gryphon
snrk

I just noticed something about danbooru

Shimakaze is probably the most popular KanColle character in terms of how much fan art of her there is. there are about 10,000 pics of her on danbooru.

Hatsune Miku?

51,000+.

:)

that's two pictures of Miku for every man, woman, and child in the city of South Portland, Maine.

pjmoyer
Hah! :)

She has been around longer, mind you. :)

gryphon
True, but the next runner-up among the Vocaloids is Rin and she has ~12K.

(poor Gumi has to content herself with a mere 3400. then again, I gather she's a lot more recent.)

I mean, it's not a competition, as such, I just find it amusing.

man alive. It's gonna take me a long-ass time to go through 51,000 pictures.

there'll probably be 52 or 3 by the time I'm done.

pjmoyer
That's what google image search is for?

gryphon
Hard to construct search terms for the kind of thing I'm riffling through danbooru for. "super cute pictures of hatsune miku where nothing horrible is happening to her jesus CHRIST what the fuck is WRONG with people" just confuses Google. :)

pjmoyer
good point.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"jesus CHRIST what the fuck is WRONG with people" just confuses Google.

It probably wouldn't give you an answer not for being confused but for "Do you REALLY want me to answer that question?".

>It probably wouldn't give you an answer not for being confused but for
>"Do you REALLY want me to answer that question?".

For the sake of my own peace of mind, I have to assume that Google is not smart enough to parse the question.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>It probably wouldn't give you an answer not for being confused but for
>>"Do you REALLY want me to answer that question?".
>
>For the sake of my own peace of mind, I have to assume that Google is
>not smart enough to parse the question.

If I were running Google, asking that question would return the phrase "A little too much LDS in the Sixties," and links to the YouTube click from Star Trek IV.

>>It probably wouldn't give you an answer not for being confused but for
>>"Do you REALLY want me to answer that question?".
>
>For the sake of my own peace of mind, I have to assume that Google is
>not smart enough to parse the question.

Well, I can say that it doesn't seem to acknowledge humor. I asked it how to get to Carnegie Hall, and it gave me directions. :)

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

>>>It probably wouldn't give you an answer not for being confused but for
>>>"Do you REALLY want me to answer that question?".
>>
>>For the sake of my own peace of mind, I have to assume that Google is
>>not smart enough to parse the question.
>
>Well, I can say that it doesn't seem to acknowledge humor. I asked it
>how to get to Carnegie Hall, and it gave me directions. :)

"And then it took my wife!"

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I initially parsed Mr. Moyer's first response to mean that Hatsune Miku has been around longer than New Portland, Maine.

>I initially parsed Mr. Moyer's first response to mean that Hatsune
>Miku has been around longer than New Portland, Maine.

Don't be silly--white people first settled that area in the 1600s!

Miku WAS first released just a few months before the incorporation of the City of South Portland proper in 1895, though. Before then that area was a neighborhood of Cape Elizabeth, where they had to content themselves with hacking MacinTalk to sustain specific pitches.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I knew Macs had a history, but not to the late 19th century~

<thats_the_joke.gif>

We ended up doing the story of Miku's awakening as a metadocument instead of a straight-up story, but a few fragments of dialogue emerged in development, such as this exchange between a couple of her engineers on the night shift during the "undercover" phase:

"How's Miku-chan tonight?"

"Lots of network activity. She just scraped the Salusia Tech computer science department's Codeforge server for everything it was worth. No idea why, I doubt they've got anything there she'd be interested in."

"Mm, we might have to tighten up those search algorithms after the tour. Still, no harm done apart from some wasted bandwidth."

Also this first-person musing, which might be from her monograph in the cyberscience journal:

[ I learned later that it's a common trait--human beings tend to personify things that _look_ like people, even when they really aren't. It explained why my engineers and producers often talked to me, and about me, as if I were a person they cared about, even before I could understand or respond. I've often wondered whether that effect somehow shaped my eventual awakening, but I supposed I'll never know for sure. I like to think so, though. ]

And, less seriously, this, from the outtakes reel.

KAITO
No, I just... a Producer? I mean... Producers _wrote_ us. A Producer even wrote _you_.

MIKU
(enraged)
No one Producer wrote me! I'm worth _millions_ of their man-years.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

These things are usually just jokes, so I thought tonight what I would do is share an actual bit of the creative process. This is how the stuff happens...

---

pjmoyer
Hey, Miku -and- Rin with Guitars - https://youtu.be/ydtubHwuLQA?t=41m50s

gryphon
I like that when they show Miku with a guitar, someone went to the trouble of modeling a recognizable real-world guitar rather than just a vague Artist's Conception of one. Here, for instance, she has a P-Bass, and when she has a six-string in most of the Project DIVA videos and concert footage I've seen, it's a Telecaster.

I guess she likes that surf sound. :)

Meanwhile, Rin appears to have a Mustang, which makes sense, given how small her hands are.

I like that someone thinks about these things. It's an attention to detail you don't get everywhere. :)

I don't know enough about it to tell if they've modeled Miku's fingering right, but she is at least animated as playing realistically, and not just strumming the thing without moving her left hand much, which is better than a lot of animated musicians manage to do. :)

I wonder how they do that? I guess they must've mocapped a human bassist at some point, so it's probably mostly right.

pjmoyer
Well, the Guitar Hero/Rock Band systems translate existing chords/notes automatically for the animation for playing.

The people who make the tracks basically map the music to the notes on a timeline -- essentially Vocaloid-arrangement for animation.

Then the engine takes care of the rest.

gryphon
heh

that is presumably another way someone who was paying superhuman levels of attention could have realized something was up during the "undercover period", when she started doing dance moves that weren't actually in her movement library; but by then said library had millions of motions, both developed for stage shows and mapped out of people's MMDs, it would've taken an enormous database crawl/comparison with concert footage for anyone to know.

(I gather that in the real world MMD is a completely unrelated product, but as noted in the Gpedia file, in UF by Version 6 they were all part of the same continuum.)

pjmoyer
MikuWatch might have started suspecting something was up, but those people are obsessed.

gryphon
heh

wild-eyed otaku pointing to the screen, "There! Right there! Three-quarter turn to the right, overhead wave, left-eye wink and right-hand me-n'-you gesture! Nobody taught her that sequence!"

"... Get some sleep, Koemi, you're losing it."

or she took a dislike to one of the costume plugins and stopped cycling to it, and the techs just assumed it was the Will of RNGsus. :)

She doesn't change her costume as frenetically in the live versions as she does in the Project DIVA in-game videos anyway; maybe the concert version's library is smaller.

or matching the model positions seamlessly is harder to do in real time, possibly. I would assume Sega's people can fix all of that in post.

pjmoyer
There's usually a specific costume associated with certain songs in performance, but most of them end up going with the default.

gryphon
still, I like the image of one of the unheeded signs being "You know, I don't think I've seen Miku-chan load Gothic Lolita #3 once since Jakarta." "Eh, you probably just missed it." "I would never miss Gothic Lolita #3." "... You're starting to make it weird, Koemi." :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

This Koemi guy... he needs to get outside more. :)

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

>This Koemi guy... he needs to get outside more. :)

She's not a guy, but apart from that, your assertion is inarguable. :)

--G.

-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"Saigo, check this concert video out."
"Miku loaded my British Schoolgirl? I thought I'd scrubbed that thing from all the servers...no, wait. Rewind it. Huh! Somebody fixed the clipping problem."

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.