Cirque du Jackhummer is a footspeed pack by Zaia.
It is a special pack that doesn't fall into either a stamina or technical classification. The pack is named after two things: the jackhammer tool and the Hummer SUV. Much of the source information this pack references can be found in a Google slideshow about internet humor represented through art movements from February 2017.
It is the oldest listed pack on the now superseded Zaia Simfiles spreadsheet (2018-2023).
| Pack Director | Zaia |
| Stepartists | Zaia |
| BPM | 116-206 |
| Songcount | 42+1 |
| Blocks | 12-23 (50) |
| Type | Footspeed (meme) |
| Format | Singles |
| Release Date | Jan 03, 2018 |
¶ Structure
Cirque du Jackhummer is an Expert charts only pack. There is one hidden song (Jackoff Marathon) in a sub-folder hidden within the “Jack” folder. The sub-folder is labeled “Don't ever open this folder”.
The pack contains no documentation beyond what is written on the old release spreadsheet.
Chart descriptions contain the ratings (not accurate ratings), but some contain flavor text. I've made an attempt on my new simfile spreadsheet to provide more accurate ratings but this kind of content falls outside of the scope of ratings system, so they're speculative at best.
¶ Development
In August 0f 2015, Mad Matt and Hurtpiggypig visited Brisbane, and we played some games together. During one credit, we played Sandstorm, by Aoreo, in Jimmy Jawns 2, and I awakened an affinity for jackhammers, and wanted to explore that more.
This pack was developed to service a player need. The machine that I was playing on, during this time in 2015, was not in a well-maintained state, and the pads were not optimized for footspeed play. I wanted to be able to play footspeed without having to mod the pads for minimalist lightweight footwork, so I began quickly throwing together some charts with high volumes of jackhammers to mimic fast-twitch movements.
Through September 2015 I wrote my Expert charts for Dragonforce SSJ2, or what would become Dragonforce Kaioken 3.5 years later. Sometime across a 4-day period in early October, Cirque du Jackhummer was written. I was writing anywhere up to 7 charts per day for this pack. Each one could be written in thirty minutes. The quickest write was Fuzzys Stole My Shell, which was done in about five minutes.
After I stopped playing consistently later in 2015 and started focusing on work and more important simfile projects like PEMB, my interest in developing Jackhummer waned. It wasn't until July 2017 and in the fortnight leading up to Armajejjon that I brought it up again to Aoreo and he synced the pack. It was then that I decided to start prepping the pack for release.
Between then and the release date, I added a handful more charts to complete the pack - primarily the low level DDR songs (specifically Burning Heat, DXY!, Graduation, SO DEEP and Spin The Disc).
¶ Artistic Influences and Chart Design
Cirque du Jackhummer's artistic roots stem from Absurdism, Surrealism and Dada.
Nobody had really considered that pack that was crammed full of jackhammers would be a valuable or meaningful pack to make, but since I was the one coming up with nonesense ideas and following through with them, I ended up being the one to invest the time into actually doing it.
The creative premise was simple: take a bunch of songs that I thought could support a ton of jackhammers and that I could listen to multiple times, and put jackhammers into them. There was no real logic behind songpicks, though I favored songs I had liked and played in the past, that I didn't really hear about anymore, so I gravitated towards songs from the 2007-2010 ITG customs time period. Those and songs with “jack” names in the title to make pun charts with.
This is taken from the release spreadsheet information. The sources are slides 6, 18 and 19 of the slideshow:
The Purposeful Destruction of Information Is The Essence Of Intelligent Work. This pack features highly articulated and nuanced patterning to aurally diverse sounds in ways that bring out previously undiscovered meaning within the music. The steps are a complementary element of the sound, existing within a symbiotic ecosystem wherein one is intrinsically entangled to the other. These simfiles offer a post-structuralist commentary on the socio-political nature of In The Groove simfiles, and patterns are metaphysical layers that are wedged in amongst one another at a quantum level. We simply lack the multidimensional spatial awareness to perceive the steps as they are intended to be - it is our minds that simplify the perception of the steps so as to appear to us as they seem, but simultaneously exist in superposition within a parallel higher brane of step. The simfile exists as a microcosm of art movements. This thought, that the way we think is a culmination of past simfile movements, can be seen in this pack. In mere years, a common form of expression became saturated with self-references, irony, deconstruction, meta, surrealism, minimalism, and abstract/avant-garde interpretations. I argue this is because simfiles serve as a widespread form of ephemeral art, evoking emotions in a rapid and disposable manner. This question applies to all forms of thinking and simfiles today. If the boundaries of simfiles are already eliminated, what is there left to challenge? Is “Rhythm Horizon” the future of simfiles, where we create not to question structure or express cynicism, but to benefit the viewer through empathy and truly believed messages? The modern simfile has already challenged and critiqued its own nature; what will be the simfiles of the future?
