Is the hololive English dream truly over?
Ceres Fauna has just declared her leaving of hololive English while I was at church this morning.
Doomposting aside, I think that there are quite a few things at play that probably few of us truly comprehend.
For one, the Cover Corporation that we knew of is not the same one anymore. Their stable of talents are aplenty, they had gone public, and have invested in stupid big amounts of money in a fancy studio to support their 3D media offering.
Their senior management has also changed, with an old director on the hololive English side being replaced, and their longest supporting director (A-Chan) having left the company earlier this year.
There has also been lots of collaborations with other companies, and many other steps had been taken to monetise the hololive IP, or at least put things on a firm enough footing that the hololive IP is kept in a form that is at least legally defensible as such.
But in the VTubing sphere as a whole, Nijisanji English has collapsed, and a ton of other small corpos have shuttered up, even as the world gets increasingly more dangerous with many rather hard-headed attempts to force things to the way they were before COVID-19 changed how we lived, worked, and played.
Third spaces have been lost, yet we find that people are starting to find alternative ways of leaving their COVID-19 shells of solace. This is especially so due to the backlash from how social media has absolutely fucked up a lot of things that matter to people a whole lot, from elections to jobs, and everything in between. Generative AI lurks in the background, providing large companies with an excuse to splurge money on some nebulous ``AI'' concept that is loosely powered by these generative AI models---the return of investment is seemingly even higher than that of the previous technological hype of the blockchain.
All in all, the world's a mess, and people seem to pine for the ``good old days''.
Unfortunately, VTubing wasn't a part of that ``good old days''. And so when big [old] money gets involved, it seems inevitable that they would force their ways of doing things down---after all, if they weren't smart, they wouldn't be the ones holding on to the capital that the company so sorely needs as ``investment'', right?
That is hard to say.
If the old ways were truly the best, then there would be no reason for evolution into the new ways. And luck does play an unbelievably large role as well, even if it isn't always the most dominant.
VTubing flourishing during the COVID-19 years was happenstance meeting some form of preparation. But whether it is something that can make it into the mainstream media as a consistent revenue stream... is something to be seen.
I mean, who can forget the sitcom era of the 1990s, and then the reality TV era of the 2000s? They eventually fell off the radar, and became niched topics at some point.
Maybe VTubing is heading to that end state.
But what I do want to say is, there's a time for everything. Every peak must be surrounded by troughs; otherwise it wouldn't be a peak. VTubing has probably hit a peak about 2 years ago, with Cover Corporation leading the pack.
And maybe it is time for a trough.
Sunday, December 01, 2024
A Little Bit More on the Flute Fair
Ah... stupid o'clock---the time of day where I sometimes grab an alcoholic drink, and start writing semi-readable nonsense.
So less than a week ago, I was a participant at this year's edition of the Autumn Flute Fair. I was normally just a passive participant, in the sense that I would spend time mostly at the trade floor, hanging out with the dealers, trying out flutes/piccolos, confusing people with music that they aren't used to (i.e. Chinese orchestral stuff), and the such. This time though, due to my affiliation with the King's Flute Choir, I was involved in quite a few of the other concert-like events. In the face of bonafide flute players [who do it Very Seriously], I stuck with going with The Big Flute instead.
Hardly anyone wants to play the contrabass flute for three big reasons:
So, why'd I play it?
Well, mostly because of reasons #1 and #2---I like low flutes after three decades of going high. And on that note, I get all the flashy stuff out of my system through ample dizi playing, and thus have no real wish to spend up to four times more time to master the Flute 1 parts. Most flute choirs are top-heavy anyway, and thus having more bass is always a good thing, making the role that The Big Flute play somewhat more interesting than might otherwise noted.
The flute Jamboree on Saturday afternoon was a fun one, and the closest to the largest combined flute choir-like entity that could be summoned during the Festival. The sonority of having a full-range flute choir when playing out chords was something to behold, especially when coupled with the good acoustics of the SOTA concert hall. While there were a total of three contrabass flutes lurking throughout all the performers, only two were available during the Jamboree proper (the Taiwan contingent came in late enough that they didn't manage/want to unpack their contrabass flute).
It was also interesting to note that of all the eight or so flute choirs that turned up for the Festival, there were only three contrabass flutes to go around. I knew that the contrabass flute wasn't that common, but I didn't realise just how uncommon it truly was.
For additional reference, The Big Flute is probably only the second contrabass flute to be in SIN city as at now, with the first one spending most of its time located in Johor Bahru due to the player [based in Singapore] finding it annoying to lug the heavy flute to and fro the Causeway for rehearsals with the flute choir that is based in Johor Bahru.
But I digress.
I won't write about the concerts, other than they were full of different harmonies due to their different composers.
I think I am likely done with writing anything else about the Festival for a while, even as I slowly find myself becoming a part of the flute fraternity of Singapore (and possibly SEA), possibly due to The Big Flute.
