Of Tired, Titan and Miku

Hi. Welcome to another Weekly Ramble, the thirteenth Weekly Ramble to be exact. It’s late and I’m kinda fried at the moment, rushing to finish my short-story and all, so today’s ramble will be relatively short. Since we are taking the speedy approach to this week’s ramble, I’ll hit a few news things, maybe talk about “Rize of the Fenix” and do the usual stuff at the end. Oh right, there is no “The Creator’s Corner” this week because “The Creator” has left early for the weekend. Hah hah hah… Shall we begin?

While I write this ramble I am waiting for my short story, which I promised would be out today, to upload onto Smashwords. So that when you are reading this ramble you can also download the free short story, I’ll link you to it in a bit.

First off, I want to show you this:

I also want to tell you that I am super excited about this game, since it is the game that comes with the special edition PS Vita that I showed you last week.

 Another video game that is in the process of being released is Dead or Alive 5.

Dead or Alive has always been one of my favorite fighting games, and now the long awaited fifth game is nearing completion!

See? I told you we are going to sprint through this ramble. What’s next? Rize of the Fenix, the new Tenacious D album. It’s good. At first I was a little underwhelmed by the length of the album, but after listening to the songs a few times, I can say that there isn’t one track that I don’t like. If you’re a fan of rock and roll, or comedy music, and you haven’t heard Tenacious D, I implore you to do so.

Hmm shortest ramble ever? Probably, but before I end it I’m going to talk about my newly published short story “RE:Inspiration; Titan”. I started this story back in December after my good friend J.R. Nova inspired to actually write something. The story was mostly complete up until part three for about a month or two, but just this Monday I decided that it could be better. So I made it better, hopefully. RE:I is a bridge between “NEw” and “Eleven” and it may be a bit confusing. I did my best to explain the setting and happenings, but in the end it was a bit rushed. I really can’t focus on anything right now so I’m pretty lost… Anyway please enjoy RE:Inspiration;Titan, Part One and leave any feed-back to it in an e-mail or as a review on Smashwords.com. Oh and if you have a problem downloading it (region restrictions or w/e) just let me know where I should post it instead. But that shouldn't be a problem. 

Ehhhh my brain… it feels like mush…

I didn’t know that Smashwords had such a strict formatting policy, so that took a lot out of me that was supposed to be for this ramble. Eh hah hah…

So yeah that’s pretty much it. Oh yeah if anyone knows how to get rid of those ugly black lines at the page breaks, let me know and I’ll edit those out of the story.

Finally I’m done. This week was another close-call victory at 4-3 again, but this time I lost on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, so I had to play perfect for the rest of the week to win. Cool.

New to the “Bookshelf of Semajj” is the complete first season of “Shinryaku! Ika Musume” or “Squid Girl” on BD. And “Pumpkin Scissors” the S.A.V.E. edition on DVD. By the way you may have noticed a slight improvement in picture quality. It is true, I worked a bit harder on them this week. You may also notice a distinct lack of Cha-Cha the little Panda-Dude. I decided to take these pictures with the items lying flat so I decided to go with a cardboard cut-out thing of Haruhi instead.

 There is the song of the week “The Ballad of Hollywood Jack and the Rage Kage” by Tenacious D, off of their new album “Rize of the Fenix”, in stores now. Anywho that’s all I got, like always if you’ve got any comments, questions, tips or concerns you can leave me an e-mail at Semajj07@gmail.com or you can leave a comment in the boxes below. See you in June!

Warning: Parental Descretion is Advised

Howdy, howdy! Welcome to Weekly Ramble number twelve, as usual I am James and I’m going to ramble about a bunch of stuff, such as: Diablo III, MOT Songs, Spending Habits and “The Little Things”. I’ll also take a trip to “The Creator’s Corner” and talk about RE;Inspiration: Titan, and as always we’ll see what’s new in “Semajj’s Bookshelf”, there’ll be a new Song of the Week and as mentioned last week I’ll announce the results of my new “game” in a new segment I like to call “Rambler versus the World”. Enjoy:

In the second half of last week’s “The Creator’s Corner” I talked about my latest MOT Song “Blind Melon x Angel Beats”, well later that night I sat down and created the above video. If there are region restrictions or whatever you can also view the video here, this was uploaded by my friend 321agemo, if you follow the link above the video to his channel you’ll find six more awesome MOT Songs. In the near future, when I’m off of my Diablo III high, I’m going to go back and make videos of the other four MOT Songs that I have put together; when I do so, I will be sure to share them all here. 7V8ZY57FMJJ

