Wota-kai!? Episode 8

We're back after having to postpone the show for a couple weeks.

Our guest, Oroboras, has a somewhat busy work schedule, so the only day we could feasibly record on was a Thursday. And when a thunderstorm caused Ren to lose all internet access a couple hours before we were about to record, it was decided that we'd have to postpone.

This is episode 8, and the second episode featuring Ren as host.

Oroboras, a regular on Konya mo TKMR, happily agreed to appear on the show, and is the second TKMR member to do so. My top-secret plan is to get enough of them on the show that the two become some form of affiliated shows! Okay, not really. But it'd be interesting.

At any rate, I've known him for a few years and is probably one of the H!P fans I'm closest to. We both have a quite similar sense of humour so I've always gotten on well with him. And so I was pretty pleased when he agreed to come on the show.

The guest topics this time include how PVs have improved or not over the last few years, as well as how fans become over-sensitive to certain topics regarding their Idols.

You can download the episode from here, or alternatively, listen to the streamable MixCloud version below.

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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.

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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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Wota-kai!? Episode 4

It has been 9 weeks since we released the pilot episode. Now we're releasing the 4th.

With each passing episode I feel more and more at ease with this show. I don't think anything will ever help me get over my hatred towards the sound of my own voice, and indeed, the editing process, which often lasts several times the length of the podcast itself, is something of an exercise in trying to not delete all of my own dialogue that makes me cringe.

This episode was no different. Over two and a half hours of audio was recorded, and both trying to clean up the audio and cut it down so it more closely resembles the imaginary 90-minute run-time I have in my head meant that I was still editing this 12 hours after I had started.

But despite the sheer amount of work, which will probably give me nightmares for the next two weeks until it's ready for episode 5, I feel that it's probably my favourite episode so far.

Our guest this week was Murr, currently serving as a translator for fansubbing group TPF, and was formerly one of the core contributors to International Wota. I think I've known her since I joined IntlWota's IRC channel, #wotachat, back in 08. And I'd probably be lying if I said she didn't scare me. Of course, most of the regulars in there scared me over the years - it's fascinating how Idol fandom seems to attract the most insane people.

In the chat, she's always quick (in IRC terms, anyway) to knock me down with a tsukkomi, and I probably imagine her as the most tsundere person in there. But actually talking to her proved to be really enjoyable, and my image of her has probably changed more in the four hours we spoke before and during the podcast than the rest of the four years I've been an wotachatter.

In any case, the guest topics this week were on fansubbing, and the difficulties of translation and how different approaches between different groups can cause problems, and finally on what it is like to live and work in Japan, the centre of fandom for most of us, as Murr does.

You can download the podcast here, or listen to it below.

If you have any comments or feedback, be sure to drop me a line. Also, if you'd like to appear on the show as a guest to voice your own opinions, get in contact with me, as I'm sure we'd be happy to arrange it.

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