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Friday, December 14, 2012

Ramble to the New Year

All aboard! Next stop: a new Weekly Ramble!
Well that was a rather short ride wasn’t it? Oh well, now that we’re here shall we get started? First off I’ll talk about an even that will be happening at my favorite thread on the internets, /AMP/; then I’ll probably ramble about a few random things like television, video games and books and then I’ll ramble about rambles. Heck, there might even be more renditions of Carol of the Bells mixed in. Shall we begin?

 

Most of you readers should have at least heard about /AMP/ by now, I think I do a pretty good job of throwing links in here and there, but if you don’t know about /AMP/ I guess it won’t hurt to tell you. /AnimeMotivational Posters/ is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, we take screen-caps or fan art of anime (although anime “related” images such as Vocaloid and Touhou are generally accepted as well) and posterize them using web sites such as wigflip or image editing programs such as GIMP. It’s a fun thread and if you like anime, jokes or a mixture of the two you might want to check it out.

Anywho, /AMP/ is currently in the middle of a competition to see who can post the most MOTs within a given amount of time (iirc there’s about six days left at this point). And while that competition is fun and all, it seems like there is an even bigger event looming. The Twelve MOTs of Christmas, from what I’ve come to understand, is a parodying of the Christmas song The Twelve Days of Christmas. It would seem that everyone on /AMP/ is welcome to join in with the fun and create a poster (or posters, I’m not sure if you’re allowed to enter more than once per verse) that can be used as a lyric for our new rendition of the classic Christmas song.

As far as I know it’s a fun event for everyone involved. Once the day is done a poll is set up and everyone on /AMP/ votes for the poster that will become the official line for that year’s song. Since this will be my first “The Twelve MOTs of Christmas” I’m pretty excited about it and I’m patiently waiting to take part in the fun!

 

I’m a slacker. Even though I know I should be working on “RE:Inspiration; Titan III” to finish it as soon as possible I’ve been on a little writing hiatus for the past few days and (so far) I can tell that I’m probably not going to make much progress today. And on that note, I don’t even really want to talk about “Titan III” today, so I’m not going to. Instead I’m going to talk about a television show that I’ve obviously been missing out on. I don’t watch much TV, in fact I don’t even have cable at my house, so any TV watching that I would want to do would have to be done on the internets, at which point I’ll just watch anime instead (I guess by TV I mean American television, I do watch quite a bit of anime). So on Black Friday I found the first five seasons of The Big Bang Theory on sale at Amazon. I was able to buy all five seasons for a total of $40.00, which is an incredible deal. I’ve only seen through the first disc of season 2, but I must say The Big Bang Theory is a brilliant show, I sometimes wish I had a third hand so I could give it three thumbs up!

In addition to The Big Bang Theory, I’ve also started on Spice and Wolf 2 (the Light Novel, not the manga) and I’m making quick work of that, I do enjoy reading about Holo and Lawrence’s financial ventures. And finally I’ve started a new game. I started playing League of Legends a few weeks back, I was hesitant at first, but I’m glad that I gave it a shot.

Oh, and there still hasn’t been any new news on the Black Rock Shooter video game. My fingers are still crossed though.

 

And now I’ve got a bit of somewhat sad news. I’m pretty sure that this ramble will be the last ramble of 2012. No, I do not believe that the world will end next Friday, but I do believe that I will be taking some time off from sharing these random thoughts and personal experiences. I can’t say for sure if I’ll be back on the first Friday of January, but I will most certainly return by the second Friday of 2013. I hope to have “RE:I; Titan III” finished before the end of the year, and when it is done, even if it’s not a Friday I’ll post here to announce its release, so don’t worry about missing it. So as of now there won’t be a ramble next Friday, or the Friday after that, but there might be one three Fridays from now and if not then, then there will certainly be one on the fourth Friday.

 

And on that note I think we should wrap things up. But before I bid you all adieu, how about another Carol of the Bells:

 
And who could forget this week’s song of the week!
 

Yes indeed that’s one of the renditions of “The Twelve MOTs of Christmas”. Anywho I shall take my leave now, as always if you have any questions, comments, tips or concerns you can leave a comment here on Blogger or you can contact me at Semajj07@gmail.com or at Twitter @Semajj07. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and have a great New Years! I’ll see you all next year!

Friday, December 7, 2012

And then there were videos...

Greetings reader! I hope that you’re doing well. Can you believe that it’s already December? Well, maybe you can. It makes sense, I mean, it’s been a week since the last ramble and that happened on the last day of November. So it being December isn’t that big of a surprise, but time does seem to be flying. Anywho, today I’ve got a few videos to share, a new MOT song, some more Titan talk (yeah, I know, I’m slow-as-a-snail) and we’ll deal with the rest as it pops into my mind! Shall we begin?

 

First up is AnimeMOTs’ new YouTube video. For those of you who don’t know, AnimeMOTs is the channel run by /AMP/ for /AMP/ (and anyone else who enjoys the videos) so in this week’s video (once again put together by zendude) is the /AMP/ Creed. Enjoy:

 
Yay! If you like that and want to see more you can subscribe to that channel and you can visit us over at /AMP/ on the Crunchyroll forums!

