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posted: 2026-03-14

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Front Matter

• Please consider this an attempt at an honest portrayal of the events. But please also understand that this is impossible, because I have had to pick and choose what I show you. It’s the truth, mainly.
• While I have written about the raves themselves, and the jokes that one might find in them, I have chosen to save them for a separate piece. It's hard to say when this will be uploaded given my current station in life. If you're looking for someone to make sense of "Infinite Quality Achieved", I'll have something up eventually, but consider that there are plenty of itneresting folks who put together this whole event who could probably talk about it just as much.
• Footnotes are to act as asides. They are intended to be part of the full experience of the story but are not necessary to understand this story. Think of them as something you can use to distract yourself if you need. Like second screen content, if you will.
• This one's a long one. It's 38 pages in my Word Document and over 15,000 words. Thanks for reading.

John Videogames Goes to the SiivaGunner 10th Anniversary Rave and Learns What it Means to Love Music (and Those Who Make it) With People Who Love It Too.

OR

The Infinite Quality Experience

What you’re looking at is a photo of me with SiivaGunner. Yes, THE SiivaGunner. It is a photo taken immediately after the SiivaGunner 10th Anniversary Rave at MAGFest 2026, “INFINITE QUALITY ACHIEVED”. Behind the two of us is Nape Mango, a person closest to a real life internet creative celebrity, and the mind behind the “We Are Number One” meme, among other notable internet contributions, photobombing us.

How did this happen? How did we get here? What is SiivaGunner? And, for that matter, who am I?

The "Before Times"

The people of MAGFest know me as John Videogames- it’s the name that I put on my badge, after all. They might also know me as “voltage” since, yes, that is another name I have adopted for myself on the internet. I chose this name for myself when I was a fifteen-year-old child growing up with unrestricted internet access, because one day during physics class we were learning about circuits, and the word “voltage” sounded cool. It is not my first username, but it is currently my longest worn. I wear it with love. It is one of the rare decisions I made during my teenage years that I still use to define myself today. Everything else I did on the internet circa 2014 is, well, less important.

Like so many members of Generation Z with a birth year starting with a 1, as a child I was free to surf the web during the twilight years of Web 1.0 and was caught in the data net of Web 2.0. This naturally coincided with the rapid advancement of YouTube’s online presence. One of my fondest foundational internet memories is watching various silly YouTube videos with my brother and cousin, almost all of these falling under the umbrella of “YouTube Poop”.

YouTube Poop is a subset of YouTube videos which can be characterized by immature and intentionally obnoxious edits of existing media to create something that would make your Grandma have a stroke ¹. Their sources draw from contemporary cartoons, video games with poorly animated cutscenes, absurd television commercials, and other familiar yet kitschy media dominating the airwaves and internet tubes. Their jokes are often crass and juvenile, which will only appeal to a very specific subset of people. While this is true of all humor, it’s hard to explain why Dr. Robotnik saying “Snooping as usual I see” is funny, without hearing the clip isolated to just say “PINGAS”. And when your parents hear a bass-blasted, hyper-amplified “PINGAS” coming out of the family computer’s speakers at Christmas, what are you supposed to say? “Haha, the video said a funny word really loudly!”.

What do you mean “The Sky had a Weegee”?

YouTube Poop exists because YouTube exists. In the same way that an empty wall is a canvas for graffiti, the Windows Movie Maker timeline presents a space for a juvenile mind to make something wretchedly amusing. And as long as there are similarly juvenile minds that feel a sense of joy from having “a leg in one hand and a brerb in the other”, YouTube Poops will continue to exist into the indefinite future. They are the creations birthed from humanity’s childish impulses adapted for modern canvases. The immature joy of pranking someone into watching something really stupid remains one of my favorite pastimes. These kinds of digital jokes appealed to my very core.

As a kid, my tastes were shaped from the YouTube videos I watched. I was a big video game fanatic ². I watched videos about video games. I listened exclusively to video game music. I would take the URL of the shittiest YouTube upload of a song I enjoyed, perhaps uploaded by the video game soundtrack channel GilvaSunner, slap it into youtubetomp3.com and download it to my PC. In my early music-appreciating years, I’d then load these songs into iTunes for my iPod shuffle. I’d be on the bus home Middle School jamming out with a set of maybe 20 songs, which might include a Drum’N’Bass remix of the Game Corner Theme from Pokémon Gold and Silver, arranged by one PokeRemixStudio.

By 2013, I had a smartphone and a Google Play Music account, which allowed me access to an infinitely larger set of tunes on demand. I would upload my .mp3s to the orange platform instead, unconcerned with the quantity of the additions, or quality of the sound. My music discovery at this time was strictly on YouTube and was almost entirely centered around video game music and remixes. This discovery process worked well when I was at home but was impossible when I was at school. Even when they gave us Chromebooks for school assignments, YouTube was a district-wide blocked domain. I could get around it by putting links into Google Translate, but this loophole was eventually closed as well. I would have to save my music searches for the evenings spent slumped over a chair, destroying my back posture during my most physically formative years.

One fateful evening, I noticed that one remix I intended to download was hosted on a different platform from the usual Mediafire or Megaupload: SoundCloud. I returned to this link the following day while at school, pleased to find that SoundCloud was not caught in the website domain filter. I listened to the remix again on the user’s page. I was shocked when the next track started automatically playing. It was a song that sounded like absolute junk: some kinds of farting sound effects played on top of some agonizing kind of trap beat. I hated it, but I couldn’t bring myself to click away. It had a single tag: “#soundclown”.

It was all shitposts in audio form. Each track was like YouTube Poop, but rather than Windows Movie Maker, someone was fucking around in GarageBand instead. The tracks took strange samples and made them stranger by speeding them up, slowing them down, playing them backwards, paulstretching them beyond recognition, all while layering song lyrics from songs from the Donkey Kong Country Animated series. They were so stupid that I can’t help but grin.

I was obsessed. Mashups of all kinds of quality found their way onto my Google Play Music playlists all through my High School Days. I would listen to albums like InfinityAlex’s “Kirby Mash Attack”, with songs like “Kirby’s Booty Massacre Medley (Kirby Ass Attack)” wherein five different songs from Kirby’s Epic Yarn are mashed up to Sir Mixalot’s “Baby Got Back”, Bubba Sparxxx’s “Ms. New Booty”, Sage the Gemini’s “Gas Pedal”, Trina’s “Pull Over”, and Joe Hisashi’s “One Summer’s Day”, respectively, and think to myself “yeah let’s listen to that one again”.

It would be almost three years later, around the Spring of 2016, when I stumbled upon the SiivaGunner YouTube channel. Given my impish nature, imagine the sense of horror I felt upon realizing that I was on the other end of the joke. I was minding my own business, browsing the internet, when I found a YouTube upload from my favorite VGM channel GilvaSunner, the Ace Trainer Encounter theme from Pokémon Diamond, Pearl and Platinum. Thinking nothing of it, I gave it a listen, only to have a stone club cave my face in. Embedded into the midi was the Flintstones theme, fifteen notes playing in a way that they shouldn’t. I didn’t remember the song sounding like this. Had I mashed through the text that incites this song so quickly that I hadn’t bothered to actually listen to it? I thought I was having a stroke ³.

This was, of course, the point of the channel. SiivaGunner only exists because of the previously existing YouTube channel, GilvaSunner. The honest channel uploaded “high quality rips of videogame music” before the times of widespread copyright enforcement on YouTube. If I was feeling like listening to the entire soundtrack to, say, Pokémon Diamond, Pearl and Platinum, I could go to GilvaSunner, and find a nice, once-looped upload of my desired song. I was the exact mark for these auditory pranksters. In its earliest conception, SiivaGunner lured unsuspecting browsers in with the familiar scent of nostalgia, only to close its jaws, dooming the browser to their ultimate demise.

As it is known today, some ten years later, SiivaGunner, the channel, is a collective of internet musicians that produces “High Quality Video Game Rips”. That is, they upload various videos to YouTube which are all encoded with some kind of joke in auditory form. Occasionally, there is one joke that’s actually interesting, maybe even enjoyable, to listen to. Regardless of the style of remix, mashup, midi alteration to play a different melody, or otherwise absurd reference, SiivaGunner has made its mark on internet culture through these various musical jokes, collective understood by the term “High Quality Rips”. These rips are an extension of Soundclown, mixed with the absurd hilarity of YouTube Poop.

In a way, SiivaGunner was bound to impact the culture, given the rate at which the channel uploads High Quality Rips. Like monkeys at the piano, given enough time and monkeys, one of them will play those funny fifteen Flintstones notes. Give them even more time and they’ll put together entire rave sets that will give people the internet shitposter’s equivalent of a religious experience.

Naturally, my SiivaGunner fandom stemmed from my obsession with Soundclown. When SiivaGunner started putting out albums of their collected works, I was downloading them all and loading them into my music library. In college, I impressed a girl by knowing all the lyrics to Childish Gambino’s “Bonfire” because I had heard and recited it so many times from a High Quality Rip that played it at double speed. I was listening to new music by first hearing it in mashups and remix collections and eventually even curated DJ sets.

