Ohiodave

Saturday, November 07, 2009

I Got Scammed

I should have known better. I should have seen the signs. Luckily, I’m only out $15.00.

The scammer in question is director Olatunde Osunsanmi, and the scam is his laughably bad new film, The Fourth Kind, which I’m happy to report was 98 minutes of pure incoherence. The Fourth Kind has been much hyped, and the little bit of the plot revealed in trailers (a psychologist investigates alien abductions in a remote Alaska town) seemed pretty interesting. Boy, was I ever wrong.

Warning: Here Be Spoilers. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

As I said, I should have seen the warning signs. The Fourth Kind begins with Milla Jovovich (who is, along with Elias Koteas, this movie’s only saving grace) standing in the woods and explaining that what we’re about to see is a dramatization based on real events that happened in Nome, Alaska, in 2000. I hated (hated!) the Blair Witch, I’m not a believer by nature, and I have a hard time suspending disbelief for anything but a really good story.

To achieve the mockumentary affect, two movies were filmed: a “dramatization” starring Jovovich and Elias Koteas, and the ostensible “original footage” featuring a bunch of no-name actors shot with camcorders. At various points in the movie, the two are presented side-by-side in a split screen. Sadly this doesn’t lend the movie any credibility, it just looks cluttered and confusing. The original footage also has an annoying tendency to get blurry and swim in and out of focus whenever anything really interesting happens. Jovovich goes to pains to explain that most of the characters besides hers have been given aliases, because they are real people and they are really concerned about privacy.

Jovovich and her unnamed double play Abbey Tyler, a psychologist working in Nome, Alaska. Her husband was murdered in their bed while she was mysteriously paralyzed and unable to help him. Tyler can’t remember who killed him, only a disembodied arm stabbing him through the chest. She and her husband were working on some sort of government project, analyzing the residents of Nome who have all been reporting the same dream in which they wake up at 3:00 AM to find a creepy white owl staring at them.

Read Full Entry »

Sunday, June 07, 2009

Twitter Malaise

It’s been eight months now, and I still don’t get Twitter. I don’t understand the etiquette of following people, I don’t know what a retweet is for, and I can’t understand why you use #hashtags when regular text is completely searchable. I don’t consider Twitter a social outlet; I’ve never been to a “Tweetup” (I hate the verb “tweet”), and I don’t use Twitter to have conversations.

I’d like to think that I use Twitter the way it was meant to be used: to answer the question, “What are you doing?” I post whatever comes to mind and don’t really expect an answer, or even anyone to read it.

Recently I’ve noticed a rather disturbing trend; more and more of my posts result in people I don’t know following me. The other day, I posted a complaint about my former web host, and immediately two people affiliated with web hosting companies followed me. Tonight I posted about how most of the photos on Flickr are crap, and three photographers (according to their Twitter profiles) added me. Then, for absolutely no reason, I was followed by a girl who describes herself as the “Official Spontent Party Chick”. No idea what that’s about.

So I wonder, is this normal? I’m pretty sure nothing I write on Twitter is of general interest, so I can’t fathom why people I’ve never met are subscribing to it.
Only two thoughts come to mind:

1. Someone is trying to market to me, or
2. Someone is trying to bullshit, trick, or spam me.

I have no way of knowing whether these people are shills, automated Twitter bots, or regular people with a lot of time on their hands. For awhile I was blocking them, but I’m starting to wonder if these shenanigans are standard on Twitter. Are they doing it wrong, or am I? Malaise…

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Dolla Dolla Billz Y’All

So I twittered earlier about the Dollar Redesign Project. I said that the project was cool, but all the designs posted so far were hideous. Within 20 minutes, the owner of the blog had tracked me down and rebutted that he’d love to see what I would do. Touché, internet.

I really do like the site and think the dollar needs a refresh, but I’m not going to post any redesigned dollars for the following reasons:

1. I don’t know thing one about designing currency.
2. I can’t point out good currency design, only bad.
   All the designs on the Dollar Redesign site are either jokes, statements (I especially like the one where all the money looks like barcode labels), or inspired by the Euro, the Australian dollar, and other neon, sans-serif-loving monstrosities. I like clean lines and modern design in a lot of things, but money isn’t one of them. I also think that more color in money is not necessarily a good thing.
3. Anything designed on a bet is bound to be terrible.

A semi-related anecdote

Recently I had to take a logo designed for the U.S. market, in which a character was holding a stack of greenbacks, and convert it for use in Canada. I agonized over how to represent Canadian dollars, given that Canadian money has changed appearance many times over the years and didn’t seem to have a strong visual metaphor the way U.S. dollars do.

Money has a certain look in America: Bills are basically duotone - black and another color. There is a border around the edges and a rounded area in the middle that may or may not feature a portrait. You can play around with most of the elements and still not lose the basic connotation of money, as opposed to any old piece of paper.

I asked a Canadian co-worker whether (a) using U.S. money in the Canadian logo would be insulting, and (b) if he knew of a visual metaphor that would play in Canada. He said that (a) yes, it probably would, and (b) suggested maybe a handful of Loonies (Canadian dollar coins). Unfortunately, the logo was too small for the coins to show up clearly.In the end I modified the bills to look vaguely like the new Canadian $20 bill, which has a green bar on top and a white bottom, but I wasn’t completely happy with the result.

About a month later I went to Toronto on vacation, and walking down Yonge Street I happened to see an ad with a caricature of Canadian money. The ad used the familiar U.S. greenback shape, but the stack of dollars alternated green and red. This seemed like kind of a cop-out to me.

A final word of caution to U.S. dollar redesigners: Don’t end up like Canada. Push the dollar in new directions, but don’t throw away 100+ years of brand equity and force a lot of designers to reinvent the wheel like I tried to, or use an inappropriate metaphor the way the designer in Toronto did.

Do any non-Americans read this blog? I’d like to get some opinions and learn how “money” in the generic sense is represented in other countries.