 

Moving on, and since we’re on the topics of /AMP/, I recently started a new MOT Song. This time instead of me making the entire song by myself, I let everyone pitch in (sure, it wasn’t an original idea, but I rarely come up with anything that /AMP/ hasn’t seen in some form or another before). Anyway, this time we all ganged up and made a MOT Song for the song “Warrior” by Disturbed. I don’t have a video of the MOTs compiled with the song, but I do have the MOTs compiled in an album (see here) and below is a YouTube video of the song. You can start the song, click over to the album and follow along, if you want to, I find doing so rather fun!


Okay, this one isn’t /AMP/ related, but it’s that time of the year again, so how about s’more Carol of the Bells?

 
And

 
Heh-heh, I just love that song!

 

Alrighty then, now we can get down to business. “RE:Inspiration; Titan III” related business to be exact. I know, I know, you’re probably tired of hearing about Titan III, but since it’s a big thing in my life at this point in time, I like to talk about it. Plus, I know there are a few people out there who actually enjoyed the first two and are looking forward to part three. smashwords you can find “RE:Inspiration; Titan” and “RE:Inspiration; Titan II” by following that link, they’re both free and relatively short, so maybe give reading them a thought. Okay, Titan III, the final draft is in the works, it’s mostly set in stone, but I need to go over it and do a fact check, a continuity check, a spell check, a grammar check and probably a billion other types of checks that are eluding me at this time. But other than that (and deciding which foot to stop on) it’s mostly done. Hopefully you’ll see Titan III by the end of the year, but as always, I promise nothing. Stuff happens and I don’t want to break any promises. But I do have the cover art! Once again I turned to my good pal megaflaem to craft a piece of art to adorn the story once it’s finished, and once again he created an awesome piece of work!

On a writing related note, if I can finish Titan III sooner than later, and it is still early enough, I might dig through my folder of “dead-end” stories, dust off a creation that was born around this time last year and see if I can make any improvements to the story of Allen Maxwell and Drip Moonshadow, but that’s not a high priority. Maybe I’ll just spruce it up a bit and post is on smashwords as a gift to all of you readers. But Titan III come first… Or so I tell myself…

 

And now for something completely different.

 
Okay, it was just more caroling of the bells, but whatever. This is my ramble, I can do what I want!

 

I just received wonderful news! A certain package that I had ordered recently arrived! Now, this wouldn’t be anything special, I get packages all the time, but this box came all the way from Japan! I won’t tell you what it is, just because I decided to stop talking about my personal purchases here, but I just wanted to let you know that I’m happy that it’s here. And now, a page from the book of zendude: “LAWL”

 

And I think that’s about all I’ve got for today. Let’s get on to the Song of the Week then, yeah? I haven’t updated my list in quite some time, so I don’t know if I’ve shared this song before, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t:

 

And that was “Saints and Sinners” by Flogging Molly! Anywho I’m off to go do stuff! STUFF!!! As always if you have any questions, comments, tips or concerns you can leave a comment here on Blogger or you can contact me at Semajj07@gmail.com or at Twitter @Semajj07. Banishment… this world!

Friday, November 30, 2012

Another Month Bites the Dust

Hello, hello, hello! It’s the last Friday in November and I totally forgot to ramble last week! So, you see, I was on vacation last week and, as usual, I sort of lost track of time and Friday had come and gone before I knew it (not to mention I was away from a computer for most of the day). I feel bad for not rambling last week, but that doesn’t mean that this ramble is going to run longer to compensate, no. In fact, this ramble might even be a little short, but more on that later. I think I’ll just jump into it and we’ll come to the topics as the come. Let’s go!

 

So, just as last week was a Holiday (US Thanksgiving) and I missed my ramble, I’ll probably be skipping a few more rambles in the near future as well. I’ll probably only ramble once or twice in December because it’s the end of the year, I’ll be busy and I might not be at a place where rambling is relevant during a Friday. But fear not, I will be sure to spam Carol of the Bells again this year (although, these rambles were still on G+ this time last year). Heck, it’s just about that time anyway, let’s kick it off with a Vocaloid Christmas Carol!
 

Yup, I like that song. I like that song a lot. Perhaps even more so because Miku is involved in that version. Moving on! I lied, again, but at least I didn’t break a promise! “RE:Inspiration; Titan III” isn’t going to be out by the end of November (duh) but I have been making quite a bit of progress the past few days, and I’m probably even going to cut this ramble short to make more time for writing Titan. (heh, I’ve got Carol of the Bells on repeat now). But before I go I’m going to link you to my Smashwords profile so you can find Titan and Titan II, just because I haven’t done so in a while:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/semajj07
 
 

As I mentioned earlier (quick, change the subject!) I was on vacation last week. I didn’t go anywhere, I just stayed at home, but I did get a ton of stuff accomplished (or so I think). Firstly, I finally finished Revolutionary Girl Utena, I then proceeded to mark Sankarea, Clannad and Clannad After Story off of my back-log, sweet! I also caught up on quite a few of this season’s anime, such as Girls und Panzer, Chuu2 and BTOOOM! I also finished The Wind Through the Keyhole and started on Spice and Wolf 2. In addition to all of that (and keeping up to date with all of my World of Warcraft dailies) I started playing League of Legends. So far I’m still pretty inexperienced, but I think I do pretty well when I’m playing as Ahri or Sona. I think I’ll start some PvP matches soon, but that’s still a scary thought.