I have never been one to appreciate music in a public way. I am not a raver. I have never been to a music festival. I do not define myself by the bands I have seen played live. I love music in an intimate, private way. I listen behind closed doors, covering my ears with headphones so that I don’t bother other people nearby. If they ask, I’ll share, but why would they ask me when I can’t hear them?

Then, I saw it.

The Crowdcam of Maximum Quality Achieved here:

If you'd like, you can just listen to the full set here:

It happened at MAGFest 2020⁴. At this first live set, SiivaGunner fans moshed to a 53 minute, and 15 second DJ set entirely composed of High Quality Rips under regular lighting. I cannot emphasize this enough, people got fucking down to Carmelldansen in the brightest convention center lighting. It was ridiculous. And yet, I knew immediately I had to be at one of these events one day. Not because of who was there, but because of why they were there.

This is the dumbest fucking thing I needed to do at some point in my life.

I imagined myself there as I listened to the set while on my runs. I’d pace myself to the beat as I weaved through Brooklyn Center and Robbinsdale suburbs during the pandemic. I would break into a full sprint at the drop 7:48 into the set, knowing I had just run a mile and had plenty of energy to spare. I was thankful that I had some way to get out of the house and explore the quiet world. I was glad I could escape my otherwise miserable final semester of college in both visible and auditory ways.

Maximum Quality Achieved kicked off the series of SiivaGunner Raves at MAGFest. Later years featured “Ultimate Quality Achieved” and “Limitless Quality Achieved”, two sets that, while impressive never quite hit me the way “Maximum Quality Achieved” did. This was hardly the fault of Xarlable, the primary DJ. The sets were fun in the way that any kind of public demonstration of an otherwise immutable craze might be. But they just didn’t click with me.

The latter of these two, “Limitless Quality Achieved” evoked a strange sense in me, that of feeling “old”. I had been a fan of SiivaGunner for so long that I started to lose interest in the newest jokes. I didn’t feel like keeping up with the next big meme, because the next big meme had become popular culture. There’s nothing wrong with the set, the problem is that I, the listener, am a hater. It would probably be spot-on. I am a twenty-seven-year-old who has chosen to ignore the flashing lights of the mainstream in favor of listening to early 2000’s Shibuya Kei albums in my spare time. I only just listened to brat at the end of 2025 ⁵. So, when I pretend that I am the culture critic, I am doing exactly that: pretending. I lost interest in some of the modern SiivaGunner rips in its ninth year simply because I grew out of most of the jokes. I am not on Tiktok. I’m not following meme culture. I’m content to let myself become a fogey. They’re nostalgic for my childhood now. Buddy, I have multiple 3DS consoles, and I modded all of them BEFORE Nintendo disconnected their Wi-Fi servers with ironhax. I was there for flipnote. I was there for- “okay that’s enough, pal.”

But still, I saw the people there. I watched them dance. I watched them move an inflatable cow across the ceiling of the nightclub.

In that moment listening to the YouTube premier of “Limitless Quality Achieved” as I sat on my apartment’s balcony, looking out on the terrace of my apartment complex one warm afternoon in June, I knew that I had to be at MAGFest 2026, just in case they had a 10th Anniversary rave set. I had to satisfy an unknown urge that lurked within me, the urge that every music fan has at one point in their life: to see their favorite band perform live.

MAGFest 2026

The plane landed at 1 PM, we were at our hotel in Alexandria around 2, and we were at the con with our badges at 3:30. My wife and I had not changed out of the clothes we had worn on the plane. Of course, we were wearing clothes that were airplane comfortable, but also moderately nice; “going out clothes” as folks would call it. At MAGFest, this made us look like normies. While I certainly didn’t mind wearing a wool sweater and some comfortable chinos, it was a rare moment where this outfit was more out of place than not. I planned for the travel, not the destination. I figured it was better to look a little more put together than not. While far from horribly incorrect, this approach was hardly the correct one either. We looked like hotel guests amongst the seas of musicians, cosplayers, and those attending the convention.

Thank goodness, I am only able to think about the first two things in the front of my mind at all times.

I am what they call in the business a “social person”. I come from a long line of partiers; my mother, the sorority girl and my father, the guy who wasn’t in a frat, but like, had his “boys”, produced me: the extremely intense freak of nature who accidentally rushed a frat ⁶. When the pandemic rolled around, I took my social energy to Discord, where I managed to balance more than a single hand’s worth of communities. The virtual groups that lasted past 2021 yielded lifelong friends, one of whom would be one of my groomsmen. While the third member of my crew, SethHeart, joined my wife, Erin, and I for our trip to MAGFest so we could say thank you for being a part of our special day, he did not join us for our headlining event of the con.

I am one of the rare people of this time who can cross the interpersonal Internet-IRL barrier with relative ease. If I can figure out who is where, and know what identifying features I’m looking for, I can manage any social situation. I try to be consistent with myself. I don’t always post exactly how I would act in real life, but often the things I post online are written in the same way I would say it aloud. Yes, I do use a lot of exclamation points! Yes, I do create a lot of annoying run on sentences that do not really convey any meaning and are designed to fill space because I’m deathly afraid of awkward silences because that’s how I was raised, and if you haven’t noticed, that’s not exactly great for conversations, but I’m trying to be better about it. Still, I’m a nerd that can talk with people. My power level is through the roof.

This is how I managed to find myself with an invite to a private hotel room birthday Party within two hours of picking up my badge.

“You all can do that. Gonna be real, that does not sound appealing at all.” Seth chuckled to himself as he spoke, given the absurdity of the situation. We were sitting around a table at hotel restaurant at the Gaylord, drinking overpriced cocktails and waiting for finger foods that we would later retroactively consider “dinner”.

“What, staying up until 2 AM to listen to the funny meme rave doesn’t appeal to you?”

“Nope!” He laughed as he replied. I can’t read minds, but if I had to guess, I’d speculate he was imagining himself in that scenario and how much he would hate it. I have to assume he then likely wondered about what my wife and I would be doing, given his preconceptions of what people do at raves, except at this rave the people would be dancing to some kind of shitty Gangnam Style remix. His flat smirk gave away his disinterest. He just wasn’t a fan of SiivaGunner. I can’t fault a guy for that.

“Your loss buddy!”

“Nope!” Seth looked content. He leaned back in his chair and put his arms behind his head to form a kind of cobra shape. “That’s great, you have fun doing that. I’ll probably be on the floor looking at vendors.”

“Sounds good.”

“How late do you think you’ll be out?”

I thought about the next few nights, estimating the time at which it would take for us to find and take a rideshare service from MAGfest back to our hotel on the other side of the Potomac.

“I think it’ll be definitely after midnight, probably more like 2 or 3 AM on the night of the rave.”

“Don’t worry about waking me up, I’m a very heavy sleeper.”

“We’ll keep quiet when we get back,” Erin assured him.

“I take it that you don’t want to go to this hotel room party either.”

“Nope!”

Erin chimed in at this prompt. “Remind me how we’re invited to this?”

“Okay so,” I folded my hands, leaning on the table, “my buddy Firethorn invited us. It’s a birthday party for a person who makes YouTube Poops. Their name is jab50yen, they/them pronouns.” I unzipped my backpack, pulled out a bottle of uncolored Pedialyte, and swung it gavel-like on the table. “That’s why I bought a bottle of this. I figure that it’s the least we could do.” ⁷

“But you won’t know anyone else there?”

“I mean, I’ll know Firethorn, and that’s a start.”

I had met Firethorn in the action button goblin bunker server, and then later again in the lowercasejai jaicord. It, like most adult friendships I had made in the current decade, had been established in a Discord voice call. He had been playing a Super Mario Sunshine romhack which had added a bunch of new levels and mechanics. It was a simple opportunity to chat with someone new, something I have embraced in my twenties. He would later join me in those voice calls where I played through sections of Castlevania: Dracula X - Rondo of Blood. Later we’d play through sections of Twilight Syndrome; he’d translate and I would react accordingly. That’s what you do when you can’t read or speak a language but are still deeply curious about the material; you watch, looking for something to latch onto in hopes that it all might make sense one day. And all the while, we’d just chat too.

It was during these calls that he mentioned that he was a MAGFest regular. His primary employer was involved with a number of the convention’s intrinsic logistics, which allowed him to be “in the know”, giving him all the perks of being a staff member, but with minimal responsibilities. It gave him the ability to walk into rooms which would otherwise be closed off. After some general questions about “what should I do as a first-time attendee?” and “Any particular panels you’d recommend?”, the SiivaGunner rave came up.

“I know a couple people on that team by the way.”

“Wait for real? Like SiivaGunner?”

“Oh yeah, I’m good friends with PinkieOats.”

“Wait, for real?”

“Yeah, he’s really cool! We’re rooming together for MAGFest.”

“Give him my regards, that’s so cool!”

As my wife and I made our way up to the sixteenth floor, that natural wave of anxiety crept over us. I have asked that age old question “who do you know here?” enough times to know the feeling behind the question. I am also no stranger to knocking on doors, fully prepared to bail if I get any kind of bad vibes. I reminded myself then that “we were invited”, so they would know we were coming. I messaged Firethorn as the elevator doors opened “we are almost here”.

