Forgotten Friday #397 - 淡水ウパ / Awami Upa

Whoo...

Forgotten Friday #397 - 淡水ウパ / Awami Upa

Totally unrelated to Upa, I am now one of those people who says "Microslop". However, I am also someone who refuses to use UTAU banks in anything other than UTAU, so here I am in a virtual machine that crashed so bad I had to sit through Windows 'repairing my computer' because Windows Update thought that ten gigabytes of RAM was an affront to life itself.

AND it happened again. Thanks, Microslop.

Anyway, Upa is an energetic teen girl who loves fish and eels.

Who is Upa Awami?

art from site

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"Now, I really don't think there's much you'll have to do..." With age Mrs. Beller's skin had thickened and wrinkled. She simply looked deathly pale as opposed to transparent. "You just need to do everything my beloved husband did before he passed."

Harper and Greg exchanged worried glances.

"You know..." Mrs. Beller laughed. "I had a feeling you'd react like that. You don't need to give me foot rubs or remind me of when I need to take my medication. I just mean that everything you two need to do, an old feeble man with failing lungs was able to do daily."

Harper awkwardly laughed. "Why, though? It sounds like we'll be doing basically nothing."

"Because, honey," Mrs. Beller laughed. "You colony folk are wired different. If we place you on a plot of land, the only thing that happens is missed quotas. We had prepared several plots of land to give out to everyone like you. But we've realized the better way to do it."

"What's the better way?" Harper leaned forward. She could feel how awkward Greg felt. Harper had put in the work and learned Ag Eng. Greg, on the other hand, was allowed to skate by on barely understanding it because he would have Harper by his side. 

"The land that was set aside for you and your baby was given to my children." Mrs. Beller smiled. "In return... When I pass away, this land is yours to leave to your children." She noticed the confusion on Harper's face. "The point of this is to raise your children up to be real farmers. It's too late for you two, but your children will be brought up in this world."

"What if they don't want to be farmers?" Harper leaned back as she crossed her arms over her chest. 

Mrs. Beller shrugged. "We'll put all of you on a cargo ship and then try and find people to replace you." She shook her head. "But once you live life here, you'll never want to go back."

Harper didn't believe her at first. But then she remembered her own childhood. She cleared her throat. "How bad is the drug problem?"

Mrs. Beller was shocked. "Our people were extremely religious. Even after the people who migrated to this Ag Ark destroyed all of our connections to our old gods, we still maintained certain practices out of tradition." She shook her head just a bit. "There's obviously Ag Arks growing drugs, but not here. Could you ferment fruit here? It's simple biology that you can. But that's the kind of thing that gets you sent to jail to sit and think about your actions!"

"Surely you have pain killers." Harper leaned forward. "At least for the animals."

Mrs. Beller shook her head. "Honey, I know you're not asking for yourself. It's constant work here. Your children will not have time for drugs. Maybe you will, but not your babies."

Harper cringed. On her colony ship, drugs were a constant. She didn't believe Mrs. Beller.

How are Awami Upa's banks?

Upa is sadly partially lost. Her VCV is missing, but she does have two CV banks with one having a lot of random English words. 

Let's look at her first bank with no subtitle. The bank is three pitches, but there is no prefix map. I cannot tell you if the English samples contain enough to make her sing in English because there's no phoneme system. Just words that you can't know if they are pronounced correctly until you listen to them. But look - I don't even really care about the English aspect because her voice singing in Japanese is so beautiful! 

Her other existent bank is called JP 1. And I was mistaken. She has one bank and that is it, for this is simply her main bank with only the Japanese samples. Oh well!

Where can I download Upa Awami?

Internet Archive to the rescue! Remember, you will need to strip out all of the Wayback Machine stuff in the URL to download the banks from the file host. But... The VCV was uploaded to the server that served that website, but it was never archived by the Wayback Machine... So unless someone saved it in the past and is willing to send it over to the UTAU Lost Media people, the VCV is gone-gone for good. But that isn't too much of an issue given how lovely her multipitch CV bank sounds! Perhaps if I were younger and more free, I would have spent the time to make her a functional CVVC English OTO given she does have CVC recordings like "kick". Oh well - I am now old and not as impulsive! Though it would be nice if someone gave Upa that!