 

And that’s about it, I’m going to get back to work on Titan III, but before I go I’ve still got to share this week’s Song of the Week! This week’s song will be “Benibana no Otome Uta” from the anime Otome Yokai Zakuro, enjoy:

 
I like that song! Anywho if you have any questions, comments, tips or concerns you can leave a comment here on Blogger or you can contact me at Semajj07@gmail.com or at Twitter @Semajj07. ‘round these parts, relevancy is irrelevant!

Friday, November 16, 2012

Swing a Little More

Middle of November, that it is. That means that it’s time to start considering Christmas shopping, oh boy. My wallet weeps already. But we’re not here to talk about my spending habits, we’re here to ramble! Well, I’m here to ramble, you’re here to read. If you really are here. Are you here? Anyway, back to business: Today, as it were, is Friday and that means that I’m busy typing away to rid myself of the pent-up stoopid thoughts that somehow seem to hang around in my mind. Yay! I don’t really know what I’ll be rambling about yet, so I guess it’ll be a surprise for all of us!

 

Let’s see, there’s no new AnimeMOTs video this week, so I guess I can’t share that. I can link you to the /Anime Motivational Posters/ thread: /AMP/. Remember if you do decide to stop by and post, read all the rules first, no one likes a rule-breaker.

What else, what else…

I guess I can re-post a link to my imgur albums: link. There you can find (more-or-less) everything that I’ve made for /AMP/. Most of them are simple MOTs, but there are other things like some of my GIMP creations and a few MOT Songs, y’know if you’re interested in lookin’ at that stuff.

Hmm, I covered Halo 4 last week, uhh, yeah. Not much has been going on. I mean, there’s a sale at RightStuf for Black Friday/Cyber Monday so if you like buying anime and stuff you can check that out if you haven’t already…

It’s been a slow week for me.

Oh! I remember something! Earlier this week Blizzard announced the release date for StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm. It’s comin’ out in March of next year, so that’ll be something to look forward to, I might even re-install Wings of Liberty and re-play the campaign before it’s released. I’m not really a competitive player, but I do enjoy the story, so I’ll most likely be buying HotS when it comes out in a few months.

Still no news on the Black Rock Shooter game, which makes me a sad Semajj, but there’s nothing I can do about it (other than import the Japanese game and hope I can understand the story without the words).

 

I know, how about a webcomic to read? I may have shared this before, but maybe some new readers (lol, like I get new readers) will be interested in it. Today, I point you to LFG. The webcomic follows the adventures of Richard, an “evil” warlock, and his elven pal Cale. It’s a pretty funny series and I’ve been following it for about a year now, so if you’re a fantasy fan and you like funny stuff you might want to give LFG a go.

 

Okay, so how about anime? I finally reached the final box in the Utena collection, so hopefully I can finish that over the weekend, catch up on a few of the newer shows that I’ve yet to see and maybe even start Clannad. And concerning the Fall season, I’m really slacking. I’m still all caught up on some of the longer running shows like Space Brothers, Hunter x Hunter and Shirokuma Café; but other than the few that have been running since last season or before Tonari no Kaibutsukun (My Little Monster) is the only show that I’ve started this season. I plan on checking out a bunch of other shows, because I’m pretty open-minded when it comes to anime, I’ve just been handling my free-time poorly these past few weeks. Between World of Warcraft and Halo 4 I’ve left myself very little time for anime, but that’s all changed! In World of Warcraft my character, Faulted, is now exalted with every faction in Pandaria, which means that I no longer have to do a ton of daily quests every day, and that frees up some major anime-watching time! And I beat Halo 4 pretty quickly, so I can’t blame too much time-wasting on that, but I’ve still logged a good 8~10 hours since it came out.

This weekend just so happens to be a “laundry” weekend, I usually spend the ~hour between putting the clothes in the washer and waiting for them to finish watching anime, so hopefully my aspirations can be met. J

 

And even though I haven’t reached my 1k words (who counts anyway, right?) I think I’ll stop here, or shortly after here. But before I go I’ll give you another song to listen to. It may be new to you, it may be old, but no matter if you’ve heard it before or not; here’s “Devil’s Dance Floor” by Flogging Molly:

 
Pretty good, right? Anywho, I think it’s time to make like a banana and split, so if you have any questions, comments, tips or concerns you can leave a comment here on Blogger or you can contact me at Semajj07@gmail.com or at Twitter @Semajj07. Zettai unmei mokushiroku!

Friday, November 9, 2012

And There's No End in Sight!

Here we are, November 9th, two weeks into November already, wowzers! I guess Fall really is the shortest of the seasons, it’s a shame that it happens to be my favorite one as well. I guess Winter’s not that bad either. Anywho today is Friday (at least for me right now it is) and that means it’s time for another Weekly Ramble! What? I’ve already started rambling? Well then, let’s just keep on trucking then, huh? Today I’ve got a few things I’m going to ramble about. First off is food, mmm, food. Then a certain video game that came out this week. After that I guess I might have some time to ramble about my continuing adventures in creative writing and I’ll probably finish it all off with a new Song of the Week. But before any of that, AnimeMOTs (the /AMP/ YouTube Channel) has a new video this week, so here it is: “Anime Motivational Posters: Xarthos’ Picks - “X-House”:

 
Again, the MOTs chosen for that particular video were picked by Xarthos and the musical track was composed by zendude. Pretty cool, eh? So that was just put out this week, and there are more to come in the near future, but if you cannot wait you can check out the rest of the videos on AnimeMOTs and maybe those will hold you over until we get a new one done. And if even that isn’t enough stuff for you, you can go directly to the source and check out /AMP/ on the Crunchyroll forums.