Our first knock was careful, quieter than it ought to be. We could hear people playing a rhyming challenge game that had recently gotten popular with streamers. Each player had to shout a series of rhyming words in a rhythm without messing up. This meant that our second knock had to be louder. The second knock is the worst kind of knock. It’s the knock that expresses an unconfident impatience that only annoys the party on the other side of the door. A second knock gives character to its knocker, it is their message of uncertainty. “Are you there, doorperson? It’s me, john videogames.”.

The door opened with a third and more forceful knock. There were two people leaning against walls in the entry way, five more people beyond them standing in front of a television, at least three others on the bed, and one hunched over a mixing table. But we couldn’t look past the people who opened the door for us, who were now eyeing us.

“Hey! Is Firethorn here? We just DMed him.” I looked past the guys working the door to see Firethorn in a bright orange beanie and a similarly bright blue shirt with cut-off sleeves. “That’s him in the PaRappa Cosplay.”

He turned around and squeezed his way past two cosplayers in a conversation. “Hey! John Videogames, what’s up!”

I slid past the door guys, my wife behind me.

“Yo! Thanks for inviting us!” I motioned to Erin “This is my wife Erin.”

“Nice to meet you.” She was managing the anxiety of the moment well.

“Nice to meet you too!”

The three of us diffused through the space, past talking heads and bodies, apologizing as we moved. Once we had found our three-body large vacancy, the conversation resumed.

“And I have”, I swung my backpack around to my front to retrieve the Pedialyte bottle, “a birthday gift for the birthday person.”

Firethorn took a look at the bottle and laughed. “Hey Jab! Come here for a sec!”. Despite the loud music, a larger person chatting with a much smaller looking DJ turned to look at us. They brushed their long dark hair from their face and made their way over with a curious and uncertain look. ‘Who are these jokers?’ I thought to myself, putting myself in their shoes.

“What’s up?”

“This is John Videogames, and Erin.”⁸

“Nice to meet you you both.”

Firethorn continued, “I know him from action button.”

Jab, sounding still a little uncertain about things, replied only with an “Oh nice.” and a nod.

I saw my opening and extended the Pedialyte bottle. “First, happy birthday.” They accepted the bottle with a slightly furrowed brow. “I figured that this would be something that be helpful for the con.”

With a bit of an exasperated laugh, Jab shook the bottle with their hand. “Thanks man.”

“Second, Firethorn let us know about the event.”

“Yeah,” Firethorn verified, “this is their first MAGFest!” He motioned to Erin who had been sitting on the bed, looking up at us. She smiled back. They smiled at her, and then at me.

“Oh awesome! I’ve been going to these for over a decade.”

“Any advice?” It was my other prepared conversation starter.

“Definitely get enough water and sleep.”

Small talk then continued. It helped ⁹.

Once it ended, Firethorn gestured to the table’s counter. “Make yourself a drink, get some snacks ¹⁰. There’s honestly plenty for how long we expect this to go.” I didn’t have to be told twice.

I pivoted and slid my way a few steps over to the row of plates and cups resting on the counter next to the nearest wall. I grabbed a plastic cup and started filling it with Wild Turkey and Coke. Halfway to the top, I realized that in all my excitement, I had forgotten ICE. Shaking my head, I grabbed a bowl to scoop some ice cubes from a nearby cooler in my cup.

“Hey man, come on. Don’t do that.” The voice came from a guy with a furrowed brow on a soft face, emphasized by his party sweat-wet shoulder-length black hair parted down the middle of his scalp. His small mustache and patch of hair on his chin reminded me of a rock star’s, though who exactly I couldn’t place. He was, no doubt, someone who was a sentence or two away from asking the dreaded “Who do you know here?”.

“Oh sorry, I was just trying to get some ice for my drink.”

“Yeah, I can tell.”

“I just didn’t want to waste a cup.”

The guy sighed, looked at the ground and shook his head back and forth as if to say, “okay sure.”

“Just use a cup next time.”

“Yes, I won’t make that mistake again.”

At that moment Firestorm popped up next to us. “Oh hey, PinkieOats! This is John Videogames.”. PinkieOats gave me a squinting grin which could only be read as ‘so who are you?’ Firethorn continued, “He’s cool. He knows your stuff.”

“Yeah! I like your rips!”

“Yeah?” ¹¹

“Yeah, you did stuff on Soundclown and a bunch of early rips right?”

He laughed at this and then pointed and squinted. It was the kind of pointing and squinting that comes only from a polite refusal to acknowledge the strangeness of the circumstances. I took a swig and then continued. “Yeah, I’ve been listening to your stuff since like, 2014 or 15?”

“Are you sure you’re not confusing me with KinkyOats?”

Despite sharing the same last name, KinkyOats and PinkieOats are not related ¹². KinkyOats is a retired YouTubePoop Music Video (YTPMV) maker known for their work on, among other YTPMVs, “The Glorious Octagon of Destiny”. I had seen their early works, including a personal favorite collection of scraps titled “183” and when a new user “PinkieOats” came on the scene, I thought it was just a matter of a creator adopting a similar name.

PinkieOats has been a member of the SiivaGunner team since its inception. While not one of the direct founders of the channel, PinkieOats submitted his first rip to the channel within a month and a half of the channel’s creation; this makes him one of the oldest heads in the backroom these days. His claim to fame rip is “Live&Learn” - Sonic Adventure 2. If you’re even remotely orbiting the Sonic fandom, you’ve probably heard it; it’s the one rip where the Crush40 lyrics start off normally, but 23 seconds in the “ooooo” lyrics are extended to play for the rest of the song at an ever-increasing pitch ¹³.

“You know, at one point probably I thought you two were the same person.”

“It happens.”

I took another sip of my far-too-strong drink.

“Well, hey, cool meeting you.” I wanted to get back to Erin. “I’m sure we’ll chat more later.”

“Yeah man, for sure.”

Natural party conversations then ensued. I met various other friends and party guests who shared their creative claim to fame. I shared that I had brought four different Nintendo DS systems in case people wanted to do some sort of Download play tournament, as Firethorn had relayed to me beforehand. I took photos for people who needed them. I stepped out on the balcony to get a simulated experience of fresh air ¹⁴, only to run into SuperYoshi (it was a YouTube Poop and SiivaGunner community gathering, I suppose) and fumble the name of his canonical video¹⁵. I couldn’t stay out there any longer without sinking deeper into my embarrassment.

As I stepped back in from the balcony to make myself another drink, there stood PinkieOats, an island amidst the waves of conversation. As a curious freak, I decided then and there that I would let myself be vulnerable in front of someone I had only just met ¹⁶. “I like your rips” as if that somehow made me different from anyone else. I needed to make sure this guy knew that, if nothing else, I wasn’t just some poser idiot.

I approached.

“Hey man, I know I mentioned it before, but I really appreciate all the music you’ve made.”

He nodded with a hesitant, closed smile.

“I listened to your stuff on Kirby Mash Attack with InfinityAlex, right? You did what, like two songs?”

PinkieOats’ face scrunched. His lips pursed into a single line. He recoiled.

“How do you know that?”

Of course, I had been listening to PinkieOats when he was posting on SoundCloud. PinkieOats made two mashups that were foundational to my teenage years a decade prior: “No Greens”, a mashup of “No Hands” by Waka Flocka Flame and Roscoe Dash with “The Great Cave Offensive” from Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, and the aforementioned “Kirby’s Booty Massacre Medley”. These two mashups were songs I knew by heart to be the creations of the person standing before me. I would hear “No Hands” at almost every house and apartment party I would attend my freshman year of college and think about how it sounded empty without the Kirby song behind it. After the convention, I would return to my SoundCloud account where, sure enough “Amalgamercy”, a PinkieOats mashup of “Amalgam” from Undertale, and “Mercy” by Kanye West, was sitting there in my “Liked Songs” ¹⁷.

“Oh, I just listened to the Kirby Booty Massacre Medley a lot in High School.” His expression began to soften. “My favorite part was always the ‘One Summer’s Day’ section right at the end.” He grinned at this point and leaned in up toward my ear.

“You want to know something funny?”

“Sure.”

“I literally just made that in Garageband.” He chuckled at this little creative secret.

“Genuinely, your music was something I would spin on replay all through High School. Thanks for making it.”

It’s a strange thing to meet the people who have made the things that you’ve come to enjoy in passing. It is another thing to have the chance to interact with them, not as idols or celebrities but as people, let alone just as “people you meet at a party”. In this time of mass human connection, it is easy to develop a strange parasocial relationship with the small independent artist on the internet. It takes every fiber of our being to not be the “cringe” freak and, with total hyperbole, blurt out “Your music saved me!”. But I had also been on the receiving end of this declaration from a similar experience when I was younger, and knew how, often, the best way to best handle the situation was to be as genuine and concise as possible.

