Captain Digital

Random musings on politics, society, and pop culture from the Internet's marketing curmudgeon.

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Are Color Palettes Racist?

This whole “color thing” is getting confusing. We’re being segregated into “white,” “black,” “brown,” and “yellow,” as if that should matter. And “white” is supposed to be racist, because in the past, white people referred to people of color “black,” “brown” and “yellow.” In fact, you’re apparently a racist just for being white. But the Left claims you can’t be a racist if you’re black, brown or yellow which, ironically, sounds pretty racist to me. 

So what’s the deal about color? I’m a graphic artist. I mean, if a graphic artist can’t get a handle on this, how will anybody else be able to understand color theory. Let me try to explain…

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Things go better when Woke?

By now, you’ve probably heard about an internal Powerpoint stack that was leaked to the public, put together by the diversity department at Coca-Cola, and how they were trying to train employees to be “less white.” You might not have seen the original story, but you couldn’t miss all the memes flying about the ‘net, mocking Coke and their misbegotten messaging. (My particular fave are the ones that show Coke firing the polar bears, and hiring brown and black bears instead, because the polar bears are…wait for it…too white.)

Yes. Wokeness has gotten that stupid.

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Jeep Takes a Left(ist) Turn

I’ve held back from commenting on the SuperBowl Jeep ad for a bit, because I wanted to see if others felt about it the way I do.

Weirdly, both Leftists and Conservatives seem to feel the same way. They hate it. But for different reasons.
If you haven’t seen it, it features Bruce Springsteen as his trademarked character, the Working Man™, riding around Kansas, in a Jeep that’s gotta predate the Vietnam War. He’s drinking a cuppa Joe in a diner, driving the backroads, and (metaphorically) wrapping himself in the American flag, all the while staking a claim for unity in America.Lots to unpack on this one. So let’s get started.

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Everything That’s Old is New Again

Sen. Joseph McCarthy
Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1908–1957

I was born in the late ’50s, a little too late to experience the McCarthy Era firsthand. For those of you not familiar, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-IL) saw his political career rise, then fall, much like Daedalus, soaring high, then quickly crashing and burning. McCarthy was convinced that there were Communist sympathizers in both the Federal government and in the entertainment industry. Turns out, a couple of things were true: McCarthy was right, in that there were Communists and Communist sympathizers, in both the government and in Hollywood. He was also wrong in the way he pursued them, in what came to be called the “Red Scare” and the “Witch Hunts” of the 1950s.

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How to light for online video (on the cheap)

I get a lot of people who ask me, “What should I buy to light myself, when I’m on a Zoom call?” Good question. Lighting is most of the battle, when it comes to looking good online. (Cleaning up the area behind you and dressing appropriately – from the waist up, at least – being the other critical factors.) There are a LOT of solutions you can find online, none of which appealed to me, because of the cost. So I set out to create my own, out of things I could find for cheap on Amazon. Here’s what I created.

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Got Soul?

I love animation. It’s part of my day job, and I don’t get to do enough of it. But I love watching animation from others, too. Have since I was a little kid. Saturday morning cartoons? I lived for that. Today, the best of the best in 3D animation is, indisputably, the work of Pixar. There, the story is the thing. From Toy Story to The Incredibles, Cars to Coco, they all have two things in common – great animation and story über alles. The Great Pandemic of 2020 screwed up almost everything, but movies were hit particularly hard. Who wants to go to a movie theatre and sit for two hours breathing other people’s germs, right? Even if you are (like me) someone who believes we all need to get on with our lives where we can, and go on living, a movie theatre seems like a big risk. So it’s particularly sad that Pixar’s latest will likely never get the attention it so richly deserves, because Soul is an absolute gem.

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Modern Fairy Tales: The Wolf Who Cried “Boy!”

The Wolf Who Cried "Boy!"

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a continuing series of updated fairy tales, for the new millennium. Think of them as “living tales,” where we adjust the story  – and the moral – to suit the times in which we live. 

Once upon a time, there was a young man, who lived in a village. The lad came from a very traditional household – family values, church, traditions, belief in self-reliance, and all that jazz. But he grew up in an era where the old ways were looked upon first as “old fashioned,” and now “outdated,” “outmoded,” and flat-out “wrong.” Day after day, he was chided, criticized, and even mocked for his beliefs. The peer pressure was almost unimaginable. He couldn’t walk the streets of the village, go into an inn, or attend school without hearing his values torn down. He felt ostracized and unwelcome everywhere but his home.  [Read more…] about Modern Fairy Tales: The Wolf Who Cried “Boy!”

What’s in a Word?

#!@‽¶≠!!

Words. We writers live by ’em. And sometimes (if you offend the wrong Muslim lunatic) die by them. But they are the essential part of how we do what we do. Words mean things. But not all words mean the same things to all people. And living in the Age of Political Correctness, not all wordsmiths are created equal, at least as far as permission to use certain words goes. Allow me to give you some examples… [Read more…] about What’s in a Word?

Ranking Race.

Photo credit: CNN

I grew up in the South, in the 1960s. It was a time of racial unrest. I remember seeing posters around Shreveport, advertising a concert planned by James Brown – the hardest working man in show business. What a lot of people don’t know about Brown is that he also helped to defuse the ticking time bomb of racial unrest, rather than work to exploit racial tensions, as so many self-styled ‘leaders’ do today.

Fast-forward to 2015. Two incidents in the news make me think that racism is still a huge problem in the USA, but not for the reasons – and the people – that you’d think. I’m afraid that this time around, it’s not Conservatives that have a problem with race. It’s Liberals. And there’s a litmus test that determines just how “black” or how “brown” you are, and it’s got nothing to do with a color swatch book. Let me explain… [Read more…] about Ranking Race.