Please check out this article written by my friend and Bloomsburg University colleague Randall Presswood. He and his wife Nancy created 1 Acropolis for assisting with your theatre production needs. Please check out their website at 1acropolis.com.
How am I involved in this endeavor? Randall had reached out to me to help bring to life his concept of the superhero Ghostlight to help bring a “light” to 1 Acropolis and promote the services they can provide theater professionals.
Tomorrow, Marvel Studios releases Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in theaters. Shang-Chi is the newest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and is the first MCU theater-only release since the pandemic started. I’ve had some friends already see it tonight and I’ll be watching it with my kids this weekend. Here is my latest icon for my mcuchronology.com website. I initially said that this icon might be the easiest one I’d do so far, but boy was I wrong. I think it took me three or four iterations to replicate this logo. The lines are so important to be accurate–no guesstimating on this one.
I think my Planet of the Apes vs. Andy Warhol wall mural for my office is ready for printing. I just need to sit and stare at it some more before sending it out. So freaking excited! This will be 50”H x 72”W and installed behind my office desk. This is riffed off of Andy’s Elvis Presley paintings.
I’m very excited that during the Security Awareness Summit 2021 (August 5-6), thousands of attendees will have the opportunity to experience the interactive scavenger hunt that my teammates and I at SANS Security Awareness have designed and developed. This multi-part eLearning game will help reinforce EndUser security awareness best practices in a fun and competitive way. I’m very proud of our team and excited to hear the feedback on this new product.
Check out the trailer here…
Celebrating the Disney+ premiere of Loki, here is the new icon for the show that will eventually end up on mcuchronology.com. I decided to base this one off of his iconic horned helmet that he wore in Thor: Ragnarok. I’m very excited to see this show! I do need to update the website with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and a few others.
It’s hard to believe that after 40 years of living in Pennsylvania we would just uproot ourselves and our family and move to the midwest, but that is exactly what we did in 2019. My wife Elle accepted a position at a company and we decided to build a home in the burbs, nicknamed “Millard Manor 2.0.” We love it out here in Indy. It’s a beautiful area and we live in an awesome neighborhood where our kids have made so many new friends. Today marks the one-year anniversary of when we closed on our home.
Before building, I wanted to purchase a drone so I could take aerial footage of the construction process. I bought my brother-in-law’s DJI Phantom 3 Standard, which I thought was a great deal for my first drone (a year later now and I’d love to upgrade). The footage that you see in the timelapse video was shot from this drone using the Litchi app to control the drone. I used this software mainly because I was able to create a specific point of interest (POI) flight path that I would be able to load up and replicate consistently because I needed to stitch these together as seamlessly as I could. I then assembled and color-corrected these clips in Adobe Premiere Pro. As if you couldn’t tell already, I am not a professional at color grading and this was my first drone; but I am pleased with how it turned out. And as an added bonus for those building homes, drones are not only great for doing this but also to grab aerial photos of your home’s foundation and other angles that you could normally not see by foot. Enjoy the timelapse.
I created my first Cricut project a few months ago. It’s really a great machine and immediately I started thinking of all of the projects I could use it for (I actually bought the Cricut Maker for my wife two Christmases ago). I thought I’d try it out on a project and what better project than to make fun of the cliche font that nine out of ten tutorials and almost every craft you find in Hobby Lobby uses. That font would be Babette. It’s probably worse than Comic Sans. But hey, you know I always say there’s a time and a place for every font. And if you’re interested in having I Hate This Font for yourself, message me and we’ll arrange it.
This week I had the honor of being asked to take visual notes (or scribes) during Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania’s biannual Corporate Advisory Council, known to everyone simply as CAC. This conference is a special event hosted by the Department of Instructional Design and Technology that combines a hybrid of professional presentations, RFP class group presentations, and interviews for internships and jobs. It’s a very special event and a very special community. I am a happy alum of this program from 2012. So, when Mark Burke asked me to be a part of this, I said yes!
Now, to be completely transparent, I am do not like to draw in front of people (live or on a Zoom call) in front of people and drawing very quickly without time for refinement. But, like I used to tell my students, it’s a really good thing to be pushed outside of your comfort zone every once in a while. So, as terrified as I was, I was equally excited. Now, since I was scheduled for my second COVID vaccine for day 2, I enlisted the help of my super talented friend and fellow alum, Vanessa Bailey. I ended up doing digital notes on my iPad in Procreate and Vanessa did them on paper with a rainbow of markers. It was really great to see her work and hers turned out magnificent.
Overall, it was a fantastic virtual CAC that has been unlikely any other in the past. The new format was fantastic and Mark Burke did a bang-up job producing. You can check out his company MYNDDSET based out of Danville, PA. And my good friend Shawn Rosler (another program alum) even showed up to do a cooking challenge based on the idea of upskilling. You can check his amazing foodie podcast The Coarse Grind Podcast (I even got to design his logo). I’m looking forward to the Fall CAC and more so the next one where we can actually be live and in-person.
Here’s a selection of the visual notes that I did:
