Practice pieces 強力 堅信 星

Some more practice pieces, using words that just happened to pop into mind at that time.

強力

 

堅信

 

星

Practice piece 夢醒

I was practising calligraphy last night and just wrote this random piece.

Fourth anniversary of Kyoto Animation arson attack

Today is the fourth anniversary of the horrible arson attack at Kyoto Animation (KyoAni), which resulted in 36 fatalities and 32 injured.

At 10:30 Japan time, Kyoto Animation streamed a video in memory of the victims.

(Note: This video will only be available on July 18, 2023 JST. Someone posted a copy of the video here on YouTube. I am not very sure if this is allowed but I am including the link for those who may be interested but missed the date.)

I have translated the contents of the memorial video below since I don't want to reproduce the video here without permission.

 

<prior to video's premiere>

Kyoto Animation Co., Ltd.

Fourth Anniversary Memorial Ceremony

Streaming is scheduled to start at 10:30 on July 18

 

<start of video's premiere>

Kyoto Animation Co., Ltd.

Fourth Anniversary Memorial Ceremony

The video will start at 10:34. Please wait a while more.

<start of memorial video at 10:34 local time>

Kyoto Animation Co., Ltd.

Fourth Anniversary Memorial Ceremony

Today marks four years since July 18, 2019.

We are streaming this video for everyone who have been showing us your support.

We will now observe a minute of silence.

<Observe a minute of silence>

<End of a minute of silence>

Thank you

Four years have gone by since that sudden parting, when we did not even have the chance to say thank you or goodbye.

 

There are times when we feel like stopping, but we tell ourselves,

"Let's do work that makes them proud."

"Let's keep the promises we made with everyone."

"Let's achieve the dreams we talked about."

We encouraged ourselves thus, and reached today, one day at a time.

We wish to express our deepest prayers for our beloved comrades.

For this memorial service on the fourth anniversary, we have received messages from family members as well as affiliates who create animation together with us. There are also messages received from our staff. Please allow us to introduce some of these messages without the names of their authors.

 

 

From a family member:

The ancients said that a tiger leaves its skin after death, and a person leaves his or her name after death.Queen's Freddie Mercury continues to bring excitement to the world even after his death.

Your works are left for future generations as works of animation together with your names in the end credit rolls, bringing excitement to people far in the future, warming their hearts, and giving them courage.

Today, like kabuki and ukiyo-e, animation has come to be widely recognized as a form of art. You who have accomplished such great work have truly left behind your names.

Kyoani's employees are carrying on your techniques and passion, and will continue to create amazing works going forward.

Your father is but a plain salaryman and cannot achieve work that will leave behind a name, but I am proud to have someone like you as my daughter.

 

From an affiliate:

I wish to express my deepest condolences.

 

Fours years have passed but the pain has never healed.

 

Your amazing animation works are seen by people all over the world. The stories created with beautiful visuals and rich character designs continue to bring us enjoyment without fading away.

Here are the fruits of your efforts, born from inspiring each other. We will convey their charms and deliver them to more people.

Your passions are in our hearts. You are like our family members, overflowing with warmth.

Please continue to watch over us.

The works that will be made in the future will continue to charm even more people in the world and widen the circle of excitement.

And I hope that, together with the heartwarming stories created with your dreams, they will continue to be loved forever...

 

 

From a staff:

Four years have passed, but I keep remembering all of you. Whether in work or the things you said and your attitudes toward work. Your professional work attitudes support me even today.

Firm, resolute, positive; that's how I remember you.

But sometimes, the fact that I cannot see you again grips my heart like an unbearable loneliness.

This loneliness will never go away, and it is very painful. But the passions you left behind truly give us courage.

And so, we continue to create works. We continue to grow.

We will always treasure your passions, and we hope to give them form in the shape of our works.

Please continue to watch over us.

 

 

<end of messages>

We wish to express our deepest gratitude for your continued support.

Your support has allowed us to create and deliver animation until today.

We will continue to create animation with passion, keeping our gratitude and the thoughts of our comrades in our hearts.

