Forgotten Friday #149 - 八重華＆辰巳 / Yaeka and Tatsumi

 I did end up taking Christmas off. I watched some TV and was in general very cold. I miss having central heat and air.

Forgotten Friday #149 - 八重華＆辰巳 / Yaeka and Tatsumi

This is the second time in this Google Docs word document that people completely missed the point of Yokune Ruko. 

Ruko has male and female banks. Both are still fundamentally Ruko. But Tatsumi and Yaeka share the same bank, only Tatsumi is g+20. Ruko is one character who can be drawn differently depending on which bank is used. This UTAU and Shallwill (I stan Will) miss the point and just make entire characters for the genderbend. Genderbends are supposed to be like, bends of the original character, not someone else entirely!

You can pull this and get it right, though. It’s harder for bodies that have been feminized with estrogen, but anyone can attempt to mimic the voice of the opposite gender. If you do poorly, there are formant filters in ReaPitch that will make it sound more like the gender you want it to be. Make two banks - they can still be packaged together as a unit! Heck, you can just run a formant shifter on the original samples band save it as a new bank. Twice the storage space, but it’s still a different library! (It’s as simple as setting the track default in reaper to that formant shifter, dragging in all the samples, and then exporting as stems.)

But two entirely separate characters for a flag setting? Naw, man. I do my best to be really positive and to say “you do you!” but like, please don’t make a virtually unrelated character the result of adding flags. (Traditional genderbends like Kasane Ted and Hatsune Mikuo are totally fine being nothing more than a flag. I have no issue with that at all!)

Who are Yaeka and Tatsumi?

Official Art from Bank

Wiki Wednesday #138 - 獏音サク / Sack Bugne

Where ever did the name Sack Bugne come from? ばくね is the reading given on his distribution page, and I don't get it.

Wiki Wednesday #138 - usa-utau's 獏音サク / Sack Bugne

In the last Usa UTAU article, we learned of Yata. She was a story of the destruction of humanity. Every major event in her life outside of Eve nursing her to health caused her to lose more of what made her something resembling a human.

Now, we have Sack. That is the official romanization of his name. He has no backstory. He seems to not even have a personality beyond the standard like, dislike, and hobby. Anyway.

Oh. I finally got where Sack came from, though. Peacock. 孔雀 means peafowl, and the second kanji has a reading of Saku. Okay.

Who is Sack Bugne?

Official Art from Bank

Forgotten Friday #148 - CODE：@ / Code At Mark

 The last article was so frustrating, I thought, write another. Get that taste of sadness out of your mouth!

Forgotten Friday #148 - CODE：@ / Code At Mark

His name is Koodo Atto Maaku. Or, Code At Mark. I kind of thought his name was cool until I read the full version. Why is that last part there? I don’t like it. 

And worst of all? He bears no resemblance to an animal for me to ramble about. 

Who is CODE: @?

Official Art from Site

Wiki Wednesday #137 - 馳音ヤタ / Yata Hasene

 This is my sixth article tonight! So cool! I think it took about three hours to get to this point. I think I only need six more to be in 2022! I definitely have that many drafts lined up, so yay! I'm excited!

Wiki Wednesday #137 - usa-utau's 馳音ヤタ / Yata Hasene

This one is a doozy! It's an usa utau, of course, but it's one of the ones that has a full backstory. Japanese tends to just leave out pronouns, and translate webpage is always worse than Google translating sentence by sentence. Translate webpage will just sprinkle in pronouns for the fun of it, even if they make no sense. 

I'm going to editorialize and recount the story with some details changed just based on the inferior translation. As a big note, according to what I read, there are major grammatical errors in some of the biographies that will screw up translation. (The error was leaving out "ni" after a "zu form" verb, which is supposedly incorrect in all cases, though I was going off of English language resources and not Japanese resources themselves.)

Mind you, I know how to write English well and I know all the rules. I will make grammatical errors all the time to emphasize a friendly tone. After I figured out what "zu form" was, I understood fully what they meant. It could have been a typo, or it could have been informal. (The biographies aren't proofread well - at one point they use VOALOID.) I don't have the vocabulary to ask whoever wrote it what the deal was. 

All of that is just to say, I know they will sometimes do things to make automatic translations wonky. That's why I cannot guarantee that my retelling is correct.

Who is Hasene Yata?

Official Art from Bank

Forgotten Friday #147 - teiravani's -OGATA-

 This will be my tenth article today! Wow! And then there will only be about 12 left before I reach my goal if I am good at counting. If I kept this pace tomorrow, I would reach the goal! If I could only do six a day, I would also reach my goal! I am hopeful.

Forgotten Friday #147 - teiravani's -OGATA-

I’ve got a question for you, Teiravani. Do you think I resemble a juvenile specimen of Felis catus? Do I look like a young member of the family Felidae?

No?

Then why are you kitten me?!

Who is Ogata?

Official art from site

Wiki Wednesday #136 - 馳音ユト / Yuto Hasene

 I can't fully go one hundred percent in order because I somehow forgot to download one of the UTAUs... and now axfc just won't let me download. What is even with that site?

Wiki Wednesday #136 - usa-utau's 馳音ユト / Yuto Hasene

So, let me tell you what's what at this moment. I'm working on writing all the articles for the usa utau group. I can't post them all in a row because of my spamming single families rule. There's about nine more of these I think? These will just randomly go between other articles. So, other than these usa articles going in the order I wrote them, there's no continuity here. I might post two in one month. I might post one in two months. So, whatever feelings I say I have in them, it will be surrounded by something different. I kind of didn't fully think the situation through, still using these as a diary but having no logical thread of what starts where.

Anyways, there's nothing really to say about this guy.

Who is Hasene Yuto?

Official Art from Bank

Forgotten Friday #146 - teiravaniの陸玖 / Riku

 I wonder if they wanted him to be Rick.

Forgotten Friday #146 - teiravaniの陸玖 / Riku

See, part of the rule about not spamming families is so that we don’t run into a situation where I just have nothing to say because no one in the family has more than five lines of biography.  (I'm sorry about breaking that rule in this time of time crunch.)

Who is Riku?

Official art from Bank

Wiki Wednesday #135 - usa-utau's 謎人 / Meito

 I wonder if I made any jokes about tomatoes when I wrote the draft for this.

Wiki Wednesday #135 - usa-utau's 謎人 / Meito

Oh look, it's zombie virus KAITO.

So, since I break these up, and there's no telling when the last usa utau article was, usa utau is a collaborative effort with over one hundred collaborators. 

They are a mixed bag. Sometimes their art is stunning. Sometimes it is bad. Sometimes their characters are compelling. Sometimes they make no sense. You literally never know what you're going to get with them.

Most of the ones I have written about lately are "virtual bodies". They tend to be either viruses, junk data, or hacked copies of vocaloids. Because of that, they tend to be a bit flat as characters. But, you know, sometimes they end up being way more than you expected.

Who is Meito?

Official Art from Bank

Forgotten Friday #145 - サオリ・ウラスジンスキー / Sao-kun

 The family name isn't romanized anywhere, and the title was looking way too long already.

Forgotten Friday #145 - サオリ・ウラスジンスキー / Sao-kun

In the last article I wrote here on Google Docs, I actually was so excited by the UTAU’s design, I typed so fast that I had written nearly a paragraph before it showed up on screen.

This isn’t one of those cases.

Who is Sao-kun?

Art from Release video