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Blue Of Mind
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  • Some of the recent discussions about nostalgia for the V2 scene has made me realise some modern Japanese producers in particular seem to be only picking up vocal synths as a way to enter the mainstream music industry. Sometimes, I've come across new producers who already have a polished, commercial sound right from the the get-go, but they use a VB like Miku as a way to attract the vocal synth fandom to their work when chances are they could easily attract attention through a human singer through their sheer talent/skill. Once they gain enough of a fandom and a contract with a mainstream label, they start pivoting away from vocal synths completely.

    Of course, it's never a problem if people want to go deeper into the music industry and make a career out of it! But at the same time, the increase in "fly by night" producers does take out the original heart of the vocal synth scene - it was literally built by amateur musicians playing around with whatever resources they could afford, after all. The bar you have to reach to gain popularity with vocal synthesis now feels too high and off-putting for most people these days. :/
    Carrying over some points from the Vocacolle thread, I do think Luka's voice type and initial niche have been supplanted by other VBs overtime. I've already mentioned in the Vocacolle thread that Luka's bilingual VB gimmick has long been superseded by multi-language and AI cross-lang support across multiple engines and VBs, rendering Luka's selling point redundant within the modern vocal synth landscape. The other factor I've realised today is that Luka's voice type has not only been done multiple times by other VBs on different engines, but also done better at this point. A long time ago on the Unpopular Opinions thread, I mentioned that I felt Luka was too soft for most hard rock and metal songs (unless you tune and mix her in the absolute right way, of course). Obviously, similarly soft/mature banks like Chifuyu, IA, Eleanor, Yukari, etc. can and will run into the same issues, but I think the key difference between them and Luka is that they're more versatile when it comes to mixing. On average, I find both IA and Yukari to be better fits within hard rock/metal tracks than Luka, and while I guess it's kind of a stretch to say that considering IA and Yukari do have a bit more power to their voices than Luka on average, on the other hand I have noticed that their voices are more flexible when tuned/mixed for louder genres. Eleanor is closer in softness to Luka, but I still find her voice more flexible to attempts to "power up" her voice compared to similar results with Luka, who typically sounds weak and strained.
    Blue Of Mind
    Blue Of Mind
    I've also been wondering if Luka has experienced a similar decline in usage within the Western fandom. Can anyone confirm this? I do know that back in the day, some people who managed to gain experience with Engloids felt that Luka wasn't the best example of an English bank because the output was clearly from a non-native bank (which meant more time and effort to tune Luka English). While in all fairness, I found Luka V4 English to be a huge improvement on V2, I have heard some people say they continued to struggle using her because ultimately, she's still a non-native bank that needs a lot of tuning (if you're a native or fluent English-speaker who wants clarity from a vocal synth).
    Mr_Meester
    Mr_Meester
    Honestly, I feel like Luka was kind of the experimental VB for Crypton. She was the first Cryptonloid to have English, E.V.E.C., and official support for XSY. Her V2 JPN voicebank is one of my all time favorites, but like you mentioned, it's being overshadowed by IA and Eleanor Forte for me.
    Mika
    Mika
    It's really a shame because I dearly love Luka, many of us do. While her voice type has been done multiple times, there isn't quite another voice that sounds like Luka on the market. There are multiple "replacements" for Gumi, voices that are so close some people would not realize it's not her. But Luka? Something about her is unique enough that there is no double. I just wonder what the handful of people who have mastered tuning do to make her sound full and vibrant instead of her usual flat and weak sound. I really wanna know. Is that achievable in editor? Is it the mixing? Or a re-tuning program? I really wanna know since I've always wanted Luka but I just won't be able to use her well..
    I know shipping within the Vocaloid fandom isn't taken anywhere near as seriously these days (if you took it seriously at all, considering the lack of canon among most of the characters), but looking at the current state of the fandom, it's still interesting to think about which ships used to be popular but don't see anymore for whatever reason. Like, I used to be in the anti-Rin/Len camp because of the twincest aspect and I genuinely got attacked by Kagamine shippers because of my opinions, but now almost everyone seems to consider that ship highly problematic because of the twincest. (Though if anyone here's old enough to remember Crypton's original statement about the Kagamines being conceived as mirror reflections of each other, then you could also easily argue Rin/Len was also a selfcest ship, which is... Yeah).

