It’s been a busy week for me, and it’s far from over. My mind’s practically on fire with everything coming at me, and I knew there was something necessary to start tying things together, to fully utilize that fire in a productive way. I needed a single location to feature my work, easy to locate and quick to load, to which I can point those interested in seeing exactly what I bring to the table in terms of programming skill and web-based creativity.
Featuring projects past and present, I mean to provide little snapshots of my adeptness at programming, my willingness to work on a team and my propensity for trying new things. I’ll be updating this as my experience grows, but for now it features four of my best sites to date.
Waterfall Jewelers, featuring what may be my programmatic pride and joy to date: a Flash-based Pandora build-a-bracelet app;
The creative mind is like a thoroughbred horse – it requires a firm but flexible grip, one that does not allow the beast to run wild, but also one that permits some leeway, lest the creature rail against its control and fight to be free. Just the right balance of control and detachment puts new ideas on the path to greatness. You know what you want, but permitting your trajectory to follow its own course allows for growth, stays agile in the face of inevitable setbacks and lends a sense of adventure to the overall process.
They’ve called it “the information superhighway.” If you want to travel on it, you’ll need a good vehicle. ‘Good’ is a subjective term – maybe you want something you don’t have to worry about, or perhaps you’re looking for a high-precision machine stuffed with power and bursting with cool gizmos. Either way, you need someone who understands both the beating heart of an Internet vehicle and how the paint’s going to look to visitors after everything is said and done.
That’s where I come in.
I take the ideas that float around the subconscious mind and make them manifest. I find new ways to get things working. I get my hands dirty. It’s messy and magical all at once. I turn dreams into gold – one jot & scribble, one line of code at a time.
What follows is the account of a conversation had in the Blue Moon Alehouse in Fallcrest. Three men, a stonecutter, a tailor and a city guardsman, gathered over mugs of ale to discuss the odd events befalling the Nentir Vale. Despite differing professions and opinions, each man knows the names and deeds of their heroes: Andrasian the elvish warrior, Krillorien Brightsong the eladrin priest of Pelor, Melanie Good-Melons of the Arcane Tower, and Lyria Thorngage of the Junction Thorngages.
“If I mention the weather,” the tailor began once they were served, “are you going to hit me?”
“Gods, you’re paranoid.” The stonecutter’s beefy hand wrapped around the mug and he took a long drink of frothy ale. “No. I’m not going to hit you.”
“It’s on everybody’s mind.” The guardsman had unbelted his sword and it leaned against the table beside him as he nursed his drink. “You can’t help but notice the snow coming out of the sky.”
“In this season!” The stonecutter shook his head. “It’s bad for business. I can’t be up the side of a building carving gutters or fixing shingles when it’s like this.”
“You’d think I’d have an easier time, but everybody’s asking for furs I don’t have, when they manage to leave their hearth fires.” The tailor sighed and took a drink. “What do we know about this?”
“It’s snow. What is there to know?”
“Perhaps one or more of the gods have been offended, my granite-minded friend.”
The guardsman shook his head at the tailor. “The only god I know of with such power over the skies is Kord, and he’s more likely to smite us with lightning than sprinkle snow on our heads. No, this is likely something else.”
The stonecutter belched. “What, then?”
“Many and varied are the magical artifacts at the disposal of our benevolent dictator. The defeat of his Iron Circle in the Harkenwold cannot have endeared him towards us. Perhaps this is Emperor Lysander’s subtle revenge, or a tactic designed to bring us to heel.”
“Codswallop.” The stonecutter took another drink, then wiped the foam from his beard. “Lysander’s a boy in a man’s clothes playing at war. He would not use such subtle means. He’d smack us with every Iron Circle fist at his disposal were he truly interested in direct conquest.”
The tailor nodded. “Besides, the Lord Marshall pays the Empire their dues on time. Lysander would have no cause to subject the entire Vale to his wrath if it’s the Harkenwold that’s offended him while Fallcrest remains loyal, at least in word.”
“All I know is the Lord Marshall and some of the other nobles have left for Winterhaven to seek aid from Ten Towers.”
The stonecutter snorted. “They haven’t dreamed up a better name for it yet?”