With the power of hindsight, I am able to consider this interaction from PinkieOats’s perspective. I can imagine how strange it must have been to have some random guy you’ve never met before (going by the abjectly stupid name ‘John Videogames’) show up at your friend’s birthday party and start talking with you about a mashup you made over a decade ago for a shitty Soundclown collaboration album. I can appreciate how disorienting it must have been to hear that not only had this guy listened to your music, but had it in his regular rotation for years, here the night before the celebration of an internet music community’s tenth anniversary. Before this party we were both people behind our screens. We were sending out and receiving signals indiscriminately. I did not exist as a real human to this person until this exact moment. And at this moment I had been the jerk who committed a party foul and then celebrated a series of decade-old remixes. Who the fuck was this guy, besides someone who had been on the internet?

He put his hand on his chest, with a thankful expression and a nod.

“I really appreciate hearing that.”

With a drunken handshake, our conversation turned towards the inflatable cow sporting a black and white “Hawk Tuah” flag on the bed.

“That’s Bovid. He’s been around.”

My wife and I left the party around 7 PM, excited to see the rest of the con floor. I was reeling from all the excitement of the space. I wanted to do everything. I was practically bouncing off the walls. But my wife -bless her and her patience- reminded me to pace myself; we had the whole weekend ahead of us. In the span of just four hours, we did what the average first-timer only hears tales of after the whole weekend. We continued to the show floor, to explore and reorient ourselves. She proceeded to demolish me in multiple rounds of Pokemon Puzzle League. We were having fun together.

The Rave

Twenty-four hours later, after a whole second day of the convention, we were back in our hotel room getting ready for the rave. The rave was set to start at 12:55 AM, and we were not going to miss it. This meant that we would have to stay up well past the time we would normally go to sleep, so we both made the otherwise poor decision to each slam a Celsius ¹⁸ . One Celsius contains approximately 200mg of caffeine. As a former caffeine fiend, drinking two of these in the span of twelve hours is enough to give me a migraine that will knock me out for sixteen hours on average. Trust me on this figure, I’m prone to migraines.

After a quick shower, I got dressed for the occasion.

At a convention full of cosplayers and folks otherwise wearing clothes representing their fandom allegiances, clothes make the person. The best way to stand out, therefore, is to wear something that contrasts the rest of the space. You gotta wear something distinct.

I tucked two clean plain white tank tops into a pair of tan Dickies work pants I had bought only a few days prior at my local Meijer, which I locked in place with a simple brown belt. I then threw on, over the tanks, my garment around which I constructed the outfit: my Green 2007 St. Gregory’s Patriots 9/11 Memorial Cooperstown Hall of Fame Little League Baseball letter jacket ¹⁹.

I found it in a BookOff PLUS in Osaka, Japan for 5,600 Yen ²⁰. It’s a Child XL; it fits me well. It’s one of my favorite articles of clothing I own. No one else would be wearing anything like it. “I’m cosplaying as my original character who is the protagonist of a video game I haven’t made yet” was what I had prepared in my head as I packed the jacket in my suitcase in case someone had decided to ask, “who are you supposed to be?”. As I threw on the jacket, I realized that was stupid. If anyone asked about the jacket, I’d tell them that it was just a thrift find. The authentic story was way cooler anyways.

I then completed the look with my Ray-Ban RB2230 Bernard Sunglasses. What can I say? I’m prone to migraines ²¹.

The colors of the outfit all worked well with the lone pair of shoes I had brought on the trip, a pair of bright orange Brooks Glycerin ’22 running shoes. The added cushion in the sole of the shoe helped ward off any knee pains from the night that could have manifested otherwise. And honestly, it just felt right to wear a pair of running shoes to the event, given my previous appreciation of the other rave sets on my runs.

I took my final prescribed 5 mg quick release methylphenidate pill for the day and then we made our way to the lobby to wait for our rideshare driver ²².

We were brought back to the Gaylord by Abbas ²³, a father of four and an immigrant from a nation in Southwest Asia. We talked about what was going on in the Twin Cities, as he saw it on his phone. I told him I was from there, that my parents lived close to where things were taking place. We were all in agreement in our disgust. The real people and spaces flattened and transmitted across the world in a matter of moments brought us together in our anxiety. I’d be lying if I said that my hometown wasn’t on my mind all weekend. I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t bothering me that I was putting my head in the sand the whole weekend. I’d be lying if I said that the short video of ICE agents assaulting a Native American family in a HyVee parking lot less than a mile from where I grew up didn’t bother me. It still bothers me now.

It was 9 PM of the second day of the convention, and I had yet to meet up with one of my newest friends, Harmful Park. This needed to change immediately. Be it miscommunications, poor cellphone service on the main hall floor, or just poor timing, we had yet to cross paths. Even now, I feel especially bad about this. I had made a clear effort to let her know that I would be willing to do stuff with her at the event months prior ²⁴. While we hadn’t made explicit plans, we had both made clear in our side server that we’d both be at MAGFest and were both planning to attend the SiivaGunner rave and that it would be fun to meet up and go to it together ²⁵. But before we could rave together, we first had to meet. The clock was ticking.

Harmful Park (Park), is a multi-talented artist who has made some of my favorite DJ Sets. She has put together multiple DJ sets (both audio and visuals) that evoke the feeling of Soundclown bullshit, many of which align scarily well with my personal shitposting tastes. I am particularly partial to her set for Hangout 2025, and her Goblin Bunker Public Access Sets for GBPA4 and GBPAV. I love how they embrace the chaos that lies dormant in the potential of any given remix. I first had the pleasure of working on a project with her during the first GBTV Programming set, where she oversaw the production of my week-long Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou fandub back in the Summer of 2025. She would later edit one section of the whole scene into a bumper which still makes me laugh even just by thinking about it.

Still, I admit I was nervous to meet her in real life. I, the person who could walk into a random party without fear, was nervous about meeting someone I had known for a while ²⁶. I knew her only as text on a screen and a disembodied voice from a Discord voice call. Words and sound, things which we transmit through machines to communicate with others in ways that we could have only dreamed of a century ago, do not give us a complete understanding of each other. We are flattened by the subset of ways we can communicate when we connect online.

Once I managed to circumvent the struggles of poor cellphone service we managed to meet up. She was wearing an orange beanie and a leather jacket, along with a white medical mask covering her face. Given her body of work, it was initially quite a shock to see how quiet and composed she was. Despite our similar tastes in internet culture at large, she initially appeared to be my opposite. She appeared composed, reserved, comfortable in the natural silence of a conversation.

She was waiting in line for the Speedruns room to watch a speedrun of the AVGN game, with guest commentary from the nerd himself. You don’t give up a chance like that if you’re a fan of the nerd ²⁷. We chatted briefly, noting that we would meet up at the main stage before the show. I had a plan to get some fresh air before going in, but I was going to get there very early to ensure that I would be front and center when the show started. She let me know that she was going to pre-game the rave by attending the YouTube Poop Watch-along Panel. “You don’t pass up the opportunity to quote YouTube Poops in a huge crowd.”

She was, of course, one member of a larger crew, but this didn’t immediately occur to me. I didn’t recognize anyone she might have been with, nor was I really trying to. I had my list of tasks, and I was in the process of crossing this one off the list and already preparing for the next. I wasn’t giving much thought to the group of people who were with her, which were a collection of goblin bunker posters who were there at the con as well ²⁸. In this way, the strange reality of finding and meeting people from the internet in real life manifested once again. But I hadn’t noticed, I was already bouncing onto the next thing.

Having made contact, my mind moved to the next thing I needed: fresh air. Can you believe that there are some pants that exist in the world that have both a lighter and a half gram joint in them? We don’t need to worry ourselves about the mechanisms that lead these items to just “show up” in people’s pants, but it’s strange that it’s possible. Can you believe it’s legal to smoke marijuana in a public space, 11.8 miles from the Pentagon? Can you believe that there are some people out there who are still paranoid about smoking in public, to the point where they’ll walk towards the nearest body of water to smoke, passing by entire groups of people doing the same exact activity literally outside the doors of a convention center? These truths troubled me. I am glad I took the time to consider them as I looked out over the Potomac at night, eyeing the large Ferris Wheel with a digital projection of the American Flag. It is good to embrace the quiet pockets of intimacy during a convention. It is good to exist with others in a quiet murmur.

But I couldn’t linger, there was an hour and five minutes before the rave started.

I’m prone to migraines, so I wore my sunglasses back indoors.

We scrambled our way up the flights of stairs towards the main stage, relieved to see a lack of line. Firethorn had said he planned to get there an hour in advance to not miss the show and have a spot near the front. He was right. We had to be there. And there we were, at the lineless entrance to the main stage at midnight for a 12:55 AM show. And there was Pinkie Oats, making his way into the stage area as well. This was a sign- we were exactly where we needed to be. Erin had to run to the restroom, so as she left, I fell in line with him in the entry chute. After a quick “we met last night, I listened to the thing you made when you were a teenager”, and a lifting of my migraine-prevention spectacles, we were on the same page.

“Sorry if I’m not really making sense.”

“Dude,” he pulled me in close with an intense look, “You reek.”

He let me go and laughed. We made our way inside. We again made small talk about how excited for the show we were. When he remarked he was off to the front to meet up with some people, I thanked him again and then stayed back to wait for my wife ²⁹.

