site going is. And coming back and immediately trying to compete with us instead of integrating into the community showed his true intentions.
But I digress, MH shut down for several reasons:
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By the end of 2019, I was the only member on the staff who could handle any technical issues. And there were a lot of technical issues. Being a SysOp is a thankless job because when things go right, no one thinks you do anything at all. When’s the last time you called your electric company and said thank you? Yeah, didn’t think so.
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Staff was quitting and no one in the community was interested in replacing them. So more and more duties fell to less and less people, who became burned out themselves, who then left, creating a death spiral.
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An overworked staff team meant that more things slipped through the cracks. The site became lawless and a bit feral. We tried to step in when possible, but when you’re six months late to an argument, any action is pointless.
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The staff took it upon themselves to try and increase activity on the forum by posting. This created ORZ, which was a group that was made to write reviews for stuff. But this just added more free labor to my plate, and people began expecting reviews for new stuff left and right on top of my other duties. One can only do this for so long.
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The tech stack itself was a dinosaur. Remember, I said the site was rebooted on an InvisionFree server. At some point, we upgraded to IPB. IPB is a black box that used the best technology and practices that 2009 had to offer. There was no documentation, there was support that we paid for, but they couldn’t really help us with more serious issues. The server fee was $200 per year (remember, we didn’t ask for any donations so that came out of mostly the admins pockets). The site was constantly under attack. Constantly. CONSTANTLY. 24/7 is not an exaggeration.
So when the site was hit with redirect malware in 2014 that took members to porn sites and other malware sites when reaching us from Google, guess who had to roll up their sleeves and figure everything out by himself. Me. This is something that experts get paid fat stacks per hour to diagnose, and I’m here doing it for free. For the community. That bug was nearly the death of me. I’m still not sure how they got in, although several security updates likely took care of the hole, but the malware was persistent. I eventually came across an article about this exact malware redirect that gave me a hint, but it took me several months more to realize that the damn virus had replicated into the backups and the templates, so I had to manually dive into the database and clip out base64 and hex and code and all sorts of gnarly shit.
This is something I never really elaborated on before, because ultimately it’s something most members don’t give two shits about. But it’s constant intervention such as this which had to be done on a regular basis, because the technology was old and IPB was not innovating nearly quickly enough.
Fun Fact 2: The only reason MH upgraded from IPB3 to IPB4 is because one member had a DM exchange so long that it broke the site. They were unable to load any messages at all. When we upgraded, we got hit with a bunch of mojibake. @nick had to step in and work magic to fix it. And then we were on IPB4 until the server itself reached EOL, and a combination of me, kai, and nick had to come together to cut over the server from one VM to another VM. This kept me up at night for months, real talk, but I never said a word publically.
Gargantuan task, only for the site to shutter six months later. Such is life.
Ten years of tasks like this, toiling in the background while certain unruly members contort themselves into a pretzel and accuse the staff of being out to get them, takes it’s toll on you. I felt very unappreciated and depressed, like I was doing everything, so I left MH.
I intended to leave permanently, but @nick pulled me back in to work here. So here I am. Lucky you.
Some people still have an attachment to MH and it’s interface, since it was a part of our lives for almost a decade, but as the person who actually had to maintain that beast, let me be the first and only to tell you that that site technologically was a piece of shit and JRO is better and modern in almost every way. This is the superior platform of the two. Full stop.
Reitas death happend like, few months ago, in April, it just sucks. I just found this website today, so I wanted to talk about it I guess. And no one I know cares. I don’t have any friends that like vkei, and literally almost everyone I meet doesn’t know what vkei is, which is fair, but it’s kinda lonley. My favorite bands are the gazette and dadaroma, I’m thinking about buying the madra ep from the gazette! It’s expensive though…… I’m so broke. Oh I’m still trying to find more vkei bands to get into, I found this cool band recently called kebyou and I like kaneto juusei, also the gallo, Meiji bray has some good songs too. Ah vkei is so dead though, it’s sad. I hope vkei gets more popular again, but it won’t be the same as it was, Yknow I recently got into it, like- around the end of 2023, so I missed out when it was popular. Oh well, it is what it is
Yeah, it’s not even been ten weeks. And I still can’t wrap my head around it, no matter what.
Hello and welcome. It’s always great to see new faces around. How did you find out about us? What attracts you to visual kei specifically? It’s a bummer you can’t chat about with your friends, but that’s unfortunately the reality of niche scenes.