I was going to do Diablo III first, but I figured I’d save it for last, so now we’ll move on and talk about my horrible habit of impulse buying. At the start of 2012 I decided to start following a financial schedule, I made it really simple: first I would have “x” amount of dollars for bills and what-not; then I had “x” amount of money that I would put away each month; and lastly all of the left-over money would be free-spending money. Well for the most part I’ve adhered to this schedule; I failed to keep my spending habits under control in March and spent a little more than I had planned but I made up for it in April. Yesterday while surfing the Internet I discovered that the pre-orders were available for the Special Edition Hatsune Miku Crystal White PS Vita, so the impulse buyer that I am, I pre-ordered it. I was planning on buying the SE Miku PS Vita after Anime Expo, now I just have to save my “free-spending money” from now until AX for spending at AX. I guess in the end I can just take my “free-spending money” later in the year to make-up for any mistakes in my plan I may have caused by spending so much, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see. More updates later, maybe…

Switching gears here really quick, I just want to say that it really makes me happy when people talk about and/or share my rambles. It’s the little things in life that matter, y’know? When people comment on these (or about these elsewhere) it makes me all giddy inside. So I’d like to thank all my readers, and super-thanks to those of you who share/talk about these rambles. I don’t really know how to reward readers, other than to keep writing, so as a tie-in to this week’s edition of “The Creator’s Corner” I’ll announce that, for better or for worse, I’m going to release the first chapter in a three-part short series next Friday. More details next week!

I guess another thing that I can do to sort of reward someone would be to share another Crunchyroll 48 Hour Guest Pass! I’ll hide the code somewhere in this ramble, and once you find it all you have to do is go to this link and enter the code to redeem it for two days of Crunchyroll goodness. As always it is first-come first-serve so if you are interested in being the lucky one to get this code make haste and find it!

Okay so I mentioned I was going to release a short-story next Friday, which is true, but there are a few things that should be made clear first: This short story is part one of three, I don’t really have a release schedule so I have no idea when part two will be released; I’m going to release it whether or not I’m happy with it, I’ve been working on it for a long time (remember, I am a slow worker) and I think it’s in a good place; a warning note, it is a bridge story between NEw and its spin-off Eleven, so details may change between the release of this story and the completion of NEw, so think of it as an early draft of a future story; and finally this is my first “original” story that I am showing to people so if you read it next Friday when I post it, please give me as much feed-back as possible.

Finally I’ll talk about Diablo III, my experience at the Launch Event, my initial feelings toward the game and my feelings toward the game now. On Monday morning I left work early and went to wait in line to get my copy of D3 and to get it signed by the developers from Blizzard. From 10:00 to 16:00 I waited in line with my sisters, at 16:00 my dad arrived and we packed up our chairs and what-not because the line slowly started moving forward. They moved the line into a corral type-line, like amusement park lines, where we waited until midnight to get our game and get it signed; while they moved the line they gave each of us a numbered wrist band for easy game-distribution, I was number 100, cool huh? While waiting in the corral we were shown a plethora of Diablo related interviews and cut-scenes from the previous two Diablo games. Along with the videos they had live art by artists who worked on the game, Blizzard employees had their Diableards shaved off and they shot plenty of t-shirts and mouse-pads into the audience, both of my sisters were lucky enough to catch a t-shirt. When the time came we were herded, in numerical order, through the gates where we received our game and got the chance to have it signed.

I didn’t stay up all night and play, but I did take Tuesday off and played mostly all day. At first I was super excited, something along the lines of “OMGITSFINALLYTIMEFORDIABLOIIIOMGICAN’TWAITTOPLAYOMGTHISISAWESOME” and now after having played it a little more my reaction is more or less the same; in other words Diablo III is awesome. The only bad thing I have to say is about the server-stability, but I understand that any server would have stability problems when several million people from all around the world try to log in all at the same time. And again if anyone wants to add me on Battle.Net my BattleTag is Semajj#1465.

