Captain Digital

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

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Visual Arts

Date Night.

Art House Hell.
Art House Hell.

I’ve always suspected that men and women are actually from two different species. While every woman I’ve ever known speaks English (okay, there was this one girl in Japan that didn’t, but we didn’t date), “speaking” English and “communicating” with English are two vastly different things. Nowhere is this more apparent than when choosing and viewing a movie together.

Keep in mind, I’m not your stereotypical “guy.” I don’t limit myself to action movies, heavy metal, or beer. I appreciate movies with an emphasis on plot and character development, jazz, classical, and folk music, as well as wine and liquor. I’m no metrosexual (ever!), but I’m also not some knuckle-dragging Neanderthal that has no interest in culture.

Having said that, what I look for in a movie is to be entertained. Let me share with you a list of some of my favorite movies, in no particular order: [Read more…] about Date Night.

TyperActive.

I love typography. Always have. From a very early age, I’ve been fascinated with letterforms. When I was in elementary school, I used to rubber-band two pencils together to create a crude way to draw Blackletter (a.k.a. “Old English”) lettering on posters. While other kids decorated their textbook’s book covers with drawings of muscle cars, military tanks or alien spacecraft, I decorated mine with words in a variety of typefaces. Blackletter, calligraphy, Cooper Black, Bodoni, Futura – you name it, and I experimented with it. As I grew into a career as a freelance artist, I discovered that typefaces could provide a subtext (no pun intended) to ad copy and headlines. The face I chose to design something had the power to communicate meaning, context, and even tell people how to think about the words on the printed page, before they’d even read them.

Waaaaay cool. [Read more…] about TyperActive.

CSS Hell.

If, as Voltaire once opined, “God is a comedian, playing to an audience afraid to laugh,” then CSS (Cascading Style Sheets for you non-nerds in the audience) were written by Geeks as some kind of convoluted “you can’t get there from here” joke on the rest of us. I’m sure God finds it funny. I don’t. 

Back when the World (Wide Web) was young, all you needed to create websites was a copy of Notepad, a copy of Photoshop, and nerves of steel. Creating anything past the simlest of pages was a study in frustration. Editing or updating a page was worse. Torture. Client requests to “make all the body copy one point larger” could make the strongest web geek’s blood run cold. Make strong men cry. Turn weaker men to ashes. You get the picture. 

Then along came CSS. The promised land for web designers – style sheets, where you could divorce the data from the style elements. Create the pages once, then change one line of code in a style sheet and watch the changes ripple through the other pages, as if my magic. 

That was the promise. The reality is something else. [Read more…] about CSS Hell.

Feedback.

Hi. Got a minute? I’ve got some questions for you, and I hope you’ll take the time to read this and let me know what you think. 

I’ve been a writer for a long time. Wrote a couple of books a few years back, on Flash and animation. Plan to write more in the future (although probably not more tech books – turns out they have a shelf life measured in months…not years). In the meantime, I blog, not just because I’d like to keep my writing chops up, but because I have to. I don’t mean someone’s holding a gun to my head…I mean I feel compelled to write, and it seems pretty stupid to write stuff and never have it read. Blogging allows me to share my thoughts with others, and it costs nothing (other than my time) to do so. [Read more…] about Feedback.

An American Tune.


Just came back from watching An American Carol, and I’m very happy to report that I found it pretty funny, very entertaining, occasionally poignant, and incredibly refreshing. It’s not often that, as a conservative, I can go to see a film and not wince at the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) liberal agenda that the studio and director choose to serve up. Way to many Hollywood films are made by Liberals, for Liberals – or even worse, made by a bunch of Hollywood types who use their films to stake their claim to “I can be more liberal than you can.”

This film is different. Waaaaaaaaaaaaay different. [Read more…] about An American Tune.

Children with Toys.

Giving young actors a budget of a couple of million dollars and telling them to go make a movie is a lot like giving a four-year-old a pair of scissors and telling them to practice those naiscent running skills…the results are not gonna be pretty. Allowing some actors a budget to make the political equivalent of potty jokes (in one case, quite litterally) is just completely irresponsible.

David “I married Courtney Cox so you don’t have to” Arquette and his ex-Friends wife have created a little opus they call “The Tripper.” It’s a fun-loving story about some Really Earnest Hippies who encounter a derranged psychopath who likes to dress up like President Ronald Reagan, mimic his voice, use his one-liners…and chop people to death with an axe. Um…yeah.

Watching some bad movies, you think, “Wow…this musta seemed funny on paper…I wonder what happened.” Not this turkey. What I wonder is what movie exec lost his job for greenlighting this abomination. [Read more…] about Children with Toys.

I’m working on something cool…

And I thought I’d let you know about it.

Here’s the deal…I’m always thinking about ways to make the things I use better. I’m also good with my hands, and notoriously cheap, when it comes to buying something I could make myself – especially when I can make something that’s better than what I can buy.

The other day, I was looking for a guitar stand, one that would hold several instruments at once. I didn’t like anything I found at GuitarCenter – too expensive, and cheaply made. I figured I could make something that would cost less and work better. And I was right. Turns out, a bunch of people agreed with me, and want to get me to make them a stand like the one I made for myself. What a novel idea. [Read more…] about I’m working on something cool…

My two cents.

The Captain is IN.I’ve been in the business of using computers, in one way or another, since 1982. I wrote my first college paper on an Apple III. I owned one of the original IBM PCs (Hercules Graphics Card! 512K RAM! Two full-height 5 1/4″ Floppy Drives! Dot Matrix Printer! DOS 2.0! Ashton-Tate Framework! All for the low, low price of $4,000!!!). I’ve worked as a software engineer, product manager, project manager, marketing manager, and user interface evangelist for software publishing companies. I was around for the birth of Windows 1.0, the life and death of COMDEX, the rise of the common user interface, the Year of the LAN, and a slew of other things, long consigned to the dust bin of computer history. I’ve been a user, author, coder, beta-tester, evangelist, designer, and planner. In short, I’ve held just about every job you can hold in the software industry.

Now I’m writing reviews. [Read more…] about My two cents.

How ideas happen.

I get to be creative for a living. In fact, my livlihood depends on me coming up with creative solutions to problems, and creative ideas in marketing, advertising and design. I’ve given a lot of thought to how ideas come into being, largely because the more ideas I get, the better off I am (within reason). There’s an old saying I like, “necessity is the mother of invention.” You could argue that it’s also the mother of creativity, or at the very least, the spark that lights the match of imagination. Case in point… [Read more…] about How ideas happen.

A shameless plug.

VectorRight.comThis is a shameless plug for my wife’s company. I say this in the spirit of full disclosure. VectorRight.com sells conservative-themed merchandise (shirts, caps, bumper stickers, etc.) I did the design work for her on the front end, and all the tshirt and bumper sticker designs as well. There’s some free stuff there, too – a bunch of Photoshopped pictures that feature Bill, Hillary, and some other lefties. It’s a completely partisan site – forget “fair and balanced,” unless your idea of fair is that she’s got a site and there are probably a dozen liberal merch sites out there competing with her.

So if you’re in the mood to see some decidely politically INcorrect stuff that trashes the Left (as opposed to what you’re USED to seeing, where the Left trashes the Right but calls it “all in good fun” – go for it. And buy something. I don’t make a dime off it – I did all the work “pro bono” which is Latin for “Honey do” (if you know what I mean, and if you’re a married guy, you do). But in order to perserve a more perfect union (mine) I’d consider it a personal favor if you hit the site, looked around, and found something nice for the Conservatives in your life.