From a link on Metafilter, I found a webcomic called Strong Female Protagonist, which was published online from 2012 to 2018. It’s a standard superhero setup but completely upends the standard genre by investigating what happens when superheroes realize that punching bad guys doesn’t actually solve anything, while navigating friendships and romance after revealing their secret identities. There are some very interesting (and, at points, navel-gazing) discussions about right and wrong, free will (in the context of a superhero who can read minds), and other moral and ethical questions about what it might mean to have extraordinary abilities. The creators went on hiatus and have not finished the series, sadly, but have gone on to bigger things. I shared the link with Finn and she devoured the entire series in a day, which is the best recommendation I can give.
Between the heat and the remains of Canada’s forests floating through the air, we stayed indoors Saturday and convinced Finn to binge the first season of Stranger Things with us. As a Child of the Device, she would much rather watch TikTok shorts than television, but we convinced her the series was good, and within the first fifteen minutes she was hooked.
While that was on, I sat my laptop on my knees and updated my new storefront with products—a tedious process of updating each design with an updated URL, uploading it, setting it up with colors that complement the design, and making it live. I’ve got all of the Scout grille designs up, a couple of different silhouette designs, and added two new Scout 800 designs. As it turned out, I made a sale while I was updating the site, making double the amount of money in profit than I did on the old storefront. Now I have to go through each of my YouTube videos and figure out how to swap in a new URL at the end of each.
This afternoon, I registered a new domain name and ordered some stickers with the URL Duganheavyindustries.com for the product I’m planning on selling. I’ve been using multiple URLs for various things, including oldlinestatebinders.com, but I decided it was finally time to centralize everything onto one site. I’ve been using the name for a while but I think it’s time to pull the trigger and make it official.
The motivating factor is the cupholder design, which is ready to go. I put together a quick installation guide for it, but I have to do the final pricing negotiation before I have the first batch made. I’ve also decided to make them out of stainless steel for both aesthetic and pragmatic reasons: if someone doesn’t paint it straight away, it won’t rust.
While that was happening, I got a request from someone about printing designs on pocket T-shirts, which Threadless, my current printer, doesn’t offer. I did some research and found a different vendor who does pocket T’s, as well as offer more customization than Threadless—and a better profit margin to boot. So I’m going to wait to hear how the shirt came out, and if that looks good, move my designs over to the new platform. Then I’ll have to go in and manually edit all of the YouTube videos to update the final card—which features a red Travelall and the URL of the Threadless site.
Back in the day, Dad was given a red nylon windbreaker from Ciba-Geigy in his early sales career. It was a very mid- 60’s design: a square band collar work jacket with two pockets. It had design elements that I came to love when I found it in the closet behind his other stuff: a black and white vertical racing stripe on the right breast with a Ciba-Geigy patch on the left. I think that early nylon must have shrunk over time, because it was marked as a medium but was definitely a small, and it fit me perfectly. When I found it, there was no way it would ever have fit on Dad, so I asked him for it. I had it for several years after college and took very good care of it. One night I wore it to a party, and it got pinched when I wasn’t looking. Heartbroken, I’ve looked for a replacement ever since.
Facebook is definitely reading my mind, because this amazing vintage Gulf jacket showed up in my feed yesterday for the eye-watering price of $175, size small. If I was stupidly rich, I’d have already bought it, but I’m not that much of a slave to fashion. I’m sorely tempted, though.
Wow, here’s a couple of hours’ worth of reading: a man researched and mapped the 8 major English dialects across the continental US, with examples of the differences in vowel pronounciation in exhaustive detail below. Sadly, the map was produced in something called Paint.net; I’m shocked that a data viz or graduate student has not volunteered to rebuild it on a proper cartographic platform.
I read a random review for an animated series on Adult Swim called Primal, which is written and directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, the man behind Samurai Jack and a bunch of other animated properties you’ve probably heard of. This series follows the story of Fang and Spear, a dinosaur and a caveman (yes, I know) who come to reluctantly bond through shared experience. Because it stars a dinosaur and a caveman, there is no dialogue—much like Samurai Jack—but it is instantly compelling, and his skill in conveying emotion through expression and movement is still unmatched. There are three seasons so far and I’m doing everything I can not to binge them all; this is made easier by the fact that you can’t just listen to it like you would a podcast, although the sound design is gorgeous: it demands your full attention. It’s a visual treat to watch due to the things I’ve already mentioned plus the lush, vibrant landscapes in every frame. Highly recommended.
This morning there’s about an inch of snow on the ground, which fell overnight. The house is quiet while the girls are still asleep, and Hazel is snoring in her bed at my feet. We hosted our friend Christopher yesterday, and were fortunate enough to take in the Amy Sherald exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. It’s been a long time since I’ve been at an art museum, and her show was inspiring and challenging—just what good art should be.
This evening I’m going to run down to Gaithersburg to hopefully pick up a DJI Mini 3 drone from a guy on Marketplace. The Mini 3 is a midrange consumer model that’s small and portable enough to sneak under the FAA size limit but large enough to carry a 4K camera, and I’d like to pick one up to work with next year for video projects. There is a possible ban on DJI coming up on December 23, which could mean that they will be unable to sell new drones in the US, so I figure it might be a good time to grab something before used prices spike upwards.
