Magi Creations is a fully functional business. We now offer not only custom website design, tailored from scratch to the needs and identity of the client, we also offer freelance writing, editing, graphic design, illustration, and expert consultation on the art of telling the story, be it truth or fiction, action or drama, short or long, narrative, graphic novel, movie...

I'm currently working on a feature I think I could see in Reader's Digest, much to the delight of the retired gentleman who came to me.

Where do you want your story to go?

I thought Vega was supposed to be a "pretty" man. I've got nothing against the guy who played him, I'm not saying he was ugly, but he was not the kind of soft-featured pretty-boy who'd wear a mask just to avoid getting his face hurt.

If you're going to do a fireball attack in a movie that otherwise seems, visually, to be based in reality, you can't be so obvious with it. You need to have the sensei ringing specific gongs from across the room, and the student not seeing what I will generalize here as the hadokens. As Jason said, it is a distance punch, not an ultimate move.

The Chun Li Monologues were very wooden. She sounded very much like she was reading off the page, which she probably was. The director should have tried some different things with her in the recording studio. She's in distinguished company: Tom Hanks was also wooden. But you know what? They found ways to deal with it. And it's documented! The director could have just googled it! Instead, he allowed the whole thing to have the same wooden feel.

As for Bison's back-story, I'm going to repeat myself: the movie, at least visually, is reality-based. If you want to bridge the gap between the realistic and the fantastical, you can't just plant something supernatural on the screen and say, "Believe this." The back-story should have been shown in muted colours, should have had just a little more build-up before he suddenly had a wife (two sentences would have done it) and that cave should have taken longer. It's okay to have a little action and acting in between the narrator's lines, and I think the characters reacting to the unusual--and to the audience, quite visible--colours of the cave. I'd have gone with some subtle misty neons, myself. Purple, mainly, with some green.

You can laugh about any combination of the comments in that last paragraph, but I am quite serious, and when I've stretched my directorial muscles, I'll show you that I know what I'm talking about.

Jason could forgive Charlie and Maya for their choppy comic-book style dialogue, but I just couldn't. The rest of the dialogue felt much more natural, at least within the world of the movie. They just didn't fit. A little less startled epiphany in every scene, a little more calm reasoning, please.

All of that said, I agree that the movie was better than my expectations, but I thought that those details that were mishandled were significant, (monologue, anti-climactic Vega battle, fireball, Spinning Bird Kick) and it was the director's folly to let them slip through.

7/10

It wasn't treated like a novelty, like Van Damme's movie. I was 13. I enjoyed the game. I was offended by the movie. I can still imagine director Steven E. de Souza saying, "Eh, they're kids. Show'em all the characters, and some unrealistic video game moves, and they'll be happy. What do you think about rockets on Bison's boots? Kids like rockets, right?"

So it's time to make good on a promise. The Homicidal Mutant Bunnies are returning, this time in shirt form. This'll make good on a couple of promises, really. The big question for you guys is, "What the heck is he talking about?"

If you'd like to get in on the ground floor, be the first to get one, you're out of luck. The first is already spoken for. Ah, the magic that is pre-orders!

But does it stop there? Heck no! See, our t-shirts aren't just going to be sold here, they'll also be available in stores! Not the big stores, mind you, the type that have pharmacies in them, our shirts will be sold in stores that don't use the term, head office.

So if you were a fan of the HMBs, whether you first saw them online, in a college paper, or way back before they had established themselves in our humble ranks, you can look forward to ordering them from our new store online, or go to an independent store in Edmonton and ask if they carry the Homicidal Mutant Bunnies. (When they look at you funny, tell them to come to our website and contact me if they're interested.)

No, we're not dead here at Magi. We were just contracted to produce something, and we've just finished. We've got two other such projects due in mid June.

We do good work, so if you want us to make you something too, just let us know.

Jason's on his way across the country now, to visit with some family that he hasn't seen since he got married.

That leaves me in charge of the shop, while he's gone... not that he's my boss or anything, I just have the total freedom now of doing anything I want without having to explain myself to anyone!

So... Now, uh... I guess I'll... have dinner.

Everybody go check out From Within Studio!