If you’re looking for recommendations, you can write what kind of sound/genre you’re interested in in this topic: Band Recommendations
Or you can have a look around the news category to find new bands. We also have a couple best of the year topics if you want new music (JRO's Community Best of 2021 🎄, JRO’s Community Best of 2022 🎆, JRO's Community Best of 2023 🎉), or you can check out user-created playlists (Share Your Playlists!) for a range of bands and styles. Otherwise, take some time to explore the forum, or even participate in the next trade-off when it happens. It’s a great way to find new music.
Don’t despair at the drop in popularity – we have a thriving community here, and live performances of vk acts overseas have seemed to pick up this year in particular! It can be difficult to get into, but trust me, it’s so rewarding to spend time exploring new music, finding and translating lyrics, discussing new releases, and appreciating the incredible outfits of past and present! It doesn’t have to be a popular scene for you to have fun and find community. Of course, while I understand how unfeasible it is, if you ever have the opportunity to visit Japan, find the time to go to a live, it’s always an amazing experience.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy your time here!
This and also Tenshi no Yume. There was also a Kote style band from Spain, Pinku jisatsu that i wish would have lasted longer.
I was there when all of thiese bands active and I remember how the Vk fan community relentlessly complained, flamed and hated on them for being “shit gaijin crap” essentially. The less bad comments still regarded these groups to be “not trve VK” - and I feel many projects eventually split because of the lack of support and constant bickering. I know Noir du’Soleil went on as the singer’s solo project for a while long after their debut, doing only lives and completely leaving VK behind (focusing more on breaking through in the electronic music corner of the Dark Alternative scene), but that didn’t seem to work out either so the project silently fizzled out.
I used to be an asshat that ridiculed “gaijin kei” as well, I kinda regret that today. I eventuall got around listening to some of the groups and found there were some that weren’t so terrible (and honestly, a lot of VK from Japan is god-awful, but praised to the heavens…). Well, at least we have Cantavanda doing music (and he seems to be well repected).
Also Ma’Rie Chrys†mAs, despite being a total joke band, wwas actually amazing, lol
Why are other dudes at work so unapologetically sexual, yes dude female customer no.8907 was attractive. Okay. We get it. Calm down. Like bro, why do you feel the need to show me twerk videos on ig stories. I DO NOT CARE.
I missed a lot of context, but that’s wild.
I believe that the reason for such hatred is because a Brazilian fan died at Taylor’s concert from heat exhaustion due to diffuse exposure to the heat while waiting for the show and there were reports that around a thousand people fainted during the concert. Taylor’s own lack of sensitivity on social media led to a series of protests on the internet and only then did Taylor herself publish an open letter on social media. And only on the last day of the concerts did the family of Ana Clara Benevides, the Taylor Swift fan, meet the artist at the third and final performance in São Paulo.
After these events, fans and Brazilians already have a negative image of Taylor and probably won’t forget it. I think it will take decades for Taylor have a concert in Brazil again.
Thanks for that added context.
I’m not particularly a fan of Taylor Swift either (as a person), for a litany of other reasons that predate this. Nature of the chants aside (which I don’t condone but somewhat empathize given the context), I think there’s a time and place for everything. Getting Charli caught in the crossfire with someone who is litigious and already quite gung ho for vengeance, is something that shouldn’t be provoked by fans.
I have friends in both fandoms, and it’s like the gay world war. They are fighting hard and dirty, the vibes are very bad imo, so I’m avoiding that drama like the plague.
There is a bit of context missing here too, weeks ago there was a viral video in Brazilian twitter/tiktok of a small child (like 10-11 yo) talking about having two dads. The video was cute, and nothing out of the ordinary. But the backlash coming from all the usual suspects was pretty bad cause the child had all those effeminate affectations. Part of that dumb backlash came from the inside of the gay community by some gay users with Taylor’s pfp. So that was also in the zeitgeist
I had no idea he went and did a solo project, what’s it called? I’d like to give it a listen lol. I’m so glad I’m not the only one who still longs for Noir Du’Soliel lmao, I’ve been listening to the same few songs of theirs on repeat for a few months now, in addition to some other bands of that style. They’ve got a unique sound, I’m amazed it didn’t work out for them
I got a really unhinged reply on reddit last night, and to my surprise it was from a russian swiftie who was casually dunking on her queen in a fandom post where T’s little beige stans were dishing on their grand damme’s progressing coke habit
I know literally one taylor song that I sort of can recall from memory (shake it off chorus) and everything else about her blends into a decade of cardigan-wearing acoustic guitar mediocrity with a chronic cinnamon mint lozenge breath and i’m like wow girls you’re cancelling her after one album full of incoherent drugged out wailing, where have you literally been for like a decade omg
help me this is the funniest thing ever bC IT’S SO TRUE
i’m cracking up at my desk and my coworkers keep asking if i’m ok