/end advertisement

 

Alrighty then. Now that my sharing is all out of the way (for now) let’s talk chicken. Chicken! I like chicken. The reason I bring up this subject is because that’s what I had for lunch; chicken! So there’s this place, I’m not going to name it, but there’s this place that sells chicken sandwiches and they just opened near my house and I decided to give it a shot. By golly, that was the best chicken sandwich I’ve ever had. I may never eat another hamburger again! Well, that’s probably a lie, because I do like hamburgers when they’re done right, but this chicken sandwich was unbelievably delicious. I may have to go back there over the weekend…

Anyway, just a thought, but if you’re reading this and want to interact a bit, how about leave a comment about your favorite food. Just a thought, I’ve already tried this “audience interaction” thing and unless I’m giving something away I usually don’t get any feed-back. But hey, everybody eats, so maybe people’ll talk about food. J

 

Okay, yay chicken, but more importantly: Halo 4. The latest installment to the line of Halo games came out this week and it continues the story of Master Chief, picking up right where we left him: frozen in the back-half of the ship “Forward Unto Dawn”. I’m not going to spoil anything, so worry not, but essentially this new story takes place four years after the end of Halo 3. As a long-time fan of the series I’ll say that I was very pleased with the way that 343 Industries handled this game. For those of you who didn’t know, the first three “Halo” games were done by Bungie and 343 took over for this new one. My new favorite gun is the new semi-automatic DMR, I’ve always favored “sniper” type play and this new mid-to-long range gun is right up my alley. Sure the Battle Rifle is still up there, #2, with its three-shot burst, but the DMR is just so cool. Another cool feature that is new to the series is sets of missions following a side story that will be released over time, kind of similar to how World of Warcraft releases patches to introduce new content between expansions. From what I hear, there are two more Halo games planned at 343 Industries, and to this I say “woot”.

 

So now we’ve talked about chicken and Halo and now we’ll saunter on over to see what’s been going on in my writing as of late. So last Friday an /AMP/-friend of mine asked me for a bit of help with a poem-type thing. So I did that, it was interesting to say the least. I’m not a poet, nor have I really done poetry before so the best I could do was match up syllables and do my best at rhyming, and he was pleased with the outcome, so I’m happy with it too, but I’m still trying to make it better.

There’s also “RE:Inspiration; Titan III” that I’ve been working on, and that’s coming along nicely too. I still haven’t finished the draft I’ve been working on, but I have gotten pretty far with it. So far, in fact, that I can practically see the end of it, so that’s good.
Quick, random Azu-nyan:

 

Okay so yeah, I’m still sluggishly moving along with “Titan III” and still ramblin’ so I guess everything’s right in the world.

 
 
And now we’re wrapping it up. Cool. I’m still not quite sure what happened last week, just a simple lack of motivation, I guess. I’m sure it’ll happen again, crappy little rambles, but I figure that even a small, not-so-well-written ramble is better than no ramble at all, right?  Anyway it’s the end of the ramble, so before I finish for reals I’m going to give you all a song to listen to (or not, that’s your choice), and this week’s Song of the Week is “Conflict” by Disturbed:

 

I really wanted to use this song to go with a MOT song featuring Ene from “Kagerou Project” but it’s really repetitive and most of the lyrics don’t mesh well with Ene anyway, meh. Welp, that’s it, I’m off to go continue progress on “Titan III”; if you want to find out what this “Titan” business is all about you can check out the two short stories for free at Smashwords. Anywho if you’ve got any questions, comments, tips or concerns you can tell me below, e-mail me at Semajj07@gmail.com or find me on G+ or Twitter (@Semajj07). To infinity, and beyond!

Friday, November 2, 2012

Consider it Chibi!

Woah, it’s November already? How does that always happen? Anyway today’s ramble may be a bit short because it’s already sort of late and I’ve got stuff that I need to get done. So let’s just cut to the chase shall we?

 

Real quick, my Halloween was boring, hoorah, but I did do something productive and this is it:

 

Yes, I turned my “bunch of images” into a video, hooray! Umm, I guess there’s no new AnimeMOTs (/AMP/ YouTube) video this week, so this’ll have to hold you until next time!

 

Wow, I really don’t feel like rambling about anything today, so I think I’m just going to dive right into “The Creator’s Corner” to talk about my recent progress with “Titan III” and see how it goes from there:

So this last draft that I start for part three in the “Titan” series of short stories is probably the Grandfather of the final version. Everything seems to be progressing smoothly and all of my previous problems seem to be working themselves out, which is awesome. If I can keep at it at the pace that I’m currently running, I may be able to finish “Titan III” by the end of the month. As always, I’m not going to promise anything because then I’ll probably back myself into a corner and need to rush to meet the deadline that I set for myself, so hopefully we’ll all get to read the third entry in the “Titan” series by December, but it’ll be done when it’s done. Slow and steady wins the race, right?