    I also don't see Kaito/Miku a lot anymore compared to say, all the way back in 2009, and the most common reason I've seen is that it's problematic because it's an age gap ship. Same thing with Kaito/Len, and that used to be everywhere back in the day. (It's worth remembering that while Kaito doesn't have a canon age compared to Miku and the Kagamines, he's clearly depicted as an adult in all his boxarts. Though back in the day, I used to regularly see depictions of Kaito as a teen.) On the flipside, Kaito/Meiko is way more common these days, probably because they're a popular and obvious duet in songs and they both look like adults.
    ...And after nearly a year, I've finally finished my leg sleeve!
    I'm gonna take a break from tattooing for a few months, mainly because I've discovered getting leg sleeves is a lot more intensive and painful than getting arm sleeves. I'm still really happy with how this came out, however. Now I'm just resting up because the last part that was finished today was the colouring at the very top, which is now stinging like crazy because it's near my thigh. 😅
    The writing was on the wall for quite a few years now, but there's been official confirmation today that E3 is officially dead. It's easy to blame Covid, but to be honest, Nintendo got the ball rolling against E3 by hosting the Nintendo Directs, which nearly every big dev later copied (or just dumped trailers online). Then rival (and arguably more modern) conferences like the Summer Games Fest started popping up and big devs started to drop out of E3, haemorrhaging E3's attendance figures. Covid was just a final nail in the coffin in comparison.

    While the idea of a big game conference every dev would go to to announce the latest games and hardware is now outdated, you can't deny E3's influence on gaming culture. (How many of us reacted to certain announcements at E3 live, or saw memes spawning from awkward moments?) The problem now is that the newer conferences and presentations don't generate the same level of excitement as E3, due to announcements being scattered. For example, if you're not a dedicated Nintendo fan like I am, you'll likely miss Nintendo Directs unless you got a notification for it somewhere. The death of E3 to me seems to have cemented a decentralisation of gaming culture that's been going on since the last decade - no longer do you have 'closed doors' where devs can easily hide certain things from the public. Almost eventually, stuff gets leaked these days. Mainstream devs also have to increasingly compete with indies now, which E3 might have gatekeeped back in the day but now they can be showcased in something like a Direct or even an indie game showcase.
    Sooo... I dunno how true this is, but I've just heard on Instagram that Tumblr is now down to a skeleton crew that's only doing maintenance on the site. This is not good news no matter how you think about it. When you combine this scuttlebutt with the fact that the Escapist and Omegle have now closed down this week, it's really starting to feel like the internet culture that existed in the late 2000s and early 2010s is now disappearing. A lot of the touchstones we might have grown up with tended to be either group efforts or solely created by bright-eyed tech whizzes who wanted to change the world. But now that idealism has given way to the influencer era and a way more individualistic mindset regarding content creation, especially with platforms like Patreon and... *cough* OnlyFans bypassing the need to be hired by an employer.

    But to be honest, many of these platforms either getting bought out by conglomerates that proceed to run them into the ground, or their Wild West nature hitting head first into the brick wall that is modern censorship and safeguarding hasn't helped matters either. Another piece of scuttlebutt is that Omegle was being investigated in the US because of some of the... unsavory people and content that was being hosted there. So the owner closed the site before the feds could bring charges against Omegle.

    Also, it's crazy to think DeviantART and FanFiction.Net have outlasted Omegle and might outlive Tumblr now. They're shaping up to be internet cockroaches in the sense that if the modern web exploded right now, those sites might be one of the last men standing lmao.
    Blue Of Mind
    Blue Of Mind
    @morrysillusion I was surprised about the news on Tumblr because the last thing I heard was that it had gained a fresh boost in popularity from people trying to avoid over-commercialised social media. So I thought the relatively anonymous sign-up and interface would have given Tumblr an advantage these days. (Though presumably, the ads will always stay bizarre! I know Tumblr needs money, but Tumblr's userbase has never been advertiser friendly.)
    MillyAqualine
    MillyAqualine
    Even though I never owned a websitge there I do admit I was shocked when skyrock was down over here and closed down (some were archived by INA, the national center for archival purposes regarding culture, and especially multimedia ones) but yeah, Internet has been so fast in growing and now things move too fast too

    Somehow I live back what I lived when I saw the forums thread fading (and so RPG ones) or how sad and slightly devastated I was when I learnt one year later that Lacartoonerie (called Toonway on the English board, basically a cartoon-making website where I spoent a good chunk of my virtual life) closed down

