#TECHNICALLY tagged with merch since they talked about the soundtrack

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

🎊 twst 4th year anni ABEMA stream 🎉

***TWST JP news + anniversary spoilers below the cut!***

The stream starts with Ace, Deuce, Jack, Ruggie, and Sebek's VAs replying to a bunch of quiz questions. I think Ace or Deuce responds with "810" when asked how many items there are on the Heartslabyul lounge's coffee table. Sebek's VA also has a hilarious answer when asked how many Draconians (wakasama fans) there are, he pulls out some super absurdly high number with tons of zeros in it.

There is then a Master Chef/Culinary Crucibles-type section where the VAs decorate their own cake for TWST's anniversary. It’s a team effort! Ace and Deuce put on the cream, Sebek added cookies on top, and Jack and Ruggie did the final decorations. It ended up looking pretty cute ^^ (Ace's VA is the one that added all the whipped cream peaks; it was mostly thanks to Ruggie's VA that the cake still looked aesthetically pleasing at the end.)

Actual game-related news time!!! The SR Grim card for the 4th anniversary is... drumroll please...!! 🥁Apprentice Chef Grim!!! ABGKSKVUkvuDSQEVUOFDFIHAFVA HE'S SO CUTE, HE EVEN HAS A LIL TUNA CAN CAKE 😭

For anniversary, there will be a series of free items given out if you log in during the event period (11th to 25th), which includes THREE 10-pull keys (released on the 11th, 15th, and 18th, respectively). You can receive up to 12 days' worth of freebies. There will be an anniversary banner as per usual; you can earn tokens by pulling on this and then trade them in for a SR magical key (50 tokens) and/or past event-limited SSRs (150 tokens), including past years' birthday cards (100 tokens). There will be a new "Event Recollection" feature which allows you to experience events that you may have missed getting the initial chance to play through yourself.

Mr. S's Mystery Shop will sell items from past events such as limited Groovy materials and spell upgrade materials. This is called the "Memory Shop".

You will be able to mark (multiple) parts of the story as your "favorite". This will be indicated with a pink heart icon.

Battles will have a new feature which allows you to save team compositions for them. Up to 25 compositions may be saved at a time. You can also pin your supports, so you no longer have to scroll to find a specific friend's character to borrow.

There will be 3 new item gachas added to the "Item Lotto" of the shop (for Crewel, Vargas, and Trein). Previously, there was only Sam's. You use a new type of medal (obtained by taking classes) to roll on the teachers' lottos, and can pull items related to what you'd typically earn in each of their classes.

Crewel's gacha may provide an herbal tea which can be used to boost Buddy Levels, including those for characters that are otherwise unable to take Alchemy classes. That means Crowley, Rollo, etc. are fair game. (Yes, you can force feed them tea to obtain FRIENDSHIP✨) The tea may also drop during Special Lessons or Alchemy class.

We finally get magical key conversion! On the summoning screen, you can turn 10 single pull keys into one 10-pull key (which guarantees at least 1 SR; single keys do not have this benefit).

The Guest Room will receive a second floor to decorate. This will be unlocked once you reach a Guest Room rank of 31.

The Guest Room rank cap will be increased from 30 to 40. Additionally, all properties of floor 1 appears to carry over to floor 2. This means the same comfort level and attributes will be present across both.

New BGMs will be added to Mr. S's Mystery Shop. There will also be new voice lines added to Alchemy, Flying, and the outfit selection screen. The official TWST soundtrack will be released on the 29th of May, though preorders are tentatively open now. It is 140+ tracks (149, to be exact!) across 4 discs and goes for 4620 yen (inclusive of tax; without tax the soundtrack is 4200 yen). Japanese retailers are offering different dorms' A5 sized holographic sticker sheets as bonuses for preordering.

That's it for now, mostly quality of life changes! There will most likely be a 4th year anniversary PV/animated short on the actual anniversary day (the 18th)!

[rephemera]

Label · 21st Circuitry

20 November 2018

For the last major type of posts (the other two being "Concept" and "Store"), the "Label" posts are going to introduce ephemera specific to record labels.  This will mostly be limited to CD inserts and, unlike price tags, not be an exhaustive collection—if I have five identical instances of a specific reply card, I'm going to detail the first I come across, and I photographed these going through the collection alphabetically, with compilations coming toward the end.  Any of these which show up as compilations is a demonstration that I don't have anything from the label outside compilations, soundtracks, tribute albums, and related material.

Typically, as I mentioned in a previous post, I don't want to get into "record reviews" of a 20-year-old label compilation.  These are going to be nearly impossible to find in a physical record store, and the only real market is the second-hand market.  The "support the artist" argument for actually buying a record like this in 2018 is utterly facile—the label ceased to exist in 1998, the same year of this release, releasing only two more albums after this album, artists typically stop getting paid when a label goes under, and the ugly truth is that retail sales of albums isn't how most artists are paid in the first place, now, in 1998, or in 1958.  Most artists are paid by touring, and merch at tours.  Even under the best record deals, artists are typically paid $0.10-$0.25 per sale of their own album.  But more on that later under "The CD as Tour Souvenir".  Appearances on compilations are not lucrative for artists, to say the least.

