extremely cursed speedrun energy

hello friendos time for cozy strem! 😀

this is a loud, noisy, possibly too distracting to be a work music playlist work music playlist. like you need to have more focus today than you’d get from pulling up youtube, but you also don’t exactly need to tackle new problems for that matter. the nightmare youngest sibling of agdqlike and I Hide Down In My Corner Because I Like My Corner. the playlist that made me add hyperpop and drone to the categories list. the playlist version of a speedrun of metroid prime that you immediately had to hit pause on because you got too busy and then had three cups of coffee. a day where you feel like you’re drowning in email and the only way out is through and you need to be enveloped in music mirroring this frenzy and the frenzy may or may not be real. is the game cursed is the speedrun cursed are you cursed these are not the important questions just vibe for a bit.

slice of life trashfire vibes

Hurting. Longing. Dancing to disco music.

A soundtrack to uneventful teenage days. Not the angsty side of youth, but the biding your time of youth. Music your cooler friends listen to that lodge in your head for processing, vibes from video games that incongruously feel like hanging out at the mall, something something identity. A cross between getting a ride from a friend so you don’t have to take the school bus and a Makoto Shinkai movie. Sort of works either as a playlist for work music or for waiting for everyone to arrive for book club.

junction system

a weirder, purposefully contrarian take on materia system that maybe overthought being “different” a little too hard. you have to read “junction system” in thorhighheels’s voice.

another work music playlist with the purpose of grounding you (it is gentle, and all songs prominently feature strings) while enabling dissociation (it weaves in songs from video game or movie soundtracks, indulging an escapist mood in a work playlist that knows you’d rather not think about work). except this time sometimes people are singing or it’s a godspeed you! black emperor song that’s approximately 4 days long.

i’ve only played some of final fantasy viii so sorry if i left out A Banger but i sure as shit scoured spotify for an appropriate cover of the triple triad music because i at least knew that much.

Dance Dance Revolution

Recently I have had a problem where I want to listen to all the terrible DDR music of my youth, but every playlist is literally just the licenses from the PS2 games, so instead of like… Boys, by Smile.dk, it’s like Temperature by Sean Paul, which is NOT what I’m looking for. I have now remedied the situation. For the world.

This is, perhaps obviously but we’ll get to that, a playlist of music featured on the critically acclaimed music game Dance Dance Revolution. I had pretty specific criteria for this, and I feel obligated to explain it, because hell hath no fury like a bemani nerd who feels the need to correct someone.

First, the songs present on a version of a DDR game are not consistent between versions. The Japanese versions of the game were released on PlayStation and Arcade versions initially, and the songlists between the two are largely consistent. However, America is a much different story. The song licenses that are often present on a DDR game are not present in their American PlayStation counterparts, which can result in deviation from the arcade list. If you grew up playing DDR Extreme (2002) or DDRMAX (2001) on your PS2 and at one point were delighted during a family vacation to find an arcade cabinet with a similar name, you were probably disappointed to find that none of the songs that you remembered from your PlayStation 2 version were present. Song lists on the US PlayStation 2 versions tended to be tremendously cut down because of this whole deal with the licenses. So you loaded up, excited to play UK garage legend Spin Spin Sugar (Armand’s Dark Garage Remix)* and instead found a bunch of completely unapproachable eurodance versions of 80s pop songs. Fun trick!

(Then you just played Butterfly, by Smile.dk 3 songs in a row. Don’t lie, I know that’s what you did.)

So, to finally explain what exactly is going on here, this playlist is every song from DDR 1st Mix (1998) (that’s the one just called “Dance Dance Revolution” [1998]) to DDR 8th Mix (that’s the one you likely remember as DDR Extreme [2002].) Additionally/unfortunately/capitalismly, this playlist only contains the songs available on Spotify, which means that this is missing every single Konami original song from the series, which means this is sadly not the first Trash Garbage Playlist to feature MAX 300. The final criteria for curating this playlist was an attempt to put the full-length, actual version of the song that appeared in DDR. Sometimes this is the original song, but usually this is a Eurodance cover of it. So if you remember a song that’s present on DDR (eg, “We Will Rock You”) that’s not present in this playlist, it’s likely because I could not find the version used in DDR on Spotify as of May 20, 2022.