And that’s that. Now to start the end we’ll have our very first set of results in “Rambler versus the World”. Starting from last Friday and ending yesterday I kept track of my points as mentioned in last week’s ramble. In the end I won 4 days to 3. Writing 1000 words (non-ramble) was definitely the hardest task, I think I only completed it once and that was on Wednesday and reading and stretching were the only two tasks that I completed each day. Hopefully I can win again this week, preferably with a better score. Okay this week I added four items to “Semajj’s Bookshelf” they are as follows: Diablo IIICollector’s Edition, Tenacious D "Rize of the Fenix" LP, Shiki Part 1 DVD/BD Combo and Shiki Part 2DVD/BD Combo. If you noticed, each item is now a link to a picture of my item accompanied by “Cha-Cha the Guardian of the Bookshelf”. From now on I’ll try to post pictures of my new stuff when I share them in “Semajj’s Bookshelf” and as usual there will be links in the next page to where you can purchase these items. Wow the quality there is bad, I'll try to improve the quality of the pictures, I was in a hurry this morning when I was in the process of taking them. I know I can take better pictures with more time spent on the lighting and what-not, but if you have any tips on taking pictures please let me know what I can do to improve my ability. Warning, the following song may contain "bad-words":

This week’s Song of the Week is “Bad Habit” by The Offspring. Cool now it’s time for me to call it a day. Like always if you have any comments, questions, tips or concerns you can leave me an e-mail at Semajj07@gmail.com or you can leave a comment below. See you in future times!

A Game in Preparation for "D-Day"

Hello and welcome to Weekly Ramble number eleven.  I am James and I’ve got quite a bit of stuff to ramble about, so let’s get straight to it. Today there’ll be ramblings about Diablo III, a new “game” that I’m going to start playing, two trips to “The Creator’s Corner” and as always we’ll see what’s new in “Semajj’s Bookshelf” and we’ll enjoy a new Song of the Week. But first, how about another new Tenacious D song/video?

Awesome, as always the D brings another rockin’ song to the table. By the way, their new album Rize of the Fenix comes out next Tuesday, but do you know what also comes out next Tuesday? That’s right, Diablo III, the year’s most anticipated video game. So since D3 is right around the corner, I thought I’d write a quick piece about what the game has in store for us. First of all, if you are planning to play D3 there are a few things that need to be done before you log in, such as: purchasing the game, creating a battle.net account and a battletag, and pre-downloading the game; all of which can done from this page.

After all of that set-up mumbo-jumbo you need to think about which Hero you are going to venture into the land of Sanctuary as. You have five heroes to choose from: The Barbarian, The Witch Doctor, The Demon Hunter, The Wizard and The Monk. This is a page that will let you look at each of the classes, and by clicking certain links on the page you can view their armor progression, the abilities they gain as the level-up and you can even view videos of each ability. Once the game goes live, if anyone is interested in adding me to their friends list, my Battletag is "Semajj#1465".

Okay, now about this new “game” that I’m going to start playing. The object of the game is to go about your daily life and accomplish certain tasks, sounds simple right? Well it is. I got the idea from my friend J.R. Nova’s recent blog post, for the past few days I’ve been building my list of tasks and I’ve come up with a pretty good list. But before I tell you what is on my task-list, I’ll tell you about the score system: completing each task awards one point per day, failing to complete a task costs two points (in J.R.’s blog he says three, but my list is only seven tasks long so if I had a -3 for each one I’d only be able to fail one task per day). There are also special tasks (2 of the 7) that can award bonus points if I complete them more than once per day, like writing.

Writing is the first task that I put on my list, each day I must write at least 1000 words on any of my projects (NEw, Eleven, Volt or Black Rock Shooter Append, a Ramble cannot count as an initial point) to get the point, but if I write an additional 1000 words in the same day I get an additional point (this 1000 extra words can count a ramble, so on Fridays I’ll almost always get a bonus point!).

The second task on my list is to create and post twenty Anime Motivational Posters over on /AMP/, this will be easy on some days when my “motivation” if flowing, but on other days when I’m lacking a line or a raw, I may have trouble living up to the expectations. This is the second of two tasks that can award more than one point; after the initial twenty MOTs posted I can earn an additional point per ten MOTs posted, so if I post forty MOTs in a single day, then I earn three points from this task.

The third task is to walk, whether it be around the block or down to my local shopping center to browse, I must walk for at least ten minutes to earn this point.

The fourth task is similar to the third task and it is to stretch. I have a certain routine of stretches that I perform most nights before I go to bed, so this point will force me to make sure I stretch each night for an easy point. Did you know that stretching before sleeping will help your body relax better for a higher percentage at an uninterrupted sleep?

This next task will be a little daunting at first, and that is to post on a social networking site at least once per day. As of right now I rarely post anything on either of the social networking sites that I belong to (G+ and Twitter) besides announcing my new Rambles. So be it: commenting on a post from a friend or posting a fun fact for the heck of it, I’ll have to post at least once to get a point.