The IT folks at work were super cool and gave me a decomissioned PC laptop this summer so that I could run the PC-only Sniper software for the red truck. With the Sniper project on hold, it’s been sitting on my shelf, but I dusted it off this week to load a free copy of the presentation software we use for our yearly looking-forward event. It always takes us a full day to get things loaded on the display machine at the filming venue, and I figured I’d try to set it up ahead of time to speed up the process. I got the program running, went to plug it in to an external monitor via HDMI cable—and it sparked as it touched the side of the laptop. The screen went dead, and I could not get the laptop to power back on.
I’ve never seen or heard of this happening before. I talked to the IT folks and they said they’d never heard of it either, but they’re going to hook me up with another decommissioned unit next week. PCs are weird, man.
News from the State Police: They approved my application for concealed carry. Which basically just means I’ll be OK to drive to and from the shooting range.
Last night I wrapped up a course designed for Creative Directors and taught by a CD at Ogilvy Canada. I went into it thinking it would be good to talk with other people at a similar age and experience level, gain some insight, and share any strategies or wisdom. The class size was close to 100 but seemed to be made up of younger Art Director-level creatives, with some newly minted CD’s looking for guidance. So I found myself to be one of the old heads in the virtual room offering advice more than I was learning. And because the course was taught by and for agency-style creatives, I felt a bit disconnected, being an in-house leader at an NGO. Still, it was inspiring, I did learn a few things, and my LinkedIn profile is full of connection requests.
The final assignment was to pitch a project as if we were in a room with the client, which I’ve always been good at doing. I looked back through my history and did a pitch for the billboard I designed for Deutsche Bank in New York City, when I was at an agency. Thankfully I spent a bunch of COVID sorting through and organizing my digital files so I knew right where to find it on the server in the basement. I set up the camera and did a quick pitch on tape, then overlaid some photos and video of the project in the final edit. I keep forgetting that we won a couple of Addys for that piece.
On Thursday I’m headed to Florida for a football weekend with a bunch of my uncles and cousins, which should be a blast. Dugans are flying in from all over, and we’re meeting at my Uncle’s house for the Bills/Dolphins game on Sunday. I have no idea what to expect here; my cousins and I are all older than our parents were when we were gathering for holidays regularly, so there is a very good chance we will all be asleep by the end of the third quarter. My days of drinking an entire case of Milwaukee’s Best during a football Sunday are long over, so I’ll have to pace myself and bring plenty of ibuprophen. And hopefully my Dugan’s Beer shirt will be here before I have to leave for the airport!
Amy Sherald, the artist best known for her portrait of Michelle Obama, is having a mid-career retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She recently cancelled an exhibit at the Smithsonian over censorship concerns with the painting “Trans Forming Liberty”, above. She’s a fellow alumnus of MICA, having graduated from the MFA program, and worked in Baltimore for 17 years. I’m going to get tickets and take the girls to this show. I was lucky enough to have seen the Michelle Obama painting at the National Portrait Gallery, and it is breathtaking in real life. Looking forward to this show.
This morning, theoretically, I am on day one of my second sabbatical at WRI. I spent the last three months cranking on a big project at work and with a few small details left, got it over the finish line (more details on that soon). I’ll have to plug in for a couple of small meetings next week, but hopefully I can step away and enjoy the next five weeks doing some personal projects and seeing family—because in the fall, things are going to get very busy again. Brian is looking at a Nissan Leaf parked in his driveway and wants help disassembling it for his electrification project, and I’m hoping I can put in a couple of solid weeks helping him with that. I’d actually like to keep working on that through the winter because I am keenly interested in that project. And as always, there are projects here around the house to tackle, and I’ve got a red truck that I wanna get on the road before the snow flies. I’m also signed up to get my concealed carry license next week, and I intend to put some time in at the range.
I will never own a watch this expensive in my life, but watching this guy disassemble, clean, and reassemble an original Rolex GMT was fascinating. This watch is gorgeous, and would be everything I would want in a vintage timepiece. That bakelite bezel is beautiful—the rich color and typography are absolutely perfect, and the wear on the whole watch is just right.
I’m currently taking a class/working group for creative directors run by the CD at Ogilvy Canada. I found it through my social media feed and signed up for it on a whim. I was lucky to get WRI to pay for it (after 11 years, this is the first class I’ve asked them to pay for) and so far it’s been pretty good. The class size is much bigger than I was expecting, and there are a lot of people who are in the place I was after about two years at WRI—they had the title, had been doing the work, but are still trying to figure out how their role fits in at whatever agency/company they’re at. This Thursday we went through the creative brief and roughly half the class had never written or used one, which I found kind of shocking. But something I’m finding universal is the lack of any formal training or mentorship for this role; if you’re lucky you work for a CD somewhere as a design or art director and they show you the ropes. My experience involved little mentorship—I had to figure it out along the way, which has been the theme of my entire career. The class will run through most of my sabbatical but that means I’ll be able to focus on the homework better.