If I were a superhero this would be my greatest weakness; too much looking back, not enough looking forward. I suppose it has to do with the way I’ve engineered myself.

Exploring who it is that I was and continue to be, as a father, husband and artist comforts the person that I’ve become.

Just as there is no secret sauce to success, there too is no algorithm to knowing what choice we made (or will make) is the right one. Instead we lean on our past and entrust ourselves to influence future decisions and hope the best for the penultimate outcome.

Robert Frost, four-time Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, put it best in his poem,

The Road Not Taken

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

We’ve all stood before the fork in the road of our choices. Just as the person Frost describes above we chose one path over another and promise ourselves that if we ever face a similar set of choices again, we might consider the other path.

Yet, it is highly unlikely we will face the same situation, so we accept that whatever we did may or may not have had an outcome we were proud of and we move on.

I can’t say that every decision I’ve made has been the right one, in fact I’d be living in a delusional world if I believed that were true.

However, I know for a fact that many of them, right or wrong, shaped the person I am today and recognizing the journey to that fork in the road is probably just as important as the decision itself.

The difficulty for me is figuring out why I decided to take one path over another which ends up being an exercise fueled with curiosity and sometimes lends itself to insanity.

It happens so often, in fact, that I begin to doubt my instincts as a designer. It boggles the mind that a Designers Anonymous group doesn’t exist for this very reason, but I digress.

This way of thinking is ludicrous because everything we create is vital to the design process, no matter the context.

For example: That movie poster that you spent several hours on, the one that was eventually canned because the hero’s (or heroin’s) face ended up being badly contorted at a specific viewing angle would probably seem like a failed creation. You might even be tempted to trash it from your hard drive, never to speak of it again.

But guess what? Horribly mangled facial crufties aside, you might end up recycling the typeface or that speckled texture for a future poster or project.

Make it a habit, if you haven’t already, to file away your delightful creations for future use and avoid cursing your design work with voodoo.

It just never works, I mean what am I supposed to do with this Chihuahua-Goat™?

Just remember the three R’s: Redeem, Reuse and Rejoice.

Actually, I’ve been tooling away at many things, one of which involves this very site, but that I can’t speak of quite yet. I’ll just say the redesign is underway and will mark the return of the crest. For older readers you know exactly what I mean, but for those who’ve only stopped by every once in a while the crest was once part of the brand of this site.

Beyond that I’m participating in Project 52 this year. What’s that?

Project52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year.

I’m challenging myself to a goal: to write something new once or more per week for one year starting January 1st, 2010. It doesn’t seem like a lofty goal really, not at all actually. It just means I have to commit to something that I’ve long neglected and somewhere along the line it might (I hope!) recharge the fizzled neon sign that is this “blog” or site, or whatever you want to call it. Call it “Fresh Fish Market” for all I care, which incidentally is the name of my wireless network.

There you have it. At least one new post a week for just a year and if I can adhere to that rule I think the prize is an all-paid expense trip to Tahiti.

One can dream such a dream, right?

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time. — Abraham Lincoln

Ever have one of those days where the future seems hazy, but you’re certain it’ll become clearer as you move through it all?

Today was that day.

As blessed as I am (mostly due to a support list that has too many names to mention — okay, one being my wife), I still ponder the journey.

Stepping stones…

There’s a scene in District 9 when the main character, after enduring a lot of pain and humiliation, has to make the choice of either running into battle guns ablaze or retreat. He chooses the latter knowing full well that his actions are driven by fear and selfishness.

District 9 or “D9” is many things all rolled up into a hard to describe package. Among them it’s a sci-fi adventure with all the elements you’d expect like blaster guns and an enormous spaceship. It’s also an unrelenting social commentary and an action-packed romp that refuses to let down its guard.

The effects and cinematography compliment each other quite well and at times it’s hard to distinguish between the two. That said, they are not of the slick variety that other films convey, but the grimy texture is beautiful and perfect for the portrayal of a enslaved race of aliens living in South African slums.

It’s an unforgiving, ravished and selfish environment, leaving barely any room for survival. It’s a film that is best experienced without digging for holes in the plot (of which they are a few) or making assumptions dealing with the character portrayal or progression.

I enjoyed it because it didn’t reveal too much of itself and yet what it did expose was raw (human and alien) emotion, flaws in the human fabric and a detached feeling of humanity, or at least I felt detached at times.

Recently, my three-year-old son Quinn asked me to draw Beast from Beauty and the Beast. He handed me a Crayola Twistable crayon and two sheets of copy paper and stood by my side waiting for the results. He also reminded me that he wanted it delivered pretty quickly, as if he had a pitch meeting to attend or something.

Since then I’ve been doing some sketches of other characters you might recognize, the idea being that these are quick, dirty and recognizable.

The Sketches

Materials: A blue Crayola Twistable, regular copy paper.

Materials: Prismacolor colored pencil, regular copy paper. Source: Don Bluth Animation

Their favorite line was one uttered by The Supreme Leader:

You infect my world with your presence! Turn the others into… trashcans!

Even though Captain EO was a favorite from my childhood, having seen it for the first time in the late 80s/early 90s, it took the passing of Michael Jackson and a flood of nostalgia to convince me to do so. What a shame.

