Running a panel by yourself is hard.

My desktop last Tuesday told me that it was going to take 12 hours to piece together and shrink this video down to a smaller filesize, and this was my reaction:

Anyway, the reason why I wasn't really talking much for the past two months was because of this:



And you can watch what transpired! You might have to right-click on the links below to download them, unless you don't mind streaming video files over 100MB:

Low quality version (120MB)
High quality version (500MB)

The attendance was pretty good given there was zero advertising whatsoever.

Other miscellaneous stuff from the panel:
- Slide for the part where I mention the shiny dots (16:51)
- Slide regarding Miku's tattoo (18:17)
- Transcript of speech (42:10) along with a better picture of the punchline (42:49)



Q&A stuff:

43:24
The first question that they ask me is my opinion of the fact that Black Rock Shooter isn't a real Vocaloid. For those of you who don't know the story behind that, Black Rock Shooter was a character created by Huke, who is part of the group Supercell, which ryo founded, and ryo is the most well-known vocaloid composer in the scene; he's so big that the first five songs in Free Play Mode of Project Diva are his.

Anyway, ryo was impressed by the character design, and decided to make a song about the character. Since they had to upload the song onto Nicovideo, they also made a video to accompany it. At animelo 2009 (which I mentioned in my Project Diva article), a pilot animation was shown to everyone attending there for the first time that there was going to be an anime about this. Which hasn't come out yet, as you heard in the panel.

You can't really hear the first part of my answer to that question, which was I had nothing really against the fact that Black Rock Shooter (yes, that's her name) isn't a Vocaloid, even though she clearly looks like a Miku clone.

After the part where I say, "I hope it doesn't suck," (43:51) someone else in the audience says something along the lines of, "Well, at least the song itself doesn't suck," and you can see my reaction to that. ;)


44:01
Teto is a voice database created using UTAU, an open-source clone of the Vocaloid software; you can see the design of Teto near the end of the Shugo Chara! MAD animation I showed everyone in the audience (11:35), which is the girl with the red curly pigtails holding loaves of bread near the end of the video.

The story behind her was a group of people (whose name escapes me) were trying to trick fans of Crypton's Vocaloids into believing that Teto was going to become the next database released from them (hence why the earliest "official" designs of her resembled KEI's shading) for April Fools. Despite her not being a Vocaloid, she's still somewhat popular with the masses, hence why they asked me that question.

You guys probably can't hear the latter part of my answer to that question (44:33), which was, "from what I have heard of her, I really couldn't make out what she's saying." This was because the only time I heard Teto used was in a music video called Triple Baka, which is a pretty popular song.

49:08
Some dude asks me when the Blu-Ray version of the concert Sega held on 3/9/2010 (aka- Miku Thanksgiving day) was going to be released, as though I was an industry insider. I really wish I was.

49:30
Then some other dude answers something that wasn't even related to that question saying that the numbers 3 and 9 can be pronounced as "Miku" in Japanese, kind of how 765 can be pronounced as "Namco" or 573 can be pronounced as "Konami."

49:48
The person in the audience asks a question about whether we'll ever see a Vocaloid concert over here in the States.

50:17
Some dude mentions about a website called Japanfiles as an alternative to using iTunes. I checked the website, and it's pretty sparse in regards to Vocaloid music. It's almost no contest in comparison. Not only that, but the prices are higher in Japanfiles than they are in iTunes.

And if all you're concerned about is not giving your credit card info to Apple, you can just buy gift cards and use those instead. And they've removed all DRM from their music since April of last year. Here's some proof.

Well, it's not all bad for Japanfiles though; they do have one complete album while iTunes doesn't.


Ugh, I'm tired from trying to transcribe all of that. That's pretty much the gist of the Q/A part of it, but I'm sure I left out a lot more than that. Overall it was pretty fun even though I was like, really tired and running on 36-something hours of no sleep on that day.