From leeks to hotdogs

It's been a couple of months since I posted anything about Toyota's Miku campaign, so I figured I'd see what's happened since then. I'd hoped that it'd just die down and fade away, but then came the whole bacon-wrapped hotdog fiasco, and a couple more opportunities to make some more terrible terrible ads:

These two are a bit cringe-worthy, but could be worse. I still think it sounds silly to say "Miku-chan" in an English language ad, but that's not such a big deal. The worst is yet to come:

Yeah, I really have no idea what they were going for in these two. The ads aren't about Toyota any more, since the last three haven't had anything to do with cars, and they certainly aren't about Vocaloid as a music synthesizing program, so the only remaining possibility seems to be to piss off fans and shit on any chance of Vocaloid being taken seriously.

If you don't think the videos themselves are bad enough, take a look at the Youtube comments, where the reactions range from the positive ("MUKI IS TAKINGOVERTHE WORLD!!") to the negative ("Dont do it miku!!! dont fall for the people who nuked your home country!!", "*transforms into Black Rock Shooter* i will go and save miku before she is lost forever!").

There's also been a contest to come up with an American Miku design, to be announced at the J-Pop Summit Festival in San Francisco later this month. Given the bacon-wrapped hotdog theme though, it's clear what they're shooting for in the American market.

At this point maybe they'd be better off going the whole way and changing the song they're using from World is Mine to something more appropriate:

今の私よりもっと太く大きくなって見せるよ

On the bright side, there haven't been any new commercials in a while. I can only hope this trend continues.

I recently ordered a stack of Vocaloid CDs myself, after getting my tax return. I have no idea why the government taxes my welfare payments only to give all the tax back to me at the end of the year anyway, but it makes for a nice windfall. I ordered the new Gumi compilation album that's coming out in a month, as well as 8#Prince's newest CD and some older stuff by 40mp, among others. Hopefully they won't take too long to arrive.

And finally, it's only a week and a half until the Dota 2 championships - it'll be the first look at the game as well as (to my knowledge) the biggest prize pool in video gaming's history. I may do a post about this later, as I consider it a pretty big deal.