We look forward to your support.

 

July 18, 2023, Kyoto Animation Co., Ltd.

 

Kyoto Animation Co., Ltd.

Fourth Anniversary Memorial Ceremony

The video has ended.

Thank you.

 

<end of video> 

List of 36 victims who appeared in credit roll of Violet Evergarden the Movie

 

Translation of video for second anniversary

Translation of video for third anniverary

 

News articles:

Kyoto Animation memorial marks 4 yrs since attack as trial looms

 

My thoughts on The Boy and the Heron (君たちはどう生きるか)

This is a deeper dive into The Boy and the Heron (君たちはどう生きるか) which I watched today. It contains spoilers so please read this post instead if you don't like spoilers.

 

The story itself is hard to understand, because many of the fantasy setting concepts are not really explained. First, the real world part is set in Japan, during the later years of World War Two. Tokyo was being bombed and the main character Mahito's mother was lost to a fire when the hospital she was in got bombed. Somewhere further down the timeline, Mahito was evacuated to the countryside, to his mother's ancestral home and the place of his father's new aircraft factory. While it was not explained, it is likely that his mother Hisako came from a rich family (they have a very huge house) and his father married into the family. This was also probably why his father remarried his aunt Natsuko (who is Hisako's younger sister) after his mother's death, so that he remains tied to the wealthy family.

The fantastical part of the story, though, is a bit harder to grasp. Apparently, there was this tower built by Mahito's granduncle. This tower is able to transcend time, so his granduncle is inside this tower, where he builds his own perfect world, keeping it in balance. His granduncle is also looking for a successor to keep building this world, maintaining the balance, and only someone related by blood can be his successor.

The first part of the story probably has that autobiographical aspect for director Miyazaki Hayao, who was born in 1941, and was also evacuated to the countryside during the war as a child. His father also worked at a factory that made aircraft parts. His mother struggled with illnesses for many years. The inability of Mahito's granduncle to find a successor can be likened to Miyazaki Hayao's own predicament. His son Goro has not shown himself to be capable of living up to his father's fame and talents. Hayao has built a world (the Ghibli name) with his 13 building blocks (his works), but there is no one to take over those from him. It is like Hayao telling the world that there is no one in his bloodline capable of taking over the Ghibli name. It is kind of sad when you see it this way. This movie is about different aspects of Hayao's life, with a message that one "should not escape into a perfect world that you build, but learn to live bravely in the real world." I think there is also that sadness about being unable to find a proper successor, but at the same time, knowing that he has nurtured many great "successors", as shown in the end credits that stated the involvement of animation studios related to Anno Hideaki, Hosoda Mamoru, and Shinkai Makoto.

Hayao also has a message to them, though. In the movie, there was a gate with the message, "Those who learn from me shall die." I think he is trying to remind these creators that, it is not enough to just learn what he has done, but to then go on to create their own styles. In this story, Hayao has created a movie of his own, for himself. I don't think he made this movie for entertainment. While the animation and music are great, the story makes it unappealing to the masses. It is not like Spirited Away, it is not like a Spiderman movie. It is more like some parts of Hayao's life, weaved with some of his dreams (or nightmares).

 

I also find Mahito's voice to be a bit out of character. Based on the height of Mahito compared to his step-mother Natsuko, Mahito looks more like someone in elementary school, maybe 10 years old, although Wikipedia says he is 12 years old. Well, whether he is 10 or 12, he is voiced by someone with a deeper voice than an elementary school boy. So based on the voice, you would think Mahito is like 15 years old, but the story and visuals portray him as someone much younger. This mismatch between sight and sound was really disruptive because it makes it hard to relate to Mahito.