¶ Graphics
A shitpost pack gets shitpost graphics.
The background (an AM General Hummer H1)
The foreground is from Gintama (season 5, episode 19)
There's nothing else of note to add.
However, the other image that is featured on the simfile spreadsheet is far more interesting.
The Haha Image
The source of the background image originates from slide 16 of the slideshow.
The punchline of the “Laughter Image” is the use of two-point perspective to illustrate the rectangular prisms, which illustrates that humor is inherently rooted in perspective - what is funny to one person may not be funny to another person, and it is dependant on their subjective point of view how amusing something may be to them. Jackhummer is conceptually the same thing - the pack would only be of value to you if you view it from a perspective that you consider valuable.
Most peoples' opinions of this pack are quite binary - they either love it or they hate it, quite literally echoing the two-points of perspective that are shown in the Haha Image.
The “haha” in Jokerman font beneath the Shinpachi-within-Shinpachi image can can trace its lineage back to irregularly-shaped polygons:
Cirque du Jackhummer can be considered an “irregularly-shaped” pack.
¶ Songlist
Cirque du Jackhummer contains 43 songs. One of the songs is a “hidden” bonus song
| Song | Artist | BPM | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aquatic Ruins Zone | Kill!K | 141 | |
| Burning Heat!(3 Option Mix) | Mr.T with Motoaki.F | 166 | |
| CAPTAIN JACK (GRANDALE REMIX) | CAPTAIN JACK | 170 | |
| Cruel Whole (Abelcain Remix) | Venetian Snares | 165 | |
| DXY! | TaQ | 148 | |
| Ecstacy | ATB | 130 | |
| Ecstacy (Super Version) | Onoken | 137 | |
| Fire Fire | StripE | 150 | |
| Fuzzys Stole My Shell | Yuka Tujiyoko | 172 | |
| Gigadelic | teranoid feat. MC Natsack | 173 | |
| GRADUATION ~それぞれの明日~ | Be For U | 125 | |
| Guillaume Tell | MC F 40 (Rossini) | 180 | |
| Heaven | DJ Sammy & Yanou feat. DO | 138 | |
| Horatio | OR-IF-IS | 165 | |
| Hyper Pressure | ASK | 182 | |
| Innocent Walls | TaQ | 155 | |
| J'ai Envie de Plaisir X2 | S.i.m. on kor Funkle | 141 | |
| Jack | DesQ | 116 | |
| JackOff Marathon | Setek | 206 | Hidden simfile |
| Kasta sten | Slagsmålsklubben | 200 | M68: Chart's bpm changes are in the wrong location, causing the chart to have incorrect rhythms and tempos. Once the chart has returned to 200bpm, the sync corrects itself |
| Kiss Me Thru The Phone | Soulja Boy | 150 | |
| Last Message | good-cool feat. Meg | 155 | |
| Loaded Futurefile | Anc | 269 | |
| Love is Eternity | kors k | 140 | |
| MAX 300 | Ω | 300 | |
| Pistolero | Juno Reactor | 141 | |
| Rainbow Hyperspace | Kommijet1 | 140 | |
| Rocket Punch!! | Neko | 155 | |
| Sakurakagetsu (桜華月) | AKITO | 138 | |
| Snow Storm | Dj Taka | 145 | Correct artist styling is “dj TAKA” |
| SO DEEP (PERFECT SPHERE REMIX) | SILVERTEAR | 140 | |
| Spin the disc | good-cool | 130 | |
| Still More Fighting (NES remix) | MadBrain | 192 | |
| The Privateer | Running Wild | 200 | |
| The Sampling Paradise | mamonis | 150 | |
| Timepiece Phase II | Hirofumi Sasaki | 144 | |
| Toccata & Fugue | Beautiful Day | 120 | |
| Toho Mathematics | IOSYS | 150 | |
| Trisection | Glome & Hiroshi Sakimoto | 140 | |
| Utopia | KaW | 166 | |
| V1 | saxxonpike | 148 | |
| Witch Doctor (Giants Toons Version) | Cartoons | 150 | |
| zl | Dr. Flowershirts | 168 |
¶ Reception and Retrospect
Cirque du Jackhummer released on the same day as Cirque du Enzo and Rebuild of Sharpnel, and was included as a “comic relief”-type pack that shouldn't be taken too seriously. I find the pack extremely fun and thoroughly enjoyed the time I was playing entire sessions out of it, but the popular reception has been understandably limited. Most of this pack is too difficult to pass on standard lifebar settings, and it wouldn't be viable to play on pads modded for touch-play.