The second-to-last task on my list is to read. I am currently in the middle of reading “Under the Dome” by Stephen King, a novel which I have been reading since my 18^th birthday back in 2010. The point of this task is to get me to read more, sure I’ve put “Under the Dome” on hold a few times and read other books, but I want to finish it and move on to more books that are back-logged, giving myself a point for reading for at least half-an-hour each day will help me accomplish this goal.

And lastly I have “watch an episode of anime on BD/DVD” a rewarding point, because all I have to do is sit back, relax and watch anime, one of my favorite pass-times. But there is a reason to this task, just like with books I have a back-log of anime that I own and have yet to watch, so watching at least one episode a day will help me get through some series’ faster so I have a better chance at catching up with my ever expanding collection of anime.

So each day I must complete at least five out of these seven tasks to “win” the day, and at the end of each week I’ll have a total of “won days” to “loss days” which I will announce here at the end of my rambles and I’ll compile a list of the tasks which I find myself struggling with. I’m still thinking of a silly/creative name for the segment, but it will happen and it will start next week!

Woah nelly, this is gettin’ to be a bit lengthy, so I’ll cut to the chase and keep this “episode” of “The Creator’s Corner” kinda short:

Last time on “The Creator’s Corner” I talked about NEw being set in an alternate universe, where everything is a clean slate for me to create upon. Well earlier this week I was toiling over the fact that space (y’know, outer-space, the universe and what-not) is big, and writing about space is though. I was in a slight depression because I wanted to study the lay-out of the galaxies in the universe (the known universe anyway) and when I started there was so much information. But then I remembered: I’m the creator here, I can do what I want, this isn’t non-fiction, so who cares if I make up a few planets in a galaxy far, far away. So I did.

How’s that for short and sweet? Now one last “trip” to “The Creator’s Corner” and that is to announce my latest mini-creative activity: The MOT song: No Rain x Angel Beats! It will be posted on /AMP/ sometime later today, but you can find the whole thing in order (once it’s finished) here at my crunchyroll gallery. At said gallery you can also find my other MOT songs and the preview/intro to “Black Rock Shooter Append”. Sweet.

And now 300-something words over my 1k goal I will tuck this thing into bed, but first I’ll point you over to “Semajj’s Bookshelf” where you’ll notice that there is a new item, an actual book! Yup, only one item was added this week and that item is “The Wind Through the Keyhole” book 4.5 in Stephen King’s 7 book “The Dark Tower Series”. The final book in the series came out in 2004 and this new book is the first book since then to return to the series. You can go here to read more about “The Dark Tower”.

Yeah, it’s an obscure song, I don’t even know where it’s from or who it’s by, I just know that I heard it as a child and have loved it ever since. Okay now it’s time to fly out of here like a fox fleeing from the farmer. Like always if you have any comments, questions, tips or concerns you can leave me an e-mail at Semajj07@gmail.com or you can comment below. Thanks for reading and see you after “D-Day”!

The D + PSG

Hello and welcome to Weekly Ramble number 10 on today May 4th, 2012. As usual I am James and I will be talking about things that I want to talk about. There are a few bits of news that I’ll start off with, then I’ll talk about some character development stuff in “The Creator’s Corner” and I’ll also talk about a fun little project that I started this week. And as always I’ll show you some new stuff on “Semajj’s Bookshelf” and a new Song of the Week sometime before the end of this ramble. Enjoy:

That’s right, the official music video for Tenacious D’s new song, “Rize of the Fenix”, is out for your viewing pleasure. You can click this link to go to the official Tenacious D website where you can pre-order their new album, buy some Tenacious D gear and listen to a few of their new songs. Like I’ve said before, the new album “Rize of the Fenix” hits stores on May 15, 2012 so if you’re into Tenacious D you’ve got something to look forward to in the next few weeks!