As far as the difficulty of obtaining something like this on streaming services, this is a great example of why solutions like that aren't complete solutions for many people.  The Luxt track is there, but that's it.  Spotify would have to hunt down whoever owns the rights to 21st Circuitry's catalogue to even bother with something like this; label compilations are a frequent casualty of streaming economics, this is common when the label is small, as 21st Circuitry was, and particularly unfortunate when the compilation is actually good, as Newer Wave and Newer Wave 2.0 were.  The return on investment for Spotify for doing that much legwork is incredibly low, and really only works in reverse–some company acquires 21st Circuitry's catalogue, probably with the intent to re-press key albums, and an eye to target feeding the back catalogue to streaming services like Spotify to pull in some relatively low-effort residual cash to fund future projects.

There are, of course, other methods of obtaining albums like this that often have very little to do with the economics of buying a CD or a streaming service, and they're treated quite differently for reasons which are often quite hypocritical—the first is YouTube, where the listener is fairly given a free pass on the supposed moral ramifications of listening to a song that literally nobody is able to legally "monetize" under a label-dominated intellectual property structure, and the second is file sharing.  File sharing is treated as a moral outrage despite the fact that the artists will literally receive as much money from it as they did from my walking into a Harmony House and paying the princely sum of $4.88 since I almost certainly purchased it after 1998.  The same would have been true had I bought it as a cut-out (more on that later), or at a second-hand music store, or today via Amazon or eBay.  Rather than take a rational look at whether any particular aspect of intellectual property law makes sense, however, we shroud it in meaningless phrases like "support the artists" without examining whether any particular act actually does.  Make no mistake, there are many ways to spend money on an album which either do not "support the artist" either in any meaningful way or in any way at all, and there are many ways to get music for free which are entirely legal which are different from other ways of getting music for free which are entirely illegal whose differences to the end listener are mostly matters of delivery mechanism, convenience, legal fictions, or which website or software one uses.  This is not a matter of agenda, as I am not advocating any particular agenda here, it is an easily documentable fact.  Whew.  What agenda I will reveal, however, is that this and its predecessor album, with wider exposure, might have been good enough on their own to justify this label by themselves.  They're very fun:  exclusive (I believe) industrial dance covers of 1980s New Wave hits, which is a spot-on combination in terms of influences and audience.  It may not have been tenable for the long-term unless 21st Circuitry had a stable of artists under its own imprint, but Cleopatra could easily have taken this formula and ran with it as well.  They came close to it, but usually focused on single-artist tributes of wildly varying quality.

There's some delicious tangents out of the way.  On to the regular staple of Label posts:  the reply card.  I've got a lot of these because if I've ever turned any of them in, I simply don't recall ever doing it.  Maybe I did send one or two in for a favorite band early on and stopped since I never got much out of it, or maybe I stopped since I never got anything out of it, I'm not sure.  I never quite grasped the value proposition.  By the time the CD era kicked in and I was buying them with my own money, I was toward the end of high school and they were still quite expensive.  By the time I was buying them frequently, I was in the military, and while I signed up for six years and was almost positive I wasn't going to re-enlist after those six years (and didn't), and even though that only covered two different assignments, it still involves a considerable amount of address instability:  Basic Training, Technical School, an AE zip code where you're overseas but you have what is effectively a US PO Box zip code for most purposes, then in the US, a series of apartments, and eventually a townhouse.  I'm not entirely sure what a person was expected to receive:  more little catalogues of the sort that CDs already came with, US Letter or European A4 printed sheets of new label releases, swag?  I'm sure if it was swag, someone would have clued me in and I would have actually bothered.  The concept of new releases is helpful enough, as this period I'm mostly talking about—1990 to 1999—largely either predates the internet or is concurrent with the internet.

Be sure that by "the internet" I mean the public internet, not the military, university, and contractor internet which is the predecessor to which it owes everything but bears almost no relationship to in terms of culture—the dividing line for culture is quite simple, on that early internet, the closest thing you could be to a normal person and be on it was a university student in particular universities in particular computer labs, and the culture was hemmed in by the requirement that no commercial activity was allowed over the NSFNET, making it a culturally separate creature from the public internet post 1995.  This makes the internet before May 1995 and after quite distinct.  For all real intents, we can talk about April 1995 as "pre-internet" in terms of what we actually use the internet for today, who uses it, and how many people use it.

In that pre-internet era, getting information about new releases wasn't exactly handy compared to today, that much I can admit.  But if you were an active consumer of music, even the increasingly niche corners of musical interest I was getting into at the time, it wasn't exactly obscure gnostic mysticism (unless it was Current 93, then it may have literally been that, but I wasn't interested in David Tibet yet).  I found out about new music and "new to me music" that wasn't new the same way my friends with the best taste did:  by raiding the collections of my friends to find out what was worth borrowing and then buying, scouring record stores relentlessly, some of the few good music shows (120 Minutes Europe on MTV Europe was much better than the US version when someone would either buy a subscription to Sky TV or more likely ... ahem ... hook it up illegally involving a weird proprietary wrench), and most importantly, the best music magazines.

