音時雨 ～Regentropfen～

最近の天気がマジへんです。だって、６月になったのに、気温が全くあったかくない。あったかいどころか、先日は零度ほどに下がってたこともあるし、雪が降ってたこともあったんだよ。まあ、こっちに来る前にすでに聞いたことなんだけど、カルガリーの天気はすっごく気まぐれだって。なのに、梅雨に入るはずの季節に雪が降るなんて…

いまは「梅雨」の季節なんだけど、全く梅雨っぽくないカナダの日々です。けど、気温といわばやっぱり、「花冷え」の方が似合うんだと思うの。ただし、６月の花冷えなんて…

まか不思議ですね、ホントッニ。

先週から振り続ける雨でずっと思っていたの、もしかしたらカルガリーさえも入梅できるのって。でも、雨の中に歩いていて、向かいから風が吹く時に、「寒いなぁ」と思い切り感じた時に、「はぁ～やっば無理だね」とにがわらいをしてた。

出来るなら本当に、世界中のどこでも四季の移り変わりをゆっくりと感じられますように。

ちょっとわがまま過ぎる願いだね、これが。

I'm experiencing the weirdest weather recently. Even though it's June already, the temperature is not warm at all. Well, how can I say the word "warm"? It was near zero a few days ago, and it even snowed. Anyways, I was already warned before I came to here, that weather in Calgary is extremely caprice. But, how can I express myself about the snow in those days when they are supposed to be called "rainy season (tsuyu)"…

Currently, every day is not like rainy season, which is what it should be like, and this is a part of my Canada life. Yet, it is way better to say the temperature is just like "chilly spring (hanabie)"… but, can you imagine a chilly spring in June?

Really amazing.

I was thinking since the last week when it started to rain a lot – so that was possible to enjoy the time of rainy season in Calgary. But when I walked in the rain, and when the wind blew toward me; "wow, it's still cold," and I was like "hmm, so it's really not possible to enjoy the so-called rainy season, sure enough."

If on it could come true, that the switching of seasons can be well experienced at everywhere in the world…

But this is just my over-willful wish, you see.

@pixiv

"yorlga" is really an amazing album. Thanks to it, I've finished my second drawing in this week. of course, I experienced another early morning at 3AM =w=

This time, I drew an image picture for the "yorlga" song: "hanachiruya", which means "a night when cherry blossom falls down" literally. But, actually, I was planning to draw something for another song, which was "yume wo kai / (buy a dream)". With the darkish ambience of "yume wo kai", I at first wanted to draw a mystical room in darkness, which was full of mirrors and cold moonlight – as well as gothic lolitas! I done drawing the girls, Serena and Kanau from my own to-be-started story, but before I started to color it, I was hesitating: I didn't know if my drawing fitted the ambience of the song well.

So I decided to change a song for it, and I chose "hanachiruya". Because all others didn't fit (could this be a reason?) – their ambience didn't, really.

During coloring, I tried a few color combinations. I'd already got the idea to use black and white, but I didn't know whom I should give black to and whom I should give white. Also the ribbon colors, I used red with white dress because I thought it looked good, yet at first I used red to match the black. – There were too much about my mind during the coloring, and I can't say all of them there. In one word, I like my current coloring result. :3

Then, the wings. I added the wings after I finished the draft. I suddenly felt like to add because of my randomness (…I think I'm not explain it at all). At least, all colors in my drawing were in good situation and looked not bad.

Thus, I was done, and the time was 3AM (again). My internal clock has been disturbed seriously, thanks to yorlga.

And my next (the last, probably) image drawing about yorlga will be "tama no fune / boat of jewel"!

@pixiv

I should have written this point yesterday (this morning, 3:00 AM, which would be more exact).

I've talked about Noriko Mitose's new album "yorlga" a while ago, and since this album was finally released, I was very excited about the music and their world. I've been looped this album for days. I especially love the song "kitsunetsuki".

Thus, it drove me into a creating mode. At a time when I didn't really realized, I've finished the draft. I firstly put a pair of fox-ears onto the character – because the cores of this song are "fox" and "shrine maiden", the character is naturally assigned to be Tohne (I think I need to start my own writing story soon, or people would be confusing about who is this and who is that… ^^;) – I didn't include them in my final drawing. I drew a little white fox, which you may hear about from the lyrics beside her, so I thought the fox-ears don't suit the whole ambience. And the clothing. That was simply derived from miko-clothing. I modified the standard version, well, now looked bad though.