Does it actually work as a footspeed training pack? It's hard to tell. Jackhammering footwork is not the same as a footspeed footwork. I like to think that it did, because I was able to record videos like the Polaris Three Bean Special after an intense three weeks playing only out of the pack.
I argue that charts like those in Jackhummer represent a deconstruction of the simfile - charts in this pack have little to no form and exist purely to service a player-oriented function: the need for this pack being the means to practice footspeed-esque motions on a pad that is not modded for them. When the charts are reduced to these separate components, the boundaries of what a simfile is begin to weaken. The “art” of the simfile begins to disappear and is left with spams of notes. On paper, they have the same notecounts and stream densities and perhaps even pattern distributions as “normal” charts, but realistically they are anything but. These numbers are performative and value-less. Even the music is superfluous: any song could be substituted for another and the chart would lose little of its artistic identity.
On the other hand, I could also argue that artlessness is not the sole determinant of value, and that the artlessness itself is the art. it must be taken into consideration that to find art in something that is intended to be artless must carry a kind of inherent value all on its own. Cirque du Jackhummer doesn't intend to purport to be anything more than it is, but it does invoke interesting thoughts about stepartistry as a process and it has allowed me to create and consider other viewpoints from which to observe and think about them. I'll admit that a normal pack would not have afforded me these considerations.
All of these videos were recorded on a machine set to Life 1:
¶ Trivia
- Jackoff Marathon is included as a theoretically unpassable “hidden" simfile.
- It is rated a “1”, but I gave it a speculative rating of “50-" on my spreadsheet
- The title includes the word “jack” in it
- The Sampling Paradise is rated a 14(mid) on paper but a 1 in the block rating
- Burning Heat, DXY!, Graduation, SO DEEP and Spin The Disc were all added after the QA period was complete, so these charts released in the finished pack with no QA passes made
- This pack is ranked on GrooveStats but it is very, very unlikely that anyone will be able to submit a score for each simfile.
- The following notes pertain to the
JACK_STATStab of the Zaia Simfiles spreadsheet 2018-2023:- Rows 1-82 (1-420) have a list of different song names
- Row 39 (420) has your name
- Row 54 (42) is Just Monika
- Rows 83-93 feature some rows from the
ENZO_STATStab. The songs, in order, are:- GHOST, The King of Lions, Yggdrasil, Cyber Spell, Journey in the Dark, Mission Complete, Sweet Dreams, BLAST ALGORYTHM, Emotional Skyscraper ~World's End, Boomerang Rush, Longinus
- Row 95, Column K, contains the entire script of Bee Movie
- Bee Movie was a simfile in Crapyard Scent (2017)
- Rows 567-626, Column C, contain a prototype songlist of Cirque du Enzo (2014-2016)
- Row 570, Column H, shows “X Done” because the Expert chart for Sigmund had been featured in Team Polygon (2016)
- Row 911 calls you out
- Rows 1-82 (1-420) have a list of different song names