Rin

This one comes with some fun context. Much like my last Rin signature, this sig is based off an album cover by my favorite Vocaloid producer. Coincidentally, the artwork is done by my favorite artist as well, so this is sort of a match made in heaven as far as my interests go. The text in this one is fairly simple- “開始“ is just kanji for "start," or a commencement/beginning of something (thanks DeepL) which is fitting for the kicking off of Rin's draft season. The bottom right text is just "Sonnet ft. Kagamine Rin" to cheekily implement the "Hikarisyuyo ft. Kagamine Rin" text from the original album cover. The album cover is Hikarisyuyo's most recent release, "Twilight" The Saskatoon render was kind of done by me- the lines and logos were added on top of a blank jersey artwork done by kwkunai. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't include a sample song off of this album since I'm making the effort to invoke its imagery. I'm rolling with "Sunburst," which for some reason gives me FFXIV boss fight vibes with the tempo and melody of its hook.

1) I think the draft was really solid overall, though there were some criticisms on stream that the "wrong" defenseman was picked. I, of course, greatly disagree. 2) Nope, I got that 5 TPE welfare baybeee 3) Cup or bust 4) Miami had an absolute field day in this draft with the amount of picks they had, I think they'll end up being a tough out. 5) Not yet, that'll be at the end of this season for me. 6) Kinda/sorta, I think they get a little tedious for me when I'm doing nothing but graphics all of the time. On the other hand, though, they're fun things to work on in the evening when I'm just looking to turn my brain off and listen to some music.

MORE ANIME HOMIES MORE ANIME HOMIES

Didn't end up getting some of my smaller PTs done last week- there was a big anime convention in town that a good handful of friends ended up flying in for. Despite some huge issues flying in and out of the con, the event itself was an absolute blast. There was SO much more Vocaloid representation this year which I was absolutely thrilled about- from cosplayers to vendor booths to a whole setup from Crypton themselves to promote their worldwide series of concerts, Miku Expo. That booth, specifically, had a huge screen playing through past concert footage. Most of it was for Miku, but with Rin getting some screen time (and love from passersby), I was pretty thrilled. It's a little tangential to the VHL, but coming out of the weekend I can safely say that I've entered my...third honeymoon phase when it comes to Vocaloid/Rin specifically? I feel like every time I get to just weeb out for a weekend, I'm reminded again why I fell so in love with the concept. For those not in the know, Vocaloid is essentially a synthetic voice software, where character voices can be tuned and used as an instrument. Producers have been using the likes of Miku, Rin, Len, etc for well over a decade as vocalists for their projects, spanning across countless genres and artists to create one big collective. In a sense, it feels like a community was given a tool to help build the identity of these characters, and even a sense of built-in exposure. I, personally, have felt compelled to check out a NUMBER of artists just because they use Rin, since I already love her voice and design. Having that familiar element to their work makes it so much easier to just jump in and listen to a bunch of different stuff that I might not have even considered otherwise. But what about the live concerts that they put on? Who provides the music for those? Actually, the concerts themselves are compilations of some of the more popular songs throughout the community. Hypothetically, ANYONE could produce a song using Rin that makes it all the way into official setlists. I explain all of this to get around to the major thought I wanted to put forth. Interacting with other Vocaloid fans this last weekend and seeing just how much love they were getting both officially and unofficially gave me a huge sense of pride, in a way. This is something that can only exist because of the love of not only the creators, but fans as well. Vocaloid has been around for well over a decade at this point, and being in a big general anime environment that still features them so prominently is heartwarming. It's a similar feeling to the VHL, where you have this massive community/entity that can only exist because of every one of its pieces. In a very stereotypical way, both are products that are far greater than the sum of their parts. So, yeah. I'm back on a massive Rin high. Again. Would be fantastic if this was my first player to make it into the HoF. Since it was the prominently featured song in the booth's playlist, my song this week is ungray days:

First off...good LORD do I love the Rin render used for this. She's fucking adorable Second...this was a great non-intentional nudge that my "first gen oopsie" re-roll was approved and applied. Went ahead and put in my new build, hopefully that's in time.

Giving the "A" to an anime girl is the W of all W's Let's get this bread

Poking @Josh, lmk when the change is made!

1) Not fantastic, though I guess that's to be expected. There's still a curve in learning how to build, so I'll take the little bit of the season I played and use it as a learning experience. 2) I really hope so! Fish of destiny. 3) Definitely get back into the film room to see exactly where improvements can be made. Shifting over to the North American game from Asia is without a doubt a massive move, so it should come as no surprise that she's off to a slow start so far. 4) Honestly, none of them. I've never been a big off-season sim guy, but I'm definitely looking forward to the draft. 5) It's one step to not having the E, which is a plus I guess. I understand the function of it from a gameplay/league balance point of view, but man is it not fun to have two to three seasons of sifting around in the minors while you wait to join the real conversation. Not a fan of the teams they removed, both of their logos were pretty killer. 6) Maybe get in a quick TPE reroll to come into next year with a more optimized build.

