DIpresation

DIpresation

Hello! This blog post is the summary and story (so far) of my latest school project, Destination imagination (DI). Specifically Tricky Tales. In this project there is not a driving question since this is not a PLP project. It is kind of like PLP on steroids. Basically we get a project and we need to create an 8 minute skit to fill the criteria. It is world wide as well. No pressure. It’s run by… itself. It’s that big. N o P r E s S u R e. Also we can’t get ANY sort of help from others that aren’t in our group. Thats not too bad but that does mean we might have to learn soldering. My group for this project is Julia, Jupiter, Kai, Luca, Makai, and Tom. Note: this is not supposed to be educational. Also I doubt this will be well put together since there are a LOT of big and hard emotions involved (also trying to make it shorter which I am doing SO well with so far (/s)). Also maybe not the best grammar. Sorry. Now lets jump into the lava lake.

Ok. I learn of DI around October I think? Well I get the general feel for what DI is. We tell them what subproject we want. I chose the Fine Arts one because I like Fine Arts. It’s cool and creative. Only latter do learn that that is the hardest one of them all. YEAH. Already stressed about it at this point, but we aren’t doing it yet. We get to wait a month before then so I try to put it out of my head. Then DI does roll around and I, from the beginning, am not trying to win it. Oh did I not mention that? It’s a C o M p E t I t I o N. No biggy. Class ends and we are assigned to read through the 14 page project and to take highlight stuff. We were also given this FIFTY TWO page document of rules. If you think thats not too bad this is a part from it about foot coverings, not shoes, foot coverings: Foot Coverings: All team members must wear shoes or foot coverings with reasonably impenetrable soles at all times during a tournament. This is to protect team members from any undetected debris that may be on the floor. A team member who loses a foot covering during the Presentation may continue their portion of the Presentation only after the foot covering is replaced. Appraisers may assist the team member in retrieving the foot covering but not in replacing it on the foot. The remaining team members may continue to present.

It wasn’t the next year that I learned that I was supposed to read of all it. I forget what we did next probably some icebreakers? What exactly is the project you ask? Well I’ll tell you just be patient. … … … haha. Ok seriously basically what my team has to do is make an 8 minute skit about a trickster in a tricky situation.  A story! Not too hard If you know how. Also we have to have a costume transformation with Technical Methods. Ooh, fancy. Basically through math and science. We need an illusion. Defined as something designed to wrongfully perceived. Fancy words, am I right? Two Choice Elements is also something we need to do. Choose two things to add that shows our teams interests, skills, talents, and areas of strength. Harder then we thought so far. We also need a story with a trickster and a tricky situation. 

What I do remember is that I brainstorming for the project. We got this doc with these squares and we wrote ideas for the project in them. Since there was six of us so far (we didn’t get Makai until later. Yeah we get more people. Even EASIER) there we a lot of squares. We spent about an hour I think sorting them. We also continued practicing instant challenges. Instant challenges are ANOTHER thing we have to do the day of. Basically we are given some materials and some instructions. We have to complete the challenge in often around two minutes then perform it for some other short amount of time. Next class we sifted through the idea boxes down into some we like… that we aren’t using I believe. Honesty our fault there but you can’t win the all. Next we start making a “Decision Matrix.” Our teachers described this as… I forget. I’ll describe it. You got chart. Put decisions that need to me made on. Choose what type of decision making you want it to be (which is a decision (inception on multiple levels:)). Then a secondary decision making way. They also showed us some damn convoluted ways to make decisions because voting and consensus are too hard. Think they mixed that one up but what ever. As you can probably guess we didn’t use. Then we really start brainstorming which was crap. I can say this because I am in this group; we didn’t get many good ideas. We got some good stuff but we should have got more. I also was sick for a while and they DIDN’T TELL me what they did! The fear of the unknown yo fancy meeting you here. Also we are teenagers so we are not the best at being on task I have really learned. Probably doesn’t help that they are listening to music, playing on their iPads and have iPads in the first place! At this point I’m crying after school every day and boy is my mental health is taking a beating. Keep in mind this isn’t the only thing that I have going on. YEAH! Also the teachers only NOW realize that we have basically no idea what we were doing and we had to do a sort restart. So I think I got us back on track (kinda) so we got an actual story that isn’t a pile of words so thats good. Then this semester is ending and we don’t have any more class time. We have to do it outside of schools. I learned that people do a lot of more things than me. And humans are fricking frustrating. Take me for example. Also teachers are shooting down everyone’s ideas. I know its not me but it still hurts ok! I’m semi-ranting in a blog post. Bet my teachers will love this. And I’m also critiquing them. Might be getting some bad grades after this lol. I also lost a best friend a few months ago. And my counsellor might have covid and is sick. Now you’re up to date. Bye.

