Birthday Bash

“Happy Birthday to you.(cha cha cha) Happy Birthday to you.(cha cha cha) Happy Birthday dear Weekly Rambles. Happy Birthday to you~ (cha cha cha~)”

Yay! Today is Weekly Rambles’ first Birthday! (Well, technically tomorrow, but I’m not going to postpone a ramble for the sake of posting it on its Birthday). And while I’m pretty happy that I’ve been able to stick to this for so long (this is #41) I’m even happier that “RE:Inspiration; Titan III” is nearing completion, but more on that later. Today’s ramble is going to be a bit short and mostly about Titan, but there will be (as always) a Song of the Week, chosen appropriately for today’s special occasion! Let’s get to it!

 

First off, some non-Titan news. Last week I rambled about a new project that I got involved in and since then it has -more or less- been decided that I will do most (if not all) of the writing. We’ve been slowly working on our details and I think we have a goal for our characters to work towards so we can start building the plot.

For the past couple of days I’ve been working on designing the city that our story takes place in. I even created our main character’s apartment in great detail, to which one of my co-creators laughed. I’m still having a lot of fun working on this and unless someone else decides to give-up first, I’m on this train until it reaches the station!

 

And last weekend I picked up another project to get involved with! Who knows why or when, but apparently my sister recently started writing a story of her own and last Sunday night she texted me out of the blue asking if I could look over it for her. So I agreed. It’s rough and needs some work, but her story (as a whole) isn’t bad.

 

And I left that last ramblegraph off sort of oddly because it continues into this one! So she asked me to help her and in return I asked her to help me with Titan. She agreed. So on Wednesday I sent her the finished version of “RE:Inspiration; Titan III”. She’ll look over it, edit it and help me work out any wonky details (I really hope there aren’t any, considering how much time I’ve spent on it) and hopefully we’ll be done with all the editing (which also means that T3 will be ready for you guys) by mid-March! Yay!

And while I rush to bring this Birthday Ramble to an end I turn to my trusty coin to see who I ramble about today. For the past few rambles I’ve been rambling a bit about some of the characters that appear in “RE:Inspiration; Titan” and today I’m torn between two characters, so I’ve decided to flip a coin to choose for me. Heads is Fen Mao or Kitty as some people call her. Tails is Geannina “Doll” Chatsworth. Let’s see who I get to ramble about today! (Flips coin off-screen)

Tails it is!

So today I’m going to ramble a bit about Geannina. Ever since I created her character, Geannina has played an important role in almost every story she’s been storycrafted into. It’s almost part of her nature to be the center of events. She is practically the definition of the word meek. In “Titan” she is seemingly-overly-concerned for Jacobi, but that’s really just the way she is. It may be a bit of a spoiler (not really considering the fact that I’ve already said that she plays a big part in any story she’s in) but you can expect to see quite a bit of story focused on Geannina in “Titan IV”. And for now I’ll leave the rest of her secrets just as they are: secrets.

For anyone who is interested in reading “Titan” you can download both parts 1 and 2 for free from Smashwords.com.

And finally a great big Happy Birthday to Weekly Rambles!

 

Anywho, 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. Also, if you have a character that you’d like me to talk about in the next ramble you can tell me via any of the ways stated above. pyoro~n

Wise No More

Wise no more, yes, that I am. As you probably noticed, there was no Weekly Ramble last week, but fear not, it did not go missing or anything of the like. No, last week’s ramble was skipped because I was recovering from having my wisdom teeth pulled. I was going to say something in the previous ramble about my little trip to the dentist, but it completely slipped my mind once I started getting into it. But today it’s back to business as usual. So I’ve got a new project that I’m involved in with a few buddies of mine, and I’m going to ramble a bit about that today, then I’m going to share a few videos that I’ve come to like recently (MMD vids for those of you who know it) and before the end I’ll probably share some more information about another “Titan” character and there’ll be, as always, a new Song of the Week.

 

It was a few weeks back when my pals and I were joking around in the chatroom that we frequent, we somehow got on the subject of making our own story. At first it started out whimsical and whatnot, a joke of sorts, but as we continued playing with the idea it somehow occurred to us that this might actually happen. This could really become a thing! And so for the past couple of weeks we’ve been slowly building our story from the ground up. We’ve got a few characters developed, a simple setting that we are working on expanding and something that could possibly be turned into a plot, if handled with enough care. At times it is a bit difficult for us to get stuff done seriously, we do seem to get sidetracked a lot, but I think that in time we just might get something we can work with.

