Railgun SS 3 read:

This completes all the Railgun books specifically titled 'Side Story,' but there's actually some more Railgun related content left to read, which I may as well do now that I've come this far.  The villains in this story were pretty dumb (the last boss was a violin of all things), but there were some fun friendship scenes scattered throughout the plot, so it was pleasant enough.  Better than fighting to stop a nuclear bomb all alone in Russia.

Meanwhile, I completed my scouring of 5-star instrumental songs, replacing them mostly with vocals from the 4-star tier, with a few exceptions.  The last replaced song was 'Lunatic Pandora' from FF8, demoted in favor of 'Morning Arch', the opening to A Channel, a series I don't even like but danged if the opening song isn't good all the same.  I love the beep beep boops of Lunatic Pandora, but inbetween those is a very slow and boring march melody.  I don't have the patience to wait for the good parts of a song, a 5-star song should be good throughout.

As a result of my purges, the 5-star music list consists of 658 instrumentals and 442 vocals, which might still look too instrumental biased, but in terms of playtime they're perfectly balanced.  It takes 1.3 days to play through all the instrumentals, and 1.3 days to play through all the vocals, so it's 50/50 at any given moment which type of song I'm listening to.  I was aiming for a better balance and ended up with a perfect balance.

Over the course of the last week I nudged the balance around 15 songs from the instrumental side to the vocal side.  It didn't take much to get this balance right, it was already pretty close, but improvement is improvement.  And the 'New Era' song is brand new and thus indisputably an upgrade from what came before.  This should finish all the tampering possible or necessary for my music playlist until Octopath Traveler II comes out next year.  It's going to be a headache finding open slots for the undoubtedly great music coming from that game.  But for now, for the next four months, I have the perfect playlist, the true top 1100 songs in the world.

If anyone wants to know all the details of which songs are rated what, my good music permapost is always kept up to date.

Also, Republicans officially won the House today.  There's no way, mathematically, the remaining vote tallies could swing so far Democrat that we lose all remaining races, so that seals it.  If Walker wins in Georgia the result is a tie Senate wise, 50/50, just like before, while in the House we picked up lots of seats and gained the power of being in the majority, which is enough to shut down Democrats' ambitions for the next two years.  That's great news.  What a relief.  It is frustrating that you can win the popular vote and still not gain control of the Senate, but Democrats have won the popular vote multiple times and lost the presidency, so it's about time we tasted the same bitter medicine.  Two years from now Democrats have to defend many more Senate seats than Republicans so we'll retake the Senate then.