By the time she returned, I was quite literally bouncing. I hopped along as I walked across the soft, carpeted floor of the main stage area, bounding (some place) ever higher to a collective destiny.

My goddamn shoes glowed in the dark.

Closing in on the stage, we found ourselves amongst other bodies in the sparsely populated space, like particles in a gas. We were aimless but excited, ready for everything to begin. Pinkie Oats was off near the front, stage left, along with Firethorn and a few others who no doubt were SiivaGunner backrooms members. We had arrived.

I texted Park at 12:01 AM

“I am in the SiivaGunner main stage”

“OH FUCK ALREADY Whats good there”

“Just pre-show shit but it’s already kinda filling in No huge rush, but like, you should get over sooner rather than later”

I had an electricity surging through my body. I had to do something, anything. What did this moment deserve? What could I do to drink every last drop of this moment? In a flash of true inspiration, I approached Firethorn and Pinkie Oats with my notepad and pen at the ready. After our quick exchanges about how excited we all were to be here, I turned to Pinkie Oats and popped my pastime question, pen on the page:

“Which rips are you excited to hear tonight?”

“Well, I worked on it so I probably shouldn’t.”

I lowered my sunglasses with a look.

“So, no rips?”

“Though, I only worked on some of the whole set, so I guess I don’t know everything.”

I bent my body and tilted my head to ask a question without opening my mouth. A raised eyebrow punctuated it all.

“Well,” he smirked with a stifled laugh, “There’s a good Banjo Kazooie drop.” His face hardened as he finished in a way that, in the limited time I had known this person, was entirely new. “I did the visuals on the Banjo Kazooie bit”. It was a kind of confidence that came from knowing the exact reaction his creation would get. He knew exactly how hype the moment would be.

I nodded, smiled, and wrote it down.

The others in the crowd weren’t as quick on their feet. They stood there, looking to the ceiling, trying their best not to give away parts of the show while still answering the question so that the manic freak with the pen would go away ³⁰.

“How about I circle back to you all?”

“Yeah! I’ll have an answer for you when you get back.”

And so, I, in my mania, began my interrogation spree. I found people who were standing, looking around with the aimlessness that came only from the human process of passing time. Some people were caught off guard by the stranger approaching them with a maniac’s expression and couldn’t think of a rip off the top of their heads. Others weren’t even there for SiivaGunner, but for the show before them, TsundereBoys and IDOL THOTS. Still, a surprising majority of those I asked had rips on their minds. As the sound check for the TsundereBoys and IDOL THOTS blasted through the speakers, I made my way back to the Siiva staff.

“Okay, I got it.” proclaimed the tallest of the group.

“Hit me.”

“Battle Against a True Hero - JP Version.” ³¹

“Thanks boss.” I flipped the notepad closed. “Hey, you all enjoy the rave, thanks for doing what you do.”

“You too, dude!”

POV: You’re at the SiivaGunner MAGFest rave and some weirdo approaches you, asking you what your favorite rip is.

It was 12:23, the show before the SiivaGunner Rave was starting. I messaged Park again.

“I am sorry, I was a little overworried Pre-show groups is good though, taundere boys [sic]”

---

Erin was passing the time while playing Pokémon Crystal on her 3DS. A fellow 3DS-haver wandering about, PinkieOats, saw her pink console and Streetpassed his way over to her.

“Oh, nice. A 3DS.”

“Yeah, just playing it for a bit.”

“You here for the SiivaGunner rave?”

“Yeah.”

“You a fan of SiivaGuner?”

“Yeah, sure!” ³²

“Well, I’m with SiivaGunner.”

“Yeah, we met last night at Jab’s party.”

“Oh SHIT! You’re married to the guy who’s super stoned!”

And with a smile and a nod, he made his way back to his crew. ³³

---

As TsundereBoys and IDOL THOTS concluded their wonderful set just before 12:55, Park found us on the floor, front, and center. The YTP Panel, as she noted, was superb. “Watching ytps in public is way too fun” she said from underneath her mask. A few quick photos were taken and posted in the relevant Discord servers, as if to immortalize the moment for those who couldn’t be there. As the photos loaded, the lights came down. With my wife in front of me, and my new friend beside me, we braced for the moment.

Carlos Ferro took the stage as the last few transitional touches took place on stage. Ferro, a notable voice actor and guest at MAGFest introduced the set. I recall thinking that this had to be a last-minute affair, that someone must’ve pulled some strings to get him here. Ferro, an actor who got his start in the entertainment industry by DJing, initially felt out of place to someone who didn’t understand his history. This was my ignorance on full internal display.

“Are you guys fans of High Quality Video Game Rips?”

The crowd cheered with a confused fervor. “Who is this guy and where are the rips?”

“No really, are you?”

The crowd roared louder at the challenge.

“Yeah, that- that’s what I thought. And that’s why I wanted to bring on,” he took a beat, “some of my favorite artists.”

I turned to Park with a side eye.

“It’s very important, my first MAGFest, means a lot to me, thanks for having me. A please, give a welcome they deserve to SIIVAGUNNER!”

Xarlable stood behind the mixing table ³⁴. The crowd erupted. It was, finally, time.

A familiar, mechanical voice rang out. “How’s everyone doing tonight?”

The roars of recognition grew. Chants of “SiivaGunner! SiivaGunner!” broke out.

“My name is SiivaGunner. It’s an honor to play in the MAGFest DJ Showcase. Now, who’s ready for some high quality video game rips?”

And so, the set began.

“Infinite Quality Achieved” in its celebration, personalizes the depersonalized detachment of the internet. It proves that there are people behind the silly jokes that reach us through our otherwise sterile screens. It proves that the internet is full of people, alive and willing to create. But this creation process can only happen through an indirect combination of communications. We are isolated, a tree in a wasteland. When we watch a rip on YouTube, we rarely consider what it might be like to listen to this music in a community. Our musicians are performing for an invisible audience in an empty room. The rave is the exact opposite experience, but it allows for a different kind of invisibility. It is to hide a tree within a forest. Raving happens in the dark because it allows those taking part to effectively lose their personhood and become one with the group ³⁶. If one is aware of anyone, it’s the person next to them. Ideally, one can have a good time in a space in a rave by losing one’s ego and embracing the feeling of the whole collective joining together to feel like a fish in the school. Dance, like no one is looking, and you’ll have a good time, they say. “I’m with you in the dark.”

Of course, the SiivaGunner MAGFest rave was streamed on twitch.tv for those who were unable to attend ³⁷. The stream itself, as previously presented in two different forms, features shifting scenes ranging from the original visuals for the rave, to shots of Xarlable at different angles, to top-down views of the crowd. This is how I was able to get the beautiful shot of Bovid the Cow, dancing over the crowd. He bonked me in the head multiple times.

He really does get around.

Yes, I am visible in the stream video- multiple times, in fact. I both love and hate the fact that I get Mike Wazowski’d by Xarlable multiple times; when he is standing in his primary position, I am just out of sight. But when he leans out of the way, you can see me, looking like what I can only describe as a “zany freak”. You can see my arms dangling from side to side to the beat. You can see my fucking pit hair. You can see me hug a fellow raver about eight minutes into the set. It happens just after Mario comes on screen for the first time.

I recall seeing him and ejecting “THAT’S MARIO! I KNOW HIM! THAT’S MY DAD!”

The guy in front of me heard me, and turned and replied, “HEY! HE’S MY DAD!”

In that moment, my expression softened, “Are we… brothers?”

“Brother!”

Our hug was quick but warm. A recognition of a moment of silly pretending by two strangers together in a space only for a moment. This moment occurs six minutes and twenty-three seconds into the unofficial twitch stream. It happens under the brightest fucking lights imaginable.

It is difficult for me to watch the stream back for this reason. As someone who once made rent by performing behind a microphone in a padded room, I am completely capable of listening to my own voice. It is a different matter to watch my own body move in strange, albeit joyous ways. I had absolutely no idea that the entire show would be streamed, let alone that I would be as visible as I am. We can chalk this up to naivete: “They hadn’t been live streamed before, why would they do it now?” Would I have acted differently had I known that I would’ve been on screen as much as I am? It’s honestly hard to say. I prefer to live through abstractions of myself, yet this comfort is something that is only possible because of the mechanism that brought me to your screen in the first place. That’s me, unfiltered. That’s me not thinking about anything but the fact that I was right there, in that moment and having the time of my life. That’s me in my entire migraine-prone, sunglasses-wearing, hyper-manic self. That’s me, the fan of SiivaGunner. That’s me. Right there.

mfw Snow Halation

Like with all instances of the channel ending, the rave ends with a calm, confident, and nostalgic mix of Porter Robinson’s Goodbye to a World”. The visuals flash a decade’s worth of art put together by the community of SiivaGunner. These are stills from the Christmas Comeback Crisis ARG, promotional materials from King For a Day, album covers, photographs of rippers at previous MAGfests, references to the smaller channels like Timmy Turner’s Grand Dad and VvvvvaVvvvvvr, and memorials to the rippers and fans who passed away before they could make it to this celebration.

