Category: ultranerdy

Self-Employment Limbo

The drawback to working at home is that it feels like I’m developing narcolepsy or something. OK, maybe it has something to do with the complete lack of structure to my day, and my recent tendency to stay out all night one day and then try to catch up on sleep the next. Whatever the reason, my circadian rhythms are shot to hell. I’m sure I’ll even out eventually, at about the same time I rediscover the discipline to sit at my desk and be as constructive as I ought to be. I bet the first serious deadline I face will whip me into shape.

Design has been on my mind a lot lately, even though most of my waking hours have been spent on more mundane tasks. But design certainly has been a popular meme among the webloggers set lately (see here and here and here and here and here and here), and it still keeps coming back to the old “form versus function” debate that the Modernists all worked themselves into such a tizzy about.

I maintain that I think flashy websites are like cotton candy. The appeal lasts about five seconds, even if they’re incredibly beautiful. Even I can’t read ’em, or if there’s actually nothing to read beneath all the bells and whistles, then I don’t go back. Any web site that’s legible and elegant (and I don’t use elegant as a stylistic term) has my undying loyalty. The web is a flexible medium as far as design goes, which is great. Good design isn’t window dressing, however, and that goes for any medium.

With this site and Rumpus Room, for instance, the design has grown out of specific issues of content or structure. I try to keep the pages consistent so that it’s very clear when someone leaves the pages I’ve worked on. Both sites are text-driven, so I try to make the text as legible as possible, considering the inherent problems of dealing with text on the web. I try to make sure that in a pinch the sites can be read with lynx, a text-based browser. Even the coding is consistent, because I use CSS to format everything. That way, even the guts are developed by design, not just the look.

It’s taken a long time to set them up properly, but now that I have, I could redesign both sites in a few hours. But don’t hold your breath, because I haven’t been convinced that the sites or their context have changed enough to warrant that just yet.

The Mego Years

Made-Over Megos

None of these guys are in my collection anymore. This is a historical photo from the Rhatigan family archives.

It’s all about Mego, baby. As I’ve been putting more stuff up for my big auction on eBay, I realized that I should do a little research about some of the more obscure Mego items I had floating around.

Please tell me you know about the Mego superhero dolls. They were the cornerstone of my childhood, my favorite toys throughout elementary school. Being cursed with an overactive imagination, I refused to play with any of my toys as they characers they were sold as, so I made up all new characters for every onbe of them. What was great about the Mego dolls, aside from their excellent flexibility, was the fact that you could swap around all their costumes and accessories to form exciting new combinations.

Well, when I went hunting around for some background on the Mego dolls, I stumbled onto the motherlode of all Mego sites. I spent hours and hours poking around there, not just looking at the almost complete picture archive of all the dolls, but also checking out the incredible galleries of customized Mego dolls made to look like almost every other comic and sci-fi character around.

Another exciting, one much closer to my own Mego experience was SmallNet, a group of people who’ve transformed their Mego figures onto whole universes of their own characters. “You are big, but we are small!” The photo-documentary of the Rocket to the Roof mission was particularly fun. It produced many smiles here in the Rumpus Room.

Excuses, Excuses

I know I’ve been delinquent with the updates lately, but my latest incarnation as a professional technical writer has been making it very hard for me to come home and type some more. Or at least type anything I have to think about first. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it to anyone, but for the last two months or so at work I’ve been editing, writing, and typesetting a manual for a pretty elaborate piece of software for publishing directories and yellow pages. It’s difficult, to say the least, when only part of the package has a GUI, and the GUI it has needs help. The rest of the system tends to skip the “G” and often dismiss the the comfort level of the “U”. so, at 230 pages and counting, I’m trying to minimize the chaos and actually explain what’s going on. Of course, I’m trying to learn the damn stuff at the same time, which keeps causing minor delays. Sigh…

So that’s starting to sap my energy, but at least it keeps me from griping too much about the latest round of unsuccessful attempts to capture the interest of interesting guys.

Scholarly Data

Overachiever fails out of grad school! Yes, it’s true. I got my report card from Pratt today, the one with all the classes I decided to blow off as a means of effectively quitting grad school. In a way, it was very cathartic to just let those grades go. I’ve never failed a class before — I’ve never allowed myself to fail a class before. (Considering where I am today, it’s a little funny that my only low grades in high school were for Computer science and Algebra II. so much for my nerd credentials.) It was a good feeling when I realized that a bad transcript wasn’t going to haunt me the rest of my life, not when I’m actually more than capable of learning and doing well on my own. What a revelation: Grades actually ARE just numbers!

For the record:

spring 1999 Courses

Grade

Credits

Typography II

A

3.0

Visual Communications I

F

3.0

Communications Technology I

F

3.0

Corporate Image Planning

A

3.0

Fall 1999 Courses

Grade

Credits

Communications seminar

A

3.0

History of Communications Design

Incomplete

2.0

Cumulative Grade Point Average: 2.0

If you’re familiar with the GradCommD program at Pratt, you’ll notice that I failed my basic requirements but aced all my upper-level courses. Basically, this is because when push came to shove and I still had to work full-time while going to school, I devoted my energy to the more challenging, more interesting stuff and blew off the irritating stuff they made me take. Oops, my bad.

