Wota-kai!? Episode 6

Earlier today we released the sixth episode of Wota-kai!?, the Hello! Project news and discussion podcast hosted by myself and Sazaki Ren.

This week the special guest was alita87.

It's actually the first time talking to a user whom I didn't know prior to the recording, which, as I pointed out last week, was probably the challenge I was most looking forward to having a crack at with this show.

All the previous guests I've either spoken to often enough,  as with Liamers who I have known and been good friends with since 2007, and guests like sanrio, who I hadn't actually spoken to all that much, but was still somewhat used to seeing him around the same chatrooms and on STD.

Alita, however, is a guest I had only ever really seen in the chat during the Konya mo TKMR livestream.

I feel the show actually went fairly well on my part. I'm not entirely sure why, whether it was his internet behaving badly or simple over-tiredness but Ren ended up being much more silent than I've ever heard him.

Thankfully, there were no major issues with the show, though, as we had last week. Originally Alita was scheduled to appear on episode 7, and episode 6 would feature another guest entirely. So we were originally expecting to have a report from Berryz Koubou at AnimeNEXT from that guest who attended the event, but when I contacted him to confirm his appearance this week, he informed me that he would be unable to make the recording. Thankfully, we were informed early enough that we were able to move Alita forward two weeks to replace him without any issue, however.

I do hope that guest renews his interest in appearing in the future, but for now I'm assuming that he will be indefinitely unable to do it.

The episode can be downloaded from here, or alternatively streamed using the widget below.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for the show, or would like to appear as a special guest and voice your own H!P opinions, then please contact me on H!O or on Twitter @The_Dran.

One suggestion I've had multiple times, and am looking in to, is to providing an alternate mirror for the download. Torrents of course die, and some users simply can't use them due to conflicts with their ISP or simple lack of knowledge about how torrents work. I've been looking in to a few locations, but I do plan to at some point provide either DDL links for each episode, or some other method of streaming the show. In order to ensure that the torrent does get a decent number of hits - enough that it doesn't die immediately - any official DDL or streamable alternative will probably be released a couple days later than the torrent, however. With that in mind, though, if you have any ideas for good podcast hosting services, then by all means let me know.

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Wota-kai!? Episode 5

Wota-kai!? is back for its fifth episode.

Making this episode turned out to be more complicated than any other episode we've done thus far, as on the initial recording day we were plagued by technical problems and Skype was simply not stable enough for recording a podcast to be viable.

Much of these problems persisted throughout the week and, though we managed to successfully record the following day, even that wasn't without its problems as mid-way through the show, Ren's internet suddenly imploded and we were left unsure as to whether he would return or if we'd have to simply finish the show without him for the better part of half an hour.

Anyway, without going into any more detail than I already have, for the rest of the week, many of these same technical issues, compounded with real life and schedule issues, interfered with the editing process and forced release back by almost a week longer than our usual release date.

Enough about that, however.

The special guest this week was none other than Sanrio, who used to host his own podcast, STD, which provided most of the original inspiration for this one (and previous ones I did a few years ago).

Sanrio is someone I've also known for some time, though never really spoken to him at any real length before this podcast - so aside from the strangeness of talking to someone I've spoken to a lot, but never with audio, such as it was for episode two featuring magatsu17, this one was an even bigger challenge in that I had to communicate with someone who I haven't actually spoken to all that much even on IRC or Twitter.

I look forward to the challenge of recording a show with someone I have actually never spoken to before.

Sanrio also set the bar pretty high, I feel, in terms of what a host should be like. There were definitely times, and we both agree, where it felt like he was the host rather than I. But this is to be expected when the guest served as host on his own podcast for several years and the actual host is a newbie just starting out - as I am.

Still, it really drew my attention to how much I need to improve to rival Sanrio, and drives me to surpass him, if you'll excuse the horribly clichéd thought.

This week also saw a fairly significant change in the format - as Ren and I both felt that what we had was a little too long, and that there was one glaring aspect of the format which wasn't working - the poorly named "This week I've been watching..." segment.

I'll admit, I'm not sad to see it go. In theory it was a fairly sound idea, but over the last few episodes we've realised that, in fact, the segment is little more than dead-weight as the discussion is only ever really interesting if everyone else has watched the same thing - recently or otherwise - which, it became clear, was expecting an awful lot from each other and our guests. And so, more often than not, the discussion would be fairly one-sided as one person talks about that DVD and repeat much of the same things that had been said about the previous DVD the episode before.

So, we unceremoniously cut it from the show, and the whole thing suddenly feels much stronger and coherent than it ever did.

At any rate, if you have any other feedback or suggestions for the show, or would like to be one of our special guests, do get in contact with me somehow, whether that's on H!O or on Twitter, or whatever you prefer, because correspondence and offers are always welcome.

You can download the podcast here, or listen in below.

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