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Back when the Japanese twitter scene was very young and fresh, and IIDX players were beginning to tackle the absurdity that was 灼熱Beach-side-bunny on RA's scratch window, a small band of mystically-minded DJs had an epiphany. What if the sun character from the BGA was significant?
Their strategy: trace the path of <(’ヮ’)> over the course of the song, map the BPM to a one-day cycle, and plot the shadows made at the time of each scratch. They even took the time of 灼熱Beach-side-bunny's appearance into account, calculating the sun's angle of elevation for the latitude of Tokyo on that day. Friends report dropping by their efficiency apartments, to be greeted with whiteboards full of numbers and diagrams, and frame freezes of the BGA.
After all this hard work, they circulated their arcane results, figures that resembled sundials, around the community, hoping to get some of the top rankers to try their method. As you can probably guess, they were laughed out of the arcades! Nobody took them seriously. Distressed by such a cold response to their surefire tactic, the "Sundial Crew" and their opus nearly vanished from social media. But the years and the mixes wore on.
Then, shortly after the release of SPADA, one of the crew quietly, almost nonchalantly, tweeted a snapshot of a high AA FC on 灼熱Beach-side-bunny. The attached message roughly translated to "Looks like we were right, after all." It was dismissed as a fluke, a player who sunk countless hours into exclusive Beach-side practice. Until the second FC hit a week later. And then a third and fourth the next day. By the end of SPADA's lifespan, the entire Sundial Crew had the same clear lamp. Some even had it AAA'd.
The progression stunned the IIDX community at large. Any direct messages or tweets at the crew members were met with no response. Players dug up the sundials from their stashes of Internet infamy and studied them, but couldn't make heads nor tails of the diagrams without an explanation. After no headway for months, the community's interest faded. Whatever; it's just one chart.
Along comes SUPER FUTURE 2323, though; and with it, 灼熱Pt.2 Long Train Running, complete with backscratching! Again, hopefuls plunged into analysis, each subjugating the turntable rhythms in their own ways. But few recalled the Sundial Crew until, shortly into copula, one of them tweeted an FC. But no new sundials cropped up! They've kept their shadow plots to themselves this time. Top rankers fumed as more FCs trickled in, then AAAs. Sundial DJs peppered the KAC ranking course C, including seven of the top 10 slots.
Eventually those other three, at their wits' end, came up with a solution: offer a bounty for an accurate explanation of the sundial method and a new diagram for Long Train Running. It'd be worth it, in the long run - all that money saved from being spent on the IIDX machine for bad runs. But such an unconventional request! This bounty on the second sundial came to be known as the