A few weeks back I shared J.R. Nova's book called Rising (The Czar Chronicles), today I figured it would be appropriate to share some of my thoughts on this novel. I’ll try to be as vague about details as possible as to not spoil anything about the story: Personally, I really liked Rising, it was a fun read and each time I picked it up, I had trouble setting it down. I really liked the twist on some classic “fantasy”/”horror” characters/creatures such as werewolves and witches; I kinda wish that we could have spent more time with the vampire, but I guess the next two books of the trilogy will cover that. Hmm I’d have to say my favorite character was the male lead character, Zen, probably because I’ve always had a thing for characters with “hidden-potential” as shown near the end of the story. Another point in the story which really stood out to me was the relationship between the “big-bad-guy” Czar and his underling Franz, the conflict between them doesn’t start to show until the end, but I like where this could lead to; especially considering a certain twist having to do with a certain werewolf who survives a certain ordeal. So overall I’ll give Rising a 5/5, it’s somewhat short (although that just might be because I’m accustomed to reading Stephen King novels with plenty of pages) but sweet, and I’m already patiently waiting for the next installment of “The Czar Chronicles”. Great job J.R.

Now I want to ramble a bit about reviews. Frankly, I suck at reviews. If you want to call the above a “review” then you can, but it doesn’t seem like a professional review, so I guess I could say “I suck at professionally reviewing things.” Well I guess that’s my ramble about reviews, hah, I don’t know why but whenever I decide to try to write a formal review I just freeze and nothing happens. If you remember a few weeks back, I said that I was going to start posting on my friend Cecilthedarkknight's blog page, but I just can’t seem to write anything worth posting for him. Bah, I’ll leave the reviews to the reviewers and I’ll just keep ramblin’.

Moving on, we have “The Creator’s Corner”! Today I’m going to talk about “Main Protagonist” who, incidentally, is the main protagonist in NEw and how he develops throughout the story. I don’t know why but I just don’t think it’d be a good idea to give out his name, so I’m just going to refer to him as Main (which isn’t his actually name, believe me). In the beginning of NEw, like in most fantasy/adventure stories, Main is confronted by a terrible villain; and after having his face pounded into the mud by this villain he decides that he will stop at nothing to defeat said villain. As time progresses Main will gain and lose allies (and foes), but more allies usually isn’t enough to stop the big-bad, and so Main also needs to go though some changes to essentially “power-up” before the final confrontation. Main starts out with a fairly week supernatural power and a set of revolvers, and as the story goes on he changes, he gains more powers (by both improving his power and gaining new powers from outside sources) and better weapons with which to fight against the terrible villain. The main thing I want to talk about today in this segment is a new weapon that Main comes into possession of: a heavenly Pole-arm called “Sortie On-High”. I wanted to share “Sortie On-High” because I thought it would be a perfect transition tool to talk about a part the world that NEw is set in: the religions. In NEw I’m starting over with human history so that I don’t have to worry about historical accuracy in my story (making sure story matches history is just a bummer, y’know?) and so, any ideas of religion in the world of NEw is, well, new.  God(s), devil(s), angels, demons, humans or whatever, they’re all on a clean slate, and I like it. I’m not going to share much more (at least for today) because I once heard (or read, I don’t remember) but sharing too much of a story before it’s done will lessen the impact of the story when it is finished.
So now I’m going to go to “The Creator’s Corner Part Two” and I’ll talk (very quickly) about a new project: “Black Rock Shooter Append” this is a short story/fanfic that I’m writing in the form of MOTs, that I’m doing for fun. The above link will take you to the “prologue” of the short story, they might change as the rest of the story gets written, so think of them as a sample of what’s to come.

Okay well that’s that for today. Limiting myself to “about 1000 words” is kinda lame because sometimes I don’t get to talk about everything that I want to talk about, but I don’t want my readers to feel overwhelmed when I post 2-4k words a week. If you don’t have a problem with reading a lengthier ramble, just let me know. But until then I’ll keep it short. One new item was added to “Semajj’s Bookshelf” this week, and that is “Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood the OVA Collection” and you can find a link to that in the new “Semajj’s Bookshelf” page/tab at the top of this page. I also added "Otogi Zoshi the Collection of Ages" to the list because a few weeks ago I got it as a free Blind-Box item, but forgot to include it in the segment for that week, so now it's there too. The following video is an AMV (anime music video) using the song "Fly Away" and the anime "Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt" (which is available for preorder from Funimation at Rightstuf.com, just follow the link). The AMV may contain spoilers and may not be exactly SFW: 

And that's our Song of the Week, "Fly Away" by TeddyLoid, oh and the "Songs to Ramble To" section is still under construction but will hopefully be done soon. Anywho I’m needed elsewhere so I’ll leave you with the usual exit banter; you know, the part where I tell you to post in the boxes below (or e-mail me at Semajj07@gmail.com) if you have any concerns, tips, questions or comments? Well that’s all for today, and as always: May the Fourth Be With You!