 

I guess that’s all I’ve got today, try as I might, I just can’t think of anything that’s worth rambling about right now. I suppose it’s just been a slow week for me, maybe it’s some sort of sugar-crash after the candy that I ate for Halloween (no I didn’t go trick-or-treating, my boss brought in a ton of left over candy and told us to help ourselves, and I did). I guess that’s it, I’m actually sorry that I can’t write more, but it’s late afternoon and my brain is fried, so let’s look at this week’s song and wrap this thing up:


Yup, “Amber” by 311 it’s a good song, it brings back some memories, and that’s usually not a bad thing, lol. Anywho if you’ve got any questions, comments, tips or concerns you can tell me below, e-mail me at Semajj07@gmail.com or find me on G+ or Twitter (@Semajj07). So this is what they meant by “a cat is fine too”…

Friday, October 26, 2012

Tricks, Treats and Rambles

Surprisingly enough, this is already the last Friday in October. I know. But hey, that just means that Halloween is really close; less than a week in fact. I personally don’t celebrate Halloween in the “dress up and trick-or-treat” or the “dress up and go to parties” fashion, but it’s the mood of the season that I enjoy so I’m looking forward to more fall-type weather soon. Anyway, it looks like I’m already starting to lose track of where my thoughts are heading, so let’s get to the good stuff. Today I’ll ramble about an /AMP/ related project, a new feature that will start happening around here and we’ll take a trip to “The Creator’s Corner” to see how some of my writing-related projects are coming along. Shall we begin?

 

Firstly, firstly I’m going to direct you to one my newest projects! As stated earlier, it is the Halloween season and so I decided to do a little Halloween-related project for /AMP/, thus “This Is Halloween” the MOT Song was born! Ain’t it just the purdiest darn MOT song y’all ever dun seen? So, to break it down, I took the lyrics from the song “This Is Halloween” from the musical-movie “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and mashed them together with images of anime characters dressed in Halloween attire. I tried my best to keep each role in the song with certain anime characters. For example, one might notice that every time the Mayor of Halloween Town has a solo-part in the song the corresponding MOT has Azunyan in it; because what town wouldn’t want Azusa as their mayor, right? A few others off the top of my head are Gintoki as the Werewolf, Fate as the Monster Under the Bed, Luka as the Monster Under the Stairs and Yuki-Onna as the Clown with the Tear-Away Face. For those of you interested in how I actually made the Motivational Posters, I’ll tell you! I started by obtaining the raws, half of them were from zerochan and the other half were provided by the folks of /AMP/ when I asked for Halloween-related raws. I then proceeded to make the base MOT with the super-awesome and super-simple generator wigflip.com. After I had all of the images with the boarders and what-not I imported them toGIMP where I re-did the text to give it the cool look (the font is called “You Murderer”) and then I was finished! And just because I like people seeing my stuff, here is a link to a collection of imgur albums containing my work, which includes my other 10 MOT songs. As a side note, the version of the song from which I got the lyrics is a bit different (CD versus the movie version) so at one point the MOT has "Halloween!" repeated six times and the movie version only has it repeated four times.

 

Okay, now for a new feature that we’ll be seeing around here from time to time. It’s not really anything just for rambles, but I figured I’d start sharing the new videos from /AMP/’s YouTube Channel just to try to spread awareness. And so, here is this week’s new video: Anime Motivational Posters: Smaragdos’ Picks - “CODE RED; extra”: 

 
Sure, I share these on Google+, so if you have me circled you might have already seen this, or if you’re from /AMP/ you’ve probably already seen this too, but a little extra exposure never hurt anyone right? Unless it sun exposure, then you can get sun burns and cancer and stuff. I guess radiation exposure is bad too…

 

Oh, a little extra bit, I haven’t really rambled about it since returning from my break, but do you remember my quest to collect Companion Pets in World of Warcraft? Well I recently put on my safari gear (not really, but I do hear that in an up-coming patch we’ll be able to get a safari-hat that’ll increase Pet Battle leveling) and headed out into the world (of Warcraft) to get me some new pets! And even though the connection between the in-game Pet Journal and the one of the Armory is a little off, I collected my 403rd pet last night (the Armor says I only have 398, but I really do have 403, please believe me). There are some pets that I’ve obtained that were a bit rarer than others, like the Baby Ape and the Arctic Fox Kit, which only appear with certain weather conditions in certain zones. Then there were a few that were lucky drops and/or rolls like the Darkmoon Rabbit and the Aqua Strider; the Darkmoon Rabbit was won off of a boss on the Darkmoon Island (I rolled a 98 out of 100, woot!), which is only there for one week every month and the Aqua Strider is a rare drop off of a rare-spawn, so those were both lucky gets. I still have quite a way to go before I can obtain the Zookeeper title, but I can’t get that until next summer anyway because of a pet that only spawns in summer, but I should make it so that that certain pet is the last one I need!

 

And last but not least, we have “The Creator’s Corner”! Just yesterday I started a new daft of “RE:Inspiration; Titan III” and even though I haven’t sorted out some of my existing problems I think this new draft is taking the story in a new, and in my opinion, better direction; especially with the sub-story that starts to take place among the crew of the Windsor at the end of part three. So all in all, other than a new draft and possible new direction, I haven’t really progressed too far in the past week. But I will start talking about “NEw” (name subject to change) and how I’ve recently been Storycrafting that story and how it’s changed from what it was a few months ago. I still don’t want to release many details, but a lot of things have changed since I last talked about the content of the first episode/story/arc/book of “NEw”. I can tell you that it starts right after a big battle; I can tell you that, unlike the “Titan” story, it takes place in an “Old Western” setting; and I can tell you that, while it is somehow connected to “Titan” and “Eleven”, the first part of “NEw” has absolutely nothing to do with “Titan” or any of its characters. Jeez, I really want to talk about “NEw” but at the same time I don’t want to give anything away! Focus brain, focus! Okay! I’ll stop here before I decide to spite myself and share any more information. But perhaps I’ll do a small teaser type-thing after I’m done with the “Titan” series of short-stories, because at the rate I work at “NEw” will take a long time to finish…
Anyway, if you're interested or want to share them, you can find both "RE:Inspiration; Titan" and "RE:Inspiration; Titan II" by following this link.