We also watched Moonwalker’s Smooth Criminal sequence, but that wasn’t nearly as cool to them. I tried to explain that when I was a kid (early 80s), Michael Jackson was something special and even after all these years he’s still considered a true talent. What I didn’t go into was all the media hype, speculation, accusations, strange behavior or giggly interviews because none of that mattered to me and someday they can get the scoop on all of that if they really want to.

Michael’s message to the world was simple: be inspired and imaginative, loving, creative and good.

It’s something we all can aspire to be and for that I thank “MJ” for his influence.

He’s also responsible for some real stinkers. Movie stink that could quickly foul a room full of underdeveloped daisies and seldom come up in conversation for fear of one being exiled or worse, thrown to a bunch of ravenous movie critics. Now I’m beginning to feel nostalgic for the cartoon, The Critic, but anyways…

Howard the Duck is perhaps the worst movie on George’s resume (yes, fouler than even Clone Wars), failed miserably at the box office and yet it retains a charm all its own. There are even days when the movie strangely hovers around in my thoughts from time to time.

If this were VH1’s Behind the Music, this is the part when the guy would say.. “And now, the story behind the story.”

It all started with some comics

From Wikipedia:

[Howard the Duck] first appeared in Adventure into Fear #19 (Dec. 1973) and several subsequent series have chronicled the misadventures of the ill-tempered, anthropomorphic, “funny animal” trapped on human-dominated Earth. Howard’s adventures are generally social satires, and also often parodies of genre fiction with a meta-fictional awareness of the medium. [Wikipedia]

If you were to pick up a Howard comic during this time you’d notice very little difference between him and Donald Duck. This was intentional on the part of its creators but for obvious reasons wasn’t carried over in the movie.

Quack, Quack!

The movie adaptation, released in 1986, retained some of the traits from the comic in the form of its star, Howard, who was still ill-tempered and anthropomorphic. Instead of doing an animated feature, which would’ve been an ideal presentation, the film was instead live-action and the duck would be part animatronic puppet, part diminutive actor.

It starred a very young Lea Thompson and Tim Robbins. Tim Robbins, up until this point (with Top Gun’s release looming) had been known for bit roles in TV and film. Lea Thompson was (and will probably always be) known as the Marty McFly’s mother Lorraine in Back to the Future.

Together, they were supporting players to their feathered star and despite the sub par script and kooky special effects, managed to give somewhat convincing performances. However, there is something to be said about the human/duck relationship that is, to this day, uncomfortable to watch. I don’t think I was ever fully up to speed on the “birds, ducks and bees.”, but I digress.

Above all us, Howard the Duck, like The Dark Crystal, was a childhood favorite of mine because it was something I enjoyed watching with my family.

It was a fantastic, awful, bewildering and grossly underrated cult classic.

The Trailer

Additional Reading:

• http://www.fast-rewind.com/howardduck.htm
• http://www.toonopedia.com/howard.htm
• http://www.norcalmovies.com/HowardTheDuck
• http://www.answers.com/topic/howard-the-duck
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_the_Duck

Lucasarts & Quantum Link

Lucasarts (then called Lucasfilm Games) was founded by Peter Langston, a musician/game designer who hand-picked a group of young and eager game designers to create original game properties.

In 1985 Lucasarts was working on a Commodore 64 virtual community game (coupled with a 300-baud modem attachment) called Habitat.

In the game you were to create an “avatar” (yes, they coined the term in this context), picking from a selection of colors and clothes using the “GET” and “PUT” commands and then chat and interact with other people within a somewhat graphical UI.

They partnered with a company called Quantum Link to provide the on-line service component and distributed a beta test. However, the game itself proved to be too popular and their servers couldn’t handle the load, so it was canceled never making it to retail.

Meanwhile the technology was sold to Fijitsu in 1989 and was later renamed Club Caribe.

Postmortem

Lucasarts went on to create many original gaming properties (successful adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle) and Quantum Link eventually changed their name to America Online.

The rest is history.

Additional reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Quantum-Link
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Habitat-(video-game)

It would seem that many of us are losing the ability to actually perform DIY skills such as changing a tire, fixing the bathtub or installing a ceiling fan and yes, sometimes, changing a light bulb.

The article quotes sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein as saying:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

I’m not sure about you, but I can on a good day maybe task myself with one or two of the above (planning an invasion and cooking a tasty meal if you’re curious). Ask me to build a wall? I’d just point you in the direction of a great masonry. Balance accounts? Talk to my wife, the accountant. Butcher a hog? Well, you get the picture.

Granted, Heinlein’s task list is ambitious. It’s like asking a kindergartner to walk on stilts in the middle of a sandbox. It probably won’t happen. The kid might be smart enough to call his friend, the circus performer, who will not only gladly put on the stilts but he’ll hold a fishbowl as well. In this day and age, we’ve got contacts, professionals, who will do these things for a whole lot or a whole little greenback.

That said, it would seem impractical or more technical DIY is on the rise. Just to name a few DIY resources: Make Magazine, Readymade, Lifehacker, DIY Life, DIY Network and one of my favorites, Instructables, just about anyone can learn how to build a solar-powered kite or superpower an appliance.

The question is then, has the DIY skill set atrophied or has it evolved into something else entirely?