To begin with, I want to congratulate everyone who has made an effort to get involved with the event in any way.

May it be contributing an entry and giving impression to every single entry, to merely retweeting some of the tweets that were made on the account, or mentioning that this event exists in a casual conversation, I believe there is no such thing as a "worthless" effort when it comes to this.

 

For there is no interest without exposure.

There is no song without artists.

There is no feedback without impression writers.

There is no winner without voters.

 

Some of you might be disappointed by the low amount of entries submitted to the event, compared to most other events.

While we did not gather as many entries as the first edition, I dare say that this is completely fine.

Quantity and quality are not inherently equivalent here.

 

In fact, I personally would say that there is value you cannot find in an event of such a small scale;

It is easier to manage the time to play through everything.

To dedicate more thought to each entry on an individual basis.

To have more room to be careful and detailed in the impressions you might eventually end up writing.

 

I would like to infer from the large amount of impressions (445 -- roughly 30 per entry) that the above claims are, in fact, confirmed.

Taking the original Be-Music West as a reference again, this is more than twice as many impressions!! This makes me very happy as an organizer. I have to admit I was very worried about not garnering any interest.

 

 

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However I have to confess that there are some things about this event I did end up displeased with.

 

First off, I would like to apologize if anyone felt marginalized by the English-only communication.

In the middle of writing an information tweet, I started feeling that it was contradictory to the event's spirit and that, as much as it helped one cause, it neglected another...

and yet I felt like stopping halfway through and making a 180 would be clumsy, so I kept on doing it anyways.

 

Second, reaching out to people for this event made me realize that this idea of growing as "the west", of standing on "our" feets, is not what I think is ideal.

The main point of this event is to "incentivize the west"... but at the same time, doesn't it just strengthen its segregation from the rest of the community?

Containing it into this enclosed sphere we're all calling "the west".

I fear we might follow that same logic to decide, when individuals with the ability to bestow us these things come into the light, that we need clients, Internet Rankings, for "the west".

We used to be on that track before said individuals vanished.

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Therefore, I discourage anyone else from hosting a sequel to "Be-Music West".

 

Rather than solidifying "the west", I think it makes much more sense to work on solidifying the "international".

In more concrete terms, moving ahead, because language and the absence of language is the number one factor that separates "the west" from the rest of the BMS sphere, I think the best that can be done right now is that we keep translating the abundant resources that are difficult to reach for many right now.

Softwares, event rulesets, clients, tutorials, Internet Rankings... anything and everything.

This obviously won't be enough on its own, because there is more to all this than the languages we use -- we're disregarding differences in culture, in how we think... differences that grow as we expand in size.

 

Naturally, that is not dismiss any of the great progress we've made so far on that part.

Getting into BMS is significantly easier than how it used to be just a couple years ago, comparing my personal experience with the one others are having.

But I still feel like we can make a lot more progress, observing the many times we had people wallowing in confusion coming to us asking, "what is this, what does this mean"? "How do I do this"?

 

We will never achieve a whole merge, and we shouldn't. We can, however, diminish the distance between us. I wish we all keep trying to know and understand eachother better.

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-AYhaz