Now we can start discussing the weird stuff. Nothing was weird up to this point. Things are about to get weird starting now.

Early versions of DDR used a numbering system where they just referred to themselves as “Nth Mix”, with occasional subtitles if there was a different version of the game (eg, 3rd Mix [1999] had 2 versions released specifically for the Korean Market, and 2nd Mix [1999] had a curious version called Substream where it could be linked with a beatmania IIDX [1999] cabinet, and beatmania and DDR players could play songs at the same time. I have always wanted to try this, somewhere, but I don’t think the stars will ever align to enable this.) Later versions of DDR would feature subtitles (DDR 6th Mix going by DDRMAX, 7th Mix going by DDRMAX2) and by the release of SuperNOVA [2006] (the sequel to DDR Extreme aka 8th Mix), they dropped the numbering scheme altogether and just referenced each game by title, which means that Dance Dance Revolution X (2008) is the 11th game in the series, bugging me to no end.

Nothing has bugged me up until this point. We are now getting to the– actually, no, the Spotify stuff bugs me. But, you know. Back to the fun.

The very specific criteria for this Trash Garbage–curated DDR playlist include, naturally, two-tone legends The Specials, who were inexplicably selected for the first version of Dance Dance Revolution with the song “Little Bitch”. Interestingly, this was one of the more difficult songs in the game at the time of release. Pick it up!

It’s also worth mentioning that most of the licenses that came on the DDR arcade version were from a series of compilation albums known as Dancemania, a Japan-only release that featured eurodance or eurobeat remixes of popular songs. This should further explain why most of this was not available in non-Japanese Spotify regions until recently. Even still, most of this music is not present as part of Dancemania compilations, but instead manifests on this streaming site in a way that I find endlessly amusing: because most of these songs are well known pop songs covered in a eurodance style that’s about 130 beats per minute, it makes them absolute perfect fodder to run a spin class or similar group exercise class to, which means that an overwhelming number of these are attributed to albums like “ULTIMATE WORKOUT JAMS TO SWEAT TO 54”.

I should also mention that because this is only the arcade version’s licenses, none of the PS2 songs appear here, which means that I was surprised a couple times with “I didn’t know that made it to the arcade version.” Chiefly surprising among these was Duran Duran’s “The Reflex”.

In conclusion, I do not endorse capitalism, even though in a way capitalism is what made the curation nightmare that is this playlist fun. You’re having fun, right?

wrapping up the work week

the other end of checking your work email on monday morning. a lot of genres, but it’s all friday. less of a getting coffee and drilling down to work playlist and more of a soaking up the morning light and the last cup of coffee of the work week playlist. yesterday was thursday. today, it is friday.

2 Hours of Relaxing Video Game Music (Except the Video Games Don’t Exist)

Smash that like button! Here’s a playlist of relaxing game music from some of the best video games of all time you may remember from your childhood except that you definitely don’t remember these games because they never existed. No copyright infringement intended! Don’t forget to like, comment and subscribe!

[0:00] SNES Start-Up Theme, “Start-Up Theme”
[2:14] Bonk Donk’s Puzzle Bop, “Quiescence of the Damned”
[5:26] Zelda 3: Oops, All Zeldas, “Overworld Theme”
[8:79] Untitled Dragon Game, “Fire (Fire World)”
[9:14] Mario Teaches Skyping, “Caps Lock”
[11:11] Sonic vs Marvel, “マルラバ”
[13:14] Chaos Squad, “Map 2”
[17:12] SNES 2 Start-Up Theme, “Start-Up Theme”
[21:43] Start Fox (Japanese Release Only), “Fuck Ronald Reagan”
[24:17] Mario vs Marvel, “Insert Coins to Continue”
[25:17] Good Will Hunting: The Game, “It’s Not Your Fault (Final Boss Remix)”
[29:92] Apricots, “Apricots”
[30:07] Final Fantasy II (Unreleased), “Garland Was Your Dad The Whole Time”
[31:17] Spacegoblins IV, “Jupiter vs Baphomet”
[33:18] Dragonopolis, “Dragon Theme”
[44:19] Call of Duty: Iran–Contra Affair, “Item Shop”
[52:22] Wordle 201 3/6
_____⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛
_____🟨🟩🟩⬛⬛
_____🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
[1:33:18] SNES, “End Credits”
[1:35:99] Shiv Megami Tensei, “Back Dat Ass Up”
[1:42:19] Final Fantasy 3D, “Enter The Dragon”
[1:44:02] Marvel vs Marvel, “No Gods No Masters”
[1:49:01] Beep Boop, “Boop Beep”
[2:00:00] Super 3D Noah’s Arc, “This One Existed Actually, Google It”

