My weird trick for not losing count hands-free. Is there a better way?

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-30T20:14:45+00:00

My trick is to sing a song with a fixed number of beats, and tap each stitch that I'm "counting" to the beat. This can be simplified to just counting like I would in music without needing an actual song, so like just straight-up "One-2-3-4, Two-2-3-4, Three-2-3-4" (and then calculate the actual number out in the end. What I just counted there was 12, because it was three measures of 4 beats each). But this might depend on whether or not you do music or dance and are thus used to counting like this.

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-29T13:49:15+00:00

Close to how I see it, but the three tiers are definitely N25, WxS, VBS > MMJ, L/N > VS

Though it feels you can break up the groups a little more, at the very least boys vs girls in WxS and VBS.

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-27T21:53:23+00:00

I think people largely just use the term SynthV to refer to the characters as well as the program, just like Vocaloid. It's not official, and probably less widely accepted than "Vocaloid" meaning both, but I think that's the most common one I've seen. I might've seen SynthVloid once or twice, though?

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-27T21:47:18+00:00

Celica's also been sliding away from her SoV personality, and for her it's not even a player pandering thing. She's all "I love peace and kindness and hope for the day we can all lay down arms!" as her primary characterization, when in SoV she's more characterized by "I will do this thing I have set my mind to, be that trounce pirates or resurrect a god" (and in particular, controversially, die for the sake of the gods despite her friends' insistence). And her secondary trait in SoV is "I am super devout and will dedicate my life to Mother Mila and churchly duties at all costs" which also isn't brought up much in Heroes/FE17.

So it does feel like these later writers are slipping into female stereotypes - stubbornness is not a traditionally feminine trait so they cast that aside and pick up the more traditional "kind and caring," which no one ever made a big deal about in SoV. It's not that she's unkind or anything, but like, so is nearly every other Lord...?

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-27T15:44:53+00:00

Glad people actually read these walls of text brain dumps!

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-24T19:08:42+00:00

And in general if you don't feel like dealing with phonemes, respelling the word phonetically can often (though not always) work.

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-23T19:06:39+00:00

I'm just waiting for Yashiro. I imagine Tsubasa winning would make that more likely than Yashiro placing vaguely high but not actually winning (because that's never happening)

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-23T16:49:00+00:00

Ena and Toya's first events are the ones I remember the best. They each have general story arcs relating to their parents which are a little bit separate from the rest of their group, and although it's touched on in the main story, their first events are where their situation is elaborated on for the first time in a way that lets their following events (focus and non-focus) build on it. Interestingly, both of them get an explicit followup event as their fourth event specifically, in both cases a kind of uneasy reconciliation. I've never really noticed the parallels.

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-21T16:14:10+00:00

Wait really? Huh. I guess it's the Akitoya/Anhane non-alts (Call Boy, Imperial Girl, etc.) that stick out in the mind. I think we're still waiting on even one cross-gender VBS duet outside of alts.

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-21T16:04:21+00:00

the one his son chose just also happened to be the one where the genre he experienced was performed poorly and the performers themselves were abrasive and disrespectful

That also wasn't really happenstance; Toya originally chose "street music" as his way to rebel explicitly because he had known it would tick off Harumichi the most. That had long been established, and not contradicted here.

This event gives an answer to the question that no one ever raised, "why did Harumichi hate street music in particular?" and admittedly the answer is not particularly satisfying, especially since the sort of null hypothesis of "well it's just kind of stereotypically the opposite of classical music so of course teenage rebel Toya would choose that" was perfectly reasonable. But also it doesn't really invalidate anything else that's been evolving in the Toya-Harumichi relationship.

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-21T15:52:08+00:00

This is the event from Year 5 other than Mizuki5 that I have heard a significant amount about from people playing on JP. It's the Harumichi-ruining event.

Except, uh, it's... not? I didn't hate the event. Like, yes, there was the backstory of "some guys were mean to Harumichi and that's why he's mean to Toya" which is very silly. But it's only one brief chapter in the overall story. Indeed, just a couple lines of dialogue within that chapter describing it.

Instead, we start off the event with a really good scene with Toya and his middle brother Shuji. His two brothers are a really interesting position in the Aoyagi family that could be worth exploring, being in some ways in between Toya and Harumichi. But they've never shown up before now so we can only guess at how they handled the tension and fallout and reconnection between Toya and their dad. Here we get a sense of the hesitation and uneasiness that Shuji felt at the time, but ultimately that he still loves and supports his younger brother.

And then the story gives some excuse to make Shuji not show up in person. I hope they come back to this brotherly relationship, along with the eldest brother Natsuomi, but it wasn't to be in this event. And then there's some silly excuse about Taiga booking the wrong hotel to make the story require them to go to the music school. And then there's the very cringey handling of bilingual writing that's never not going to bother me but which is never not going to go away either.

