About iGerard
Gerard Ian Prud'Homme MSc (G.I.P.H)
Empathic Autodidact 🧠
Nations I lived in: 🇬🇧🇫🇷🇩🇪🇦🇺🇺🇸
Fan of: 🏊⛵️🏋♜🎨🎼
Noms-de-guerre:"THE BILL" (London 🏴 slang) 🕵, "G.I." 🪖, "WOLF" 🐺, "DIME" 🪙
Spirit animal: 🐺
Favourite dinosaur: Stegosaurus 🦕
Favourite colour: Greyish green (Hex:#4D5D53) 🪨+🍀
Favourite sports: Football (European), Golf, Formula One, NHL, Tennis
Favourite composers: Wagner, Mozart, Grieg, Orff, Holst, Bach
Favourite philosopher: Nietzsche
Favourite fashion designer: Hugo Boss
Favourite car maker: Volkswagen
I'm a sui generis developer, cinéaste, artist, littérateur, and soloist.
I often ponder my orb and cogitate vis-à-vis the ineffable mysteries of life, such as how the pilot in "Mad Max: Road Warrior" ends up meeting Max again in "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" and why they pretend not to have ever met. Furthermore, is "Evil Dead 2" a sequel or a remake? If it's a remake, why is it named "Evil Dead TWO," and if it's another movie in the same series, did Ash lure an almost identical group of people to the haunted bungalow to watch them die? And was Cheech simultaneously a border guard, a nosferatu, and a fugitive liaison in "From Dusk Till Dawn?"
🤔.Furthermore, it's evident that the Cenobites are just avatars of Nyarlathotep, or his "Masks," as it were, but that is not to belittle the 1st and 2nd films in that franchise. They're some of the crème de la crème out of all the HP Lovecraft ersatz pastiche. As you may have surmised, I love genre fiction just as much as "Literary Fiction" by the likes of Orwell, McCarthy, Burgess, et al. Ipso facto, please don't treat me like a scruffy nerf herder.
My alma maters are Harvard (founded 1636), Paris (founded 1045), Oxford (founded 1096), and London (off. founded 1836/parts of UoL have taught since circa 1662). I have a graduate degree, Master of Science, from University College London, founded by the Philosopher Jeremy Bentham, part of the University of London, 3rd most ancient university in England after Oxbridge (parts of Uni. Lon. have been teaching students since the 1600s, before the States even existed!). I have had employment as a domain expert for different Fortune 500 businesses, and I have lived in Great Britain, Germany, France, Australia, and the States.
I'm employed as a scientific expert vis-à-vis the pedagogic discipline of Computer Science. My primary field of expertise is Computer Application Programming, a sub-division of the academic domain of Computer Science. I also offer info about my experiences to others by writing about advances in the academic discipline of Computer Science.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?.
I aim to produce high-level output with the experiences I've gained from decenniums of employment. The areas in which I have achieved the highest degree of proficiency include the following: high-tech, health, asset management, and law.
High-tech: I have been a Lead Senior Developer and led a team of 5 engineers for a Fortune 500 company. I have a Master of Science degree in this field. I have decenniums of employment experience in the high-tech arena, dating back to my first job as a programmer at 18, whilst I was simultaneously studying for my undergraduate degree full-time.
After graduating with my Bachelor's degree at age 21, I attained employment in F.T. or FinTech (a portmanteau meaning Financial Tech.) on the bourse in Paris, FR. I saved up the money from that period of employment. Then, I returned to graduate school afterward, using the money I had saved from my professional ventures to pay for my postgraduate science degree. That was after being employed through my undergrad whilst attending university full-time and additionally being awarded merit-based honorariums worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for top ~1% ACT/SAT/IQ scores, 4.0 GPA Senior year whilst attending A.P./Honors seminars, A.P. Scholar with Honor Award, Regent's Seal, National Honor Society, ad infinitum.
I've always been adroit with tech. I programmed my first significant piece of shareware at 12 and released my initial selection of financially remunerative shareware at 15. I also started earning university-level units in programming whilst still in high school. I've earned L.P.I.C., O.C.J.P., C.L.A., and Linux S.U.S.E. 11 Specialist certifications. I have a membership in the European Federation of National Engineering Associations.
