As mentioned above, a ton of stuff has happened this week;
heck it’s still happening as I’m typing this blog. I’ll start off with some
great news (if you are a World of Warcraft fan that is, otherwise it’s just
bleh). Last week, Blizzard hosted a “Mists of Pandaria” Press Tour, where they
invited members from various Video Games news sites (sites such as
MMO-Champion, Wowhead and Joystiq) to experience the latest “build” of the
“World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria” game. During the week the press members
were under a NDA and couldn’t release any information they had gathered until
Monday March 19, 2012.
If you haven’t guess by now, the first big thing this week
was the removal of the NDA and the release of a TON of information related to
the latest “World of Warcraft” expansion. I’m not going to go over a lot
(hardly anything actually, I’m trying to stick to my 1k word limit) but I will
go over a few of the tidbits that made me cry tears of nerdy joy. First off,
there was more information added about the Pet Battles (a mini-game being
implemented into “World of Warcraft” akin to the classic “Pokemon” games from
Nintendo); the best piece of news announced, in my opinion, is the addition of
[roughly] 100 new pets to collect. A few other awesome features that are being
added in the new xpac are and Area of Effect looting system, where you’ll be
able to loot the corpses of all of your enemies within a certain proximity of
your location; and a new character slot so that you’ll be able to have eleven
characters per realm.
Lastly they introduced the female Pandaren model, and in
my opinion, it looks great; I’m going to link you to The Official Blizzard Press Tour Coverage Page.
If you follow the link, you will find a page, nicely laid
out by Blizzard, with links to each site and what they have posted concerning
the Press Tour and more information on the subjects that I covered above.
So that was Monday/Tuesday, on Wednesday the week took a
turn for the worse; my supervisor at work went MIA and had apparently given his
two-week notice two-weeks ago. With that my office was in a slight panic, we’d
lost our only project manager. We brought in a foreman from the field and I
helped give him a crash course on estimating as part of his new training to
become our new project manager/estimator. Somehow it all worked out, but it was
a stressful experience to say the least.
On a lighter note I finally made my introductory post on my
buddy Cecil the Dark Knight's Blog.
It’s nothing fantastic, in fact it’s just me saying “Hi, I’ll post here later!”
but if you are looking for anime, manga or visual novel reviews/news you might
want to check out some of the other posts there.
And finally another piece of “World of Warcraft” news that
put my week back into a good place, was the announcement of the start of the
“World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria” beta testing period. That happened late
Wednesday night and on Thursday we saw a new slew of icons, tool-tips, images,
videos and models from the upcoming expansion; this morning even more
data-mined info was released in the form of armor sets and a video
demonstrating the new AoE looting system. What a crazy week it’s been…
As of late I’ve stopped adding to the story that is “NEw”
and I’ve started expanding on the events that take place during the arcs of
“NEw”. For instance, instead of spending time wondering about what will happen
to the heroes and villains after a certain major turning point near the end of
the story, I’ve been working on a (mental) frame by frame of the beginning of
the story. Doing so has brought on new story-telling problems that are harder
to see from the grand scale of creating; like the background characters. I’ve
tiered my characters into an “importance hierarchy” ranging from “Main
Character” to “Main Follower” to “Plot Character” all the way down to
“Character That Is Hit by a Bottle in a Bar-Fight Scene”; of course the last
character doesn’t have a name but that doesn’t mean that he won’t somehow
evolve into a plot character later. I suppose the biggest problem I have when
looking at a frame by frame is the fluff scenes, parts of the story where
nothing really happens, and how to identify them and either skip or transition
into/out of them. Anyway, I’ve got a general idea of how the entire first arc
will play out now and I’m working on how to split the story between arcs two
through four, but that’s a secret.
My, my would you look at the time (word count), it’s time
once again to fluff the pillows and tuck this beast to bed. Before I do that,
like always, it’s time to announce this week’s “Song of the Week”; this week I
give to you, the musical styling’s of “Weird” Al Yancovic with his performance
of “CNR”:
Heh, I’ve always liked “Weird” Al, now we’re moving on to
this week’s edition of “Semajj’s Bookshelf”. This week I got two new dvd sets
to add to my collection. The first was the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack of “Fairy
Tail” part four, the last part of season one. Funimation still hasn’t announced
the plans/release dates for part five onward, but I’m keeping my fingers
crossed. The second set I added to my collection this week was “Motto
To-Love-Ru ~ Trouble” the second season of one of my favorite ecchi/harem shows,
sadly it wasn’t available on BD, but I guess I can’t complain since I got it on
DVD; better than nothing. And that’s all she wrote, except I’m not a she; that’s
an odd expression… Anyway thanks again for reading and as always if you have
any comments, questions, tips or concerns, you can e-mail me at Semajj07@gmail.com or leave a comment in
the boxes below. And since the question thingy didn’t work (no one commented,
woe is me) I’m not going to ask a new question this week. See you next Friday!
Thanks so much for the wealth of the resource!Two-week Notice Form
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