See ya around and goodbye, Judah G!

 

ps shoutout to Caden for coming up with this awesome title.

Universes Beyond; beyond kindness

Magic the Gathering and Universes Beyond

Hello and welcome to my third blog in a mini five part blog series! It this post I will be talking about the VERY controversial topic, a sub-brand in Magic: Universes Beyond. I am definitely not the most informed about this topic so if you want to look in depth in this topic, I would suggest watching this video by Tolarian Community College.

First of all what is Universes Beyond? Universes Beyond is a sub-brand of Magic. In this fairly new product line Wizards of the Coast sells unique cards never seen before… but with a different IP. For instance, Walking Dead which happens to be the first look we see at Universes Beyond. Not only that, but at this point they weren’t going to be printing them ever again. Magic IP or not. People were fuming. A huge problem Magic has is that distribution of cards, and these were expensive and limited! Also this brought up the question; is Magic just going to become I crew the Death Star with Superman? Nobody wanted that. And if you wanted to use these cards you had to use the other IP’s! Will they do any IP? Hell yes! They will suck this cash cow dry until the we kill each other with population!

Nice little card I made as an exmaple.

Well, for once Wizards of the Coast listened. They were going to print Magic IP versions of those cards… in a few years. Well its better than nothing. Actually, Universes Beyond could be really cool if you give the people the choice. It might be frustrating when you wanna have a game and someone pulls out there Fortnite (they are doing that!) cards, but hey you can’t win them all. Now just some things that Universes Beyond is NOT. It is not canonical to the story line. It’s not the Magic “skins” though I wish it was. 

Stay tuned for the finale Magic blog and see ya around and goodbye, Judah G!

Magic Metal Robots are Awesome!

Hello and welcome to my third blog in a mini five part blog series! In this third  blog I will be showing you some of the best art in Magic in my opinion. To any lawyers; no copyright infringement is intended. 

You must be asking yourself, what is this man’s favourite art? Why Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer. Not only is his art amazing, the tokens he creates have amazing art as well. Both of those pieces were done by Daarken, who was hired by Wizards of the Coast Part of the reason I love these pieces is how they incorporate red and blue, the colours of the cards. I also started a simplified fanart of brudiclad.

As you probably noticed I like how the creature Myrs look. Here’s one that you can just see the movement in. It was done by Jana Schirmer & Johannes Voss, hired by Wizards of the Coast.

Here are some of the best art of landscapes in Magics history. First Steam Vents by Piotr Dura, hired by Wizards of the Coast. Also Fabled Passage by Howard Lyon, hired by Wizards of the Coast.

 

This is a link to a series of videos about art of different legendary artists for Magic. This was done by Rhystic Studies on YouTube.

Stay tuned for the next Magic blog and see ya around and goodbye, Judah G!

Most Coool things about Magic!!! Not click bait omg!!

Hello and welcome to my second blog in a mini five part blog series! In this second blog I will be telling you about 3 interesting things about Magic!

I will start by making a list of the things I’ll talk about. Since this is supposed to be shorter, lets just jump into right away now!

  1. Information about Magic Nicknames
  2. The Power Nine
  3. Commander

Now, Magic slang. This is very complicated as there are so much slang in Magic. There can even be slang upon slang. Newer players might get confused about slang that veteran players use without thinking. I don’t have enough time to delve into all of Magics slang but I will provide a link to a (mostly) full list of Magic slang. Nicknames. This isn’t a specific slang but some cards have Nicknames. Gray Merchant of Asphodel is often called Gary because his initials almost spell “Gary.” Sakura-Tribe Elder is better known as Steve. I don’t know why. Then there is Bob. The cards real name is Dark Confidant. The card is called Bob because the original art depicted pro player Bob Maher.

The Power Nine is the next category. There are (big surprise) nine Power Nine. The Power Nine are the most cards in Magic. Some of them cost up to $123500 Canadian dollars. AND that’s even without going into auctions where they are normally sold. Even though the are so expensive none of them are “win the game good.” They just help you get either more cards to play, mana acceleration, or both. They are the five Moxen, Timetwister, Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, and last and defiantly not last, the most powerful card in Magic: the Black Lotus!!!