The blue fox-fire was added when I tried to merge a background picture. I adjusted the hue of the original picture, and added a gradient effect to turn it darker. "Why not to add a fox-fire? That must fit!" I thought, and what I thought was right.

When I finished all drawing plus merging works, it was almost 3AM already. I just published it onto dA, and went to sleep. I wanted to write a post then, but I was afraid if I know what I was writing in that situation.

So… that's about the drawing, I might draw more "image" pictures for this album.
And…
I NEED TO WRITE A REVIEW FOR "YORLGA" ASAP!! :P

I've become a foobarian since May 24, 2010.

I was (and still am) a big fan of the media player "JetAudio". But since this afternoon, I officially switched to mainly use another player "foobar2000".

I like JetAudio because it meets almost all my needs of playing media files – it supports for a bunch of formats, it's very customizable for the interface and displaying info areas, and, the most important feature made me loving JA was that it has a nice lyrics viewer, which can display the lyrics tag of a track. I'm also a last.fm user, so to enable autoscrobbling for the player is also important for me. There isn't an official plugin for JA, but JA fans made one. Very good except it doesn't scrobble the album tag. I don't mind this point though. That's why I could use JA till now.

But, JA doesn't support cue index file, which is a pain for me to deal with a lot of lossless files. To be able to read those cue files, I started to use foobar. Before, I only used foobar to convert and batch-tag. I also tried to get foobar work for last.fm, but it didn't work and thus I gave up.

So, how came I switched?
Because I wanted to display my current music in my google talk status field. Unfortunately JA doesn't support it, but there is a plugin of foobar can do it. From this, I started to install more plugins and tried to get foobar more fitted my needs. – As a result, I managed to customize all my needs~ which included: google talk status displaying, go to tray, support last.fm autoscrobbling, and tag-lyrics viewer.

It took some time, but all plugins worked well now!

Before on JA, album tag was missed during scrobbling, now I can finally scrobble with them (I disable it though)! I even do not need to start the last.fm software; I can scrobble directly via foobar! But, I still need JA to do some convert works. Foo can convert from cue to flac, but it's too slow to force me convert into wav via foo first and then convert into flac via JA. Luckily, I can do batch-tagging in foo, so the tagging won't be a pain. Then, the only problem would be the icon. Foobar's icons are … kind of scary for me. It's also easy to change icons, what you need to do is only to replace the icons in its icon folder!

Foobar is open source software, that's why it has so many plugins. Jetaudio has integrated most of good features. Both are nice. So, currently I'll mainly use foobar but I'll still keep JA in my computer. Both of them have their strong points. I need to switch using them to maximize the effect! XDD

Foobar is almost perfect, and JA is probably in the second position.

character: Liselsia Cesarini (Symphonic Rain)

I drew this one in yesterday evening (or this early morning). To be honest, I firstly knew this game was because of Ritsuko Okazaki's album "For RITZ". I liked it a lot. All songs from it are so beautiful. I especially love the song "lyceenne". Yesterday, I tried to sing it, and thus I suddenly wanted to draw a fan art of Liselsia Cesarini, whom the song "lyceenne" was dedicated to.

A few days ago, I finally got the game, I'm in a super SR free playing mode now! XDD

I've mentioned that I tried to sing "lyceenne" yesterday, and I did have a recording of it. I wanted to publish it, but I didn't think I was satisfied by it. So, today, I recorded it again. My voice was sometimes not so stable, but this version is better than the previous one. Also, currently, it's very difficult to record, because... my dear Kosmoton-chan (my vaio laptop) is making noise from its fans -__-|| To record without such interference, I've got to wait for it stopping making noise, and the chance is rare, I think... orz

あるながーい眠りのあとで（約９時間30分ほど）、私はもう一度元気をちゃんととり戻った。訳があんまり分かんないけど、今週はずーっと忙しくて忙しくて過ごしたんだ。そして自分もいつも自分に「あぁ、疲れたっ」とか、「眠りたーいっ」とか呟き続いた。
やっぱり自分のいる国は寒い国なんだね。先週（先々週かも）まで雪がまだまだ降り積もっていたのよ。雪のほうが嫌いじゃないけど、降り続ける雪のおかげで、私は今までまだ「わぁっ、今はもう五月なんかなぁーっ」とカレンダーを見るとすごく驚いた顔をしたの（笑）。
大好きなKOKIAさんのインタビューを翻訳することさえもしたくないほど疲れたの、
です。
でもしょうがないじゃん。自分のボスは出張したので、約二週間もいなかったもん。（汗）
というわけで、あの二週間の時間を十分に利用して、ずっとしたかったKOKIAさんに英語のファンサイトを作る願いを叶った。
あんまり内容がまだまだ弱そうに少ないけどね。^^;

