This week, I uploaded my cover of Fantasy on soundcloud. It's been a while since I check out my soundcloud page and some of the comments I get there were pretty harsh. And then I decided to give my old covers a listen. And you know what? They're right. What was I thinking back then when I uploaded those covers? I must've thought that I was some hot shit back then. Like, bruh, you don't even sing it at the right key. Comparing my old cover and newer ones, there's an improvement there, however subtle it is. The vocal training does pay off. Thanks, coach.
Oh, right, my birthday! I celebrated my birthday a couple of weeks ago. And as you know, I did a birthday concert.
Setting up this concert took me a couple of months. From picking up the setlist, recording the songs, doing motion capture, etc. Mostly the time I spent on working on the A.I. voice models of me and my friends to use. I already have permissions from all my content creator friends who were kind enough to provide me with their voice to train their a.i. with. But for some reason, my a.i. was completely broken. I must've overtrained it, because my a.i. voice came out like it had speech impediment. It just gave up on pronouncing consonants. I might going to have to redo my a.i. model. But now that my birthday is over, I'll probably refrain from using a.i., and instead just use my actual vocal.
Recently I've been busy with helping with my town's preparation for Indonesian independence day. I was selected to be a committee to train kids for the independence day ceremony. I mostly help with the administrative side of things, and show up during rehearsal from time to time. If this event goes well, fingers crossed, I might be able to upgrade my computer so I can stream properly. That is if I don't go broke from commissioning artists for stuff.
During my birthday concert, I commissioned artists to do some key visuals and channel logo. After one and two commissions, I might be getting addicted to it. It really doesn't help too due to the fact that hiring domestic artists is a whole lot cheaper (like seriously, the key visual art for my concert only cost $5). And recently, I commissioned an artist to make a bunch of stickers for my discord (and for the low low price of $2, hell yeah). No more blackmailing my artist friend into doing my bidding.
Anyway enough of that, let's talk about Maria's Curse. Thanks to everyone's support, Maria's Curse one shot manga actually won the preliminaries of the one-shot tournament to the final round. So many comments and support on the app from fellow Ake no Tobari fans. But, we're not done yet! There's one more voting round for the final! The procedure is similar to the previous one. Go to Ganma's twitter account, and retweet the manga! Or go to the manga's page on Ganma app, and leave a comment there. The voting period ends on August 13. And as an incentive, Momochi Dori-sensei actually posted a bunch of illustrations and short manga on their twitter page, which I also translated in this post. So please, give it a go!
So here are the chapters, it was Saturday when I started writing this post, and as it's already Sunday by the time this post is uploaded.
As usual, let me know in the comments or discord if you find any error or mistake. I'll see you next week.
Maria's Curse bonus illustrations: Read Online | Download