 

And that’s all of the crumbling that this cookie has to do. I think I’ve used something like that before, oh well! And so, here we are, at the end of a ramble with only one thing left to do. That’s right; I’ve still got to give you a song to listen to! I don’t know if anyone actually watches/listens to the songs that I post, and I don’t really care, I like having something other than just text in here, you know?


 

Yup, it’s just “This Is Halloween” from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” if you want you can queue up the video, open up the link from earlier in the ramble and listen to the song while you read along with the MOTs, just sayin’. Anywho, I feel a spur of inspiration coming on, although it just might be my stomach telling me it’s near lunch-time, but either way I’m going to end it here; so if you’ve got any questions, comments, tips or concerns you can leave a comment below or you can e-mail me at Semajj07@gmail.com. And remember kids, staying in school is uber cool!

Friday, October 19, 2012

Seven Minutes to Spare

It has come to my attention that for the past two weeks I’ve made an error in the closing statements of my Weekly Ramble. Somehow I started replacing “concerns” with “complaints”  which isn’t really that big of a deal, but just in case any of you thought it might be a purposeful or permanent change I’ll tell you right now that it isn’t and starting today it’ll go back to being the way that it was. And now that we’ve got that all sorted out we can start with our regularly scheduled ramble. So today I’m going to talk about a few things, most of it isn’t important stuff but I’ll still talk about it because that’s what I do here: “The level of importance isn’t important here!” Heh-heh. I’ll talk about some new anime heading to the US in the next few months, I’ll talk about my free time, but most importantly (even though importance isn’t important) I’m going to spend quite a bit of time talking about “RE:I; Titan” because I’ve been stuck in a rut for a while on this subject and I think it’s about time I crawl out of that rut and get something done for once!

 

Okay, it’s been a while since I’ve talked about anime here (it’s been a while since I’ve really talked about a lot of things here, but that’s beside the point) so I thought I’d share some information on some of the series’ that are coming soon to Blu-ray and DVD. As you might know I like to support the American companies that license anime and bring them state-side and the best way to do that is to buy the stuff that they release so I’m gonna help spread the word on some awesome series’ that will soon be available.

First up is Bakemonogatari. Aniplex of America is going to be releasing the complete series on Blu-ray in late November, the set is going to include all 15 episodes with English subtitled (no dub, sorry dub fans) and it’ll also come with a 36-page art book! It’s pretty pricey ($150 usd, yikes!) but I really liked this series and hopefully Aniplex will get the sequel series Nisemonogatari later this year. /support

Next is the Hellsing Ultimate sets by Funimation. The first set is already out and contains volumes 1 through 4 in a DVD/BD combo pack! The second set, containing 5 through 8, will be out mid-November and will also be in DVD/BD combo pack. Also they have both dub and sub so everyone wins! I personally haven’t seen Hellsing Ultimate, but I’ve heard great things so I decided to grab it and check it out. /support

Let’s see, how about Bodacious Space Pirates! Early next year (read January) Sentai Filmworks is going to release the first half of the Bodacious Space Pirates BD set, it’ll have the first 13 episodes and it’s in both English and Japanese (so sub and dub). I really liked this show, other-wise why would I buy it, right? /support

Another Sentai title in early 2013 is going to be a BD release of Fate/Stay Night. It’ll only be the first half of the series (sub and dub) but hopefully this re-release is a sign that Fate/Zero will be making its way to the States eventually (without the $300+ import price). Also, as a side note, I haven’t seen this series either, but taking the risk and buying a new series is part of the fun! /support

Okay last one for today is Penguin Drum, another great grab by Sentai. It’s another Blu-ray “Collection One” so it’ll only have the first 12 episodes, but they’ll have both subs and dubs and, let’s not forget, it’s Penguin Drum. This show is a great watch and if you haven’t seen it I’d recommend checking it out. /support

 

Well then, if spending money to support the market isn’t your thing and you decided to just skip past all of that, I suppose you might be reading this now, right? Right? Anyway as I mentioned in my first ramble this month World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria has been sucking up almost all of my free time since its release on the 25th of September, luckily for me I’ve started to get back into the usual swing of things and I have finally started to even-out how I spend my free time. It’s not much (yet) but I have been slowly chipping away at my back-log of anime (both old and new, but mostly the new) and I finally finished three shows from last season and I caught up on two more that are currently running! I also started working on “Titan” again, but that’s for the next ramblegraph. Hopefully by this time next month I’ll be all caught up on my anime back-log, I’ll have finally finished the book that I am currently reading (and hopefully RightStuf has another book sale so I can buy the complete series of Haruhi Suzumiya and Spice and Wolf) and hopefully I’ll have kept up with my dailies in Warcraft and have all of the new factions capped out. But one can only hope…