The final thing I’ll talk about today is the most popular format in Magic: Commander (or EDH)! This is a format where you have a starting “Commander” that you can always cast. They are commonly Legendary Creatures. You also start with 40 life instead of twenty. Your deck is a 100 card singleton deck meaning you can’t have multiples of cards in it (beside Basic Lands and cards that specifically say you can) and there is a hundred cards in it including your commander. The world of commander is so complicated that I couldn’t even fit in in a normal sized blog without writing a novel, so I will instead give you some links. Official page for EDHThe wiki. Youtube guides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gdozNO_jIs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jO2fmsef0g, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk3EQdyGT4Y. 

Stay tuned for the next Magic blog and see ya around and goodbye, Judah G!

The Magic of the Best Game, Magic

Hello and welcome to my first blog in a mini five part blog series! In this series I will be detailing one of my favourite hobby’s, Magic: the Gathering! Since I need to churn five of these blogs, these will be smaller. This blog will be about giving you an entry level knowledge of Magic for the other blogs. Now lets jump into it!

Magic is a tabletop and digital collectable card game created by Richard Garfield. It is owned now and run by Wizards of the Coast. (Wotc) Magic was one of the first big CCG, if not the first. It is extremely complex and has many rules. There are generally two people per game but you can really have any amount. There are two archetypes for playing the game, Limited and Constructed. Limited is when you take some random packs of cards and make decks with them on the spot. Limited decks have 40 cards. Constructed is when you take your collection and make a deck to fit the criteria of a format. They have 60+ cards per deck. What’s a format you ask? Why a format is way to play Magic. Different formats have different rules and cards your allowed to use. Here’s a link to the Wotc formats page here.

 The general feel of the rules to begin is this: each turn you get one more “mana.” With that mana you can cast spells. (your cards) You draw one card per turn from your library. (Your deck of cards) To win you traditionally get all your opponents to 0 HealthPoints. (HP) The main way of dealing damage to your opponents is by attacking them with creatures. Creatures are cards that you play that are like animals or monsters. They can be almost anything of that sort. They have a certain amount of HP and Damage that they can deal. When you attack an opponent with a creature, they could have one of their creatures block it. In this situation instead of the opponent taking damage, the the two creatures would fight and try to kill each other. If one of them did, then it would go to your graveyard (the discard pile). Oh one more thing. There are five different elements to choice to play: white, blue, black, red and green. This is the extreme basics and if you want some more info about it while still just learning watch this video here.

Stay tuned for the next Magic blog and see ya around and goodbye, Judah G!

Herzog: taking photos with an iPad

Hello! This blog post is the summary and story of my latest Maker project. This project is divided in two parts, Carr and Herzog, so this is just the first blog post for this project. I was assigned Herzog first so that is part of the project I are writing about today. Herzog was all about learning how to take intriguing photos and how to edit them. The driving question for this project is why is it important to use technology to further improve our ability to communicate and to think creatively? The reason we are learning this is because communication and creativity will be in almost all jobs by 2025 if not already and PLP wants us to prepare for that. The adult world connection is the understanding that we develop as we do the project, not exactly what we are working on specifically.

The big thing we learned was how to actually use the camera app in more detail. We learned how to make silhouettes by tapping and turning down the brightness and how to take Live Photos and edit them. We also learned what a panorama shot is and how to take one. Another key part of this project was learning about different camera angles. Camera angles are ways and directions to take a photo. I first learned about basic camera angles; Bird’s Eye, Worm’s Eye, Close Up and Long Shot. A Bird’s Eye camera angle is when you shot from above, while a Worm’s Eye is when you shoot from below. As you would expect a Close Up shot is one that is close up, while a Long Shot is one from far away. After we had all “mastered” those, we moved onto advanced camera angles. These include Eye Level, High Level, Extreme Close Up, Extreme Long Shot, Medium Shot and Canted Perspective. If you really want to learn about those click HERE. That link shows what those camera angles are. As well if you want an in depth look at basic camera angles click HERE.

Another thing we did in this project was… take pictures! I know right crazy! Taking pictures in a project about photography! Well we did. The first picture I remember doing is a silhouette one of DANIEL. CALLUM was also in my group. How we made a silhouette was by backlighting the subject, then tapping before you take the picture and bringing down the brightness. After that you edit and mark it up and you can colour in the background so it looks like a true silhouette. The next photo we did we did in the RAIN! We walked down to this beach near our school and then took some photos of the landscape. I had some help from CAMERON and KAI. I do actually really like taking landscape photos. I think they can be quiet beautiful. The last photo I am going to talk about is one we did for homework, manufacturing Moods. The mood I got to manufacture was tired. In my photo for it you may think I’m acting. I’m not. Well, maybe a little but my arms were tired from raking.

