Wota-kai!? Episode 7

Last night we released the 7th episode of Wota-kai!?

It comes as we pass the middle of the first season, and Sazaki Ren takes up the reins as host for the coming few episodes, while I myself am relegated to co-host for the duration - though my work behind the scenes hasn't lessened by very much.

This episode proved to be the most difficult yet, that much is certain. The internet troubles and poor Skype quality that have so plagued us in previous episodes reached a new low this episode, and there were several times when at least one of us simply couldn't hear what the others were saying as the audio stream cut out. We made do and pieced sentences together with whatever words were picked up, or we waited until the call stabilised a bit and then resumed, with the role of actually playing host to the call jumping back and forth several times as someone disconnected.

Of course, thanks to the way in which the show is actually recorded, none of those Skype issues actually affect the quality of the show we release to you, as the audio quality is limited only by the grade of the microphone and audio set up each host and guest uses. But it does certainly make the recording process a bit of a nightmare sometimes.

Then, halfway through discussing the guest topics, our guest suffered a minor incident where his headset was accidentally torn from the USB cable that allows it to work, effectively rendering the headset useless. It was a dilemna. He didn't have a spare and wouldn't be able to replace it for a few days. We were faced with the option of cancelling the show for the week and attempting again the following, or continuing on for the last 20 minutes without our guest. In the end, that's what we decided on doing.

Then the third nail in the coffin was that upon receiving all the raw data to begin editing with, I noticed that a few sections in the recording were either in the wrong order, or overlapped. I managed to correct the order easily enough, but parts where the audio had overlapped were completely unusable, so I cleaned those up as best I could and re-recorded any parts that were unusable but essential.

It was definitely one trail after another, but we pulled through and managed to get the show finished. And there are a few things I learnt from it, and will hopefully better prepare for in the future.

So who was this guest who brought unbalance to the show? None other than Nao-kun, of course!

I had started looking around for potential guests to come on the show, as offers had begun to dry up, and my mind instantly went to the group of regulars in the Maasa thread, and Nao-kun happened to be the first person I asked.

Aside from perhaps myself and Gin, I believe he's one of the longest serving users still active in that thread - as much as the Maasa thread can ever hope to be described as "active", at any rate. Though technically a Momoko fan, he's also one of four people I recruited to help with the Church of Maasa - a blog with levels of activity that fluctuate even worse than the Maasa thread itself. 

The guest topics for this week, for as much as we actually got to discuss them, were on H!P overseas events and how they compare to Japanese ones, and on the various English-speaking fan communities around the internet.

The episode can be downloaded from the tracker here, alternatively, the MixCloud version is now available below.