“Well, it beats ‘The Keep We Reclaimed From The Heretics Trying To Open A Portal To The Shadowfell And Still Creeps The Folk Of Winterhaven Out’, doesn’t it?”
“Who asked you, tailor?”
The guardsman rolled his eyes, and waved the barmaid over for another round.
All locations, NPCs, spells and equipment copyright Wizards of the Coast unless otherwise noted.
My sister’s Commander. She gains life. A LOT of life.
My family has become pretty keen on the “newest” Magic: the Gathering format. I put the quotes around ‘newest’ because it’s a format that’s actually been around for a while, underground & independent. But like the rockers who have to trade in their hipster glasses for suits & ties because they have to meet with label people now, the format’s been picked up by the big name and now is getting mass-produced later this year. I’m speaking of what Magic calls Commander, but some folks still know it as Elder Dragon Highlander, or EDH.
Instead of your typical constructed format, Commander has an interesting if somewhat quirky rule set that changes the pace and flavor of the game:
Each player begins with 40 life.
You may have 100 cards in your deck, one of which must be your Commander.
Aside from basic lands, you are allowed 1 copy of each card in your deck.
The Commander must be a legendary creature.
Your Commander is not shuffled into your deck but remains in a special area out of play. You can summon it at any time for its mana cost.
If your Commander would be destroyed, exiled or otherwise removed from play, instead of going to the graveyard or being exiled it returns to its area. It can be resummoned, but 2 colorless mana is added to its casting cost for each time it is sent back to its area in this way.
The colors of the Commander define the colors of the deck. For example: if your Commander is red, blue and black, the cards in your deck cannot contain green or white.
Typically, the Commander also lends a theme to the deck, be it creature removal, life gain or straight-forward beat-down. I originally built a creature-enchantment deck around Razia, Boros Archangel, but since most of my father’s cards are red and white, he picked her up as well. So, I’ve gone back to the drawing board. I tried a red-black burn deck with Lyzolda, the Blood Witch as the Commander… it didn’t end well. Now that more or less I know what I’m facing, as my family has become my ‘local meta’, I’ve started on a few ideas.
Vorosh, the Hunter is the most viable, unique Commander I have currently, as Teneb is being fielded (quite effectively!) by my sister-in-law, Beth. I’m building a graft/infect deck around him. The more proliferation I can get into it, the better. Until then it’ll be using some of my more insidious control tricks, at least until I get some other decks up and running. While it might be some time before that happens, due to limited resources, a couple other ideas have popped into my head.
The other big idea I had involves control and artifacts, two great tastes that taste great together. The latest block of expansions introduced a few really neat control devices reliant on artifacts, so I would need a Leonid Abunas to keep them safe. But what if he didn’t come out in time? And I still needed a Commander. A little searching, however, introduced me to Sharuum the Hegemon. Black allows for creature recursion (Abunas won’t stay dead!) and her ability for bringing artifacts back is not only good for when she gets sent packing back to her perch outside of the game, but also plays right into the hands of my favorite planeswalker – Venser the Sojourner.
So I have a few things to consider as I plan for my next encounter with my fellow planeswalkers. After all, in the end, there can be only one.
There are a great many cautionary tales that carry the message “Be careful what you wish for.” Some of the most potent come from our own history. For example, never allow yourself to be dared to do something you normally do with compensation for free, just ‘for the fun of it.’ It isn’t fun at all when you need to review a movie like Druids.
The title’s misleading, in a way, as druids only exist peripherally to the historical tale of Gaul warlord and king Vercingetorix. It’s likely that the production companies behind this awful film figured that was too many syllables for large American mouths trying to talk around the processed meat of their Whoppers. Anyway, Vercingetorix united the fractured tribes of Gaul in 52 BC against rising Roman proconsul Gaius Julius Caesar. While other chieftains never managed to get more than a few tribes on their side before another chieftain decided he had bigger balls, Vercingetorix dropped his mighty brass ones on everybody’s faces until they fell in line, and introduced the world to scorched earth warfare. Unfortunately, the tribal leaders remained fractured without his leadership, and when he became beseiged at Alesia and sent out for aid, the aid that came was practically leaderless and faced fortified Roman positions. In the end, Vercingetorix surrendered in person to Caesar, who imprisoned him and later executed the King of the Gauls at his Triumph in 44 BC, just a few steps from the Senate where he would be stabbed to death himself.