Health: I'm a weight lifter and amateur bodybuilder who has lifted for 26 years. I have religiously examined scientific advances in health science for decenniums. I am also a trained martial artist.
Asset Management: My employer employed me as a FinTech guru on the bourse in Paris. I'm also an afficionado of trading, earning ~+23% per annum on a variety of bourses from my investments.
Law: I've always been intrigued by the legal field. At one point, I was planning to become an attorney, and I was admitted to a T14 (Top 14) law school (~50,000 applicants for 500 places in the year I applied) and have an LSAT (Law School Admission Test) score of top 5% (166).
I.F./Pen-and-Paper RPGs/Strategy Gaming/Wargaming: I only had a few toys growing up, as my legal guardians were highly parsimonious. Albeit, I'd sometimes find used issues of "Dungeons & Dragons" manuals (missing half their pages) for a dime in Salvation Army stores. I'd read those pieces of literature over and over again and was able to imagine entire worlds inspired by the ideas presented therein. I would also pump my legs on my velocipede for hours to get to the library to read worn-out issues of "Dragon Magazine."
You were never permitted to check out the latest issue! At the same time, all the older editions of "Dragon" were perpetually M.I.A.! I would use "LEGO" men from the Salvation Army store as miniatures ("minis") because I was unable to afford proper minis from my local game store/LGS. Fortunately, the board game "Battle Masters" offered a plethora of cheap plastic minis. I used to search amongst the flotsam found in the bargain bins at regional toy stores for low-priced versions to add to my menagerie of baddies for my mostly solo "Ersatz LEGO & Dungeons & Dragons" sessions.
Eventually, as I grew older, I not only DMed (DungeonMastered, the name for the guy who invents the game worlds and describes them during play, a role which fit perfectly with my love of writing), but I also played in a few PnP RPGs as various characters. In Rifts, I played a Free Quebec soldier/mechanic with a robotic suit of armour, and his name was "Montcalm." I named him after a General of the New France forces during the "7 Years War", a New World 18th-century conflict primarily fought between Britain and France.
Even when playing PnP RPGs, I would name my characters after extremely high-brow esoteric historical references that 99% of the world would never understand. It's alright, though. I feel the same when I read Howard Phillips Lovecraft and realise that Nyarlathotep is etymologically similar to Ancient Egyptian names like Imhotep.
That's something he added that only some people will ever understand. However, I feel connected to a man and a giga-genius who lived about a century ago. Perhaps a century from now, a man will understand all the references I've hidden in the literature I've written, the art I've made, and the video games I've programmed/written the dialogue for/made the art for, etc.
I.F.("Interactive Fic.") & Video Games: My introduction to the world of I.F.("Interactive Fic.") & Video Games was similar. Growing up, I was uprooted many times. So, I had to start a new elementary program repeatedly. The experience led to me being a loner, as I would have to start over and over again after a brief period. One of my few friends during those lonely years was my O.G. Nintendo gaming system (released in 1983) with bargain-bin games I played numerous years after everyone else had moved on. I fondly remember "Zelda II," e.g., "I am Error."
I played through nearly all the Dragon Warrior series on the N.E.S. Those games fit a tremendous amount of gameplay and story despite the memory limitations of the N.E.S. My desire to understand how game programmers made RPGs like Dragon Warrior and StarTropics inspired me to teach myself programming. Then, that desire led to me studying those same ideas in my university programs and getting my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees.
I have always loved RPG series. A few of my favourites were the Phantasy Star (ファンタシースター Fantashī Sutā) series, the SaGa (サガ) series, etc. I love those JRPGs, but I also love Western RPGs. I've been playing CRPGs since Autoduel 1987. I played through most of the Gold Box games, such as Pool of Radiance 1988, Azure Bonds 1989, Secret of the Silver Blades 1990, Pools of Darkness 1991, Death Knights of Krynn 1991, and The Dark Queen of Krynn 1992. I used to alternate between voraciously reading the Dragonlance books one after the other and then playing through the S.S.I. games based on the same setting!
I furthermore played through all of S.S.I.'s Dark Sun games, read most of the Dark Sun novels, and adored the first Baldur's Gate game (GO FOR THE EYES BOO!), the Might and Magic series. Strangely enough, I never enjoyed the plebian favourite Final Fantasy series, maybe because I've been a PC MASTER RACE afficianado since the early 80s when just knowing how to use a P.C. was a bizarre rarity.
