Forgotten Friday #75 - カステロイド / Castelloid

Okay so! I wrote a one thousand word video script that outlined the ideal UTAU plugin for English that requires the user to input all of the relevant data, but then automates the creation process. Since I finished the script (the read from kind, not the computer kind), I did come up with more important features to be added. I downloaded Delta's C# library for making UTAU plugins, but I got nothing but errors no matter what I did. Masao stepped in and told me to download Visual Studio 2017. I have to wait until free internet time, but hopefully that fixes it. (Lambda expressions! Who thought programming could change so fundamentally so quickly!)

Forgotten Friday #75 - カステロイド / Castelloid

Note on the name... My dyslexia works in mysterious ways sometimes. I can read hiragana front and back with no issues, but katakana kind of is blurry to me and it takes a lot of effort to read it. It isn't an issue of me just not learning katakana. It's just... really hard to read katakana. I always paste the readings of names into Google Translate to get the correct romaji reading. I had originally had the name as Casteroid as that's what Google Translate translated it as, but the file name for the bank is actually Castelloid. 

Who is Castelloid?

image from nicopedia

Wiki Wednesday #64 - 紅歌舞はつ / Akakabu Hatsu

Where is my cute veggie pun?! Radishes are red, but I mean, is that the most salient thing about them? Apples are red! Cherries are red! But this is red singing and dancing... I think Hatsu is just a name without any meaning. Not everything needs meaning, but I'm just bummed I took the time to find the veggie pun, and there was none.

Wiki Wednesday #64 - 紅歌舞はつ / Akakabu Hatsu

Another Vegedol article! I actually like this entire series quite a bit, and I'm tempted to just do all of them in a row. But that breaks one of my rules - don't just go through an entire series in a row because anyone who doesn't care about that series will have nothing to read for like half a year in the worst cases.

As I said earlier, there's no cute pun in the name. Hatsu's color scheme doesn't scream radish, but she has a carved radish on her head.

Who is Hatsu Akakabu?

Official Icon from Bank

Forgotten Friday #74 - 大音フク / Daine Huku

It took a lot of effort to decide whether to use Fuku or Huku, because both are technically correct. What caused me to go with the "unconventional" spelling was the fact that the CV bank is named huku, and all of the passwords are huku. (Usually, giving out passwords is a big no-no, but it illustrates my point.) I do get how typing in Japanese works and why someone would choose "hu" even if they meant "fu", but yolo.

Forgotten Friday #74 - 大音フク / Daine Huku

So, when I started this I wanted to go in order so that it was like you were reliving the early days. That fell apart really, really quickly because extremely old UTAUs that qualify for this series tend to be kind of boring. "There's one CV voicebank, it's sounds like all the other ones with this voice type, there is no character." You need some 2010 action to spice it up!

Huku is different because his distributor is actually still active to this day. His latest bank was from 2013, but his 2009 bank is still available for download! His website is nice and tidy, and he doesn't seem like a 2009 UTAU. Anyway, I have three banks to look at, so I don't need to say as much up here!

Who is Huku Daine?

Official Art Packaged with Bank

Wiki Wednesday #63 - 終末の愛未 / Shumatsu's Ami

Feeling a lot better than I did before I started the last article. Thank goodness! Let me start by saying that I miss a lot of details when it comes to kanji until I actually look them up. It's a combination of a lot of factors, but most of the time, kanji look like varying blocks of grey when I'm on my computer. I set my phone so that the text is always huge, and I can put it up really close to my face. Pasting them into Jisho or Google Translate fixes that because the font is giant there, though!

Wiki Wednesday #63 - 終末の愛未 / Shumatsu's Ami

So, 末 and 未 aren't the same kanji. They look the same, but they aren't. Shuumatsu (with those kanji, I don't know where the extra u went in the romanized version) means the end. (Unless you're Google Translate, and then it's Apocalypse.) Ami has 未 , which means not yet as opposed to end. So Ami means not yet love?

Maybe this is all revealed when I look at the character information.

Who is Ami?

Official Art Lifted from the UTAU Wiki
Because seriously, how can you talk about Ami without seeing her bear?

Forgotten Friday #73 - Takeshi Fujiwarane / 藤原音武

Here's another UTAU whose online presence has been completely torched, but somehow still has a bank available for download on the UTAU Fandom. Fun fact, the voice provider included his MSN handle and his skype handle in the readme. MSN was such a dope instant messenger. You could draw in it and send the drawings, you could basically make your own small reaction gifs, and you could customize what color your chat window was. Then Skype got bought out and Skype replaced MSN. That's life, I guess.

Forgotten Friday #73 - Takeshi Fujiwarane / 藤原音武

As I said in the lead in, this UTAU just doesn't exist anymore. There's one image on deviantArt and two videos (that I counted) on YouTube. Those videos are both from eight years ago. It's a miracle one of his banks was still up. (And as a super plus, it was his VCV that survived!!)

Anyway, on to the article!

Who is Fujiwarane Takeshi?

Official Icon Packaged with Bank

Wiki Wednesday #62 - UTAO!の羔＝コルネ - Project UTAO!'s Kohitsuji Korune

I was sufficiently distracted when writing the other post and my dizziness went away. But then I got to a natural stopping point and it came back and I'm like, what do I do? What can I do? Go eat something? I mean, yes, but I don't want to gain all of the weight back. Just focus really hard on writing? I want to make it clear, I'm not starving myself. My stomach doesn't want more food, and I'm eating the right amount of calories. I'm just really dizzy.