A big part of this project was learning how to use apps to edit photos. The first app we learned to edit in is Camera, the default taking and editing photo app for iOS. In camera you can crop, markup, choose the genre of photo and edit the fundamental things of the picture. Let me explain what those are. Cropping photos is when you cut some parts out. Marking up your photo is when you draw on your picture. Choosing the genre is choosing an option and changing the whole photo to do with that. Some examples are Vivid, Dramatic and Mono. Editing the fundamental things (this is not what its is officially called. I don’t know what it officially is) like the contrast and shadows. We also learned how to use Snapseed. In this app you can do all those things and more! As there are so many things you can do I’ll just tell you my two favourites, Healing and Head Pose: Smile. With Healing you can take out part of the photos and it puts there what it thinks should go there. It can get cursed very quickly. Head Pose: Smile is something you can do to force the a person to smile. This also can get very cursed fast. The final app we learned about is Pixelmator Photo. This app costs money! My favourite features in this app are Healing and ML Super Resolution. You might be thinking “but Mr. Judah, we already know what Healing is.” And to that I so no! Well yes, but here’s the difference: in Pixelmator Photo it… works! (Better) Now ML Super Resolution is it making it so it has, as in its name, Super Resolution! It can actually do quite a bit of work.

All together I did really like this (part) project. I think I did good and I’m content with my level of work. I did like taking photos and editing them, for some pictures can be really beautiful. My 

See ya around and goodbye, Judah G!

Summary of Becoming a PLP Learner

Editors note: there is a video with my Keynote Guided Tour at the end that has all the things that Judah talked about in this post(yes this is Judah making this note but I thought it would be funny).

Hello! This blog post is the story and summary of my first Maker project, Becoming a PLP Learner. This project was about exploring who we are as people and applying that the PLP Team. The Driving Question for the project was “How do I build and strengthen the PLP Learning Team?” My main team members and people I worked with were Dylan, Jupiter, Andrew, Max, and Caitlin. The final part of the project was making and giving a presentation on a time capsule of yourself including the main things we did for this project.

As soon as they taught us about what we will be doing for this project and how to use the main apps, they through us into it head first. The first thing we started was the Big Life Journal. It is a workbook that we went through each day for the whole project. It was filled with thinking about the future, making goals, and strengths and weaknesses among other things. Something that I had fun making was my interest brain. It was a a picture of a brain with arrows coming off about the main things I like, my interests. Another thing I created was an app idea. My app was one that helped you improve your memory by choosing a picture to remember then later you will get a ping to choose the picture that you were supposed to remember. 

We also made a Team Member Contract for the time capsule. This was something we created to represent what we can do and will do for the PLP Team. It included my Memoji Laptop, an picture I specifically drew for the Contract, and some parts of my User Manual. A User Manual was a text we created that was basically an Apple manual for ourselves. I had a setting that was Emotional Monster! It was quite enlightening and fun to make, especially when we got to see our teachers. The drawing I did for the Contract was of different objects or symbols for things I can help with. For example I drew super glue because I bring us together.  My Memoji Laptop was a emoji of myself that had a laptop with stickers of things I like. Some stickers that I remember are my sweatshirt and the MTG logo. 

I also made something physical! I know, crazy for PLP but it’s true! We called it a physical representation, well since its physical and it represents something. It represents how we can contribute to the PLP Learning Team. It that sounds familiar it’s because it is. We are making lots of things that represent us in this project. You might be confused why I made it with such weird and obscure objects. Well, we were given three choices of objects and I choose Table B. (Mr. Hughes teased Ms. Willemse unsurprisingly about calling the different choices tables) I also made a key to what the different objects represented which we called a Artists Statement for some reason. It kind of makes sense, but I think calling it a key makes more sense. Making the Physical Representation was actually a nice change to working on the iPad.

We also had to choose one more thing to put in our time capsule. I choose to put the Mentor Text Connection. I loved creating this, it was amazing. Remember the User Manual? Yeah, our teachers made some to give us as an example (for some reason they called their’s Mentor Texts). After we read them but before we made our own we analyzed them and found different things that were different and similar. My favourite part about this was keeping in with the theme of Apple products, so I wrote it as an product review (you can probably see I found myself quite clever there)!

Overall, this project was a great learning experience and was super fun like all of PLP so far. My favourite part of this project (though not really connected) was realizing that I wanted to work for Wizards of the Coast through the BLJ!

See ya around and goodbye, Judah G!

PS: here is a video of my time capsule presentation (also known as a Guided Keynote Tour).

PSS: I know I could have edited the post but I wanted to use PS!