I think I may take a stab at finishing the work for the history class. The professor was a fun old queen who I liked a lot, and who wants me to submit the one paper I finished (on Piet Zwart) to the Pratt library since they don’t have any good reference materials on him. I wouldn’t kill me to write a couple of other small papers over the course of the next few months. After all, I certainly like reading up on designers and whatnot. Maybe I’ll finally write that essay about Art Chantry that I’ve been meaning to for years now. Art Chantry totally saved my life as a designer, but that’s a story for another day…

No More Pontificating

As of last night, I am no longer a college teacher. Technically, of course, I was an instructor of a basic computer skills class at Pratt’s school of Professional studies, but it was basically teaching college. I loved teaching, and I’m glad that I’ll be doing a lot of training as part of the new job at Miles 33, so I’ll still be able to scratch the itch.

One nice thing about teaching a class in basic Mac skills is that I get a chance to start people off on the right foot, and explain to them early on my whole philosophy about how computers are still just tools, not creative solutions. And that once you get the idea of how a system works basically, you’re armed with the ability to make educated guesses and teach yourself more, rather than just operating like some kind of trained monkey doomed to a lifetime of crappy production jobs.

Having never taken a computer class in my life, and just figured all this crap out for myself over the years, it’s nice to try and save someone else from wasting just as much time as I did being mystified by the glowing box with keyboard in front of it.

Old School

I don’t mind being 29. In fact, I was speaking with Gina today about how I think I may have been born in time to enter the design field at just the right moment. My education and experience as a designer started the old-fashioned way: I drew type by hand as a regular homework exercise, I used gouache and Letraset and colored paper to make comps, and my first job involved specifying type for professionally set galleys that I pasted down by hand for a 180-page book which I planned out on a Mac. And when I started working as a typesetter for B.U., I learned how to use a serious, complex typesetting system on which no assumptions could be made. Every decision about typography and page layout had to be considered, so I learned discipline and craftsmanship which served me through the dark times of the desktop publishing revolution. But at the same time, I was right there working with Macs and the Web as they exploded, and I was in a great position to learn as they developed.

So I am old enough to have learned the craft that preceded me, and young enough to be open to — and a part of — the possibilities that are swirling around us now. And lucky enough to have been able to learn how to use the best elements of both approaches. I love me!

The Good vs. The Bad and the Ugly

Good Lo-Tech

Bad Hi-Tech
Datebooks, Address Books, etc.
Immediate access as long as you have the presence of mind to keep them with you		 Databases and Electronic Calendars
Vulnerable to power outages and and disk crashes; it takes a long time for your computer to start up just to get a friend’s
number for a thirty-second call to an answering machine
Nice, Solid Wood Furniture
Easily repaired and looks better with age		 Any Furniture from Ikea
Sure it looks sleek, but it’s often wobbly after a while, and that formica-covered pressed wood is awful to the touch
Stationery and a Nice Pen
Nothing says “I care” like a handwritten letter		 Word Processors
A note to a friend should never look like a memo from the boss
A Screwdriver, a Pair of Pliers, and Gaffer’s Tape
Can be used to fix almost anything with a little imagination		 Telephone Tech Support
Punching buttons to get through a complex maze only to wait and then have someone condescend to second-guess everything you’ve already tried
Incandescent Lamps and Candles
Warm and soothing		 Flourescent Light Fixtures
“My, what an attractive complexion you have;” Flickers just enough to be annoying
SLR Cameras
The crappiest 35mm camera from the Salvation Army can still produce a picture with rich color and good detail as long as you hold it pretty steady		 Any Affordable Digital Camera
One-tenth the quality at four times the price. Don’t even get me started
Leather, Silk, Cotton Naugahyde, Acetate, Nylon
Goosedown Fiber-Fill
Reality
Touch it, smell it, taste it, do it now		 Virtual reality
Wait for it, pay for it

I’m a Bad Geek

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a big nerd. I was a little slow to give myself over to the world of electronics — I never played video games very much, and I never used a word processor until I was a sophomore in college — but I sure as hell made up for lost time. At this point I can work a computer like it’s an extension of my hands. Technical glitches are generally little more than a series of logically connected hurdles to me, and I’ve got good intuition for technical matters that helps me make a few bold leaps along the way. Software makes sense to me, and I love the speedy efficiency of digital technology. I have no fear of it.

This level of comfort with modern technology extends far beyond the workaday world of computers. Let’s be realistic: even though I may take to computers more easily than others, if I didn’t have some degree of comfort with them I wouldn’t really be able to hold down a job at this point, would I? No, I really like almost all things electronic. I like having an alarm clock that I can set by pushing a couple of buttons while I’m half asleep. I like having voice-mail and managing it without the use of clunky machines and crappy Radio Shack tapes. My six-disk CD player is like having a shrine to music inside my apartment. I pride myself on having not spoken to a bank teller in six years except to open an account or purchase foreign currency. And don’t even get me started on how much e-mail has kept my family and friends together as we’ve scattered across the globe.

A friend once told me that he thought I’d be happiest if I could manage my life while strapped to my computer all day being fed Skittles through a pneumatic tube. This is not true, and not just because the Skittles would send my blood sugar level soaring out of control.

I’m very critical of the media trend —spearheaded by technology pundits,
the advertising efforts of hi-tech companies, and everyone connected to
Wired magazine —that would have us believe that a better world awaits us in which we can fuse the Internet to our television programming, solve problems at work from the beach, and satisfy all our consumer needs without ever leaving home. I like leaving home and think people should get out more often. You don’t have to live in a cramped New York studio to know that there’s plenty more going on in the outside world to amuse people.

I worry about the death of printed matter that techno-doomsayers keep threatening. I worry about becoming more isolated from people on a daily basis than I already am. I worry about homogenization of the things I touch and the things I see and the things I read. While I support technology and the convenience, efficiency, and new opportunities it can offer our culture, I worry about what it’s doing to our critical standards and our self-reliance.

I’m a bad geek, because I also believe in lo-tech.

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