And I’ve got to say, working on a group project like this is a ton of fun! Discussing how our characters act, what they look like and what they provide for the story is a blast. There’s something about bouncing ideas off of other people and making stuff work that isn’t there in solo writing. As I’ve said before, we’re still working on the big details so we’re miles away from anything solid yet, heck, we don’t even know what roles we’re going to play in creating this thing, other than coming up with ideas.

 

And now for some videos, yay! First up is a MikuMikuDance video of Ahri (and a few other LoL characters) dancing along to the ever-so-famous “Gangnam Style”

Next we’ve got Miku Append singing and dancing along with GLaDOS to “Still Alive”

 

And finally this is a song I just heard for the first time last night. This one is called “Perfume” and features the Append models of Hatsune Miku, Akita Neru and Kasane Teto.

 

 

Yes, yes. MMD can look so awesome if done well. But enough of that! Now I’m going to introduce/talk about another character from the “RE:Inspiration; Titan” series. Today’s character doesn’t play a very large role in the happenings of “Titan” but he is someone that I’ve wanted to talk about for a while because he was used as the basis for a character of mine who goes by the name of Allen Maxwell. If you’ve been a long-time reader you might remember Allen from the little Christmas story I threw together back in 2011 (WHAT!?!? It was that long ago?). When I created Allen, who was next in line to inherit the title of Santa Claus, I decided that he should have a special skill (he was a Wizard after all). And while I was thinking of skills that a Santa Claus might wield I somehow found myself looking at an old character of mine: Devon Hastings. Devon has always been part of my cast for the story called “Eleven” and ever since I came up with him he’s had the same special ability, the power to warp space around him. Devon, or Slick as he’s more commonly referred to, can warp the space around his body, which allows him to move around with ease, even in a crowded place. He can even fit through small passages that people might otherwise not be able to fit.

And so I decided to “borrow” Slick’s ability for Allen, after all, Santa can somehow squeeze through chimneys and stuff. I had planned to continue Allen’s story as he traveled the world, but he somehow how put on the back-burner. But Slick’s story is just beginning, or will be just beginning when I start the “NEw” series. For now though, I need to focus on what is on my plate at the moment, namely “Titan III”. T3 is on the final stretch of its writing phase, one or two more scenes and it’ll be ready for revisions, edits and finally: publishing. But until it is finished all I can do is thank any and all of you who have read either of the first two “Titan” short stories and ask that you wait just a bit longer for the next part.

 

For anyone who is interested in reading “Titan” you can download both parts 1 and 2 for free from Smashwords.com.

You can just click on that link to go straight to my profile ^.

 

And that’s the end of the road for this ramble. Before I get out of here, I’ll leave you with this week’s Song of the Week: “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons

 

Anywho, 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. Also, if you have a character that you’d like me to talk about in the next ramble you can tell me via any of the ways stated above. pyoro~n

Late But Not Forgotten

Somehow Friday snuck up on me this week. But that’s not such a bad thing. Part of why the week seemed to fly by is because I’ve been hard at work, both with work and with “RE:Inspiration; Titan III”. It could be due to last week’s normal-size ramble or because of the Archive project that I started, but either way my productivity on “Titan III” sky-rocketed compared to the past few weeks. But enough about that for now, let’s get to rambling, shall we? Today I think I’ll ramble about a few random things, like World of Warcraft Pet Battles and up-coming anime releases and then I want to ramble about “Titan” because it’s still a work in progress but I don’t want people to forget about it. So let’s hop to it:

 

Last weekend I spent most of my freetime playing World of Warcraft, which is something that I don’t really do anymore (play for long periods of time, that is). Over said weekend I accomplished quite a bit in the way of Pet Battles. For one, I got my 500th pet. 500! Wow! I also unlocked the Pristine Pet Trap by leveling 25 pets to level 25. And while I no longer need to catch pets for quantity, I still need to catch them for quality. You see, the pets are ranked in three different ways: Family, Breed and Quality. The family is based on the type of pet. For instance, my Fox Kit, Elsie, is a Beast because foxes are large animals. My Darkmoon Rabbit, Fluffeh, is a critter because rabbits are smaller animals. In total there are ten pet families: Beast, Critter, Humanoid, Dragonkin, Flying, Aquatic, Magic, Mechanical, Undead and Elemental.