There’s then flashes of real human faces. Not faces of memes but faces of the people behind the music. They’re there, in a collage of memories. I caught PinkieOats’s selfie of the crowd that had gathered in the Chipspace in a previous gathering. There they were. I wonder if they knew they’d be up on the Main Stage one day.

And then finally the sprite of Mario that started it all appears only for a moment before fading away. With Siiva’s robotic voice breaking, and the lights cutting to black, the has show ended. This is SiivaGunner. This is the power of a community. This is the end of the rave.

Afterwards

Chants of “Holy Shit” rang out from the crowd as people tried to make sense of the past forty-eight minutes. The crowd , once crystalline, sublimated as people made their way in all directions towards the exit. My wife, Park, and I acted similarly, bumping into Firethorn right near the exit. The two hadn’t met up until this point, so they got acquainted as we were ushers into the hallway so we wouldn’t be a fire hazard.

Outside, a small crowd had gathered. The members of the Siiva team that I had previous interviewed were all congratulating each other on a job well done. Beside them stood the SiivaGunner standee that had been on the stage during the rave. I would get my photo with it, but there were people to meet. Firethorn made his way over to PinkieOats, and Park, Erin and I followed in tow.

“That was sick, dude.” Firethorn dapped up PinkieOats, who himself looked absolutely delighted with himself. He had been chatting with another guy- a lanky, dark-haired fellow with a trimmed goatee and a pair of Spamton-style³⁸ glasses- but he turned toward us to catch up with Firethorn.

“Hell yeah man. You have fun?”

“Oh of course!”

I then turned toward PinkieOats,

“Fucking excellent work on those visuals, man.”

He grinned. “I told you they’d be good.”

“Yeah man, that shit owned.”

As Firethorn and Park started chatting about the visuals of the set, PinkieOats called out to the guy whom he had been talking to previously.

“Firethorn, this is Nape Mango³⁹.”

You may know Nape Mango from his remix of We Are Number One which single handedly kicked off LazyTown’s meme resurgence. Park knew him from his work with a few others in making Spongebob Patrick, a video that synchronizes the names of Spongebob characters to the Super Mario Bros. 3 Athletic theme. He, along with everyone else on the SiivaGunner team at the event was the closest thing to a genuine creative internet celebrity.

PinkieOats continued, “This is, uh-”

“HarmfulPark”

“Right… and have we met?”

“I don’t think so?”

Firethorn filled in the gaps, “I know her from action button. She does rave sets and visuals.”

PinkieOats then gestured to Erin and me “And this is Erin and John Videogames. And dude,” PinkieOats’s face hardened, “this guy pulled out a deep cut last night.”

Nape Mango raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, I told PinkieOats last night that back in High School I listened to his stuff on Kirby Mash Attack by Infinity Alex.”

“Wooooah!” Nape Mango recoiled like he had been slapped in the face by a wet fish. “Infinity Alex? What the hell?”

“I know right?” chimed in PinkieOats.

“Yeah, I was a during from the Soundclown days.”

“Dude this is like a Nardwuar Interview! What the hell? What was your name again?”

“John Videogames.”

Our little cluster continued to reminisce about the past and the current state affairs of meme music; it was surreal. Here I was, having a casual conversation with two people who had made the music that defined my teenage years. Here we all were, old and new friends, talking about how someone had made a Deltarune Third Sanctuary remix that defined 11/8 time signature by synchronizing it to “Pretty Patties, the best idea ever” from the name sake episode of Spongebob.

By this point it was after 2 AM. My lovely, beautiful wife reminded me that we would both soon be turning into pumpkins. She was right- we needed to get back to the hotel room to sleep. But before doing so, we had to get a photo with the SiivaGunner standee. I stood there, posed like I had to do it to ’em, gazing at my wife’s camera. The natural joy of accomplishment shaped my soft smile. I then gestured Park over to get a photo with her to remember the moment with someone. We had only just met in person three hours prior, but our shared appreciation of SiivaGunner had brought us both here.

I looked at the photos after we finally got home. My photos with Park turned out wonderfully. The multiple photos I thought had been solo shots yielded an amusing surprise. Unbeknownst to me, Nape Mango had followed me over to the standee, caught that Erin was getting photos, and managed to align himself in the window between me and the standee just so that his face, with an eyebrow cocked into an inquisitive stare, was entirely visible in every single shot.

“I saw him doing it, and I thought it was funny. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all my love. Not at all.”

This instance of photobombing only occurred because of my history with the genre. It only happened because I knew about Kirby Mash Attack. It only happened because I knew the name “Infinity Alex”. It begs the question, “Who is Infinity Alex?”. But to answer that question, we first need to answer the question, “What is Kirby Mash Attack?”

Kirby Mash Attack

Kirby Mash Attack (2015) is a Soundclown album presented by Infinity Alex and the mashup memelords of Dream Land. It is a “-core” album, wherein members of the community come together to contribute remixes and mashups to a whole collective project on SoundCloud. I won’t pretend that I know anything more about this album’s conception, nor will I pretend like I bothered to look for any kind of information regarding its development. I was, and still am, only a fan of listening to the world’s most annoying sounds. This is how I came across the album as a bored High School Student, after all. I found a video game remix album, downloaded it, uploaded it into my Google Play Music, and as previously recounted, the rest is history.

On the plane ride home after MAGFest, I found myself wondering “what the hell had I just admitted to listening on repeat to these people?”. I thought back to the days during my senior year of High School, dry mopping the gymnasium where I worked, listening to Triple-Q’s No Poi Bling and Hol’ Up Orange. I thought about how the latter of these two songs was ultimately where I first listened to the artist who would create some of my favorite music of all time ⁴⁰. It didn’t feel like those days were ten years ago. It was then that I rubbed my thumb against the ring on my left hand. I thought about my home. I thought about what it might be like ten years from this moment.

The first recreational activity which I partook after unpacking from the weekend was to return to Kirby Mash Attack. For better or for worse, it was exactly as I remembered it.

Kirby Mash Attack is not a particularly refined album, though this is to be expected. This album is, again, a community affair which brings together more than twenty different SoundCloud artists to present a series of Kirby mashups and remixes which have a dramatic range in quality. But this is the reality of community projects; there are bound to be pieces that overperform and underperform. Generally, out of a couple dozen tracks, one can find a handful of tracks, say six-seven of them, that could be incorporated into regular spins. This is the case for the album which is “brought to you by InfinityAlex and the mashup memelords of Dream Land”, and with a subtitle like that, what did you honestly expect? These “memelords” include the aforementioned Triple-Q, and PinkieOats, as well as other notable musicians like Sound Circlet (presented here as “SirSpaceBar”), and future leaders of SiivaGunner like MtH. There are some genuinely fun tracks on this album. Aside from the ones I’ve already mentioned, I am partial to more of tracks on this album than one might anticipate, though special nods (for one reason or another) go to ICECOLDS’ “Dyna Blade it Off”, bikwin’s “Orange Holograms”, Christopher Mauro’s “Neo Seat Freestyle”, and all three of MtH’s contributions, “Crank Cave”, “X-Post From /S/QuidCore” and “Light” .

This remix of Light from Kirby Air Rider ended up on the SiivaGunner channel as its own special rip in August of 2016. It shouldn’t be a surprise, all three of MtH’s tracks are definitional “High Quality Rips”, with Light standing at the forefront. It was a shocking encounter having previously heard it without the Flintstones theme song on Mash Attack. Even with a remix like this, I got fucking SiivaGunner’d. Well played, MtH. In fact, there are a healthy number of tracks on this album which were eventually touched up and repurposed to be published as rips on the primary SiivaGunner channel over the course of 2016. ebinyamyams’ “Rules of Crystal Shards”, Said Wade’s “Kicked to the Kirb”, and, my favorite example, PinkieOats’s “Kirby’s Booty Massacre Medley”⁴¹ all demonstrate a level of quality that one might consider to be “high”, given a little time and tuning.

World’s worst commenter.

Look, there’s not a better place to really talk about this one particular track, but I need to do so anyways. The 17th Track on Kirby Mash Attack, “STRAIGHT OUTTA DREAMLAND” by dsdfdsfdsfdsf dsfdsfdsfdsf is quite literally an insane mashup of NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” with the the credits theme of Kirby’s Dreamland 3, which then also includes a second track in the back half which is a mashup of a Japanese song I cannot place mashed up with “Great Cave Escape” from Kirby and the Rainbow Curse. It’s just insane. It’s defies any logic, and it was my suburban-ass white boy’s first exposure to NWA. I think it just needs to be heard to be understood. It’s so entirely something that could’ve only been cooked up by a teenager in their parent’s basement at like 3 AM on a Thursday night. These are the little treasures you can find when you spend your time listening to Soundclown trash.

