My second-to-last Smallville recap before summer vacation is posted. It's a little longer than usual because I brought back a character I created a really long time ago. I'm doing a little bit of that with the season finale recap next week, too, in which there'll be some special surprise guests for people who've been reading the recaps for a long time. I had a little time over the last few weeks to give it some thought in advance, which is not something I usually get to do with recaps.

Anyway, here's the one for "Injustice." I don't write a lot of fiction these days, but I guess you could call the Roger the Rottweiler thing a kind of fictional creation. It got me a little emotional, in any case.

Itty Bitty Pity Committee -- Tess's band of teen heroes, including Punky Bruiser, is a lot less impressive in action than in theory. While hunting Doomsday, they fail miserably, but not before whining about their hard-knock lives before they worked for Tess. Clark and Oliver, meanwhile, continue to tussle over the morality of killing Davis. And Roger the Rottweiler stops in for a visit.

This week, we're taking a look at the upcoming Richard Curtis movie The Boat That Rocked. I will see it, no doubt. I am a complete sucker for these kinds of movies, even if this one looks particularly twee and feel-good manipulative.

Not sure what movie we're doing next, but there's a Quentin Tarantino Nazi-hunt movie on the horizon that looks interesting.

This week's segment for All Tech Considered was about what happens to your e-mail, digital files and social networking accounts when you die. It's a great topic, one that was addressed at a Core Conversation at South by Southwest Interactive this year.

So far, the piece has drawn some really good comments from listeners, as has the blog entry I wrote on the (redesigned) All Tech Considered blog.

One of the weirdest things about my job is that I work for a newspaper and yet writing for the publication that rolls off presses and ends up in people's slightly ink-stained hands (sorry for that) is becoming less and less a part of that job.

When I'm working, I try to blog every single day on Digital Savant and Twittering is now a small, but important, part of my day-to-day. I'm also doing video stuff and occasional live chats with experts on the blog. Some of the stuff we're doing does feel like, "Let's throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks," but other things, like the use of social media and video, feel like they're going to continue to be major parts of how we cover news for the foreseeable future.

I know that my attitude toward print has changed a little. There are things I work very hard on and that I think are of very high quality that never end up in the paper. By the same token, the stuff I work on for the paper doesn't always seem to have the same impact online, where you can't see the excellent job our designers do to package the news in attractive, visually stimulating ways.

That's probably more than you needed to hear as an introduction to two stories I wrote that appeared Friday and Saturday in the Statesman. I'm on vacation (it started Friday and continues through this coming week) and am getting a little bit introspective about work and my various other projects.

I just gave up a major freelance project (I can't talk about it yet, but I will write about it in full after my vacation, promise) and have been reevaluating all the other things I'm working on right now. My brother and I just relaunched our comic strip again and I had an idea for a very fun thing I want to work on with an old friend and it might take up a large chunk of my summer.

I'm very loyal to my workplaces, so it's very hard for me to give up any kind of work, but this is definitely a year of getting my priorities straight and beginning to work toward creative goals, not just let things float toward me and grasp at them when they're close enough to seem real.

So, the stories! The first one is a story about Internet star (and very genuinely sweet person if my SXSW interview was any indication) Felicia Day. We'd been planning to write about her since the festival, but had a hard time attaching it to what we call a "time peg," an event or release date that would justify running the story at a specific time. We ended up running it the day of the Dollhouse finale despite Felicia Day not appearing in it (explained in the story). She's one of those people who is as nice as you'd imagine from everything you read about her. It was cool to find out she's been this smart and talented for a very long time.

The second story is about how-to Web sites like eHow and Howcast. There's a pretty large concentration of how-to talent in Austin and a lot of the videos you might see online might have originated from here. This was a very tough story to finish on deadline for various reasons, but I'm glad it came together.

For my vacation, I'm lucky enough to have friends in from out of town and have gone to the gym enough lately that I don't feel too terrible eating everything in sight for a few days. Yay, Eat Through Austin tour!