Ricky continues to write like two journals a day instead of actually writing a story or something.

I'd like to talk about something deathly serious to me that has kept me up for many nights and has caused me to have a nervous breakdown.

beatmania IIDX.

I've been playing for...well I don't really know how long. Maybe since January or so. For those of you that don't know what IIDX is, it's a DJ simulation game by Konami (technically bemani, I guess) that is amazingly fun and has fantastic music. You have 7 keys and a turntable, and you hit them when the screen tells you to so you can like...create the song and like I said, it's amazingly fun. Song difficulty is rated on a scale of 1-12. I'm barely at about 10 at the moment, and this upsets me.

You see, IIDX has this fun ability to have songs that are easy UNTIL the ending, where it's just suddenly impossibly hard and I lose all of my health and fail and then I get upset. And if it's not that, songs are just REALLY DIFFICULT THE ENTIRE WAY THROUGH OH MY GOD. I thought that playing for almost a year would mean that I would be amazingly good, and then I see videos like this:



I don't know what the hell is going on. I just know I want to do it. I try to do it in my room on the PS2 version, and when I don't I yell obscenities at the TV. I think some Japanese game developer is sleeping soundly with a big smile on his face because of my anger. The learning curve is steep like...um...a hill that causes you to trip and break your face open.

Yet, I still play religiously in hopes that I can head to the arcade and impress the pretty Japanese girls with my IIDX skills.

Right.