The first games I programmed were all I.F., with text parsers where you had to say things along the lines of: "Go West. Get Torch. Defeat the dragon with bare hands! (Unbelievable, isn't it?)." One of the earliest games I ever played was an Atari S.T. port of 1975's ADVENT/"Adventure" (the first text-based adventure game to ever exist, it had the appellation ADVENT because the room-sized mainframes running the game had a six alphanumeral limit).
Literature: I wrote my first book at the age of ~12. It was hundreds of pages long and about an anthropomorphic stuffed animal that could speak. I'm sure Calvin and Hobbes influenced me, although The Velveteen Rabbit, The Tin Soldier, The Indian in the Cupboard, etc., were all books I grew up reading that had a similar premise. Sadly, I lost the manuscript for that work, alongside many other things I wrote around that time.
I have a dozen books published on Amazon, but so many other things I've written throughout my life have been lost to the sands of time. Between moving all over the planet and spending many, many, many years living on continents 5000+ miles apart, getting my undergrad and grad degrees, attending the best universities on the face of the planet, etc., I've lost many of the books I wrote and also the art I've made as a result of the perpetual moving from one place to another which has been the hallmark of my life from a very young age. My family moved from the town I was born in (where I've never lived) to another village a few months after my birth. I was moved again a few years after that, and I've perpetually moved from one place to another after a few years dozens of times throughout my life.
It's tough to live like that, which is why very few people do. About 90% of Americans live their entire lives within a small radius of their place of birth. Meanwhile, I've spent many years living in many different nations on many different continents 5000+ miles apart from one another, and even in the U.S., I've lived in about a dozen other states, in addition to having driven through nearly every single state in the U.S.
Strategy Games & Wargames: With strategy games, I would take pieces from different pseudo-undamaged board games I would find at the local Salvation Army shop for a handful of pennies each. Add the 19th-century artillery from Risk with the rules from Axis and Allies (A&A), use the artillery pieces to represent long-range salvos, and have a rule they're allowed to fire into a neighboring province like strategic bombers in A&A. Mounted 19th-century troops would use the same A&A rules as a Panzer. Boom, you got Napoleonic warfare with rules and pseudo-period-appropriate cheap minis.
Graphic Novels: To persist vis-à-vis my rambling about my nerd bona fides, Métal Hurlant / Heavy Metal Magazine was a gargantuan thing for me. I still have some issues from the 1980s that I bought in the early to mid-1990s. Like most things in my life, I bought them used from a regional bookstore, as they were the only thing I was able to afford. All the rich, spoiled youths had their mommy and daddy buy them the latest D.C./Marvel output, but I had to make do with the old, tattered issues of Heavy Metal.
However, the art in those pages blew away anything done by the big studios. The Euro artists had amazing grace vis-à-vis their ideation. The Heavy Metal movie was another example of their outlandish work. Mœbius, or Jean Giraud, was one artist I especially enjoyed. For a brief period, there was a series of Western art in Métal Hurlant / Heavy Metal Magazine and the Heavy Metal movie, and in shows like Aeon Flux, The Maxx, etc., where the Western artists were producing mature, intelligent, beautiful art that was every bit as high quality as Nippon's(日本) Anime/Manga scene.
Of course, like most beautiful things, it has now been replaced with a wave of mediocre trash.
Anime & Manga: I've been a huge fan of Anime since I saw it first on late-night cable T.V. in the early 90s. I believe it was either T.B.S. or T.N.T. that showed 'Vampire Hunter D' (1985).
Languages: Natal tongue = English. Near-native fluency = French, and I primarily taught myself. I watch everything in French, listen to French books on tapes, listen to radio shows in French, etc. I last watched a US TV show or movie in English ~10 years ago. Intermediate = German, and I'm now working on getting to a high level in German as I did in French, all by teaching myself. I am aware of a decent amount of Latin.
Here's some literature that I've written: Software Process Improvement, The Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics, Switching Theory and Logic Design, Advances in Geometric Modeling, Software Metrics and Software Metrology, Microcomputer Architecture and Programming, Java Technologies, Systems Programming, Network Analysis & Synthesis, Computer Based Management System & E-Commerce, Wizard, and Colonize.
Please email me at: giph@igerard.com