Remember when I said "I'd like to apply for GM" and it got someone banned for a few days LMAO

Rin Kagamine +10

I will always fawn over the effort put in to swap logos and uniforms. Love it

Well, I'd like to think I have some history with-- I'm just fucking with you, you're not getting me with this one again.

I need a .com article topic this week, so I figured I would "react" to trivia moving to a portal-based task these days. Does my opinion matter? Is it even interesting? Not in the slightest! But I'm going to look back on old trivia anyway. Unsurprisingly, I think the move to the portal is the best thing that ever happened to trivia. "Back in the day," we used to have to send our answers to a designated trivia head, who would check the answers and award TPE in a week-ending thread that tagged everyone who was eligible for the TPE. Not only was this a grueling, time-consuming manual process, it also kept the door wide open for people to just cheat and share answers. See, everyone would end up receiving the same questions every week, meaning a lot of people would just rely on a buddy or a LR relaying the answers in order to get their free 2 capped TPE. While a good number of members knew where they should look to find answers to trivia questions, mostly everybody ended up being lazy and just submitted whatever answers were posted in a LR chat. With things moving to the portal, though, you get a number of obvious benefits: Every user can get a unique set of questions, as the portal can just pull from a large bank of them and randomly assign two per week Nobody has to constantly check the answers received; the portal will do that automatically No claimable thread needs to be posted in order for users to get their TPE, and updaters don't have to clear the queue in order to award TPE. The portal can assign capped TPE automatically if questions were answered correctly. So with the move to the portal, a LOT of overhead is simplified down into an automated workflow, making it so much more practical to both engage with and be rewarded by weekly trivia. Fantastic change, I always love to see something so overly complex brought down to a much simpler, cleaner method.

The real best take is always in the comments

Well I thought I was going to be a lock for Istanbul, but it looks like that's not happening anymore. I still would rather just go straight to the pros, though. Getting to the E is like getting to the end of the line at Disney World, only to discover that the line actually keeps going, but at least now you're inside.

And of course, I should post a collection of VHL Rin's past...

Fuck yeah, Rin thread. In commemoration of her being my new player, I went out and had a jersey swappable Rin commissioned! Planning on using this for future sigs and graphics, but maybe I'll have one more done in the future with more of an action pose.

Rin's initial impact on the Halifax 21st hasn't been massive, but I guess it's been a bit bigger than I initially felt. Though she went pointless in the playoffs, the 20 games she played in Halifax resulted in roughly .5 PPG pace, with some pretty unremarkable defensive stats to boot: Getting as many as 9 points surprises me a little bit, admittedly, because it felt as if there were quite a few pointless sims for the Kagamine twin. I know I shouldn't expect a low TPE player to be lighting the world on fire right off the bat, especially when I'm still slowly figuring out how to build, but I would have loved to see just a little more production from, what I thought, was a slightly more offensively-driven blueliner. Taking a peek at some of the VHLM scoring leaders from last season, though, it seems like the BEST offensive strategy is to...not build offence at all. I guess this tracks, since the old strategy was to just pump scoring as high as you could to separate it from passing, since shoot-first minmax players were absolutely the way to go. Since we can't separate them anymore, it makes sense to start pumping TPE into defense; it was always known as one of the better investments as far as STHS is concerned. I'll be using a first gen re-roll to better allocate some of this TPE, hoping for a nice bounceback season in the upcoming 90th season. This time, I'll be armed with a little more knowledge and a lot more of an ability to dump points into the right places. For this week's Rin song, I'm going for an unbelievable hidden gem that was released fairly recently. A bop among bops, AnamoriP's "hug"

1) Given that it's 3-1 in the series so far, it's looking dire. We'll have to dig deep for this one, but it might be too much of an uphill battle. 2) I'll give it to Mexico City, on a hunch that 1 seeds won't bring it home. 3) We might already be witnessing it with Houston going down so easy, though a 3-1 deficit for a top contender might not hold. 4) I guess I haven't been looking too deep into VHL content (I should probably change that), but some kind of an "immaculate" grid would be a fun newspaper-like game to include and boost engagement. 5) Maybe, though creating everything by hand has to be a slog. Maybe for specific, one-off events; I know we used to use the EA games for All-Star games. 6) I'm biased and I'm not sorry about it.

Came back just in time to see the GOAT step down. Chicago was, and probably always will be, the best LR I've ever been a part of. Even with all of those seasons with Helsinki for Pepper, and only the latter half of Winter's career taking place in an expansion town, my best memories of my time in the VHL are with that core. I feel awful for fucking you over with the surprise retirement, but I'm really proud of that cup win. The s76 Phoenix are all-time. Massive cheers, and thank you for everything you've done for Chicago!

Oh my god, you're right....what have I done??