Last week, on the day of the Mashable Austin party, I posted an alarming message on Twitter (which in turn ended up on Facebook):

Blood on my shirt. I'll explain later.

I never got around to telling the story, but my friend from LCP, Danu, has been persistent in her inquiries. She cares.

Here's the story. Last Wednesday, at Social Media Camp, I was having a grand old time chitty chatting with people I usually only see online.

I was wearing a nice white shirt with black stripes and carrying around my laptop bag the whole day.

At one point, I was hanging out by the bar talking to someone and they said, "Is that blood on your shirt?"

Usually, in the movies, someone says that and it means the person they're talking to has just been shot. They look down and there's a giant spreading pool of blood soaking through their shirt. Had I just been assassinated? Whom had I pissed off? The list could be long.



You can't see it so well in that photo, but I had several spots of blood on my upper left side and up near the shoulder.

I looked down and went, "What the fuck!?" Then I quickly excused myself to go to the bathroom.

I looked down and saw that the quick of my thumb was crusted with dried blood. How long had I been walking around a bloody mess? How many people had I chatted with, smiling, as they were thinking, "Oh, well, he obviously murdered his wife this morning."

In the bathroom, I washed my thumb and tried my best to blot the blood on the shirt, succeeding only in spreading it around. I took off my giant nametag and tried to cover up the most egregious spots, but I still had a few bit of blood peeking out from the top.

And then I figured out what had happened. I injured my thumb somehow without noticing and as I was carrying around my bag, I had my thumb wedged backward between my shirt and the leather strap. My thumb must have been leaving little bloody trails up and down the shirt while I was walking around.

Nobody seemed to notice the blood after that (or if they did, they were too polite to call it out). But I had a whole party to attend that night and no change of clothes. I suppose I could gone and bought a new shirt, but I was pressed for time.

That night, I soaked the shirt in some soap and now the spots are completely gone. I can't even find where on the shirt they used to be. So, sadly, there will be no poignant Brokeback Mountain ending reenactment.

There's the bloody shirt story. Disappointing, right?

Business in the front first, ladies: I wrote a story in Sunday's paper about using Twitter (sort of like, "Hey, I'm on Twitter. Now what?") that got some nice attention and which inspired this very lively online chat that I moderated in the morning. The chat ran fast and furious and it was all my poor eyes and fingers could do to keep up. I think this Twitter thing might have legs.

I also wrote a review in Sunday's newspaper of the spectacularly bad new search engine Cuil.com. The story didn't make it online, but I got your back with the Digital Savant version of the review. Texty!

We took Lilly to Landa Park on Saturday and apparently she is going to be a swimmer. The water was freezing, but she wanted to go in anyway. While we shivered, she sank in the water and paddled, all happy. What is up with that? Is she part mermaid? Is that a recessive-gene thing? Oh, God, we're going to have to send her to Mer-college.



We saw Dark Knight on Saturday night after much delay and it was so good it just took my goddamned breath away. I've seen every Christopher Nolan movie since Memento (yes, including Insomnia) and I have loved watching the brothers Nolan grow and learn and expand and this feels like the culmination of their dark, complex arts. Everyone is comparing the movie to Batman Begins, for obvious reasons, but the real parallels I saw were with The Prestige, with all the turnarounds and misdirection.

Enough has been written about Ledger's Joker and I won't belabor the point here, but there was certainly more to the performance than licking of chops and cackles. He found the center of the character, which is impossible because The Joker's center is chaos and nihilism. It's an amazing thing to see. I could have watched another two hours of The Joker and, even though I don't think another Joker-centric film would have been in the cards even if Ledger had lived, I think he would have made for a Hell of a cameo. It's an impossible loss.

As if that weren't enough of a weekend, my brother came over last night and we had a very fun time amusing each other with this project we've been working on. I so enjoy what we're doing and hope it can continue.

Lastly, we put Lilly to bed very early and then I stayed up very late, unable to sleep. Amid the sea a'churnin' in my head, I thought about her most. She turns a year old next week. It feels at once like an immeasurably long stretch of time and also an instant. She grows and grows.

I got teary thinking about how we moved her out of our room. She's so much happier, it seems, and sleeps much better, but I still miss seeing her poke her head above the crib, gripping the slats, as I wake. I miss when she couldn't blaze across the room in a crawl. I'm sure there's plenty more I'll miss.