Infinity Alex, the self-proclaimed “OG Mashup Scrublord”, has his name on one sixth of all the tracks on this album. These ten tracks are all a serious step down from anything else made by any of the future rippers on the album. I mean, for goodness’s sake, they are ALL skips. They are frankly incomplete. There’s some real bones of an idea in tracks like “Let the Big Bodies Hit the Floor”, but the two tracks are so poorly synced up, that when the chorus of Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” starts, the beat is entirely off with the backing Boss theme from Kirby Superstar, leading to extremely comedic, but sonically unbearable effect. “The Fresh Prince of Cookie Country” sounds as if it were made by synchronizing the two tracks in Audacity, speeding up Will Smith’s vocals and thinking “yep, this lines up more or less”. The only true banger is “Invincibility’s My Bitch”, A mashup of the Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Invincibility Theme and “Move Bitch” by Distrubing Tha Peace and Ludacris, 2001, but that’s only because the Invincibility theme is on a six-second loop, making it rather straightforward to change the speed of the vocal such that they line up. But even then, there are still some obvious rough edges which only become more pronounced the more you listen to the track. I could probably do this in an afternoon with literally no experience. One must wonder if the fictional SiivaGunner lore character, Mr. Rental ⁴², was created with the intention of banning mashups like these from the SiivaGunner channel. There’s a kernel of truth in every comedic bit.

What makes these tracks so embarrassing is that they are all from the headliner of the entire album. Infinity Alex presents himself as the guy who organized the whole affair, solicited remixes from various members of the community, and then put together the whole album. I must assume that he is the primary artist behind the tracks that are made by “InfinityAlex and the Mashup Memelords of Dream Land”, save for xXx 5KR1LL3X KN1GHTZ xXx which was published by Triple-Q on their YouTube channel to promote the album’s release. The fact that on the album this song is not attributed to Triple-Q but instead Infinity Alex is a gross misappropriation of credit and makes me ponder how this accreditation came to pass.

The closing track, “Fountain of Memes”, also by “InfinityAlex and the Mashup Memelords of Dream Land” is a prototypical low-quality High Quality Rip, jampacked with references and memes that are selectively spliced here and there in efforts to align with the instrumentation and beat of the bombastic base track. Of course, these samples are often out of key, off the beat, or generally mixed very poorly. I would hate to be a member of the “mashup memelords of Dreamland” if this was what the primary leader of the group considered to be a finished, high quality track.

I remember skipping quite literally every single track made by Infinity Alex when they’d come up on my car’s stereo. I’d never care enough to notice that they were all made by one particular artist who seemed to be more interested in quantity than quality. It makes sense that Infinity Alex was left behind with the formation of SiivaGunner. It’s not High Quantity Rips, it’s High Quality Rips.

The roots of SiivaGunner lie within this album, but its organizer is nowhere to be seen in the backrooms of SiivaGunner. Still the echoes of Infinity Alex haunt the halls of SiivaGunner’s oldest chambers. In the summer of 2016, SiivaGunner released a new album titled “Kirby Rip Attack” which featured a total of 97 public facing tracks and one hidden track. These 97 tracks feature both new High Quality Rips, and a subset of tracks previous featured on Kirby Mash Attack, specifically those from the rippers on the SiivaGunner team who had previously contributed to Kirby Mash Attack. The single hidden track is titled “Fountain of Memes 2.0” and is ripped by someone here presenting as “UnlimitedAndy”. The track itself started the exact same way as the final track, “Fountain of Memes” on Kirby Mash Attack does with a sample of “Gangnam Style”, before pivoting into a boring, one-note mashup centered on the Nutshack theme song ⁴³. Fountain of Memes 2.0 is, at its best, a giant middle finger to Infinity Alex.

And Infinity Alex got the message loud and clear:

⁴⁴

It makes me wonder about what happened over the course of the project that led to this level of animosity. It’s interesting to think that ten years ago, a group of people on the SiivaGunner team felt so moved by their work on Kirby Mash Attack that they decided to release a better version of the whole album under the SiivaGunner brand, all while pissing on the person who put their name on the original project. As someone who never has and will likely never knows the inner machinations of of this project, I can only speculate about what led to this sequence of events.

My best guess is that the contributors who went onto form the original SiivaGunner Team had this specific album, Kirby Mash Attack⁴⁵, in mind when establishing the ultimate vision of the channel. In this regard, I am sure that at some point, Infinity Alex raised a stink of being excluded for not making “High Quality” Rips, which no doubt made everyone on the team a little on edge. When there’s one very vocal person claiming that this popular channel is “stealing from them”, any and all responses and comments arguing something similar were bound to be met with staunch defensiveness.

But, come on, the trailer is a shot-for-shot parody of the original Kirby Mash Attack Trailer. Not knowing any better, I, at eighteen, posted a comment about the high levels of similarities between the two albums with a candor possible only through the detached nature of internet communication.

Damn, I guess I struck a nerve. Fuckin’ ChazetheChat, the founder of the SiivaGunenr channel, replied to my comment, the backrooms were surely focused on damage control. Also, hello again PinkieOats. I’m sorry about this comment too.

Even after ten years of SiivaGunner, there is still a history of a community that existed before it. Obviously this history is well documented in terms of how the channel was started, but I wonder about the private messages that were exchanged that will never see the light of day. I wonder about the not so romantic stuff. What do you think your favorite band said about the member that they kicked out when they made a new one?

I don’t intend to judge how this situation was handled. Frankly, it’s not my job. I also don’t intend to condemn anyone for their behavior. These are human interactions, specifically disagreements. I am only a fan. I am not a ripper. I am only someone who has partaken in the art for long enough to know the things that are otherwise lost to time, paved over by our own growth as people. I don’t claim to know the whole truth, only the truth that I experienced. It is for this reason that I can understand and respect the decision made by those in the backrooms of SiivaGunner to denounce Infinity Alex’s Kirby Mash Attack. Even if Infinity Alex’s intentions were grounded in good intentions, his tracks bring the album down to such a degree that it makes sense to me that a kind of mutiny took place. And with the power of time and hindsight, we can claim that this was an excision for the better⁴⁶. It is something that both I, a fan, and others who contributed (or chose specifically not to contribute) can laugh about a decade later. A beautiful community of talented artists and musicians developed from the likely ashes of interpersonal conflict rooted in creative differences and expected standards of quality. “We can do better than this, right?”

In this way, I cannot define what “quality” means in this context. “Quality resists definition because quality precedes definition” ⁴⁷. My experience with this event is defined with the context of my fandom of SiivaGunner which itself hearkens back to days that fade further and further out of view. I have never been one who could say “this rip is high quality” then, in the same way that I cannot say “this rave was high quality” now. It was a high quality experience because it brought to me a sense of joy and euphoria only possible through a kind of connection between human spirits that only art can afford. To say that “this rave set was the best one” misses the point. I can say that Maximum Quality Achieved is still my favorite of the sets, but I can also say that Infinite Quality Achieved is my favorite experience listening to these sets. When we extend the context of our perspective of an experience beyond simply “good” or “bad” we allow ourselves to celebrate the process of human creation. And honestly, I’d rather be able to say, “I had fun”, than to say, “it was good”, even if I do think it was good! I had fun, which made the experience Good.

I don’t know what I was hoping to achieve from being here and meeting all of these people. I’m not sure what it means to me that I was able to leave an impression (positive, negative, or somewhere in between) on the people whose work I admired. It reminds me that, to them, I am only a fan. A fan that got REALLY into being “just happy to be here”.

Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. I wasn’t trying to insert myself into the narrative, to become their friend, to do anything like that. In the moments of the tenth anniversary rave I had my moment of actualization. The things I liked that I had been so ashamed of liking for long were legitimized here. I was not alone. I had never been alone. And I knew from then I wouldn’t be alone. I was more than just a face behind a screen. I was a person who was there. I was at the tenth anniversary event for my favorite music collective. I cannot claim that I should be recognized as anything more than that, but it isn’t nothing either. It is the human experience of validation put forth in a collective experience.

And maybe the people who I met there that weekend for the first time found me to be a weird, over-excited maniac. It would be sad if they did, but that could very well be the case. But this is who I am and who I was and likely who I will be. I crave the funniest, authentic moments in life. I want to always have these moments to share, ones that come from the experience of talking face to face with people. I know that there will always be interactions where I look like the maniac, the kind that make the other side of conversation think “who is this guy?”.

But I’d rather have those moments than none at all. And I’d rather be that guy in earnest, than to be someone I am not. This is who I am, who I’ve been and who I’ve become. Ten years all condensed into a single weekend.

I am a fan of SiivaGunner. I have been a fan of SiivaGunner for as long as SiivaGunner has been around. I am lucky to have been a part of the group’s history at MAGFest 2026. My knowledge of the history of the genre was enough to elicit reactions from people that were interesting to me. I met the people who were behind some of the music of my teenage years. I engaged these people in a way that celebrated their own history. I was appreciated for understanding the history and effort that allowed these people to be the closing act of the DJ Showcase on the main stage of MAGFest. I got photobombed. And I had a gay ol’ time.

I’d say this was a high quality experience, wouldn’t you?

