Tag: art

How to Scare Yourself

You’re a writer – y0u know how it goes. Sometimes you create something that, well, sorta give you the heebidy-jeebies. Stephen King once said he knew his description was too gross if he felt like throwing up on his keyboard.

Yum.

So, as you know, or maybe not – I can’t keep up anymore – I have a podcast. It’s called The Three Point Line and it’s dreadfully serious about making illustrations in Adobe Illustrator…

Boy, talk about ch-changes – now, I know this is an aside…

Here I am using the Windows Snipping Tool to make a screen cap of making the illustration of a Matchbox car – come on, who doesn’t like toy cars? My grandson and his family show up, so I stop the recording and save the illustration and go be a good grandfather – no, not a great grandfather. Not that old.

Two weeks scurry by. I open up the Snipping Tool with a new screen capture recording, open up Adobe Illustrator, and, what? It wants to load a printer? Illustrator won’t run until it finds a printer? WHICH printer? What is going on???

Stupid me, I forget to turn off the recorder while I dump Illustrator, visit Creative Cloud and reload, ask questions of Claude.AI and find out it’s a bug in Illustrator, and scramble through my Windows settings to fix it. Finally, the recorder stopped when I rebooted the PC. it’s a charming video filled with swear words and bad juju.

Anyway, the video got finished, the illustration is done, and I moved on.

Talk about your pointless asides, huh? Done now. Thank you.

So, the kid, who spends his days in preschool, brought home a cold, which I caught, of course. It’s in the job description.

This morning, I was thinking about that song “I Think I Love You” by the Partridge Family. Alright, I was singing it, but my voice is uber-froggy, and I got this idea…

The video link is here: Apologies to the Partridge Family

It really makes me laugh, right before it scares the pants off me.

That final line, that “I think I love you,” is so dark. Just a character, I shrug. But that guy’s inside me. Ew.

Because, you know that the basis of humor is truth, right? That’s what makes it funny.

I think that means that there are elements of the creepy guy in that video in me. Sitting right here inside right now. Typing. This.

Helping himself to my macaroni-and-cheese-with-tuna for lunch.

Brushing my teeth with me.

What am I supposed to do now? Sleep?

An Intrepid Trek

You’re a writer. Writing is what you do. Here’s my advice: stick to that. Don’t try to build a media empire – just plain write like you mean it.

Earlier this year I got the opportunity to visit the Intrepid Museum in New York City with the fam.

As you know, or perhaps didn’t but soon will, I run another site called Marvelous Air Museums. It used to be called California Air Museums, but I kind of moved to the great state of New Jersey, where it’s much more difficult to visit the museums in California.

Anyway, never mind about that.

Well, actually, the purpose of this post is to advise you of this post: Intrepid Museum, which links to this video here.

But now I’ve given you, like, three links in the first, like, 100 words of this post, and I, like you, must find myself getting confused. What?

It could be a marketing blunder, like putting too many fonts in your online ad – makes you look like a rookie. I’m sure that’s true with links, too. Oops.

Anyway, never mind about that.

I put together that video for the Intrepid Museum in Adobe After Effects and Premier Pro, and it was a pleasure doing so.

As much as I enjoyed using DaVinci Resolve, and I truly did, the degree of freedom you get in working with After Effects is simply breathtaking.

The Adobe CC Suite is expensive – there is no doubt about that.

But, if you can bite that bullet, the leap is like jumping from one of those $29.99 department-store tool kits your parents got you when you moved out of the house to that sleek $300 Mechanic’s Tool Kit that you find at the big-box home improvement center. Put down those slip-joint pliers, my friend. There’s a socket wrench for that.

On another and related topic, I’m still running a website called Skippity Whistles. Back in the day, like, last year, my idea was to download all the stuff I had figured out how to do onto this website that you, the person stuck with the $29.99 tool kit, would find useful.

We, not the imperial we, but my wife, daughter and I, worked hard to come up with useful pieces of information for the site. As problems occurred in our real life, they would get solved and show up on Skippity.

In truth, nobody visited California Air Museums, and even fewer visit Marvelous Air Museums. But they’re swinging by good ol’ Skippity at a fairly good clip.

The difference between the sites is that there are more people who care about how to use a pair of locking pliers than there are those who care about an EA-6B Prowler.

Huh. Go figure.

Anyway, go take a look at Marvelous Air Museums and then go over to Skippity Whistles, and let me know what you think.

Although I’m a media mogul, I could use a little help sorting all this out…