 

Alrighty then, I think that this ramble is turning out to be quite a well-written mess, don’t you think? All that’s left for today is a visit to “The Creator’s Corner” and our exiting statements (which will be correctly written this time). So it’s been quite a while since “RE:Inspiration; Titan II” was published and made available for you to read (if you haven’t yet read it, but do want to read it you can find it for free here). Last week I said that Charles was a big problem in developing “TIII” which is and/or was true, I’ve played around with his personality, explored his past and tried to imagine what someone in his position would act like. All in all I think I’ve come to understand Charles a bit better and this will make writing him a bit easier. Now a problem that I’ve run into is the action scenes. In the two previous installments of “Titan” there wasn’t very much action, in fact most of the action in the two combined was at the end of “TII” and that was only a short bit. I guess the main problem that I am having is with the speed of the action scenes. I know that in any situation a scene filled with action is going to fly by compared to a scene with lots of dialogue but they just seem to be going by too fast in “TIII” so that’s the next hurdle I have to over-come as I work on “Titan III”. But don’t fret, I am still working on it, in fact I just recently started another draft, so we’re all one step closer to finding out what happened in the sewers of Titan City!

 

And we’re done. I know, it’s like them actiony scenes and it just goes by too quick, but hey I actually put some time into this one! I feel like these exit ramblegraphs are empty now, especially since I am no longer doing “Rambler versus the World” and “Semajj’s Bookshelf” so, I’ll try to keep an eye open for a new little gimmick to add here at the end, but for now I’ll just throw out a shout-out to the /AMP/ YouTube channel: AnimeMOTs. If you’re interested in reading /AMP/ but just don’t have the time, you can check out our YouTube page where we upload new videos (pretty-much) weekly! And now for our Song of the Week:


 

That’s right, this week’s Song of the Week is the Star Wars theme, flashmob style, and I think it’s a pretty cool video plus an awesome cover of the song! Anywho, with that I’ll have to seal it up and ship it out, so if you’ve got any comments, questions, tips or concerns you can leave a comment below or leave me a message at Semajj07@gmail.com. May the forks be with you! Wait, what?

Friday, October 12, 2012

Quickly, quickly now...


I figure a hastily written ramble is better than no ramble at all, don’t you agree? It just so happens that today is a very, very busy day in the life of me and I was planning on putting my ramble on hold, but that’s not a very good business model; coming back from ~a month break, only to take the second week off. No, no, bad me. And so I’ve decided to write this rushed messy mess of rabble, just for you, my dear readers (although these rambles are still just to get all that extra mass out of my mind). So as I run though this ramble as fast as my fingers can take me I’ll probably end up talking about “Project Diva f” which was something that I had originally planned on rambling on, so far so good, and I’ll also talk about “RE:I; Titan III” and how that’s coming along. Anything else that happens to fit itself into this ramble is gonna be there, whether I like it or not, so let’s get goin’!

 

About a week after I quite rambling back in August, actually it might have been two or three weeks, but who’s counting anyway? Anyway a while after I took a break from rambling a new video game came out; “Project Diva f” is the latest in the line of Vocaloid based rhythm games for the PlayStation system. Up until now they’ve all been on the PSP, but now with new technology and what-not they decided to move it to the PS Vita, which is an awesome little gaming device, if I do say so myself. So it came out, I waited a week or two for international shipping and then, finally, I got my copy of the game. Needless to say I was enthralled with it and wouldn’t put it down unless absolutely necessary.

I don’t really remember where I was going to go with this (remember that part about me being in a hurry?) but hey it’s an amazing game, it’s got Miku and who doesn’t love Miku?

 

What else, what else? Oh, rememberJ.R. Nova? He’s started working on the second novel in his “Czar Chronicles” series, and I’m pretty excited about it. If you weren’t around at the time, or just decided to ignore it, "Rising" is a novel written by J.R. Nova and I highly recommend it. It’s got a little bit of everything, even a werewolf! If you’ve got a few bucks to spare you should totally check it out, it’s only, like, three dollars (usd), that’s only a quarter of what you’d pay to go see a movie now-a-days. You can follow the link depending on where you want to buy it from; yeah it’s only available digitally, so you can get it atAmazon orSmashwords. Your choice.

 

Okay, so last week I mentioned that I’m slowly trudging along with the third installment in the “Titan” short-story series, and this is true, I’ve gotten in a few thousand words this week; but the good news is that I found the root of my problems (probably). I think I’m having a rough time writing this part of the “Titan” quadrilogy because Charles Zappia plays a big role in the third part, and I guess I just don’t know him enough to write him consistently. So what I’m going to do (next time I have the time) is practice writing some scenes with him interacting with different characters; in fact I’ve got the scenes all storycrafted out, but it should be known that actually writing them down on paper (or rather typing them in Word) makes the ideas seem more solid.

In other “RE:I; Titan” news, I went back and read part one, just to try to get back into the “outer space” theme, and I was shocked at how lousy it was. I was horrified and quickly continued on to part two to make sure that it wasn’t as bad as the first, and I was relieved to find that “RE:I; Titan II” was a lot better than the first part, almost as if they were written by different people. So if you read “T1” and were interested, but not impresses, I ask you to give “T2” a try. You'll find them here.

