Archive for Nate Voss
In 2008, Donovan Beery and I sat down with AIGA President Sean Adams in Omaha, Nebraska, where Sean was attending the AIGA Leadership Retreat. During our visit with Sean, he was incredibly gracious and cordial, and often disarming with his humor. We met Sean in a large but decidedly un-decadent hotel room and discussed the formation of Adams Morioka, what makes designers take the plunge into self-employment, and the perks of sharing an office building with Larry Flint. (The full interview can be heard on The Reflex Blue Show, available for download here.)
Hey everybody! We’re always hard at work over here adding new things to the site, and from today forward you might notice some links under each post to the social bookmarking site of your choice. If you see an article, comic, or podcast that strikes your fancy and you want to let your friends (or the world at large) know about it, just click one of the icons and it should take you straight away to that site.
As a test I dropped The Big Geek Switch onto my Facebook, and the process was clean and simple. We’re using Byrne Reese’s Promote This plugin on Movable Type, and for someone who knows very little about the engine driving this site I found it very easy work with and integrate into our template. Currently it doesn’t have Twitter support, which I’d like, but it does work with some other sites not listed above, so if there’s a site you use that we don’t have up there let us know and we’ll see about getting that in.
—nv–
There’s something very… monumental in the works. Something primal. I can feel it. A shift.
Earlier this year many people my age and older, some a little younger, finally took the last burden and insult from the once legendary Star Wars, as Clone Wars stumbled out like a long lost friend at your high school reunion who’s gone off the deep end. The one who used you be your best mate, and who, after losing touch, seemed to make an endless stream of brain-dead and baseline-crazy life decisions and now is off in the corner half-dressed and drunk out of his mind, listing off reasons to people of how he’s not really stalking his ex-girlfriend, even though no-one brought it up. You see your old friend and you realize he’s too messed up. He’s too far gone, you think. You walk away from Star Wars. I was one of the last holdouts — Revenge of the Sith is my second-favorite Star Wars movie if I close my eyes and ears during the scenes where Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen talk without shouting.
You can call it Star Wars mourning, if you like. Like a breakup, even a good breakup — a breakup you were prepared for — you need some time to heal. And then, when you’re ready, you can behold the god-damn-awesome-with-fireworks Star Trek trailer that hit the tubes today.
As a die-hard Star Wars fan, never, never in my life have I been excited for a Star Trek movie. Sure, I could enjoy me some STNG, but anything after that — or movies that don’t have KHAAAAAAAAN in them — weren’t worth it when you had Luke and The Force to cheer for. But that’s just it, we don’t have Luke anymore. We don’t have the same Force. We have snippy-padawan-sidekick girl, as well as the word “padawan.” And instead of boring, slow moving ships and non-action, we have god-damn sexy Kirk and Sylar Spock, the hot girl from Curse of the Black Pearl who wasn’t in the sequels, and about ten gallons of screen-busting awesome. It’s almost as if smoldering Eomer “Bones” McCoy walked into the living room where we were going through old photos of Han and Lando on Cloud City, with overflowing buckets of awesome saying “Excuse me, could someone please tell me where to put all of this awesome? I have all of this awesome overflowing here and nowhere to put it down.” Suddenly, the unthinkable has happened. Star Wars is now solidly, completely terrible, and Trek has stepped in to show Wars how it’s done. And people are going to follow. In droves. To me, it’s the strangest thing, how one story got it so wrong when it came back for a second go, and how, on what seems to be it’s third trip around the block, somebody seems to finally be getting the other one right. This is a time in geekdom that people are going to look back on. This is The Big Geek Switch.
A last note. A few months ago I saw my friend Donovan about to toss out or donate a Star Wars Monopoly game. When pressed, he offered it to me instead. When I took it home and opened it, I was amazed. The game was made before the prequel movies ever existed, and seeing it was like seeing an old friend, long gone.
Another last note: Scott Kurtz perfectly nailed a point to this argument in PVP that, yes, I was thinking as I wrote this.
–nv–
Dave Nelson demonstrates yet again why he is one of the most vital designers working out of Nebraska right now with his new site, WhyIAmVotingForObama.com. It’s an honest, earnest look at the candidate through the eyes of a devout Christian, for single-issue (ie: abortion) voters. Dave’s been a guest of our show (and earlier on the Be A Design Cast) and you can see more of his great work here, and at his blog here.