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!

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?

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!

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?”