The best music magazines for what I was into at the time included Spin (which wasn't great, but often included short reviews about better albums), AP (which was better), NME (which covered a very broad range of music, but was printed frequently and was huge at the time, both in terms of pages and reach—this was a British magazine which was printed in tabloid newspaper form), and to a slightly lesser extent, Melody Maker (NME's rival which was, at the time, physically similar and a bit more interested in pop music than NME).

Unlike many people, the public internet wasn't a revelation for me, it was an improvement of an older idea.  That older idea wasn't the science-and-military pre-public internet, however.  That older idea was BBS culture typified in the 8-bit and 16-bit consumer computer era, mostly the Commodore 64.  When I'd left the BBS scene in September 1990 to start military training, I didn't have the opportunity to have any actual leisure time until my first assignment in the UK in January 1991.  While I had my C64 there, and purchased my Amiga 500 there from a fellow American (getting a UK PAL system instead of a US NTSC machine would have introduced a lot of unnecessary complications once I had the system back in the US that any retrocomputer YouTuber will happily nod at), what I didn't have running is my handy Volks6480 1200 baud modem—using a US modem in the UK wasn't just a bad idea, it wasn't possible for local systems, and for long distance calls, it would have been some combination of incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive, and incredibly illegal—there was no possible way to do it that would not have actually covered some of all of those grounds.  Getting a new UK modem and exploring the UK BBS scene would have still been incredibly difficult and incredibly expensive, due to technical considerations not entirely worth getting into involving electricity, device compatibility, and the considerable expense of getting a private line into the dorms in the early 1990s.  The dorms had both UK and US power, but that only solves one part of one of the problems.  When my second assignment brought me to the US in January 1993, I re-connected to the BBS scene at the height of its power shortly before its death due to the public internet.

This BBS scene—particularly the version of it which I encountered upon my return to the US—was quite good for having discussions about music, including new releases.  Part of this had to do with the venue—the DC-Baltimore corridor rather than a disappointing rural Michigan bedroom community—but a lot of it had to do with technology, most notably FidoNet, which allowed for distributed conversations.  With FidoNet, it didn't matter if nobody else in your county knew about an artist like T.H.C. (Total Harmonic Distortion, not the other acronym), they could be in Alaska or even Finland since FidoNet was a distributed conversation.  Imagine if Reddit was distributed by a peer-to-peer network where you logged onto a local host instead of a central server, and those local hosts exchanged packets of posts, usually every night.  Some of you might immediately be thinking of Usenet, and that's a good comparison.  The conversations took on a more freewheeling nature since they were slightly asynchronous.  But it was better than talking on the local exurban BBS in the mid 1980s where there were ten regulars on the BBS total, and the only people you shared any music in common were your other two friends who were computer enthusiasts, probably listened to similar music, and who had the same equally good-or-bad information as you did because we were all at the ass-end of the music information food chain as high schoolers in a rural midwestern hellhole safely insulated from challenging trends.

Moving back to the early 1990s, the best approach for a label to get their releases into my hands was to get them into record stores.  With the exception of must-have albums by favourite artists, if I was in a record store, I was more often than not looking to spend money on something interesting to listen to, I wasn't merely looking for a specific record.  If your new release wasn't there, I'd probably find something else.  If I was looking for something specific, and it wasn't there, I'd be annoyed, but if it was one of those stores where the store could "special order it for you", they might as well have asked me if I'd like to order it from China and ship it by sailboat and it would take two months.  "No, I don't want you to special order it for me and take forever, I want you to have it right now and I leave with it and listen to it when I get home, that's what I want.  Figure it out."  Barring that, what I want to do is find another record store that has it.  It should be pretty obvious that I enjoyed being in record stores, so this wasn't exactly a high bar, so that wasn't an infrequent internal response.

What I didn't see the value of was a mailer being sent to wherever I lived when I originally returned the reply card.  I do some work with statistics and music, so I completely understand how the questions on this reply card have value in getting a handle on the demographics of the listeners, particularly in the pre-internet era (putting aside for the fact that this particular album is from 1998, the practice was constant throughout the era where the CD was a primary delivery media).  You couldn't just link it with data from Facebook or Google or Spotify or Apple.  This reply card is replete with questions that smack of this sort of thinking.  It screams "please give us data points" to the point where it sounds like a database asking the questions.  There's no voice of a human in it, much less of a human talking to another human who is interested in the sort of music their record label is actually known for.

Given that there were only two albums released after this, it seems very likely that few, if any, of these cards were ever dealt with in any way—meaningful or otherwise.  What happens to mail sent to a company that goes out of business?  In 1998, and even today, it's very easy for a record label to go out of business and someone to fill out a return card and not realize they're effectively sending a dead letter.  What usually happens in the case of a PO Box, it's just put in the PO Box regardless of who's currently renting it.  Today, that PO Box is owned by an unrelated company, which is unsurprising since the San Francisco Post Office is kind of a big deal.