Umiyuri's Den of Thoughts

14:04 Umiyuri According to the US Sonic website, Sonic should be a billionaire if he keeps all the rings he can collect in the entire series...
14:08 Umiyuri Let's see...
14:09 Umiyuri …My Sonic has an enormous amount of game overs. Presumably, he's completed a lot of levels without any rings in his possession.
14:09 Umiyuri Additionally, he gambles a bit, so that's more down the drain.
14:09 Umiyuri It's also possible he's missed a ton of level routes that would've snagged him more.
14:10 Umiyuri And then there are things that Sonic needs to buy, like snacks and shoes and movies and books and stuff.
14:10 Umiyuri He's got roughly a thousand pound's worth of books on his shelf at Tails' place alone...
14:11 Umiyuri He's a world traveller. He needs to learn a lot about local geography and languages.
14:12 Umiyuri As well as having a personal interest in mythology and culture, and also some guides on machine maintenance, and things like that.
14:12 Umiyuri Sports annuals too.
14:13 Umiyuri Plus I imagine he's more than a little bit philanthropic.
14:13 Umiyuri With the stuff he gives away to charities, and to local businesses, and to homeless people on the street...
14:14 Umiyuri Then there's the flats he buys in different cities in case he needs a night over.
14:14 Umiyuri At the end of the day, he might not actually have much in his pocket.
14:15 Umiyuri Buuut government would probably fork over a lot of money in gratitude for him saving the world. Especially GUN, after their massive folly a year or two ago.
14:16 Umiyuri …Buuuuuut unlike the rest of the money he gets, they'd pay into a bank account, wouldn't they? And Sonic isn't eighteen. He can't touch the money in there.
14:17 Umiyuri …And all of this is why he continues to scavenge money off the forest floor.

Why, hello there! We haven't spoken for a while, have we?

Today is a very special day for me (in a sense). Today is the birthday of Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic's responsible for me sitting in a fandom nobody has wanted to stand near for the last five years. He's responsible for vague childhood memories of my brother and his old Mega Drive, sitting around and running. He's responsible for me suddenly wanting to play games, learning how to work them, learning that great feeling of success that comes about even when you complete the most trivial things.

But probably more importantly, he's responsible for getting me to meet and talk with people I would've never thought to notice before.

Let's see: the Nigels Kitching and Dobbin, a pair of wonderful guys who every year give advice on how to break into the comic industry. Lee Brotherton, AKA Bentley Jones, a very passionate person who knows how to get exactly what and where he wants and has done so with flying colours. Senoue Jun, a quiet but excellent musician and the person who has had the best reaction to my on-the-spot drawings that I have ever heard. And AAUK, who is essentially the most self-sacrificing person I have ever met, giving up his time, his money and his health just to make seven hundred people he hardly even knows happy for one day.

This is what Sonic has become to me - a symbol of socialisation, of confidence, and of generosity. Of course, people seem to hate the idea of that last one on Sonic. They want him to be the asshole they always secretly wanted to be. You can see it in fic and art and in the writings of the most senior fandom members. But I'm from a different era, and this is my perspective on the whole thing.

Also, he's a symbol of good character design.

Sonic is made entirely of basic shapes. He doesn't take a figure drawing class to learn. His colours are basic, but bright and distinctive. His outline is completely unique - even against his own doppelganger Shadow. Sonic is the kind of character design that is slowly getting destroyed by the 'hardcore' game industry as the world moves into advanced motion capture and overly-mature plots and games that are essentially just movies with the occasional button press.

Cole Phelps could be an old film of a generic 40s cop. Sonic the Hedgehog can't be anybody but himself. Now have a think for a minute about which one's more widely-known.

 When the darkness absorbed Mobius, it got a little freaked out.

Imagine you are locked inside a music classroom, sitting in front of a piano, and taking constant hearing tests. (The hearing test is the portion of a music exam where you are told to play back a short excerpt played by the teacher, paying special attention to key, tonality and rhythm.) You have one shot at each test, no practice and no retakes. You might be played a similar tune later, but never the same one. The keyboard you're sitting in front of has a thousand keys, and the difference between a black key and the white key next to it is minimal.