------
In other news, the upcoming month or two is going to be a mixed bag. On the one hand, things have finally tapered off somewhat due to the end of the year, with many of my team taking turns to go on long leave. On the other hand, I'm still stuck holding the fort, and having a couple of new mini-projects that I need to work on, as well as supervising an intern for a special project.
I know that I have no plans to travel out of SIN city, but damn I feel tired. We'll see how it goes.
I wasn't expecting it, but Brotato is a damn fun game. It's like a less claustrophobic version of The Binding of Isaac crossed with the ``be the bullet hell'' progression of Vampire Survivors, and it is addictively fun. I have been playing it at bursts, and have been enjoying it. It also has some quality of life options, like allowing the re-attempt of a failed wave to make it less annoying (I naturally took it---I'm an older man now with little time to spend on grinding unnecessarily).
100 Bullets is a very gritty story that is worth a read.
I think that's about it. The Anchor Strong beer isn't particularly strong (6.8%), but it is getting late. The last thing I would say is my bemusement at realising that an Applebot crawler is actively crawling this blog, possibly when its operators realise that a real-ish human is still writing new entries on it, as opposed to some AI-generated slop.
To the Applebot crawler: don't be a dick.
To everyone else; till next time.
So less than a week ago, I was a participant at this year's edition of the Autumn Flute Fair. I was normally just a passive participant, in the sense that I would spend time mostly at the trade floor, hanging out with the dealers, trying out flutes/piccolos, confusing people with music that they aren't used to (i.e. Chinese orchestral stuff), and the such. This time though, due to my affiliation with the King's Flute Choir, I was involved in quite a few of the other concert-like events. In the face of bonafide flute players [who do it Very Seriously], I stuck with going with The Big Flute instead.
Hardly anyone wants to play the contrabass flute for three big reasons:
- Shit's big, long, & heavy;
- Shit's not flashy; and
- Shit's expensive.
So, why'd I play it?
Well, mostly because of reasons #1 and #2---I like low flutes after three decades of going high. And on that note, I get all the flashy stuff out of my system through ample dizi playing, and thus have no real wish to spend up to four times more time to master the Flute 1 parts. Most flute choirs are top-heavy anyway, and thus having more bass is always a good thing, making the role that The Big Flute play somewhat more interesting than might otherwise noted.
The flute Jamboree on Saturday afternoon was a fun one, and the closest to the largest combined flute choir-like entity that could be summoned during the Festival. The sonority of having a full-range flute choir when playing out chords was something to behold, especially when coupled with the good acoustics of the SOTA concert hall. While there were a total of three contrabass flutes lurking throughout all the performers, only two were available during the Jamboree proper (the Taiwan contingent came in late enough that they didn't manage/want to unpack their contrabass flute).
It was also interesting to note that of all the eight or so flute choirs that turned up for the Festival, there were only three contrabass flutes to go around. I knew that the contrabass flute wasn't that common, but I didn't realise just how uncommon it truly was.
For additional reference, The Big Flute is probably only the second contrabass flute to be in SIN city as at now, with the first one spending most of its time located in Johor Bahru due to the player [based in Singapore] finding it annoying to lug the heavy flute to and fro the Causeway for rehearsals with the flute choir that is based in Johor Bahru.
But I digress.
I won't write about the concerts, other than they were full of different harmonies due to their different composers.
I think I am likely done with writing anything else about the Festival for a while, even as I slowly find myself becoming a part of the flute fraternity of Singapore (and possibly SEA), possibly due to The Big Flute.
------
In other news, the upcoming month or two is going to be a mixed bag. On the one hand, things have finally tapered off somewhat due to the end of the year, with many of my team taking turns to go on long leave. On the other hand, I'm still stuck holding the fort, and having a couple of new mini-projects that I need to work on, as well as supervising an intern for a special project.
I know that I have no plans to travel out of SIN city, but damn I feel tired. We'll see how it goes.
I wasn't expecting it, but Brotato is a damn fun game. It's like a less claustrophobic version of The Binding of Isaac crossed with the ``be the bullet hell'' progression of Vampire Survivors, and it is addictively fun. I have been playing it at bursts, and have been enjoying it. It also has some quality of life options, like allowing the re-attempt of a failed wave to make it less annoying (I naturally took it---I'm an older man now with little time to spend on grinding unnecessarily).
100 Bullets is a very gritty story that is worth a read.
I think that's about it. The Anchor Strong beer isn't particularly strong (6.8%), but it is getting late. The last thing I would say is my bemusement at realising that an Applebot crawler is actively crawling this blog, possibly when its operators realise that a real-ish human is still writing new entries on it, as opposed to some AI-generated slop.
To the Applebot crawler: don't be a dick.
To everyone else; till next time.
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