Mahito's step-mother Natsuko, who is also his aunt (his mother's younger sister), is also another character that is hard to grasp. I don't know if she wants to get along with Mahito, or she hates him. I mean, at the start of the movie, Mahito just lost his mother. The next thing you know, he is being evacuated to the countryside, his father has remarried his aunt, and his aunt-now-step-mother is pregnant. And she is the one who told him, "Your father and I got married. And can you feel the baby here?" This is not what an aunt would say to her nephew, unless she is trying to one-up him. Maybe Natsuko never got along well with her sister Hisako (Mahito's mother), or maybe Natsuko was actually in love with Mahito's father but Hisako was the one who got married to him. It sounds like there is more juicy stuff to this story. But then, in another scene, Natsuko becomes the understanding mother who just wants to get along with her step-son.

Mahito's father is also a horrible person. His son has to transfer to a new school after being evacuated to the countryside. He has just lost all his friends and needs to somehow get along with strangers in class. And this father thought it was a good thing to drive his son to school in a car when most people didn't own cars... you know, show off the wealth a bit. How is this supposed to impress his new classmates? Or did his father think making his son the new subject of school bullying is the best education for him?

Well, in the end, Mahito got bullied, and to get his father's attention, he hurt himself. But instead of noticing that the injury was a call for help, a cry for attention, his father went off accusing the school and trying to find the classmates who hurt Mahito (they didn't cause that injury) and in the end, made a "donation" to the school so that Mahito didn't need to attend classes anymore. Great parenting. Teach your son to buy his way out of problems instead of facing them.

If you can look past these unfathomable parts of the characters, and like to try to interpret the dreams (nightmares?) that Hayao had, maybe it will be a story that you can relate to. But personally, I just can't.

 

At the end of the day, The Boy and the Heron could well be Miyazaki Hayao's way of showing that hardcore fans will watch and praise anything made by him, Goro's haters will love anything made by Hayao, and movie critics will say anything to show that they are the only ones with the intellect to see the true meaning in a film, even when the director himself doesn't understand it. 

 

In the end, if you ask me whether I would watch the movie again, frankly, I think I would not, unless someone comes up with a super-interesting discovery about the movie that requires me to watch it again to ascertain for myself. If you do think there is something interesting enough to warrant another look, please leave a comment.

Watching The Boy and the Heron (君たちはどう生きるか)

The Boy and the Heron (君たちはどう生きるか) premiered in Japan last Friday, but instead of watching it, I went to watch The Quintessential Quintuplets∽ which also premiered the same day. You can't really blame me, since no one knows what The Boy and the Heron is about, with no trailer nor advertising. It felt like a cheap trick by Studio Ghibli to make people watch the film using curiosity.

But in the end, curiosity got the better of me, and I went to watch The Boy and the Heron today. However, I refused to pay for a movie that I know nothing about, so I used the points I accumulated at the nearby cinema (watch six movies and you get to watch a free one).

The movie is 124 minutes and I came out of it with really mixed feelings. I am quite sure that director Miyazaki Hayao had a message for viewers, and it probably goes along the line of "do not escape into a perfect world that you build, but learn to live bravely in the real world." The animation was also Ghibli quality and serve as a work of art on its own. At the same time, the story is difficult to follow with many of the concepts and background unexplained. I am quite sure I even dozed off during the movie because I was so lost by the different fantasy world settings all thrown into a big mixing pot, leaving it to the viewer to unravel.

 

While metaphors can be a great way to help tell a story, like everything else, moderation is key. Excessive use of metaphors (or anything, for that matter) can have the opposite effect.

If you ask me whether I would watch the movie again, frankly, I think I would not, unless someone comes up with a super-interesting discovery about the movie that requires me to watch it again to ascertain for myself. Or if I need a way to fall asleep (although it could be a bit rude to sleep in the cinema).

 

At the end of the day, The Boy and the Heron could well be Miyazaki Hayao's way of showing that hardcore fans will watch and praise anything made by him, Goro's haters will love anything made by Hayao, and movie critics will say anything to show that they are the only ones with the intellect to see the true meaning in a film, even when the director himself doesn't understand it.

You can find my deeper look into The Boy and the Heron here, although it will contain spoilers.