    Now the way you formulated it, I kinda feel like having occasional quirk to imagine a kind of Internet-based equivalent of INA, museums and such (though yo'ud tell me, the Wayback Machine already fills the role but only if people add pages to the content database)
    Blue Of Mind
    Blue Of Mind
    @MillyAqualine As far as I'm aware, the Wayback Machine struggles to archive social media posts, especially if the site has a robots.txt script in its code since that blocks their crawlers. (I know FanFiction.Net has this script, so once a story disappears, it's gone unless someone is kind enough to reupload it.)
    I decided to wait until I got much further with my leg sleeve before posting a new update picture on here:
    You can tell which parts were done just yesterday and which have long healed up already. ^^; Some more branches need to be added next time, and after that, I'm gonna have a final set of branches finishing off the tree right at the top of my leg, with maybe a cobweb and a Red Admiral butterfly for decoration. I might wait until the sleeve is completely finished before posting another update, so it might not be until January or February next year.
    So I managed to finish Mario Wonder's story over the weekend, and now I'm honestly thinking of going for a 100% clear on it. Not only because there's actually a bunch of secret and special levels left to unlock (it feels like there's a hundred secret exits when I think there's only like, under ten lol), and I'm still missing some badges, but because it's obvious Mario Wonder was a carefully crafted game with genuine love behind it. And thanks to the lack of a timer in this game, it's relatively carefree to explore the levels, actively encouraging you to go out and find secrets. I hate to join in with the mainstream Pokemon bashing, buuut... If Game Freak could pull off something with just as much heart as Nintendo's main studios can with Mario Wonder, the current Pokemon fandom would definitely be a lot less angry all the time.

    World 6 sucks when it comes to difficulty tho. Just warning everyone lol.
    MagicalMiku
    MagicalMiku
    :qingxian_ani_lili::lapis_ani_lili:I haven't finished it yet, but I'm really loving it, it is like the sequel of both SMB2, SMB3 and World all combined in a beautiful series of stages, all so different and full of surprises. And I've read some interviews about the development, is very interesting: it all started as a side project and the team was very small, and they immediately started planning many ideas for what could come next after Mario Maker 2. The ideas kept growing, as well as the team, which got many talented developers from both EAD Kyoto and Tokyo (the main teams of Nintendo), and the result is really wonderful🎀🌷
    When you're watching permanent hair straightening videos out of pure boredom, but you're pretty sure one of the royalty free songs you've heard so far has Avanna singing... 🤔
    AmazingStrange39
    AmazingStrange39
    ooh. you've got my attention
    Blue Of Mind
    Blue Of Mind
    @AmazingStrange39 I did try to look for the song afterwards, but the uploader only linked to the channel the track was from, not a video with just the song, and it was taken from one of those royalty-free song channels that have well over a thousand uploads or something. Even if I tried to type in Vocaloid or Avanna within the channel's search engine, it might not have turned up anyway, considering professional musicians tend to not reference or credit Vocaloid. orz
    AmazingStrange39
    AmazingStrange39
    could you link the video the song was in? i'm curious about this
    It's been a while, but the bottom part of my leg sleeve is pretty much done! (I might add a bee or two somewhere, but that's something to discuss with my artist at the next consultation). Next time, the top and bottom halves of the sleeve should be connected.

    Not the best quality image, but I hate trying to take pictures of my legs lol.
    I know there are tons of ethical issues surrounding AI voices (by which I mean people creating AIs out of fictional characters and celebrities, not our AI synths), buuut... I've recently developed an addiction to the current AI singing wave, and it's both cracking me up and scaring me how good AI programs are getting. To me, this is almost like an evolution of all those UTAUs made from fictional characters that were still around until just recently. At the same time, I can see why some voice actors and singers are complaining.
    morrysillusion
    morrysillusion
    i get you on that- i remember when this was first coming up and i was doing it for fun, and honestly i think it is fine to have fun with it privately tbh. i think the biggest issue publically about this new stuff is how the Utaus were easily identifiable as not real. prior to that, people would do that cut up/mash ups of voice clips for youtube poops and it wasnt much different. they were clearly clips being cut up to sound like things (and additionally wasnt as "accessible" due to the work of cutting things up too. i always had people asking for my sonic and shadow voices and told them to do it themselves, but there are very few covers from other people due to the work!). they were still in a grey area at times but i think compared to AI now theres a much bigger difference of course... all in all i still mess around with diff-svc with the character voices i trained. no prob w that!
    I'm now officially a member of the glasses mafia! The lenses are insane - everything looks a lot brighter and clearer through them, and it makes a massive difference to my long-distance vision in particular. (They're meant to help while I'm looking at screens too, but they don't seem to do much other than make text a bit larger and brighter.)

    The only problem I'm having right now is that the bridge of my nose hurts like crazy after around a couple of hours of wear - any tips for that, or is that just a general glasses wearer problem that I'm stuck with?
    MagicalMiku
    MagicalMiku
    the glasses mafia! hehe
    my vision is not so bad (in fact I discovered I needed glasses only after failing the driving eyes exam, which needs perfect vision), so I don't wear glasses always, but yes, the amount of details is insane, is like watching a blu-ray instead of a dvd!
    for the screens, probably your lenses have the blue-light filter, so I recommend to adjust a little the monitor color temperature to your liking, because the lenses will change the colors a little.
    another screen tip: always use font size/screen dpi which feels comfortable to your eyes, and remember to look at a far object every like 20 minutes ^^
    and for the nose bridge, yes.. it hurts at first :ring_lili: for the first weeks, I recommend to put a small band-aid or some skin cream on your nose bridge and also behind your ears :seeu_ani_lili:
    AddictiveCUL (Add)
    AddictiveCUL (Add)
    Welcome! All members out there, let's fix our glasses position like the badasses fellas we're in respect to the new guy!

