Corey Catanese | The Pubcast

About Corey Catanese

aspiring writer with a travel addiction

Talking with Jessie Artigue, Style & Pepper stylist and blogger

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Corey Catanese — No Comments ↓

Corey Catanese interviews Jessie Artigue, founder of and writer for style blog Style & Pepper. Artigue discusses how she became a full-time blogger, the need to keep a site’s design fresh and current, and how to differentiate yourself in a crowded blogosphere.

This interview was recorded on December 3, 2013.

Due to technical issues, an audio recording of this interview is unavailable. What follows below is a written transcript of the interview.

Corey Catanese: For people who don’t know, what is Style & Pepper?

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How Did This Get Made?

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Corey Catanese — No Comments ↓

For all the pop culture lovers, movie addicts, constant critics, and overall snarky and sarcastic people, How Did This Get Made? is the perfect podcast. Each episode dissects the acting, music, plot, characters and directorial choices of some of the worst movies ever made. The three creators, all comedians or comedic actors, Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas, give legitimate criticism of the movies, while also making fun of the ridiculousness of the movies.

The episode I started with, number 27, focuses on Twilight Breaking Dawn: Part 1. The three panelists are joined by Doug Benson from another podcast, Doug Loves Movies. Although I haven’t seen Breaking Dawn, I saw the first in the series and admit to reading all the books. The podcast comes off as natural because all of them are friends (Scheer & Mantzoukas are married) and when they get excited or passionate they have a tendency to talk over each other. While talking over each other seems like it could be confusing, it adds to the energy of the podcast and makes for a more entertaining episode; it feels like you’re listening in on a personal conversation. Having the mix of males and females is also great because it adds to the credibility of the show; it would be so easy for all the men to dismiss a movie like Breaking Dawn and just completely make fun of it, but having the back and forth of the few moments in the movie that are actually tolerable adds to the depth.

For all the entertainment and great opinions in the show, it does have its issues. The show attempts to bring in the listeners with two short segments, Second Take and Tagline, reading reviews of the movie on Amazon and listeners creating their own taglines respectively, but both seem like a through aways. They are good ideas to incorporate the audience, but need more commitment. Also, the episodes, which average about 50 minutes an episode, can have a tendency to get repetitive. Overall, though, How Did This Get Made? is a great way to spend an hour of your time.

40 Days of Dating

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Corey Catanese — No Comments ↓

40 Days of Dating is one of the most well designed blogs I’ve seen, not surprisingly, it is run by two designers. It incorporates many of the design aspects we discussed in class. It is responsive as you change the size of the window, graphics are animated (mostly hand drawn) and the days, as you put your cursor over them, change to reveal their date. The site is so responsive that it goes down to mobile size and instructs the user to switch the direction they are holding their phone to reveal the mobile version of the site. There is also the minimal information bar along the top of the site, which stays with you as you scroll through the site.

It is a very colorful site that somehow doesn’t clash; each day’s banner fits together like a piece of a puzzle. Once you click on a day, the post is revealed. The posts themselves are alway broken up by questions, which helps give structure and much needed white space between the text. The design make a very text-heavy blog look non-threatening and intriguing. Once you are done with one post and move on to the next, the previous post automatically minimizes, a nice feature that makes sure you do not end up with a seemingly never-ending page. You can tell there was a lot of thought put behind the design of the site not only from a visual standpoint, but from the user experience aspect as well.

Coming Soon…

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Corey Catanese — 2 Comments ↓

My website will be a continuation of a blog I had to keep for a class last semester and have since added to over the summer. For the class we were supposed to write weekly posts on the subject of creativity, it was open to any field, as long as it demonstrated creative thinking. My past post have a great range, from a restaurant that has adjustable acoustics, to Pharrell’s Twitter as an unlikely place for inspiration, to the marketing campaign created for the final season of How I Met Your Mother. Creativity is a great platform for this because it is at the root of all the truly great ideas and innovations. I want to continue the eclectic mix of information, trying to spotlight, as much as I can, what I find interesting. I am coming from the point of view of somebody that is just interested in discovering more about the world and attempting to enhance their own creativity.

The blog will hopefully be comparable to other creativity-focused sites, like Brain Pickings, The Art of Non-Conformity and Get Busy Living. Brain Pickings is a blog that preaches creativity as a collaborative process and highlights people across disciplines that exemplify it, all the while trying to enrich the readers’ own “pool of resources.” Maria Popova, the blogger, has created a site where creativity is not only celebrated, but inspires creativity in her readers. The Art of Non-Conformity focuses on how to live outside the norms of life, work and travel. Chris, the blogger, writes mostly on his own life and experiences, but occasionally mentions other people he admires; he embodies a person that is always looking to learn. Get Busy Living is a blog that is all about inspiring others to live a freer life; the one they’ve always wanted to. This blog is more philosophical than the other two, not citing specific creative projects, but giving the reader the tools to do more with their life and create a mindset where you are open to more. I want my blog to be focused most on the works of others like Brain Pickings and Get Busy Living, but to use my personal insight in the posts like The Art of Non-Conformity. I want to have the personal touch because the blog will be a curated site based upon my opinion of what should be highlighted.

Just a Guess

Posted on September 17, 2013 by Corey Catanese — No Comments ↓

Since the trend has been that technology is decreasing in size, while increasing in power, speed, battery life and storage, the future of technology is basically infinite. So, what the world will look like in 5, 10 or 15 years is completely impossible to know, look at the Jetsons, they thought we’d be on our way to flying cars and living in impossibly high towers with robots to do all the things we’d rather not, but guessing is always fun.

Currently, most of the innovation has been in the way we access technology, whether from the cloud or through the Google Glass, it is all about the interfaces. In the future I imagine that the individual devices will no longer be necessary as every surface would instead have a thin, flexible glass with wifi or 4G (or whatever speed we’re using at that point) capability which allows you to access all the applications you now use on your computer, phone and tablet and your personal cloud with unlimited storage. They will replace not only current devices, but also traditional information sources like magazines, notebooks, newspapers and books. These screens could be rolled up and taken with you like a single sheet of a newspaper or propped up on a desk like a monitor. The screens’ length will be adjustable as they will feed out from a small cylindrical piece on the edge. These screens will also be easy to read in all lighting with multiple setting options. Basically, it’s the only thing you will need for all your daily activities.

Now this is just one potential future we may live in. I’m totally open to teleportation devices, robots doing my laundry and having my very own mini green house with fresh food everyday.