There are times when the world is an unmitigated cess pool of crap. Where the people who run our lives are lying evil bastards...

Not sure where I was going with that, except for to say that at these times being able to site down with friends and play some games is always nice. Having a random chap in the pub shake your hand for having an awesome t-shirt is cool too (my Game of Thrones Christmas T-shirt in this case).

Anyway, I took 6 of my more recent Commander decks to the pub to meet up with the usual suspects for the first time in a couple of weeks. A dice roll before we started picked Kozilek as my weapon of choice. The deck performed quite well, but was taken down because it turns out summoning Kozilek and giving him Darksteel Plate and Lightning Greaves makes him a bit of a threat. Still fun was had an some things learnt.

Mainly I need to focus the deck more, get some more artifact creatures in and some removal. I am thinking on looking at that deck and Breya making Breya more focussed on Energy, pulling in some cards from Kaladesh and the upcoming Aether Revolt. (I do hope they keep Energy in that), while moving some of the Artifacts from her deck to Kozilek.

Then before leaving myself and the yougest of our cohort Luca had a one of one battle where I tried out Ruric Thar. The deck was as much fun as I thought it would be bringing out massive stompy creaures and Thar has the chilling effect I hoped for. Tips for playing it include makde sure I pump Thar as much as possible (I Scavenged a DeadBridge Goliath onto the wrong target) and I need more Trample Brawn and Nylea may be required.

Still lots of fun was had and that's the important thing in these trying times. More soon. Have fun.

So I've been a bit worse for wear today after being out with work colleagues last night. But I've managed to put topether another deck in the Commmander Project this time it's mono white with Avacyn, Angel of Hope.

So, I've been writing Perl for a living now for over 15 years. Which is kinda funny in some ways. There's been asides where I've been doing Javascript, PHP, Java and even some C at times. But Perl is still the language my brain likes to revert to. There's a few others that have tempted me over the years, mostly in the functional areas, but my mind tends to just gel with Perl.

Shame really that my work is really, really into Java. Partly because it's quite easy to get java developers. (I have some thoughts about that but I don't like to be rude so I'll hold of on them). But there's also a love of the ecosystem and reporting tools that you can get with the Java Virtual Machine. Which is cool, I understand that, we're not a tech ocmpany as such, we're basically printers. We print your stuff, if you have a photo we'll print it on something and we make some really nice stuff. I'm always impressed with it. But the fact that we do make bespoke stuff means we also have bespoke software and it's been mostly written in Perl. And now the company would like to replace it.

But I have a plan up my sleeve, because whilst I've written Java I'd rather not. Being punched in the genitals sounds more fun than developing in Java full time. It's just so verbose and overly complex. Bleh. Anyway during the times I've been coding in Perl there have been work going on with Perl 6 which for a long time was something of a joke and had a serious impact on the development of Perl 5. Well Perl 6 is finally ready for production and is having new versions coming out every few months, and it runs on the JVM... sort of.

Right now the JVM version doesn't work with al the modules though and especially doesn't work with Panda the module installer. So I'm going to try and work out why and if I can help. Because if I can carry on writing Perl I'll be a happy bunny. More here soon.

Meanwhile here's a fun little bit of Perl 6 from the website how to define a Factorial Operator :

sub postfix: (Int $n) {
    fail "Not a Natural Number in Factorial" if $n < 0;
    [*] 2..$n
}

So my Wednesday night Commander game last left my try out my new Sidisi deck which performed well. I managed to fight my way to a victory with 3 life to spare. Sheoldred is a stand out in this deck and I was lucky enough to draw her, play her and reanimate her at least twice. Having played the deck now I think I need some non creature recursion to really make it horrible Eternal Witness and Archaeomancer will probably be useful and Regrowth to get back my various reamination.

Meanwhile at work it's that weird period. We're REALLY busy (Christmas is our busiest time, why not buy a canvas?) but I'm not doing much as we go into code freeze for a few weeks. Lots of planning though. Yay?

So on Sunday I met up with my regular Commander group for breakfast and Commander, which is a great way for me to start the day (beats my previous Sundys of sleeping int until midday). As part of the ongoing craziness that is The Commander Project. I took 10 decks (all I currently have boxed) and randomly rolled for what I was going to play. This gave me Vorel.

I will admit I did not start the game with high hopes. I was playing against a Breya deck which was slightly updated, an Atraxa deck that was more updated and a partnered Tana and Ravos deck whose owner had decided Saskia is too dangerous to play in multiplayer. Not sure he's wrong.

The game started going crazy early on as Breya got Daretti into play and managed to keep him alive to ulitmate him. Things were looking worrying, after I failed to steal Atraxa for more than a turn I cloned here which meant we had two people proliferating my Otherworld Atlas. Ahh group hugs. Then the young man running Breya decideds to Alhpa strike and take out Atraxa (who was not managing to get board presence). I sat there behind a small but solid wall ticking up Jace and trying to come up with a plan.

Next turn Breya turns on me, leaving his father for last, a shocking turn of events. I manage to stay alive but my board was seriously depleted. Things did not look well, not only was Breya preapring to do it again but I was pretty sure I was about to be repaid for my card drawing largesse with a Saskia to the face. Luckily Jace had been hiding at the back being ignored and making all attacking creatures a bit smaller, so one ultimate later I have Grave Upheaval and Ring of Three Wishes on the stack (and something else... I cannot remember what). This lets me put Pili-Pala from my graveyard into play with haste. This combined with the Grand Architect in my hand give me near infinite mana. The Ring lets me search up Biomass Mutation and then this, the millions of mana Pili-Pala and the Grand Architect gave me plus the two Beast tokens I had in play after my Thragtusk and it's token copy died last turn and Thassa who had been sitting giving me a bit of scry every turn meant I swung with 2 2,000,000/2,000,000 unblockable creatures.

Which was I felt a lovely way to spend the morning. I'd love to say I had it planned but it was mostly luck and deck synergy. I got home to then continue the 22,000 light year trek to Colonia in Elite Dangerous where I plan on spending some time. As each 2K part of the journey take a couple of hours it's going to take a while. It's relaxing though and I can listen to a podcast while I travel.