Watching The Quintessential Quintuplets∽ (2023)

I am not sure if The Quintessential Quintuplets∽ actually counts as a movie, since it is only 49 minutes long, but it got a run in the cinemas in Japan starting from 14 July 2023. This will be followed by airing on Japanese TV. For those who watch it in the cinemas, there is an additional 12 minutes of footage at the end, where the voice actors (Futaro and the five sisters) talk about their thoughts after hearing that this short movie will be made and other related topics.

The Boy and the Heron opened in Japan on the same day, but I decided to watch this instead.

This short movie is actually a collection of episodes that were not adapted in the TV series and the finale movie. For example, the part when Futaro went to the beach with Raiha and then invited the quintuplets to go spend time at the swimming pool. Also, when Futaro and Nino went to visit the store owner at the hospital. There was also the part when they took care of Ichika's boss's daughter. As well as Yotsuba recollecting her relationship with Futaro.

They are all snippets, and I felt there were kind of forcefully strung together. So for anyone looking for some consistent story, nope, there isn't any. You need to have watched the series itself for this short movie to make sense. It is basically a collection of episodes that fans love but had not been adapted previously. In a way, fan service.

The cinema was actually quite packed, a surprise since it was a Friday and the first show in the morning. I guess we must not underestimate the fans of this series.

I came back with this. Two booklets about the movie were on sale, plus a small "door gift" handed to those who came to watch the movie. It comes in five designs featuring each of the sisters, randomly handed out. I happened to end up with the one sporting a design with Ichika.

I guess this concludes this franchise. The manga has ended, the anime adaptation has gotten as far as the end of the manga, and even the "missing" episodes have now been adapted. It is nice to see the effort to conclude the series, since many anime series are left hanging and fans end up having to read the original manga or light novel to find out the conclusion.

Playing around with voice cloning

Recently, I have been playing around with voice cloning that uses neural networks. There are several popular frameworks out there, such as SoftVC VITS Singing Voice Conversion Fork (aka so-vits-svc or just SVC) and Retrieval-based Voice Conversion (aka RVC).

At first, I started with SVC, but I found that it requires several thousand epochs in order to create a good model. This means that it is hard to train on Google Colab within the free GPU usage time. I had to train models on my Proxmox workstation using the Nvidia T1000 8GB, which was REALLY slow.

Then, I came upon RVC, which gave quite acceptable results after 300 epochs of training. This means I can easily run it on Google Colab. The trained models can then be downloaded and used for local inference even without a GPU (but CPU inference can be a lot slower).

Here is my workflow.

First, I had to gather voice samples. I use Kdenlive to cut various scenes that had the voice of the character I want to clone. I then piece them together into a single clip with about 2 to 10 minutes of speech and exported it as a WAV file.

Next, I used Ultimate Vocal Remover GUI to remove the background music and other sounds. First, using the process method "MDX-Net", I used the "UVR-MDX-NET Inst HQ 3" model to remove the background music from the vocals. Then, I used the "UVR-MDX-NET Karaoke 2" model to extract only the main character's voice. Finally, I used the "VR Architecture" process method's "UVR-DeEcho-DeReverb" model to remove echoes and such from the extracted voice.

Then, I used this audio slicer to split the voice clip into smaller samples of several seconds.

 

I then uploaded these samples to my Google Drive, which will be used for linking to Google Colab during the training process. Next is to run the Python notebook (v2) on Google Colab. There will be a link in the "terminal" of Google Colab, which you can click to access the webUI. The "Train" tab is used for training.

 

Once training is completed, the weights can be downloaded for local inference.

Here is one of the videos that I watched to learn about how to use Google Colab for RVC training.

Here are some samples created using two models that were trained by me. The base sample was created using Google's text-to-speech service using default voices for English, Japanese, and Chinese.

Alice Synthesis Thirty from Sword Art Online, trained using RVC for 300 epochs

Kubo Nagisa from Kubo Won't Let Me Be Invisible (久保さんは僕を許さない), trained using RVC for 300 epochs

Violet Evergarden, trained using RVC for 600 epochs

 

What do you think? Personally, I think the base sample created using Google TTS was quite artificial in the first place, so the converted samples also sounded quite false. They do perform a lot better when used to clone songs, but due to copyright issues, I have not uploaded such samples here.