---

Les Footnotes:

1. For a more in depth explanation of YouTube Poop, consider watching lowercasejai’s analysis of “The Fesh Pince of Blair”, YTPs, Fesh Pince and You↩︎

2. I mean, what did you honestly expect from a guy who goes by “John Videogames”?↩︎

3. The original upload of rip was lost to time with the various channel deletions over the years. Thankfully, my old comment is too.↩︎

4. Right before the COVID lockdowns, isn’t that interesting? This was, for some people, their last big outing before the pandemic. Fun to think about.↩︎

5. And it was ooookaaaay in my book.↩︎

6. Long story, we don’t need to go into it here.↩︎

7. As is my custom for birthday Parties (emphasis on capital P), I brought along a bottle of pedialyte as a birthday gift. It’s a safe option, one that allows me to bring something that isn’t booze, one that demonstrates that I’m willing to contribute, and one that shows that I want the celebrated to be able to enjoy the day after their birthday as well. I have no idea if the celebrated used it or not, though they certainly posted about it. I was already in the door, but this ensured that I was able to at least have some ins on conversations. After all, it was just me and my wife. We were wearing clothes that could only be described as “normie-core”, what with me in my sweater and chinos and she in her cardigan and jeans. One of the people who was working the door told Erin later “I wasn’t sure if you all were in the right place. You looked a little too normal.” (or something to that effect)↩︎

8. The amusing contrast between these two names is not lost on me.↩︎

9. As someone who was one of the five guys who lived at the resident “party house” during my senior year of college, I am acutely aware of what it means to be on the other side of this exchange. I have felt that tension that starts with a “who do you know here?” and ends with a “kick rocks”. I have had conversations with randos showing up to my house, saying “Oh I know Mike, it’s his birthday”, and I having to tell them to get lost, because there ain’t a Mike living at this house, I can tell you that. I’ve also had conversations with people I barely knew before the party but had a great time with once we established that they were cool. This kind of vetting process is one of the many things I learned in college beyond the classroom.↩︎

10. “Or a little flames!”↩︎

11. As if he had never heard anyone say that to him in his life before.↩︎

12. this one goes out to my survivor fans out there.↩︎

13. Members of Crush40 have seen this rip and laughed about it, by the way.↩︎

14. The balcony just opened to the interior of the Gaylord.↩︎

15. A moment which may indeed haunt me forever.↩︎

16. Not thinking about what it must’ve been like for him to have this dude meander up to him again over the course of the party.↩︎

17. This is a song I had liked in late 2015 / early 2016. It’s a song I remember listening to at a fucking Quiz Bowl tournament between rounds. Lord. I did not share this information with him. I’m sure I would have had I remembered this fact.↩︎

18. Drinking a Celsius after 1 PM is not a strange thing for either of us. What IS strange is having one after 7 PM.↩︎

19. The cuffs on the sleeves have little yellow stripe accents, which has prompted multiple inquiries as to why I, a die-hard Minnesota Vikings fan, am “Wearing a Green Bay Packers letter jacket?”. Alas, it is one of the rare times I will ever wear something with this set of colors.↩︎

20. That’s 36 dollars when converted to USD at time of purchase.↩︎

21. And, also, I represent myself as a Swampert modeled after Joe Cool on the internet, and this character also wears these round sunglasses, so I was unintentionally embracing the digital persona I had made for myself in the way so many people at the con were doing.↩︎

22. Could taking this stimulant in advance of a rave concert be considered abusing my medication? Possibly. However, I had been following my dosage requirements all weekend, and was otherwise operating as close to normal as possible. It wasn’t like I was taking like three pills in the span of an hour to hype myself up. I took my medication because my psychiatrist recommended that I take my pills to the exact dosage every day when possible. Here at MAGFest, this meant that, if I started my day around Noon, took my second pill around 4-5 PM, then my third pill ought to come roughly four hours after that, which aligns with when I was leaving the hotel room, right around 9 PM. Look, I don’t need to explain my medication habits, so let’s just leave this discussion in the footnotes, shall we?↩︎

23. Not his real name.↩︎

24. Though of course, she had a group of friends she had also met up with from the action button goblin bunker as well. I would also meet up with this group and hang out with them for a bit following day. They were even with her when I met up with her, but I didn’t recognize any of them because I didn’t know who I was looking for. I was just looking for Park.↩︎

25. This is another point where I must confess that I am split between so many Discord servers that I often struggle making deep connections with people without doing something specific with them. I have a bad habit of going for breadth than for depth and what it does is limit me from really giving my full attention to the people whom I consider to be really good friends. This set of miscommunications with Park was one of the main factors that made me realize that I need to be better about focusing on people to show that I care to them, even if I know I care.↩︎

26. I’ll delete this footnote later, but I think I was afraid because I had been invited to the smaller group server for GBTV after it was nearly completed and didn’t really know how to “dive in” necessarily, among other reasons. Crazy, I know.↩︎

27. And given that her most recent GBPA set featured a significant section featuring AVGN ranting, one might be inclined to call her “a fan”.↩︎

28. I would later reconvene with this group on Saturday. In the moment though I didn’t register who these people were, which I think must’ve made for a confusing, but funny moment when I reintroduced myself to some of them later in the weekend.↩︎

29. Whether he was legit and I did smell, or if he was just responding for the sake of getting out of the conversation with the weird dude he met the night before didn’t matter, it was time to be in the space.↩︎

30. I cannot read their minds, they probably were not thinking about this.↩︎

31. With all respect, I am glad this one was not in the set. I do not care for the entire first half of the rip, though the second half is pretty solid. This would be very appropriate as an inclusion in Limitless Quality Achieved, I feel. It’s one hundred percent for shitposters and memers who are, say, six, seven years younger than me.↩︎

32. My beautiful, lovely, wife, is about as much of a fan of Siivagunner as I am of K-Pop. I have no qualms with K-Pop. I quite like a good subset of K-Pop songs and groups! But to say I am a “fan” of K-Pop would be an overshoot. She enjoys the occasional rip I play in the car on the way home from the gym, like the Hatsune Miku Levan Polka x “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” mashup I had listened to while doing my laps some cold Tuesday night. She is not a rip digger.↩︎

33. This anecdote is included here only because it makes me laugh every time I think about it. I might kill this darling, but damn it if it isn’t one of the funniest moments of the night. Shoutouts to PinkieOats, you’re cool as fuck in my book.↩︎

34. As an aside, Xarlable also wearing a cool letter jacket made me feel extremely validated with my outfit selection for the evening. His jacket fucking rocks.↩︎

35. You don’t have to listen or watch the whole set here before continuing, but I would recommend doing so if you haven’t already done so. It’s helpful to have context for what I’ll be talking about next because I don’t intend to recount the set chronologically. I was experiencing the set, not taking notes on it. My analysis and discussion of this set comes from MANY re-watches and re-listens of this 48 minute and 31 second long rave set.↩︎

36. This is reinforced by the visuals during the EVA x FFVII mashup section with visuals featuring the third impact.↩︎

37. Though, if you do watch this release of the rave set, you will have to contend with not one, but two different live chats. Use your discretion.↩︎

38. That is to say, glasses where one lens is pink and the other is yellow,↩︎

39. Like every other name in this story, I have elected to use a pseudonym or username, even when people are on first name bases.↩︎

40. Hol’ Up Orange is how my white suburban ass got started on Kendrick and To Pimp A Butterfly. Why would I ever actually admit this?↩︎

41. swirling flashback effect “Yeah dude I made this in Garage band”.↩︎

42. a character whose whole focus is the “ban all mashups”,↩︎

43. At the time, the Nutshack theme song as a joke was often met with significant pushback from the audience. From my own perspective, the Nutshack was one of the most annoying jokes from 2016. I have since softened on it. Still, it is the “third joke”, not “one of the big three” in my book.↩︎

44. It is REALLY funny to me that the official Siivagunner Twtiter account replied to this post.↩︎

45. And a few of the other “-core” albums↩︎

46. This is a really difficult point to discuss with a level of nuance that I want to really dance around more here. I don’t generally advocate for exclusion; I think that there can be generally positive things that can come out of encouraging others to challenge themselves to make new and difficult things. I think it’s empowering to watch yourself improve, and I think it can be difficult to hear others put down work that you are proud of. It stings when I hear back from someone “this isn’t good” or “this could be better”. But this latter remark encourages me to try to improve in any capacity. It makes me consider what I did to make the thing I made, and it makes me reflect on my own creative motivations and practices. It is, for better or worse, something that I carry with me.

    But what do you do when someone disregards these comments and continues to churn out low effort, low quality hogwash? Are you supposed to just accept it? And when they don’t listen to feedback, take no efforts to improve their own practices, and are generally satisfied with making something lower than the standards of everyone else in the community, are you supposed to simply drag them along? I think that at some point, the team within Siivagunner are allowed to impose a threshold of quality that much be reached for every single track they publish. It is true of quite literally any other creative field or industry. As much as I would love to have my pieces published in journals, they are simply not yet of the caliber of those that are published. When viewed from this perspective, I think it is completely reasonable for the Siivagunner team to attempt to reclaim their high quality works for themselves, to refine them and publish them as something greater, more widely appreciable than Kirby Mash Attack. And frankly, in my decade-removed, outside observer’s perspective, Infinity Alex deserves only the credit of compiling the album. The rest of the credit of making the album to be truly what it is, a fascinating compilation of surprising and fun meme mashups, goes to the artists themselves who spent the time to make each track with precision, passion, and care.↩︎

47. As spoken by CrimesNewRoman in their video “Why is art discourse so bad now?”↩︎