Forgotten Friday #130 - 墓場音ジャック / Hakabane Jack

 The frustrating thing about Twitter is that if I want to interact with the fandom, I actually have to spend a few weeks retweeting, tweeting, and replying constantly to make myself viable to the algorithm. Even if people are following me, Twitter will push my tweets down further to make room for people the algorithm likes, even if my follower isn't following them! That's not dope, because getting that involved involves getting that social media dopamine mess that makes people who are nice on the inside meanie-butts. 

Forgotten Friday #130 - 墓場音ジャック / Hakabane Jack

So, after getting so many words in, I realized that most readers, like, don't care about what I have to say about Halloween. He's a fifteen year old zombie with a pet floating pumpkin and a lantern. He eats candy with ghosts in the graveyard. You can skip to the audio file if you want to now!

Okay, now back to the actual article:

Get it?! Jack-o-lanterns?! 墓場 means graveyard. So he's graveyard song illuminated pumpkin!

Who is Jack Hakabane?

Official Art from Bank

So, カンテラ means a handheld oil lamp. He always carries one. I think that there is a ghost in his lantern and he has a floating friend who is a pumpkin. According to Google translate, the floating pumpkin is named Pumpkin. 

Jack is a fifteen year old zombie with a giant screw in his head. When it is turned, his personality goes from cute and sweet to super obnoxiously evil. He loves sweets and playing in graveyards.

I hate Halloween. I legitimately can't stand it. As a child, it's an excuse to gorge on candy. I'm a binge eater. That is not good for me. As an adult, it's an excuse to get wasted. My anti-psychotics will not let that happen. I will be curled up in a ball sleeping on the floor after I smell a strong shot. 

And don't get me started on the aesthetic. Orange and black? Garish. And all the spoopy skeletons and zombies? Gross. 

I grew out of my weird emo phase a long time ago and haven't touched eyeliner in years. But still! The inauthentic punk in me still rolls my eyes at posers. And posers are why I hate Halloween. Okay, not just posers. There were these hardcore Halloween fans who had a zombie shrine and a brachycephalic black dog that they thought resembled some creature of the night. (Ew, and ew.) They wanted to buy a decommissioned ship to convert into a haunted house… well, a haunted cruise?

But here's the thing. They wanted it to be year round… in South Carolina. The only reason I can think of to go to South Carolina is to go on down to Gullah Gullah Island! Which is actually Saint Helena Island. 

United Shades of America has a really good episode on the Gullah Geechee people. It's a political show on CNN, so of course it might be offensive to a lot of people. But it's still a really nice show that teaches a lot about different groups in America. The latest episode was about Skid Row in Los Angeles. 

It's crazy that even though there are laws against sleeping on the sidewalks there, people are legally able to because of a deal the mayor made. If we don't build enough affordable housing, you can keep sleeping on the sidewalks. Wouldn't it be better to just build affordable housing?! But they don't do that. And I know all the arguments against building a place for all the homeless people to live. They're mostly only arguments from people who don't want their property values to go down. 

All of this I have said just because I really dislike Halloween. 

Wait a second! He's not a zombie, he's a Frankenstein! (Doctor Frankenstein created Adam Frankenstein. They're both Frankenstein.) He has the screws that were in the monster's neck in his head. He has stitches holding him together. The doctor got lazy and gave him a giant button as an eye. The skin looks jaundiced, but also, I just drew white people with a yellow colored pencil for a long while because I was a dumb kid and thought yellow was the closest I had to white people skin tones.

Huh. I guess I should have noticed he wasn't a zombie sooner.

How is Hakabane Jack's voicebank?

Yay. Jack has a CVVC bank. He has a one pitch VCV bank, and a four pitch CVVC bank. Extra yay!! I love getting to use my CVVC tester USTs!!

But, here's a word of warning. If you have shareware UTAU, turn off the "a" button at the bottom of the screen when you use CVVC banks. The VC notes break the prefix map for some reason?! But if you turn it off, you'll need to input the VV note names by hand, but prefix map will work fully.

With VCV, the OTOs are decent enough! I can tell that "pure vowel theory" was used! But long consonants in some places mean that to make it uniform, overlap ended up on the consonant itself. No fun!

His voice is painfully adorable. Like, it's all my favorite parts of the wonderful SRS's Psycho, with none of my least favorite parts. Which, ironically, is also how I would describe Psycho's MEL bank.

With the CVVC: Trick. The OTOs have pretty major errors that only I care about. The voice is a lot less forceful, which makes it a breeze to use with heavily tuned USTs! His voice is just so, so adorable!!

Where can I download Jack Hakabane?

Here's his distribution page. I love CVVC to a silly, silly degree. And I like cute things! So I'm happy :)