The second way the Battle Pets are sorted is by quality. Quality determines how many points your pet has to spend between the three Pet Battle stats: Health, Power and Speed. The higher quality a pet is (Poor, Common, Uncommon or Rare) the more points they have to allocate between the three stats. This leads to the third way that the Battle Pets can be ranked and that is by breed. I only recently started learning about the breed system, but basically each different pet type (i.e. Fox Kit, Darkmoon Rabbit, Fluxfire Feline, etc.) has certain breeds that they can come in. The Darkmoon Rabbit, for example, can come in three different breeds: H/S, S/S and B/B. These stand for, respectively, Health/Speed, Speed/Speed and Balanced/Balanced. What this means is that even though my opponent and I both have the same pet, the Darkmoon Rabbit in this instance, our pets aren’t necessarily evenly matched because they can have different breeds.

The breed of the pets is determined by how their stat-points are allocated. A pet with an S/S/ breed will be really fast, which means your pet attacks first, but will have lower than average health and power. A Power/Power (P/P) pet will hit like a truck, but is also potentially squishy when it comes to taking damage. Health/Health pets are good for taking damage, but when it comes to dealing damage they don’t excel. And finally (even though there are many breeds it’s mostly self-explanatory) the Balanced/Balanced pets have their stats all equally allocated, meaning they are like a jack-of-all-trades in pet battles.

 

Anime! Last time I rambled about the currently airing anime and now I’m going to ramble about anime that will soon be released on DVD and/or Blu-ray in North America. As any long-time readers would know, I like to collect anime (evidence in the old feature called Semajj’s Bookshelf) and that hasn’t changed. In these up-coming months there are quite a few series coming out that I’m pretty excited for. Later this month the sequel to Bakemonogatari, Nisemonogatari, will be released and, even though it’s quite expensive, I’ll be picking it up when it comes out. There’s also the Sora no Otoshimono movie and Tiger and Bunny (part 1) that will be released this month, both of which I’m happy to finally add to my collection. Further in the future I’m really looking forward to the K-ON! movie, Acchi Kocchi (woot!), Kids on the Slope and the second parts of Penguindrum, Fate/Stay Night and Bodacious Space Pirates. I’m especially happy for Acchi Kocchi (Place to Place) getting a release; it’s such an awesome show!

 

Okay, okay let’s talk “Titan”. While “Titan III” is taking quite a while to get finished (which is really an understatement “Hurry the heck up, Semajj!”) but it’s quite a bit longer than “Titan II” which was twice as long as “Titan”. But just because “Titan III” will be more than three times as long as the original, it’s not really an excuse to be taking this long. So I figured I’d talk about some of my characters while I make you guys wait for the real deal.

Today I’m going to talk about the little furry member of Jacobi Myles’ crew: Charlie. Charlie is a unique character, not only because he’s a monkey, but also because he is the only known biological artificial intelligence in the “Titan” universe. And while his A.I. technology is far less-superior than that of the A.I.s on the Windsor (Avast, Bolt and Jolt), he is still far better at computing than people are. Another thing that separates Charlie from the likes of normal A.I.s is the fact that Charlie has a personality, whereas most other A.I.s operate just like a computer would.

Charlie’s character originated years back, he was originally a side-kick to the hero of the jungle, Monkey Man. As a side note, Monkey Man wasn’t an ape-like-man like Tarzan; he was just a talking monkey. The “man” part came from conventional super-hero naming; Spiderman, Batman, Superman, etc…man. The Charlie of the “Monkey Man” universe wasn’t a cyborg/A.I. like the new Charlie, but the concept of the character remains the same. Due to time constraints (and laziness) I won’t set a link, but if you’ve got the time and are interested, you can Google or wiki the Golden Lion Tamarin to see, more-or-less, what Charlie is based off of.

I don’t really know what else to say here, without spoiling stuff, but hey you now know more about Charlie than you did!

 

And that’s it. I’m out of here!

Song of the Week: “Sonna Koto Ura no Mata Urabanashi Deshou?” by Megumi Nakajima.

 

Anywho, 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. Also, if you have a character that you’d like me to ramble about next time you can tell me via any of the ways stated above. *happyface*