    *Fixes the glasses position*
    Guess who has to wear prescription glasses for driving and looking at screens after an eye exam flagged up long-distance vision issues? 🙃
    • Wow
    Reactions: MillyAqualine
    Blue Of Mind
    Blue Of Mind
    I should clarify that I was supposed to wear glasses to correct a lazy eye when I was a toddler, but obviously, good luck telling a three-year old to keep on and look after glasses lol. (I can also distinctively recall the glasses itching my ears like crazy, which was probably the main reason I didn't wear them. Hopefully, I shouldn't have the same problems as an adult.)
    mobius017
    mobius017
    Yeah, sometimes the earpieces can cause some irritation. It might not work if the frames are all plastic, but for ones made of metal, the optometrist office (or you, if you're careful) can bend the frames a little to keep them from rubbing your ears irritatingly. There's probably a little bit of getting used to them, too, but it won't take your body too long to accept that there's something new there.
    MillyAqualine
    MillyAqualine
    I guezss it's a matetr of habit and for how long you have them... Honestly, I wear some since I was 3 because of hyperopia (and even though I remmeber looking at coloured lenses and not wearing glasses sometimes, finally I'd probably never start to use lenses because of how tricky they are and because wearing my glasses on the whole day instead of carrying an étui and worrying over it is easier for me)

    I'd say the only thing that bothers me with glasses (along with getting them dirty and sometimers not even noticing it) would be that on photographs I have to remove them because not all the pairs I've had got the reflecting free treatment and because glasses + bangs make me sometiems look like I'm wearing tinted glasses and people can't really see my eyes
    Sooooo... For the very first time in my life, I may have caught chicken pox. Yes, I was lucky enough to never catch it as a kid. But it seems that my luck ran out around last Saturday, because I noticed some weird spots on my chest, but I didn't think anything of it at the time. Unfortunately, the spots just kept spreading on my stomach, back and top of my legs, to the point that yesterday I finally had to tell Mum something was wrong - her inner armchair doctor diagnosed me with chicken pox.

    What's weird is that even though I've been stuck at the spot stage for around seven or eight days now, only one on my back seems to be turning into a traditional pox blister, and the stupid things keep trying to spread everywhere - I've discovered one on my neck after a shower around a hour ago. If this crap spreads to my face, I'm gonna cry. :cry:Another weird thing is that the spots haven't been as itchy as you might expect from chicken pox - the worst itchiness has been tingling sensations on my back and shoulders. So I dunno if it's some kind of mild chicken pox or possibly something else, like a different viral infection.

    Mum's ordered some calamine lotion, despite the spots not being super annoying. Meanwhile, I just feel like a disgusting troll and I wish these spots would piss off.
    • Like
    Reactions: MagicalMiku
    Blue Of Mind
    Blue Of Mind
    Fortunately, my parents and my boyfriend had already contracted chicken pox when they were kids, so I haven't passed on anything to them. Saying that, I'm now concerned I've accidentally passed it on to other people because I was most likely infectious before I knew I even had pox. If anyone in the Black Country area has contracted pox recently, I'm so sorry but you might have caught it from me!

    Interestingly enough, I did have a fever a couple weeks ago, which normally proceeds pox, but it was during one of our heatwaves so I didn't think anything was super unusual, minus waking up in the middle of the night. But what confuses me is that pox normally shows symptoms much faster than what I'm experiencing. Dunno if it's because I've caught it as an adult tho, and it clears up much faster in kids
    lIlI
    lIlI
    Get well soon! :flower_lili:
    MagicalMiku
    MagicalMiku
    take care and get well soon! :miku_sakura_lili:
    i remember i got the varicella on first year of elementary school, I liked the fact that I could stay home for like 2 weeks hehe :lapis_ani_lili:what i didn't like was the itchy feeling when I had some spots on my face, but after a little I got used to it and just relaxed sleeping a lot and watching cartoons on tv. calamine lotion is perfect! also, drink lot lot of water (and green tea without sugar if you like it) and try to eat lot of salad and fruits, they can really help:gumi_lili:

    Obviously, it's a CeVIO song rather than Vocaloid, but that old school, 2008 vibe is in full swing. I miss these types of comedy songs!
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