We were lucky to catch up with Steve Weintz recently and have shared our conversation below.

Steve, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’ve love to hear an interesting investment story – what was one of the best or worst investments you’ve made? (Note, these responses are only intended as entertainment and shouldn’t be construed as investment advice)

Iertainly one of the best creative investments I ever made was the purchase of a used NeXT Cube with a NeXTdimension video/graphics board, and some software for the machine. I’d lost steam in my pursuit of a graduate degree and became enchanted with the NeXT computers then available in some campus computer labs. They entranced me with their power, ease of use, and especially the beautiful, sophisticated user interface.

NeXT was Steve Jobs’ next adventure between leaving Apple and returning. The sleek black computers wove together an advanced operating system, a handsome and sophisticated user interface, and an extraordinary programming environment. The essentials of the World Wide Web were invented and developed on a NeXT Cube. They also featured advanced 2D and 3D graphics.

In 1993 I hocked my pickup and borrowed some money from my folks to get a NeXT computer with lots of extras. I holed up in my apartment for a winter and taught myself web coding and 3D graphics using the NeXT. The big thing was the experience of using a tool that encouraged – rather than frustrated – my explorations. It unlocked so much within me.

During 1994 and 1995 I joined some visionaries and writers in producing an “Onion”-like web magazine, creating much of the layout, graphics and web coding on that single machine. The NeXT continued to produce graphics, tiny videos and websites for my on-and-off-again freelance career, well into the 2000’s. It recently received an overhaul that should keep it running for a good long time yet. Not bad for a computer manufactured when the Soviet Union still existed…

Steve, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’ve tried out a lot of different career paths and interests (not always well); but I find nowadays that all those adventures and experiences became grist for the mill, source material for many creative works.

An invitation from my friend and collaborator Daniel Azarian led to my participation in The Voiceover Repertory Company, a group of voice artists and creatives founded by Tara Langella that produces quality audio drama podcasts. My contributions include writing and acting in Magic Rocks From Hell, a five-part serial comedy, and three half-hour dramas, Justice, Bait, and an adaptation of Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman.

Although I never served in the military I have relatives who did, and an interest in military matters led me to become a defense blogger during the 2010’s. I wrote about nukes, weird weapons and odd military history for Medium’s War Is Boring and The National Interest.. Writing such articles sharpened my abilities to engagingly recount true events and technical detail.

Early exposure to Hollywood though relatives in the industry led to a lifelong desire to become part of it. For the past seven or eight years I’ve focused my filmmaking aspirations on scriptwriting. In 2020 I adapted a classic sci-fi novel to the screen, capturing the book’s tone and world setting while augmenting the original story with additional plot and characters.

My artistic interests include sculpting, graphic art and animation. In 2009 with the help of friends and family I created a three-minute stop-motion demo for a proposed retro-sci-fi miniseries, “The Lost Hieroglyph.” Writing the script, building and acquiring the sets, props and dolls, and filming the action consumed a great deal of time, effort and money but some of my vision for the production made it to the screen. The experience was fantastic and immensely instructive, and the art form remains a great favorite.

Inspirations include Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, Raymond Chandler, JRR Tolkien, Dorothy Dunnett, Patrick O’Brian, John Le Carre, CJ Cherryh, Chesley Bonestell, Ursula K. LeGuin, Hannes Bok, Willis O’Brien, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg,

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

It’s hard to pin down but I suppose it’s a deep valuation of human diversity, the humane and the human past, and a ever-questing curiosity.. We’re so focused on the Now and the New and the Ours in our culture (because often the hucksters want to get your money for the new thing while you’re still satisfied with the old). People like us have been around for something like 300,000 years, according to the latest archaeological studies, and during all that time they’ve repeatedly solved problems and enriched their worlds in ways we could learn from. The roots of our current world run very deep. Paleolithic artists in what is now France drew overlapping images of animals to convey motion, used scale to indicate perspective, and may have made simple two-frame animations of images, scratched on ivory discs spun upon sinew.

When you read or learn about the Epic of Gilgamesh, or Journey To The West, or Inca creation myths or Maori accounts of epic voyages, you can begin to get a sense of both how universal and how strange are the varieties of human experience. I feel an awareness of the long, deep history and variety of human creativity situates us and suggests to us in vast ways. The more grist for the mill, the better.

And the whole point of travel, of anthropology, of history, of art and culture, is that other people and their works and ideas are essentially valuable and interesting; not people and things to be shunned, banned, silenced or ignored, as some might have it.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

My engagement with the social world has ebbed and flowed, and the tide is slowly coming in again, so to speak. I took a sabbatical the past few years to focus on personal matters, but am cautiously returning to “the pub” for conversation and company.

I started slowly, testing the waters, trying to avoid previous mistakes in socializing with strangers, but gradually let my hair down and published a curated but real version of myself on Facebook, then Twitter. Facebook I retreated from, after recalling the barked shins earned while participating in ancient online fora in the early 1990’s, but I keep the channel open for family and friends. I worked up a pretty good audience on Twitter during the years I wrote as a freelance military blogger, and really gained a lot from the many interactions I had with soldiers, sailors, scholars, scientists, artists, filmmakers and other witty, sometimes famous people. I quoted quotable quotes, posted and reposted animals and nature pictures, mused aloud both sententiously and satirically, and laughed at others’ jokes. Along with posting much about my own endeavors, I tried to connect my followers with worthy stuff I came across, and reshare as much good creative work as I could. (Narrator: It worked.)

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.groovium.com
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/groovista/videos
• Other: I’ve just returned to social media and established myself on Bluesky: steve-weintz.bsky.socialMy website and YouTube channel are fossilized relics soon to be refreshed, but the addresses are good ;-)

Image Credits

Daniel Azarian, Getty Images