Category: The Ultimate Underfold

Hollywood is making more and more superhero movies where they’re supposed to be “realistic” which is funny… because they’re not. The thing is, people are following along with the craze and I recently read a report about the real-life cost of the latest Superman vs. Zod battle would have cost in Man of Steel. They estimated that there would have been over 149,000 people left dead from Superman trying to save the Earth…

This would never happen with Ninja Philip. He’s too awesome. I can’t wait for you to meet him.

What’s a superhero you’d love to see a “realistic” movie version of?

I realize that there are jobs where you can play video games and watch movies and write things about it… but even that’s too much. Like… I just want to watch movies and play video games as my job. Is that too much to ask for?

If you could get paid to do anything, what would you do?

It’s true. Everyone should know it. When you write your own comics or books or make your own movies, you can make whatever you want. It’s fantastic.  However, I’m all in favor of self-deprecation.

Anyway, I should also take this time to point out that Comics Are Great! is a podcast by Jerzy Drozd and it is wonderful.

If you made yourself into a comic book superhero, what would you be?

Okay. So, it’s funny how things like this work. At my day job, I’m having a similar problem with one of our payment pages. We started with a page with 3 small-ish icons, clearly labeled to what they were supposed to be organized horizontally.

People clicked the wrong things.

So we changed it to a vertical layout so that people would see what most of them wanted first and would have to scroll down to get past it.

People still clicked the wrong things.

So I made the icons enormous. With big words. Then we have words on top of our icons with more description. You have to scroll for a while to get past the things that most people actually should click on…

PEOPLE STILL CLICKED THE WRONG THINGS.

Holy moley. I guess maybe I’ll wind up drawing pictures at my day job too. Big, clear, simplistic pictures. But at this point, I doubt even that would help.

What do you do in these types of situations?

Contextual logic is a lost art. If something’s not labeled, it’s a mystery. Working in webdesign, I’ve found that in certain circles, you really do have to spell things out for people (and even then they get it wrong).

This is how it was when I literally did this job, serving coffee at my church. Two carafes, one is labeled “decaf” which leads one to deduce that the other is not decaf. And if it’s not decaf, it’s likely regular, caffeinated coffee. This is not Sherlockian style thinking. It’s just logical.

Where did this skill go? Why did it leave? Don’t we need to be able to figure things out on our own?