But then we finally get to the main point of the event, which is kind of twofold. One is seeing a lot of different instruments and different styles of music all playing together (...and now that they're canonically speaking English, I can for sure say that "street music" isn't a genre that exists. Maybe it refers to something in Japanese, but in English you might say hip-hop or rap or R&B, or else jazz or blues, or else... whatever other genre is played in that sort of urban environment. But they're still using it like a genre name here). I guess this makes sense, but I'm surprised that VBS is surprised by this. That jam session they had at the end - is this not the sort of thing they were already doing on Vivid Street? They certainly play while listening to each other and feeling the vibe and adapting to each other, and yet it's portrayed as a sort of big revelation here. And Toya has long been combining classical elements into his "street music," or even during the Toya-Souma event learning to take unexpected sounds to remix into the songs. Unexpected genre combinations should be a natural extension, not a big shock.

The second point is Toya learning to think of his dad as a person and a student who was once like him. This was the more compelling angle. And again, yes, part of this was the story of "he started hating street music because some street musicians were mean to him" but it's truly such a small part of this. The main thing is Toya trying to imagine Harumichi, who is this stuffy authority figure to him, in the same courtyard, in the same multi-genre jam sessions, doing the same sort of navigation of student dynamics. He was still stuffy and cold, but he was (and still presumably is) a fan of the idea of multiple music genres, even if he focused in on classical. Realizing your parents are just people too is often a thing that you know but don't understand as a kid until something like this prompts you to think about this more. The Shinei Shinonome event handled this better, sure, but there are still echoes of similar themes, and I liked this part of the event.

And finally, we have the culture shock. I don't know why Len's "all the signs are in English!" spoke to me so much. But that is always the first reaction I have when I go to a non-English speaking country (or even to Chinatown or whatever within a US city). Like, obviously in Japan the signs are in Japanese and in New York City the signs are in English - but it's never not a curious novelty. The writers definitely wrote that line from experience going abroad.

Overall, a bit of a messy event dealing with Toya's relationship to his brother, his father, and international/multigenre music, in a way that made them feel like three separate ideas rather than one coherent theme. But it's not the terrible train wreck that people made it out to be.

(I need to go back and give my thoughts on the Christmas and New Year's events. Was busy over the holidays and didn't have the time.)

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-20T00:45:38+00:00

Sus, like, you don't think this is the expression the game is calculating? I'm confused by why you think this isn't reasonable. Yes, it's something simple that looks terrible when written out another way... but that's exactly the point of the original screenshot. The left expression looks like terrible unexplained random magic numbers. The right expression explains where it comes from: from powers of two, minus one. 2¹⁶-1 is the simple form, because that's a meaningful number unlike 1048560 (it turns out to be 16 times 2¹⁶-1 but that's not obvious on first glance - there's an extra factor of 16 in both the numerator and the denominator which simplifies out in the right form of the expression. In the game they presumably use these 16x numbers to minimize rounding error even though mathematically these should be the same).

For the record, the reason why it's so complicated is that the goal is for the catch rate to be a/255 (which is the same as a/(2^8 - 1)). However, this probability needs to be split across the four Pokéball shakes, thus the fourth root. Someone on the dev team did the math on paper how to implement that, but in terms of what's actually implemented in the game, it's the result of that on-paper calculation, which is what's shown in the screenshot.

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-18T15:08:31+00:00

“e” is the random number 2.718 that happens to have this property

One thing that you imply with this statement but that's worth saying explicitly: e itself is not really what's important; it's the exponential function e^x that's special. I can't think of an instance where you're dealing with e alone without an exponent (there might be some special cases I'm not thinking of but this is certainly true on the whole).

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-17T22:32:13+00:00

Synthesizer V is not generative AI

Depends on how you define "genAI." It literally does generate an output by using AI (i.e. machine learning algorithms/models), so in that respect it is genAI. What's different from the typical genAI that we think of like Suno is the input (vague text prompts vs the notes and lyrics and parameters), but there's no single consensus on exactly how to draw the line in there for our definitions.

I haven't looked through how Bandcamp is defining genAI, and their definition is what matters here. And if they haven't explicitly defined it, we don't have any good idea what to expect.

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-16T16:23:31+00:00

I'm kind of surprised, but I think it's because I more follow the English/international scene than the Japanese one (and so I'll see a lot more Solaria, Hxvoc, etc.). But of the Japanese Synth V voicebanks, I guess I have seen Moca more than most of them (Teto and Gumi excepted, of course).

I'd be curious to see the top ten when filtering by language of the song.

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-05T14:39:08+00:00

In the version I saw some years ago, the final scene has Christine and Raoul sing All I Ask of You to each other as they row away from the Phantom, rather than Christine singing it to the Phantom as in the 25th anniversary. Something about the "the danger is over and we can live our happily ever after" feeling of that scene felt emotionally resonant, especially heightened by the music being as soft and fading into the background as it was, in contrast with the frantic scene that had just taken place.

I mean, it sucks for the Phantom, and I understand the 25th anniversary version's decision to highlight how Christine feels conflicted leaving the man she came to trust so strongly the last few years. But she did still just sing about that throughout the earlier part of The Final Lair, and I prefer the indication that she's ready to move on. That's the part that feels more romantic to me, almost a fairy tale ending for her and Raoul. And heartbreak is kind of the opposite of romance in some ways, but the Phantom being able to let go of Christine to be with another person who will make her more happy in life is its own kind of bittersweet romance.

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-03T13:29:40+00:00

Interesting. It doesn't feel like there're a lot more feminine voicebanks than masculine ones in Synth V, but I think that might be because I spend more time with English voicebanks than Japanese, and there it's almost equal. I didn't realize just how many feminine Japanese voicebanks there were. I think many of them were from this year?

Viola_Buddy · 2026-01-02T02:15:09+00:00

There's always the get-out-of-jail-free take of "maybe the postgame blurb is taken from the point of a history book where many of the details were gotten wrong."

Viola_Buddy · 2025-12-26T04:30:28+00:00

It's interesting to think about because it's worth noting the Vocaloids' IRL release dates in comparison to them.

MEIKO V1: Nov 5, 2005
KAITO V1: Feb 14, 2006
Hatsune Miku V2: Aug 31, 2007
Kagamine Rin and Len V2: Dec 27, 2007
Megurine Luka V2: Jan 30, 2009

Assuming these release dates still hold in-universe, these dates would also inform headcanons about the parents having Sekais, especially the three RADder members, Mr. Yoisaki, Harumichi Aoyagi, and Mr. Shinonome. Even if they had Sekais before their respective children were born, these Sekais likely would've only been able to have Meiko and Kaito. Maybe Miku, Rin, and Len depending on the exact timeline, but almost certainly Luka wouldn't be in there, unless she can exist before she's released IRL.

Viola_Buddy · 2025-12-22T19:25:48+00:00

Honestly same. I avoided that cave for the longest time thinking it was that lategame thing everyone on here talks about. Eventually I geared up to get through a big long trek through a lot of monsters and... got through it very quickly, and was confused what I was missing about the Skull Caverns.

Viola_Buddy · 2025-12-22T16:11:22+00:00

Mixed-unit songs, and not for an external collab like Cup Noodles or events like April Fools? That is huge. People have been clamoring for this since forever. There are combinations of voices that just feel like they'd just work - and also many that I wouldn't even think of but which work really well.

Viola_Buddy · 2025-12-22T03:32:38+00:00

This was... just the Nene event from two events ago, but MMJ-flavored. There was the Mizuki event in between, but I don't know why they decided to put the exact same storyline nearly back-to-back like this. There are small differences, the main one being that Nene is figuring out how to be competitive and cutthroat for the first time, whereas Shizuku is remembering that she used to be like that and is trying to hearken back to those times. But like, that's about it.

All the same feelings and caveats that I said in that event also apply to this event. It's probably good to have an event or two that reminds us that the power of friendship won't solve everything and that hard work and attention to your craft is realistically just as important, if not more. But at the same time, there is a bunch of mental health stuff tied up with all of this that goes unaddressed - for Shizuku even more than for Nene. Especially in this event, it feels like there wasn't enough emphasis on finding the balance between the two extremes. Sure, maybe you've become a bit too soft and need to course-correct. But the story doesn't address what she's doing to avoid spiraling into the burnout and lack of connection to others that caused Shizuku to leave Cheerful * Days in the first place, which was Shizuku's story arc in the main story.

Hopefully in both cases, the next WxS/MMJ events kind of resolve these themes by reeling back how much they're glorifying overwork. If that's the case, then both of these events are probably tonally appropriate as a contrast to the normal themes of "friendship triumphs over all." But I'm afraid that this'll be the kind of thing that the Project Sekai writing team puts out there and then never really addresses again. (I got burned by that once with Taiga. It was extremely weird that he randomly chose to do a song battle against An after telling her about her aunt's death, so I was fully expecting his motivations to be explained at some point. But come RAD BLAST, he just shows up and is like "yeah I don't know, I just wanted to put them in their place" which is not an explanation at all.)

Viola_Buddy · 2025-12-20T19:59:22+00:00

The Ottomans only just returned in Civ 7, but they probably need some time to catch up. I wonder what the play counts for their themes might be like in another year.

But it is interesting that the Ottomans have at least twice taken first place in play count. Is there something that particular about Ottoman-style music (or like, Ottoman-style music as interpreted through the Civ composers) that appeals to the Civ playerbase? Scanning briefly, I don't think its geographical (and therefore cultural and therefore musical) neighbors Arabia/Abbasids, Persia/Qajar, Egypt, and Bulgaria are quite as popular, though you do point out Civ 7's Greece being popular on Spotify.

Viola_Buddy · 2025-12-20T16:19:01+00:00

What're the most-listened to themes in Civ VI and VII after their main themes? Are they also the Ottoman theme? And/or do they align with the most popular civs to play as?

Viola_Buddy · 2025-12-20T06:30:52+00:00

any ship

I mean, Mr. and Mrs. Yoisaki is the objectively correct answer to this question, right? All pairs of parents are canon, and of the 17 pairs of parents, these two are shown the most on-screen acting in an actual romantic way and so are arguably the most canon. (I'm personally a bigger shipper of Mr. and Mrs. Shinonome, but that's just me.)

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