You just happen to be tone-deaf.

People might be aware that you're tone-deaf, but you are locked into this classroom and forced to take these tests no matter what. Plus, tone-deafness is easily confused with just not listening. The adjudicator (whose only job is to tell you when you've got it right or wrong and not show you how to play the correct answer) will always opt for the latter as the truth because the latter is more likely - there will be people deliberately diagnosing themselves as tone-deaf in order to get away with not concentrating on the exam.

While it's possible to be able to tell the difference between tone-deafness and dicking around, it takes a lot of special examination and recognition of key symptoms to make a diagnosis, and unfortunately for you the room you're stuck in does not want to 'waste its time' on such matters.

Essentially, you are screwed over except in the almost impossible event of somebody recognising your problem and, by then, more than enough damage will be done.

I'm picking tone-deafness instead of dyslexia for a metaphor because, unlike tone-deafness, dyslexia can be treated by just making dyslexic-legible typefaces (and yes, those exist). However, you can't reinterpret music aurally for a tone-deaf person to hear.

This is the list of things good parents do to their children to make them turn out horrible in the modern day. As usual their lists count down. I've noticed it's a good way of building tension and forcing the reader to continue to the end, especially if it's a list of fewer than ten items.




Note that everything I have been screwed-over by in this actually makes very little difference when I have Asperger's - autistic spectrum disorder accounts for many social-personality issues and is genetic. Which means the huge majority of my issues are ingrained into my DNA. I can't actually get rid of them. Additionally, none of this accounts for other traumas I've faced (another long story short: I have actually flatlined). But this is still a bit of a warning list.

Enjoy analysing yourself via the original article here.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

 

After finding another of those November-time articles declared the death of music because of a Vocaloid concert, let's get the entire thing clear, shall we?

- Miku is a voice bank for a computer program called Vocaloid first and foremost and the 'hologram'/projection was only produced for the concert.
- The Vocaloid software is a consumer-grade product. This means anybody can buy and use Miku in their homes, simply provided they have a Windows computer with enough space on which to install the program.
- However - and this is something people still somehow cannot learn living in such a technological world without getting first-hand experience with the same kind of computer software - the Vocaloid software cannot produce songs on its own. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication in order to correct pronunciations, tune Miku's voice, program lyrics and write a song for her in the first place. No computer on Earth - let alone consumer-grade computer program - has true artificial intelligence and cannot do anything without their knowledge preprogrammed by humans using any method. Not even Watson, the computer that won Jeopardy! twice, is a true artificial intelligence.
- The Vocaloid software isn't a Japanese invention; it's English. The first Vocaloids were English soul-singers.
- The Vocaloid software isn't the brainchild of Crypton; it's a Yamaha invention. Crypton merely builds voice banks for the program, and is not the only producer of the voicebanks.
- All voicebanks are provided by a voice actor whose name is usually made public. This voice actor does get paid for the licensing of their voice, gets payment from CD sales, and if they're not happy with that (or indeed if they are happy, as is the case with Shimoda Asami), they have all rights to cover the songs produced using their voice.
- The Vocaloid software does not include midis for instrumentation. You need a separate program to produce music, or - as most people, and the official concert, use - live instrumentation.
- The Vocaloid software is never licensed out to bands. All the songs in her concerts, games and CDs are indie productions that have been eventually approved by the company producing the voice bank to become part of Miku's official repertoire.

I would want them to not have AS, just so I can see how much it's really affected my personality and social ability.

I can't fight this feeling anymore
For the fate of all, this love means war

Ahhh!

Grey skies and cloudy days
Form a monochrome carousel
Sunshine never raining down
There's shadows all around
And the twilight never seemed so-

Blue, this world just falls apart
I have to know - will you be there to rescue me?
I can understand, but still I just don't understand
What can I do? What should I do?

How can I be so stupid...

I ain't stopping anymore, 'cause baby this is war
Your smile when you're with her has got me absolutely floored
This crazy love I'm in has got to be a sin
I'll make you see the feelings that've rocked me to the core