Wiki Wednesday #72 - 亜留郷静か / Shizuka Arugo

1/5. In last week's article, I said I'd play a little game where I try to beat an imaginary opponent. I can pretend that it's someone writing a competing blog, but it's really just a virtual dice roll. Today, the dice said five. If I can write five articles today, I tie with the dice. If I write more, I win for the day. But, if I have a day where I can do nothing, I can make up for it by writing more other days. Anyway, we'll see how this goes. It may seem rushed, but there are so many Wiki Wednesday banks that need to be covered before they get more banks and my articles are out of date!

Wiki Wednesday #72 - 亜留郷静か / Shizuka Arugo

Jiisan UTAU! It's a Jiisan UTAU! If you want to be technical, it's not fully a jiisan UTAU as it is recorded by an American dad (heh) and not a lonely old man who put work above finding love. But, from one sample I listened to, the quality and tone seem to make it sound like it will definitely sound like a jiisan UTAU, only slightly off due to the accent. 

So, with that said, let's get on to the article.

Who is Arugo Shizuka?

Official Art Packaged with Bank

So, you can't doxx yourself. Doxxing is when someone else releases private information on you, mostly in an attempt to cause you harm.

A fun joke about how sharing public knowledge isn't doxxing is as follows: a man approaches another man. The approaching man seems sinister and is wearing a trench coat. Sinister man leans in and says, "Hey... I know the president's address..." He slips the second man a slip of paper. On the paper, it read "1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500". You see, the joke is that if you walked up to someone and said that you knew Barbra Streisand's (how did I spell that correctly the first try) address, it would be bad to share it because she didn't give you permission to share it. However, the address of the White House, where the president lives, is public knowledge.

All that is to say, it's not doxxing himself for the UTAU's manager to name the UTAUs his family makes with their legal last name. However, I still think "yooo, you just doxxed yourself." Gavenloid released the information publicly of his own accord. It's not doxxing... but yoooo.

(As an important note: I am, in fact, old as dirt. We weren't even supposed to let anyone even know our legal first name. I guess that's why I'm Mae and not Anna. Facebook making it normal for people to use their legal names online still weirds me out, a decade after the fact.)

Anyway, Shizuka is fifty and dangerously underweight. His character item is protein shakes.

I'm just going to be honest here. People don't get enough protein, and I do believe protein shakes are stigmatized to a degree. But, if you buy protein isolate by itself, you can do almost anything with it to get your protein up. For example, my mom mixes her protein powder into coffee. You could use it in cooking, you can use it in smoothies... Protein shake mixes tend to be kind of nasty. Extremely artificial and way too sweet from zero calorie sweeteners. But with the isolate by itself? It's just normal daily business, only now with protein.

Then, the bio goes into full on Japanese bio mode. He... is not a dog. He is a human... but he has the brain of a dog. But he's capable of singing? Which implies he's capable of speech, kinda? And he physically attacks criminals. How?! He's underweight to the point of being sickly, fifty years old... and a human with dog ears and a dog tail. Does he use a weapon? Does he wrestle the criminals? The main thing dogs do to attack things is to bite them and not let go. Was his jaw replaced with a canine jaw when the brain was transplanted... Was he born with a dog brain?! How does this work!!

See? Full on Japanese bio mode. This confusion makes me feel pretty happy.

How is Arugo Shizuka's bank?

The bank is a one pitch CV bank encoded in romaji. The average pitch is B2. This doesn't really sound like a Jiisan UTAU, amazingly. I don't know why I'm surprised, as plenty of old people sound like young people. If I had to guess the age of the voice provider, I'd probably put it around... nineteen? 

For what it is, it's a pretty good bank. Not perfect... but for a bank that you had your parents record even though they probably don't understand it? It's really good. 

Where can I download Shizuka Arugo?

You an can download him from his UTAU Wiki page. If you want a really nice voice that's a bit noisy, then this is a really good bank. I think most noise can be mitigated just by mixing it. There's some things that aren't perfect... but this is someone's dad. Not an UTAU user, but an UTAU user's dad. And that makes the bank impressive.