film noir detective pikachu

The longer and nerdier version of Dark Alley Jazz. We like short tightly edited things over here at trash garbage, but the room we found for an exception this time was, apparently, what if Detective Pikachu just really leaned into it. (I love Detective Pikachu.)

This is exactly what it looks like. Just shy of five hours of smoldering, dangerous, moody jazz, weaving video game music covers in with “real” jazz from the staples like Miles Davis and the new groundbreakers like Nubya Garcia. Put it on around your extended family and trick them into thinking you’re sophisticated.

agdqlike

seeking to fill the void left in the wake of another completed SGDQ? great news: trash garbage is here to provide! this one is a semi-high-energy background noise featuring words that don’t make much sense, just like GDQ speedruns.

this is the more chaotic sister playlist of our twitch streams playlist. a similar concept of work music characterized by the presence of human voices throughout (but not vocals, mostly), but rowdier and less polished. if i can’t really get into twitch streams is the analogue of half-watching a stranger play video games, agdqlike is the analogue of half-watching a crowd watch a stranger play video games. it’s not a video game music playlist, that shit’d be unlistenable.

the cave level from pokemon snap

Some twinkly vibes for taking pictures of bats and plants in a cave. That’s it. I just like this level from this game. Here, I made a one-hour loop of it! Put on the playlist, put this video on in the background, and just feel how cozy and charming this is!

I’m not interested in writing about the concept of nostalgia or its utilization in late-capitalism and/or the collective trauma of a pandemic or whatever vis a vis New Pokémon Snap. So instead here is every Pokémon featured in the cave level from the original N64 Pokémon Snap ranked by what they would sing at karaoke and how good it would be.

14. Zubat would croon “She Will Be Loved” by Maroon 5 off-key and get mad at people who happen to be leaving the bar during their performance.

13. Grimer would be a white guy doing Wiz Khalifa. He will butcher it. Everyone will be uncomfortable.

12. Weepinbell would do a Disney song and it will suck.

11. Jynx would dedicate her song to her boyfriend and then do a very warbly rendition of “Landslide” and it’ll make the crowd confused and uncomfortable for just a whole bunch of different reasons

10. Magikarp would do a very slow, 5-minute song that nobody’s ever heard of. It has a full minute of guitar solo played by a MIDI keyboard that Magikarp just stands on stage nodding along to. There is still a whole chorus to go.

9. Ditto would do a song that somebody else has already done earlier that night, obviously.

8. Jigglypuff would be hella shitfaced and do “Sugar, We’re Going Down” but would only actually scream the choruses and either doesn’t know or is too drunk to pay attention to the verses. Jigglypuff really worked up the crowd first, so it will be a huge disappointment when you realize what’s going on.

7. Articuno will do “Born in the USA” and some people will be extremely into it and some people will be extremely not into it.

6. Koffing will throw everyone for a loop and do a surprisingly touching rendition of a Phoebe Bridgers song, but it will bring the mood down.

5. The Bulbasaur that are actually Ditto would do “Piano Man”. Everyone will roll their eyes, but get really into it. The crowd is all singing along by the end of it.

4. Pikachu is reluctantly dragged on stage by their friend to do Lady Gaga’s parts of “Shallow” with them. It turns out they’re a breathtakingly good singer, but they don’t like to show off. A bunch of men try to buy them a drink at the bar afterward, but Pikachu doesn’t drink. Pikachu leaves the bar to go home at 10pm on the dot.

3. Victreebell would do a terrifyingly metal rendition of Britney Spears’ “Toxic”. It will work astoundingly well.

2. Muk would do Biggie Smalls’ “Big Poppa” and it will slap.

1. Pikachu Riding Articuno would be the equivalent of Carly Rae Jepsen showing up at your local bar for no reason, singing “Cut To The Feeling”, politely waving to the stunned crowd, and leaving. No one will ever believe you when you say this happened.