Xiaoshu 小暑

After 夏至 (Xiazhi; summer solstice), comes Xiaoshu, or 小暑, another of the 二十四節気 24 solar terms. It literally means "minor heat", and signifies a period of hot, windy days.

 

 

I tried something else too.

 

 

Live-action adaptation does not always work

Do It Yourself!! (どぅー・いっと・ゆあせるふ!!) is an original anime that aired in 2022, with a parallel manga run (still on-going). I would put it under the "cute girls coming together to form a club and doing something together" category. In this case, as the title says, they are the DIY club in school, making their own stuff and eventually a treehouse.

Well, recently, a live-action adaptation of Do It Yourself!! started airing on Japanese TV. The title is DIY!! Do It Yourself!! (DIY!! -どぅー・いっと・ゆあせるふ-).

I recently wrote about Insomniacs After School's live-action adaptation and was somewhat critical about it. But still, it could work. I even gave my own thoughts about how it could be made to work.

But the live-action adaptation (I shall call it DIY!! from here) is... a very simple "no".

Why?

The main character, Serufu, is a clumsy, cute girl who keeps hurting herself accidentally. This makes for a lot of comic relief and running gags in the anime. And the anime uses a unique colour palette to make it very clear that this is a work of fiction with all the exaggeration. This makes it something that you can watch, laugh, and forget about.

But a live-action adaptation will suffer from two main problems. First, the "accidentally hurt herself" part is going to be very very difficult to act out without actually endangering the actress or others around her. But this is the central theme of the story so any watering down of this aspect actually weakens the overall story. It is funny when you see an anime character fumbling with an electric saw. But seeing a real person fumbling with a REAL electric saw... that is downright SCARY!

Second, a clumsy, cute girl can bring laughter in an anime, but when you see an actual girl looking like an airhead with the IQ of a snail, talking like a 5-year-old when she is supposed to be 15... it is just irritating. Annoying. Frankly, in the real world, a person like her would be in a school for people with special needs, not a regular high school. The character design and story works when it is an anime because everyone knows it is not supposed to be real. When when real people start to portray these characters, it just becomes unbelievable.

(There is also the part about the pig. In the anime, Serufu has a pet pig, and it is a running gag for the pig to shiver in fear whenever the family eats pork during meals. In the live-action adaptation, there is only a pig plush toy so another funny aspect of the story is gone.)

Bottom line: some stories just aren't meant for live-action adaptation.

Watching Insomniacs After School (君は放課後インソムニア) live-action adaptation movie

Insomniacs After School (君は放課後インソムニア) was adapted into an anime and is showing on TV right now (but almost ending soon, though). A live-action adaptation movie was also announced and I was quite interested to see how well it runs as a story. The movie premiered in Japan last Friday (23 June 2023) but I didn't managed to catch it until today because the movie is not screening at many theatres. Well, at least not at the nearest theatre.

Here's the trailer.

Here's an excerpt from the movie, when the main characters visited Mawaki Site.

Compared to other live-action adaptations like Let Me Eat Your Pancreas (the anime's English title is I Want to Eat Your Pancreas) I think the director was too ambitious. Let Me Eat Your Pancreas is a single-volume story, but Insomniacs After School is a manga series with 13 volumes currently containing more than 100 chapters. Trying to squeeze the story into a two-hour movie is going to be really difficult. For example, the anime adaptation has reached volume 6 in its first 12 episodes. The movie tried to squeeze the content of the first 10 episodes of the anime into the first hour of the movie. Instead of character development, it is more like a summary and can be very confusing to people who have not read the manga or watched the anime.

Instead, the director could have been a bit more selective, skipping over entire parts of the story and focusing on the beginning when our main characters got to know each other, (re)started the Astronomy Club, and then went on that trip to photograph different parts of the Noto Peninsula. This would make the story short enough to fit into two hours without rushing, yet still make some sense in terms of consistency. The live-action adaptation of Your Lie in April followed this technique and it didn't turn out bad.