 

And now that I’m really, really pressed for time I think I’m going to wrap this thing up! So here’s this week’s song of the week:

 

 

Yay Miku! That was Do You Kotonano (or something like that) by Hatsune Miku, it is one of the songs featured in the PS Vita game “Hatsune Miku’s Project Diva f” that I talked about earlier. I’m pretty sure you can find a complete list of songs somewhere (I’d look for you, but I haven’t got the time), heck, I was going to suggest you go look it up, but here’s “ODDS&ENDS” another song from “Project Diva f”:

 

 

 

Anywho, I’ve really got to be going now, so if you’ve got any comments, questions, tips or complaints you can let me know in the comment boxes below, or you can send me a letter at Semajj07@gmail.com. So much to do, so little time!

Friday, October 5, 2012

Well Here We Are Again, It's Always Such a Pleasure

What? It’s October already? Well, it was a good break, while it lasted. So yeah, hello and welcome to Weekly Ramble number Twenty-Five, not the twenty-fifth consecutive ramble (obviously) but the twenty-fifth ramble written for this blog~thing. As per the norm, I’ll be changing things up with this next run of rambles, sure the site itself hasn’t changed, but I like the way it looks as-is. I’ll have a little section below dedicated to what’s new and/or changing with rambles, as well as stuff, and things and more stuff-type things!

 

As always when I tire of rambling and decide to take a break, I take some time to look at what rambling is doing for me and each time that I do this I see that rambling is a great thing for me to be doing. Sure, I may not get a lot of views, but to be honest (and this is a point that I usually forget) these rambles aren’t meant for you. I’m not writing these to entertain people, I’m writing these rambles to get rid of all of the gobbledygook that occupies my mind so that I can have space to think and to grow when I actually work on writing that matters. So these rambles are for me, but if you read them, and you like them and they entertain you to a certain point, then that’s fantastic! More often than not though, I lose sight of the fact that these rambles are for me, that they help me free my mind and I get tunnel-vision’d on the fact that people (or a person, who knows) are reading these rambles and I try to do my best to entertain them, which turns the act of rambling into a chore, which leads to me not wanting to ramble anymore. Hopefully the next time I decide to take a break, it’ll be for a better reason than not wanting to ramble anymore, but I guess only time will tell.

 

Okay, now that that’s out of the way let’s talk about some of the changes around here! Remember “Semajj’s Bookshelf”? Well it’s gone! Remember “The Watch List”? Well it’s gone! Remember “Songs to Ramble to”? Well it’s gone too! I have my reasons for cutting these out of the rambles. For the bookshelf, it was getting to the point where it was a lot of work to brag about every little thing that I bought, so I may still brag about some of my cooler purchases, but it doesn’t need to be a weekly thing, right? The watch list never really took off for me, I don’t really care if you know what I’m watching or what I’ve watched, I’ll still ramble about anime from time to time, but there’s not going to be a separate page dedicated to it anymore. The same goes with the “Songs to Ramble to” page, in fact I’m not even sure if it’s published or not, if it is you probably won’t miss it because it’s more or less empty. I’m still gonna share new songs with the Song of the Week, but if you want to see certain songs, you’ll have to go back to the ramble that the song was featured in to find it, otherwise a simple YouTube or Google search will suffice.

Let’s see, what else, what else. I’m going to start a new version of the Motivation Game soon. I tried re-booting it a few weeks back when I was in a horrible state of laziness, but it never went anywhere. So as soon as I get all the details ironed out I’ll be sure to post the rules and what-not in a ramble. There’s other stuff, but I guess I’ll cover it as it comes!
 
 
 
It really is amazing how quickly these rambles reach the 1k word mark, but then again, I guess a month’s worth of gobbledygook is well worth a thousand words. So, about that short story series that I’m writing, you know, “RE:Inspiration; Titan” well, I said I’d try to have part III out by the end of September, and I was making good time with the first draft, but it started to run a bit long (20,000+ words long) so I decided to turn it into a quadrilogy instead of a trilogy and I continued to work on the fourth part instead of polishing the third part. Then I stopped rambling and all of those filler-nonsense thoughts started to cloud the way and I kinda lost motivation to write, so T3 isn’t that close. I know where it’s going; I just need to spend the time working on how to get there (and all the little details that go with it). So, it’s on its way, but still a ways away.

 

And to wrap things up I’m going to share a few things:

First is World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, this game is the best thing that’s happened to WoW since ever. It just blows Cataclysm out of the water on every level!

Second is /AMP/. I’ve shared /Anime Motivational Posters/ before and I’ll share it again. If you like anime and jokes then you might want to check us out on the Crunchyroll forums!

Thirdly is /AMP/’s Youtube Channel we post small video compilations of random (and sometimes not-so-random) posts here, accompanied with some awesome music, cool!

Fourthly is my Smashwords profile. You can find “RE:Inspiration; Titan” and “RE:Inspiration; Titan II” available for free download there, what a deal!

And finally is this week’s Song of the Week:
 
 
That was “Cemetery Walk” by my friend from /AMP/ zendude. The video was the latest video posted on /AMP/’s YouTube Channel, so if you enjoyed it please head over to YouTube and check out the rest of our stuff! Anywho, enough advertising, let’s wrap this up: if you’ve got any questions, comments, tips or concerns you can let me know via e-mail (Semajj07@gmail.com) or you can leave a comment in the section below. “They woke me up when September ended, now what?”