Over the Frail Dream

wrote this article about a month ago but sat on it for a while in case i thought of anything else important i needed to address. think it pretty much covers what i've been feeling about "tech" as a term for a while now

you can read it here: https://mescog.org/tech.html

huge credit to Windoze, Foxfire, and Lofty for feedback as i was writing it. interested to hear all of your thoughts

Generally agree that the term covers too much ground at the moment. I think the one reason this happens, is that some words tend to include more meaning over time while not shedding the old, due to the old not being "removed". An example would be that a subtitle with "this is tech", made in 2006, will still be there and still be read today alongside all the new charts that are around. There's a now deleted interview with Toph (with a screenshot found here in the SECS discord) where he mentioned being the first tech charter, which at that time meant following the music closely instead of undercharting / following the ~vibe~ of the notes. Due to how timeless etterna can be, we live in a world where this is completely correct in context, yet so vague in a new discord message.

I noticed technical as a skillset being an issue from when i began using etterna more than SM5, as index packs i played lots tended to all be "technical, stream" or "stream, technical". I had dismissed the whole skillset a bit in the back of my head due to this, and i honestly wasn't aware that the term was as overloaded as it is now. I think the issues arising from the calculator will never go away, until someone expands upon it and adds "rainbow", "transition heavy", etc. My headcanon is that it is supposed to mean "difficult to execute", but tell a calculator that and it will return a nullpointer...

One funny instance of tech being used differently in different groups, was when WoC was in the making and snover got really annoyed that it was called a tech pack by someone. When i asked him what it was if not tech, his answer was something like "well, it's not tech".

this is great, so many points i had never even considered, really. i agree that "tech" as a term is overused, and thinking back on it, i've felt like this for a long time, i just never realized it.

couldn't agree more about the tech/dump binary point, this ship actually never ever sailed in my mind. i always thought it was an oversimplifying concept, although i do think that it's an interesting stepping stone for beginner charters and has its applications. you know, something about learning rules and then learning to break them (because they're not really true in the end).

although one of the more incipient definitions of "tech", i could never fully accept that accurately charting a song could ever be a category of its own; accurately representing a song can lead to a chart that fits into any category depending on how the song is composed. from that perspective, i was always a lot more inclined to believe that "accurately charting songs" causes tech (as well as it can lead to jumpstreams, handstreams, jacks...), instead of being the consequence of tech, which is why the definition might have eventually shifted from that to "lots of weird patterns" in the first place, as all other categories already had names.

i always found myself defining tech exclusively based on pattern complexity. this always made sense to me as it embodies making a chart as complicated/tricky/technical as possible to score on with the least amount of notes. it makes the most sense as well when compared to broader definitions of "technical". if someone tells me they would like more abrasive patterning in a chart of mine, that to me always equated to a request to make the chart more technical. in this regard, maybe "tech" could restore some validity as more of an overarching skillset like "stamina" (which i'd like to see your take on as well), or maybe in the end i'm just using "tech" to describe a potentially more fitting term, "abrasiveness".


also,

Durvin wrote: *

Thu Feb 19, 2026 10:47 pm

One funny instance of tech being used differently in different groups, was when WoC was in the making and snover got really annoyed that it was called a tech pack by someone. When i asked him what it was if not tech, his answer was something like "well, it's not tech".

indeed a very snover response lol

handful of thoughts; maybe will write more later

Quote:

The old pushback against these charts is part of why this conversation exists in the first place: charting culture split between "express the music" and "transcribe the music."

i dont think this is what the split really is; i think the real split is between "the music modulates the pattern the charter wants to use" and "the music dictates the pattern the charter uses"

Quote:

The phrase "tech dump" makes this failure explicit. On its surface, it doesn't really make sense: if these two terms are meant to be opposites, combining them should be nonsense. The fact that players and charters use the term anyway is less of a mistake and more an admission that these labels no longer work. In practice, "tech dump" tends to be used for charts that appear abstract and follow the pattern-to-sound approach while still feeling musically coherent, or for dumps that include unusual patterns or some unconventional structure. These are real distinctions that people are trying to gesture at, but the phrase itself doesn't clarify which of these qualities is being referenced. Rather than resolving this ambiguity, the term compounds it.

it gets even more confusing because if you talk to really old charters there used to be the idea that any chart that was just really hard and densely layered was a dump, so stuff like robotomy, puppet's AA, or patashu's joker would count despite all of the notes following notes in the music, so those all would have been considered tech dumps back then (can ask CBR about this, he'd confirm)

Quote:

That being said, some terms are still useful when they're applied narrowly. One example being "conventional." If used carefully, it can describe charts that follow a standard, accurate approach; charts that rely on familiar ideas and are easy to justify in terms of note placement. Additionally, this describes how a chart is made, not how it feels to play or whether it's tricky. It might be a limited term, but it points at something concrete.

the main issue i have with the conventional/traditional labels is that there's a lot of cultural weight behind the words that imply whatever doesn't follow this style is fringe when it feels like the "conventional" style has been the one on life support for the past decade. i think framing it in terms of amount of usage of ghost notes, the "scoring vs art file" dichotomy, or something like the modulation idea above avoids "picking a side" on which one ought to be standard

alright so here's your new replacement words for these charts:

tech / conventional / whatever the fuck it's called now: kiki
wave-based / dump: bouba

iesuoykuot wrote: *

Sun Feb 22, 2026 7:29 am

alright so here's your new replacement words for these charts:

tech / conventional / whatever the fuck it's called now: kiki
wave-based / dump: bouba

Windoze wrote: *

Sun Feb 22, 2026 5:18 pm

works until midare puts a 24th jack to nothing. which is dumping but also indubitably kiki

this is kouga patterning

it was over before it even began...

Windoze wrote: *

Tue Feb 24, 2026 4:54 pm

it was over before it even began...
dgk.png

bouba dump vs kiki dump
2009 though god damn