5500/5500:

I've done it!  All 5500 songs received a rating after being carefully vetted and judged via a thorough listening, and then I moved ratings around and changed a few slots in retrospect when their positions seemed unwarranted.  After all the tidying up was done, I had five equal tiers of 1100 songs, the quintiles I'd always dreamed of.  1 star: 1100.  2 star: 1100.  3 star: 1100.  4 star: 1100.  5 star: 1100.  The cleaning up process, which I feared would take months or at least days, was all done within hours, so close had I balanced the initial ratings in the first place.  It's like hitting a hole in one in golf, how evenly spread my ratings ended up before I'd even lifted a finger.  As you might expect, out of those remaining 100 songs many warranted being ranked as 5 star, so I had to go back and demote some earlier 5-star entries to make room for these more qualified substitutes.  All in a day's work for what were only preliminary ratings until now.

And what an amazing 1100 those final 5-star folks are.  From the most estimable pedigree, songs from Ogre Battle, Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy, Lunar, the usual suspects.  But it never would have worked if not for the new music I had discovered only this year.  Octopath Traveler, Xenoblade Chronicles 1 & 2, Love Live! Nijigasaki, together form a large portion of that vaunted list.  Important contributions also came from last year, with Kamisama ni Natta hi, Summer Pockets, FF7 Remake, Valkyria Chronicles 4, Senren * Banka and the like all contributing.  In other words, I didn't even have 1100 great songs with which to form an upper tier of music until now.  The music hall of fame project would have failed if I had started or finished it any sooner than now.

In another remarkable coincidence, I didn't need to replace any additional songs at the exact same moment as I ran out of good anime opening themes with which to replace them.  A moment of preestablished harmony, no remixes or bad songs once I'd run out of ammunition to deal with them!  It's like I'd planned all this from the beginning.

There are only two steps left before this massive undertaking is finished.  First, I have to listen to all the new songs I added to the music hall of fame to replace the bad songs and remixes 100 times, to upgrade their status from 'provisional' to 'permanent.'  This is just a formality, because in other settings (while watching the anime openings directly), I'm already very familiar with these songs and am confident in their enduring worth.  Nevertheless I said every song in my music hall of fame has been tested by the grueling and demanding 100-listening test, and so that applies to these newbies too.

This should only take a couple days.  There are only 12 songs yet to reach my 100-listening threshold left, and it's much easier to listen to 12 songs 100 times than 5515, what I was doing previous to now.

After that it's just reconstructing the music hall of fame permapost from scratch, along the new lines of quality x quantity points instead of just quantity.  Posting the results of all my labor and research for all the world to see and gain from, so that they too can enjoy the best music across all time and space.  For the next couple days my work on the final product will be cheerful and diligent.  I barely slept the past couple days trying to get all these ratings done once and for all.  Nothing could enter my head except 'the next song, the next song!'  Now to turn that blood fever to this one last task.

While I was at it, I also finished reading Gray Lensman and much of Second Stage Lensman to boot.  With my music listening done, my ardor to read all day every day can also cool down, but I suppose I should finish my reread anyway now that I've come this far.