In the end, the movie felt rushed in the first hour, and in the second half, when it tried to further develop the characters, it was hard to follow or feel any sense of empathy for the characters. In terms of the visuals and audio, there wasn't anything that made it a "must watch on the big screen" kind of movie too. It is more like a "watch on a streaming platform if you have nothing better to do" movie.

Update 4 July 2023: The anime series ended last night, and I must say I prefer the simple ending that the anime offered. The overall pace of the anime series was much better and it made use of the longer run to provide a story that developed the characters, ending at an appropriate part of the overall series. The live-action adaptation movie, on the other hand, was really rushed and ended with a slightly bitter taste.

Upgrading workstation to Proxmox Virtual Environment 8

Proxmox Virtual Environment 8 was recently released. Based on Debian 12, it also comes with instructions on how to upgrade from Proxmox VE 7 to Proxmox VE 8.

I decided to slowly upgrade my home servers to Proxmox VE 8, starting with my Fujitsu Celsius M740 Proxmox workstation that was installed with XFCE desktop on top of Proxmox VE 7. As the base installation was Proxmox VE 7, it was supposed to be a simple matter of following the upgrade instructions.

However, somewhere during

apt dist-upgrade

the process hung when setting up libgdk-pixbuf-2. I had to abort the process, then run

apt -f install

dpkg --configure -a

apt dist-upgrade

to finally get everything properly upgraded.

Running neofetch then gave me this:

😍

I will slowly be upgrading the other servers (probably the ML110 Gen9 first, followed by the custom install on top of LMDE5). I also have a server with Proxmox VE 7 and Proxmox Backup Server installed that has yet to be put into service, and I will wait for Proxmox Backup Server to be supported on Debian 12 before upgrading this one, since the upgrade instructions say "Co-installed Proxmox Backup Server should wait until a public beta or final version will be released."

 

Update 10 July 2023: My Microserver Gen8 with Proxmox VE 7 and Proxmox Backup Server 2 has been successfully upgraded to Proxmox VE 8 and Proxmox Backup Server 3, following the instructions here and here.

The screenshot only shows Proxmox VE but it is actually co-installed with Proxmox Backup Server. It is currently not in use but I intend to switch my existing Proxmox Backup Server to the Microserver Gen8 eventually. The current server, though, has low power draw and is therefore really great for 24/7 operations. The Microserver Gen8 draws more power (and even more if I add a SAS controller to use SAS drives) but it comes with iLO4 which makes remote management a lot easier.

Update 11 July 2023: I finally updated my main server, the ML110 Gen9. All I needed to do was to follow the instructions here.

It upgraded without a hitch. I also added another 4x3.5-inch drive cage to the server, so it can handle up to 8x3.5-inch drives now. All of them are connected to a SAS controller that is passed through to the TrueNAS VM.

 

 

Duanwu 端午 (Dragon Boat Festival)

The fifth day of the fifth lunar month is Duanwujie 端午节, also called the Dragon Boat Festival. It has nothing to do with the 24 solar terms but I thought I would still write something as practice, since it is a traditional Chinese festival.

Summer solstice 夏至

After Mangzhong, or 芒種, comes the summer solstice, or 夏至 (Xiazhi), another of the 二十四節気 24 solar terms. It literally means "extreme summer", and this is the day with the longest period of daylight.

 

 

What started out as calligraphy practice is becoming a habit, and I hope to at least finish the entire cycle of 24 terms.

Calligraphy grading

Every year, the calligraphy group that I am under has a grading. Well, it is not like an examination, held on a single day. Rather, there are certain phrases that need to be written and submitted before the deadline. This year is no different.

The phrases are made known in March, and the deadline is in late June. Results are announced in September. After months of practising, these will be my submissions.

And this is the trash... about 200 sheets, I think, based on a very rough estimate.

Wish me luck! 😊

Mangzhong 芒種

After Xiaoman, or 小满, comes Mangzhong, or 芒種, another of the 二十四節気 24 solar terms. It literally means "grain in ear", and signifies the last opportunity for sowing grains.