やく一ヶ月前、youtubeにてたくさんの紹介ビデオを見て、CS5しかないの「fill」というフィーチャーを試したかったため、この火曜日、私はただ発売したばかりの「Adobe Master Collection 5」をインストールした。
ただし、私の想像したようにうまく上手に使えなかったのね、はうぅ～ >_<

そして木曜日、ラブミーティングにて、なんとなくみなさんはパソコンにPhotoshopがインストルしたかしないかというトピックにしった。
途中こんな対話になったの。
A：「ライセンスのあるPhotoshopをインストールしたのはたった二台しかないので、他のパソコンにインストールしたかったら、まずこの二つの一つからアンインストールことにならなくちゃ。」
B：「ただあるサイトからクラックヴァージョンをダウンロードすれば？」
A：「だっだ僕はCS5があって、ダウンロードするなど必要はない。」
C：「あぁ、君はすでに入手したの？いいね」
Boss：「ちょっと待って、君たちの行ったCS5って？」
C：「あれはものすごいだよ。新しい"fill"ってフィーチャーで、ひび割れをフィクスしたり、パノラマの空白を補完したり、どんなこともできる。僕たちの実験データを修正するのもできると思う。」
Boss：「はぁ？実験データまでも？」
C：「ええ、例えば君はあるゲルを選択し、その"fill"を利用して、自分のほしいバンドやみたくないバンドも、自分の思うとおりすればいい」
Boss：「むんんんん…次の話題に行こう」
と、ラブミーティングからこんなに妙な雰囲気になったの。面白かったけどね…　^^;

ついに金曜日になって、フライデーと言っても、フリーデーとも言えるのよ（かな？^^;）
夜から、7、8年ぶりの「エンジェリック・コンサート」ってゲームの進級ヴァージョン（？）を手に入れた。
「あぁぁぁぁ、なつかしぃぃぃぃぃぃ」
と、無我夢中になった。
さすが私のプレイした最初のゲーム。
最高ですっ！
堀江由衣さんの声が好き！！（´∀｀;）

夏がだんだん近くなってたの。私、より涼しい壁紙がほしいの。今は前に描いた「虹の電車」という壁紙を使っているので、オレンジの夏の夕方をテーマにしたけど、やっぱり暑いなぁと感じるの。そう言えば…binariaさんの音楽からなにかを描こうね。binariaさんの音楽がいつも夜の静かさを感じさせるように、涼しくて美しいだよ♪

ということでこれが私の夏がくるときに書いていた長っぽいブログエントリなのです。（なかなか日本語で書かなかったので、能力が下がっているのがいやぁ！）

After a long – which was about 9 hours and 30 minutes – sleep, I regained my energy. I didn't know the reason, but this week was so busy. I was like "ah, I'm tired", or "ah, I wanna sleep".
The country I'm in is such a cold country sure enough. Until the last week (or maybe week before last), it was still snowing. I don't dislike snowing, but thanks to the snow, I could show you a surprised face when I looked at the calendar "What? It's May already?!" (laugh)
Yes, I was tired, and I even didn't have the energy to translate my beloved artist: KOKIA's interview.
You see.
But, I couldn't help either. Our boss was out for two weeks before the last week. (sweat)
So, I fully used the time of two weeks, and made my wish came true: an English fansite for KOKIA.
Although it still needs much of content to make it better. ^^;

About one month ago, I watched a lot of videos about Photoshop CS5. I wanted to try the unique "fill" feature, so I installed the just released "Adobe Master Collection 5" on Tuesday.
However, it was not as easy as what I imaged at first. >_<

Then, on Thursday, we got the topic about whether or not our computers have photoshop installed during the lab meeting.
And we got such a conversation.
A: "Only two computers have licensed photoshop; if you want to install PS onto other computers, you've to uninstall from those computers first."
B: "Then can we just download a cracked version somewhere?"
A: "In that case, I have CD5. You need not to download again."
C: "So, you've already got CS5? Nice."
Boss: "Hold on, what's the story about CS5?"
C: "The new CS5 is almost perfect, it has a new feature called 'fill', and you can fix cracks, or fill up the blank for panoramas, or even our experiment data."
Boss: "Your data?"
C: "Yeah, you choose a region of your gel, and you can get the bands you want and delete those you don't want."
Boss: "Hmmmm…. Well, next topic"
Like this, what an ambience at that time. Although it was interesting… ^^;