As stories go, in and of themselves, that’s a pretty good one. It takes real effort to butcher the narrative into something nearly unwatchable. You begin with your basic Anachronism Stew, which in this case is equal parts middle ages European architecture, horned helmets for the Gauls, period inappropriate armor for the Romans and stirrups on all of the horses. Mix in the facts of the events from a Grade 9 history textbook, write some dialog with the skill and editorial sense of a Final Fantasy fanfic writer, give the actors their direction in the vein of a high school dramatics production, fill the scenes with generic music, and presto! You’ve got a shitty movie.
One of the biggest problems with this movie is that it isn’t sure how best to approach its material. On the one hand, it seems like they’re trying to convey the timbre and timing of the events as they happened before the birth of Christ. On the other, it feels like they’re trying to cast Vercingetorix as the bastard butt-baby of William Wallace and Conan the Barbarian. The involvement of the druids seems to indicate that our hero has a mystical destiny, or at the very least special powers or a magic sword. The way the camera slows down, then speeds up, then slows down again during his ‘training’ certainly point things in that direction. Then again, these shots are so disjointed and crappy I think the director might have been drunk through the entire production.
Get used to that expression, he wears it the whole film.
There are so many bad production and editorial decisions on display, I don’t even know where to begin. Playing the role of Vercingetorix is Christopher Lambert, who delivers his lines so woodenly I suspect he attends Entmoots with Hayden Christensen and Channing Tatum, which says nothing about a stare so dead it shames any game BioWare’s ever made. Max von Sydow is the archdruid and I kept asking the man what he was doing in this turd. Gone is the cultured gravitas of Leland Gaunt or the mystery of Doctor Kynes or the malevolent glee of Ming the fucking Merciless; hell, this makes me want to watch Judge Dredd again so I can see the man do something at least approaching his level of grandeur. And a robot that tears people’s limbs off, and Rob Schneider in a role where I didn’t completely hate his annoying ass. …What was I talking about? Oh, right, Druids. Or The Gaul. Or Vercingetorix or whatever it’s actually called in its native French. What’s French for “Don’t watch this turd”, I wonder?
That’s another thing. This film was shot in both French and English, but it’s all dubbed. One moment the characters are speaking synced English and the next they’re obviously speaking in French but the words we hear aren’t in that language. Hell, some of the English lines are so badly dubbed while English is being spoken it’s like they didn’t know how to speak any language properly. If it had all been in French with subtitles, at least I could change the emoting in my head to spice up the flat, lifeless dialogue. It’s writing so stilted and ungainly it makes me want to cry. People don’t talk like this, even when you translate French to English. Just ask Luc Besson. Or better yet, go watch The Professional or The Fifth Element. Don’t watch this film.
“No, Mr. Vercingetorix, I expect you to die.”
On top of the awful writing, the shoddy direction, the abyssmal soundtrack and the unforgivable abuse of pre-BCE French history, there’s the portrayal of Caesar. It’s one thing to portray one of the most influential figures in Roman history as an intelligent, calculating and ultimately ruthless man; it’s quite another to cast him as little more than a Bond villain. And yet here we have him, a noble Italian gentleman of both arms and letters, played by a roly-poly Austrian dude who’s biggest claim to fame is being… well, a Bond villain. The one from Never Say Never Again, in fact, where he plays a video game with Bond. He doesn’t so much display charm and aplomb as much as he oozes the sort of slimy, ambitious arrogance that just makes your skin crawl. I mean, sure, maybe Caesar really was like that but with this guy in the role it makes the Roman Reich feel a hell of a lot like the Third.
And… now that I’ve Godwin‘d this review it’s probably time to end it. I think I’ve made, belabored and overstated my point: Do not watch this film. Watch the HBO/BBC series Rome for a much better take on the history of the period. Watching the aformentioned Besson films for good French action and direction. Hell, go watch Flash Gordon to see Max von Sydow enjoying himself instead of letting the man who’s been dead inside since he stopped being the Highlander kick him in the ass.
Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.
