First thought -- if one song had to be broken into 5 pieces, it's *really* long. It is a medley, however, which kind of explains it. I've tried the first 2 parts of this so far, and the irregular tempo in them makes them difficult to get through. I'm not sure I even recognize some of the songs to anticipate what's coming up. Also, the new colored arrows are hard to follow. They're small fractions of beats that most songs don't use. It'll take me quite a bit of practice to follow the songs because of these two points. I get the feeling this song was chosen specifically to show off the new arrow colors and support for changing tempo. That's OK, but I don't see myself playing them very much because the points above make them a bit too confusing for me right now.

Lately, I've barely been improving, and it's kind of disappointing. Yes, I know there are some things I can try, but I've done it before and adjusting is hard. I'm also not in this to be #1, but I would like to see some improvements, and recently they haven't been coming. I can't even improve combos or ranking on some songs no matter how much I try, it seems. And my muscles are still tiring out rather quickly when playing harder songs. I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe I've hit a plateau, and breaking through it will require more work or new techniques. I don't know, but it is kind of annoying to have this much trouble, even on easier songs I used to do fairly well at. Oh well.

I think I've kind of overworked the arm muscles that I use when playing FFR. It seems to take less time for my forearm to get tired and the muscles to kind of tighten up. It's not really bad pain or anything. It just seems like a muscle strain, getting sore from overuse. I think I may have to cut back a bit on playing FFR, at least on stuggling through harder songs, and give my arm a little more time to relax and start feeling better. I'll probably keep playing some games to keep my overall, points-based rank from slipping too far, but I should be careful not to stress my arm too much for a while.

I just hit full combos on two more songs just now, Burnout and Massive (ffr remix). Yeah, they're kind of medium-low songs, 2.5 difficulty on the chardish/jimerax scale, and a piece of cake for some of you to FC. But every new FC is an accomplishment for me, and reaching 50 FCs is something of a milestone. It's a nice, round number and roughly 1/3 of the songs in the game right now. I may not be able to consistently FC every song that I've FCed so far, but having done it once shows that I have the ability to do it. With practice, consistently getting FCs will become easier. In the process of getting here, I've also just gotten my overall rank to better than 3000, and my average level rank just under 5100. Considering I'm not that great of a player, these don't seem too bad.

I got three more PCs yesterday. OK, they were on really easy songs, but I'm not a great player, so I'll take what I can get. Besides, I always have trouble keeping up perfect or near perfect accuracy, so I'm happy to get any PCs. The songs this time were Love You Anymore, Falling Into You, and Halcyon. That gives my 6 PCs total. Not that good compared to some of you, I know, but remember that not everyone is a fantastic player. Some of us are happy for our lower level accomplishments.