Finally, it was Friday. We call it "Friday", but I think it's okay if we call it "free day" (no? ^^;)
In the evening, I got the upgraded (?) version of PC game "ANGELIC CONCERT", which I used to play a lot 7 or 8 years ago.
"Waaaahhh, so nastalgiiiiiiiic."
So, I was absorbed completely.
My first game.
It's THE BEST!
And I like Yui Horie's voice!!（´∀｀;）

Since summer is coming, I want a cooler wallpaper. Currently, I'm using the wallpapaer "Niji no densha / rainbow train" which I draw before. Although this one has the core of an orange summer evening… I feel a bit hot for this. Well… this time, let me try to draw something with the ambience of binaria's music. Their music always gives me the feeling of a silent night, cool and beautiful ♪

Here, I've written this a bit long blog entry at the time when summer comes. (oh, noes, I haven't written in Japanese for a long time, wish my ability to write in Japanese won't decrease!)

fake KOKIA-zou was made by me ^^

The basic idea was born in the last week. Suddenly I wanted to create an English fansite for KOKIA for no reason. That day was April 29, the same as KOKIA's debut date, nice.

The very beginning would be in more months earlier. A friend of mine ever asked me one day.
- "You like KOKIA so much, do you want to make a fansite for her?"
- "A fan site? What would you like it to be? www.cyouwa-oto.net?"
I said this imaged domain name immediately, because she was the owner of the Yuki Kajiura fansite (that is, www.canta-per-me.net), that would be my parallel thinking (you see, both domains were named under a song title)… well, don't you think so? XD

However, at that time, I didn't yet have the desire to create a site: it needs time and energy. But, a few months later, that was, on April 29, I was like being spelt and got the strong desire of making one.

Of course, like I've said before, I know it needs time. I firstly searched online, after confirming that there were no any really active fansites available (based on first 3 pages of google search), the idea became one of my tasks.

Now, I want to talk about my thinking about KOKIA. I think I've talked about it for many times on this blog before about how I like her music, and my thoughts about them. But… have I ever written something more detailed about how I knew and fell in love with her?

I guess not, so let me say it here.

I knew KOKIA from her song "ありがとう(Arigatou)" in 2006 summer. I just liked that song and didn't think she's my favorite. Then, in the beginning of 2007, I listened her single "調和oto / 愛のメロディー (Cyouwa oto / Ai no Melody)", and thought "ah, this artist is very nice." Yet I still didn't consider her as one in my top artist list. I can't deny that at that time, I was a big fangirl of Yuki Kajiura, so I mainly paid more attention on Yuki Kajiura and related artists but KOKIA.

In 2008 February, I by chance listened to her new album "The VOICE". Although I still didn't think KOKIA was in my top list, I have already started to listen to that album once and once again (till now, this album is still in my top album list). I liked that album, and finally, I started to take more look at the artist: KOKIA.

I listened to almost all of her music during 2008; her rank in my artist list was increasing day by day. Yet my favorite artist was Yuki Kajiura.

I didn't think I would change my mind about my best artist at that time… but the fact told me, that I was wrong.

Yuki Kajiura's No.1 position kept until the end of last June. I watched KOKIA's Live in Paris in 2007 DVD. That was the FIRST time I cried because of listening to music. I myself didn't know the reason either: My heart was full of happiness from listening to her music, but tears were coming out uncontrollably. Why I was in tears? Even though I felt so happy!!

Later, I thought it should be her unique charm. The voice was so gentle and the melody was so warm. When you listen to her music, you would feel like that nothing was left out; everything was like being blessed to be in the eternal heaven.

After watched that concert, I started to play all her music in my library like crazy. According to the record of last.fm, I played her music more than 1000 times within one week, and I even didn't try Kalafina's new single because I just wanted to play KOKIA again and again. Also, thanks to my crazy playing, KOKIA made her top position in my artist rank. Finally, there was an artist beat my to-love-only-Yuki-Kajiura rule!

I still love Yuki Kajiura's music, but not as much as how I used to be anymore.

Start from zero was such a big effort, but I managed to organize all data I had since last week. Although there is still much of stuff being missing, I thought the current site was enough to be put in public.

The most interesting part was about writing the "decipher 'gematria'" post. It was impossible to decipher it if only based on data we already had. I even took three or more hours to write down the booklet lyrics and try to order each letter from the lyrics in the correct position… but, I gave up due to lack of data eventually. orz…

Anyways, since yesterday night, my fansite was finally available to all people around the world. I will do as much as possible to update the site and make it better. I will also try to translate more articles about her and her music. I don't know how I can do, but, because there is the love, I believe…

Everything is because of love.