So my Internet Explorer just quit working. I can no longer use IE to access the internet. Been trying to figure out how to make it start working again, but I don't think that's likely to happen any time soon. I've downloaded and re-installed the damn thing, and it's still doing exactly the same thing: Cannot display webpage.

So I did what anybody would do when they're out of ideas: I tried to reach tech support. But I don't want to call any of the four phone numbers they offer on their website for this region, nor do I want to call long distance for any of the others. I wanted to email them. In order to do that, however, they want me to log in.

Log in to what!? They want me to sign up for the privilege of having my products actually work? I'm not reloading my operating system for this, I've got too much stuff on my computer that's not important enough to save, and a pain in the ass to reload afterward.

Maybe when I buy a new computer, one that isn't a pitiful excuse for a piece of equipment owned and operated by a website design team... Well, at least I don't need IE to do my job.

Did a lot of hunting, trying to find the best place to have t-shirts printed. Found a place that had quality shirts, that would provide them at a decent price, and, I swear it was a coincidence, I had a coupon for that would have saved me a couple hundred dollars off the first printing.

We carefully selected the images, which ones would be in the first run, and the second, all the way to the fifth. Then Jason used all his imagician tricks to improve the quality of the images, make them sharper and cleaner.

This was all done during moments when we weren't working on Roycustomguitars.com, fromwithinstudio.com, and smithmusic.com, as well as my truly kick-ass proposal.

Oh, did I forget to mention?

I'M GETTING MARRIED! A big thanks goes out to my Magi buddies for making it possible to pull off such an ambitious proposal, all while keeping her totally unaware of all that was going on around her. It took a lot of careful planning as well as some quick and clever thinking by the people who were involved, to keep it secret for so long.

Now that I've pulled it off, I get to relax. Or work on guest lists and venues and menus and dances and speeches and now that I can play the piano, I'm actually writing songs, and let's not forget the clientele, still have to deliver for them.

You know what vacation is like? I don't think I'll even remember until some time next year.

Oh, wait. We'll have to add finding another t-shirt place to the list, because while we were taking care of all that other stuff, the place we had selected went out of business.

At least we hadn't paid and then not received our merchandise.

Magi Creations continues to soldier on. We're serving new clientele these days, in addition to our established clients. It's pretty cool. It's what we spend our time doing these days, hence the sparse Avatars updates.

There are some projects such as Animal Feed, and the general content of the R&R section of this website, that have been put on hold while we've been taking care of our clientele.

But I can't blame paying jobs for my hiatus from the Final Fantasy Villians review. What I blame for that is FFV. I played through that game in a week, right after writing the FFIV review, and it sucked all my enthusiasm right out. Playing it while actually paying attention to little things like plot and character development was such a repugnant experience, I was stuck on how to approach it. I came up with a map of the game--several maps, actually--and I used flash to animate the thing, so that I could show you exactly how mind-numbingly stupid and pointless the whole thing was, and then right when I gave it the "save" command, the program crashed. Sans save.

I can only assume that my computer had an allergic reaction to so much stupidity. It's a good thing I never managed to put it up on the website, I might have brought down our entire fanbase. That's, like, six computers!

No, actually we were getting pretty good numbers on this website before our Avatars drought. We still have a pretty decent-sized viewership, and to everyone still watching, thanks for coming back from time to time. I promise, we'll have plenty of new material for you in the coming weeks and months. If you want to help support our efforts, buy yourself some cool HMB products. And let us know if there's anything else you think we should be selling.

But in other interesting news, our website apparently holds the rank of #6,219,662 in the world. Since there are more than 25 million websites in the world, that puts us somewhere at or better than the 76th percentile. Go us! Just imagine what would happen if we were doing this full time. Seriously, buy something.

As a matter of fact, buy a website! We're now serving a number of tradesmen, and I'm looking forward to a meeting with a salon owner pretty soon. We've also come to the point where we can serve people anywhere in the world, and give them the same level of service and satisfaction as the clients we serve face-to-face. So if you're in California, Australia, Scotland, or anywhere else in the world, and you need any or all of the many services involved in building quality websites, drop us a line!