Wiki Wednesday #62 - UTAO!の羔＝コルネ - Project UTAO!'s Kohitsuji Korune

So, that's a wordy title. Her name is listed as （姓：コルネ　名：羔）.  The word they use for surname is a fancy pants, beyond level 30 kanji on WaniKani. So, they... Used the Western order? The reading for her name was Western order? What about the equal sign? Generally, I really do try to take this all seriously and give the UTAUs the respect they deserve, but I can't consistently write that name. She's Lamb Cornet. Google Translate agrees with me, calling her Lam Corne. I can't even feel too bad considering all the weird readings I've ran into recently.

I'll use the given reading for the section headers, but I'm calling her Lamb.

Who is Kohitsuji Korune?

Official Art Packaged with Bank

Forgotten Friday #72 - Kaita Kumone / 雲音カイタ

No one recognizes that you shouldn't mash together kun'yomi and on'yomi. I don't mean no one as in overseas people. I mean everyone in Japan, also. But, what can you expect? The reading of 月 is either, Getsu, Gatsu, or Tsuki. How does the protagonist of Death Note read "moon"? Light. The reading is Light. Is there any world where that makes sense? I actually thought the kanji would be 光 because at least that actually means "light". But no. 

Forgotten Friday #72 - Kaita Kumone / 雲音カイタ

I generally do my best to limit off topic discussions to Japanese UTAUs. Especially for Forgotten Friday articles. A user might have wandered off for several years, but then just randomly show up and read this if they speak English. If they don't speak English, they wouldn't really read this even if they did show up.

I did some digging. Don't Google the name in the character file ("enikaitamochi"). Or do, but you'll see a lot of stuff you probably wouldn't want to. (Soft-core prawns.) All of the accounts are very much from Japanese people who seem to not speak English. If you want to see her voice provider's most recent contact that I can find, it is universalPraesepe. It's really crazy because Kaita was getting covers in 2013, but then she straight up fell off. 

So, I have a feeling Kaita's voice provider won't show up again, and this does feel too important to put behind the break so here it is. 

At the time of writing this, it is April 19th. COVID-19 is really scary.

I live in a red state. For non-Americans, that means that my state (with the exceptions of a few places) hates the government. That's a bit of a stretch, because they would walk on coals for Reagan or Bush. Almost all rural areas are red, and all urban places are blue in America. So, when a governor in a blue city puts a lock-down order in place, the red rural area protests and just... Stands in the road. Because we're red from the top down here, there's no strict lock-down orders. No protesters at all.

And literally nothing has changed for the nearest part of the nearest city. Don't get me wrong - schools are closed. But, they're closed in Summer also. It took me a while to figure out, but then it hit me. Other than stores that probably employ like five people, everything is essential. I don't think anyone lives in that area except for restaurant workers and low level employees for major corporations. When I was getting physical therapy, the therapist told me that she was driving about an hour to get from her house to the clinic. There are non-essential workers in the entire city, but not in that section. And, you know those people know that they've been exposed... Meaning, I can see them thinking there's no reason to not just go get vegetables to plant from the hardware store. 

So, when I hear about opening the economy up... Not yet? Going through that part of the city after my necessary doctors appointment, it looked the same. The only thing you could really tell was different was the tornado damage from before COVID-19. The only major difference if it was opened up here would be kids going back to school to finish the year (which is borked quite a bit because it's actually illegal for my area to have online-only school due to some children literally not having internet access) and places like the Senior Citizens Center opening back up. Going to a blue city, it was eerie and empty. A red city? It was just normal life. 

Thanks for listening to my rant. For me, nothing has really changed.

Who is Kaita Kumone?

Official Icon from UTAU Fandom

Wiki Wednesday #61 - 夜詠蒼 / Ao Yoyomi

My meds are kicking in and they're kicking in hard. It's getting harder to think and I feel more uncomfortable, but I'm glad I'm calming down. I was so proud of myself because I woke up and just had coffee for breakfast, but I feel like the hunger dizzies will attack today. Maybe if I just write enough and sit still, I can ignore them. 

Wiki Wednesday #61 - 夜詠蒼 / Ao Yoyomi

Night song blue! That's her name. Well, or Blue Evening Poem. Who even knows in this crazy, mixed up world. 

Ao's concept art is so pretty. This UTAU is so pretty. I'm not checking to see if she suddenly catapulted to fame before writing this, but I'm shocked when art this good just gets ignored. That never happened in the old days. Good art was your ticket to stardom. Now there are thousands of UTAUs instead of dozens, though, so I do get it a bit.

Who is Yoyomi Ao?

This is the official art, but the official art packaged with the bank was eleven megabytes. That's huge, so I saved the preview on the UTAU Wiki to my computer and used that. The quality is a little lower, but WOW, my internet is too slow to upload anything that big right now.

Forgotten Friday #71 - 雪村ツリアナ / Tryana Yukimura

It's the middle of the Coronavirus lock down. Today, I left the house for the first time since this started to go to the doctor for a routine but very important reason. (Okay, it's not actually that important to most people. I just don't want to live through the elevator scene from The Shining for like three months straight.)

Forgotten Friday #71 - 雪村ツリアナ / Tryana Yukimura

So, my mental health has been so low I could barely write, so high I could barely stick with one coherent thought, and then just eh. I spent like a month saying, "It will be better if you put off writing the blog. You want to give people a good product! And then I was like... It's not happening if I wait until I can think and write well.

I'm still not at a place where I should be writing articles, because I'm really easily distracted and I want to write almost everything I think. I spent like five minutes trying to write the cold open, because I wanted to be just... honest? But then I think about how awkward outright saying what the doctors visit was actually for might just be. So, revision, revision. I usually don't do much revision because I can usually think well and in a way that presents the front that I want to present. And, of course, my sentence length becomes Japanese. (You can crack open a Japanese book and one sentences takes up an entire page.)

So yeah, on to the actual thing people come here for. Don't worry! You're getting your picture and audio file! 

Who is Yukimura Tryana?

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