I'll miss Year One. It has been amazing.

A review that I wrote of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and Guitar Hero: On Tour ran in today's paper. As you can probably guess, my fingers are a mess.

What else is on my mind these days...

• Have decided that it's not just me: Blogger sucks. Ever since Google took it over, it's been a mess and I'm ready to jump ship to another platform, preferably WordPress, which is what we use over at Videogamey. But the process of moving everything over from Blogger terrifies me. And I know this site is badly in need of a redesign and I just don't have the energy to do it. It would be a good summer project, but summer will be over before I know it. Part of the reason I don't update more often here is that I hate dealing with Blogger, which has grown increasingly cranky. Just sticking an image or video on my blog is never a sure bet, and forget about updating from an iPhone.
  
• The project my brother and I are working on is behind and I only have myself to blame. I wasted a lot of time over the weekend that I should have spent getting us up to speed.
  
• I'm going to a Social Media Camp tomorrow, which sounds like it's going to be half-conference, half geek party. We'll see what happens.
  
• Lilly is so close to walking that even her day care teacher thinks it's going to happen at any moment. I'm still terrified by the idea. And I also miss the little immobile baby who couldn't even roll over. Make it slow down!
  
• I had my annual review at work yesterday and it was very positive. It's such a major relief to have a job that I enjoy and that I feel I'm good at. I suffer from so much less stress now than I did in previous positions where I felt I was in over my head or not tapping into what I do best.
  
• I miss the Latino Comedy Project and feel very out of the loop. That's not anyone's fault, it's just how things are right now. I thought it would be easier to take a break, but I'm suffering from some separation anxiety, I think.
  
• It feels like I'm missing summer, which is a shame because I live in New Braunfels, which is an awesome place to live in the summer.
  
• I like FriendFeed. It feels like the beginning of something cool.
  
• I still have not seen The Dark Knight. We're going to try to watch it at the IMAX in San Antonio this weekend. We're halfway through I Am Legend on Blu-ray and it's... kinda boring.
  
• I miss drinking a little bit. I don't think I've had anything stronger than a beer in months.
  
• My future reviews for the paper include a Luis Miguel concert and the So You Think You Can Dance tour. God help me.

I had a story in the paper Monday, a Masters of Their Domains about Hill Country Rambling. We also did a live chat with Andrew Butler from the Web site and I shot a video:

And then, weirdly, Obama Girl posted a response to the video I shot of her. There were a lot of comments about it on Digital Savant and on the Postcards blog, but since there were just as many comments saying the interview showed her in a true light than there were comments saying I was just out to get her. I'd say the whole thing was a wash.

It was kind of a weird week.

The other thing I wanted to share was some audio that my brother Pablo and I recorded for an ongoing project we're working on for an entertainment Web site. It's sort of a draft of a draft of a pilot (minus any video), but it's not really usable in its current form, so I thought I'd put it out there before it gets too stale. (Or MORE stale, depending on your point of view.)



Direct link to the MP3 if you don't have Flash.

I met Obama Girl today. I can't even tell you how weird the sequence of events was, but in short, I was covering the Netroots Nation conference for this blog, and found out she'd be stopping by the media room for a visit.

You can read two versions of what happened next, one on Digital Savant, the other on the Postcards from the Lege blog.

Yes, I now how goofy I look in that photo. That's why they don't put me in sexy Web videos to support presidential candidates.

And here's the video:

I can't stress enough how much I DON'T write about politics, yet somehow I ended up on the top of A1 today with a piece I co-wrote about political bloggers. I'm at the Netroots Nation convention doing a bit of blogging for work.

I vented a bit on Twitter, but there are just some areas of stories where you know exactly the kinds of e-mails you're going to get, and they are never pleasant to deal with. Any time I've written anything related to politics, immigration or Tejano music (don't even ask), the e-mail floodgates open and I spend my whole day trying to convince people that I didn't write what ran in the paper just to personally piss them off.

Hoping next week is more "normal," whatever that means.

We were working on another project for a while (and we may work on it again), but in the meantime, my brother and I hadn't had a chance to do much work on the "Space Monkeys!" comic. That changed last night with the posting of a brand-new, cheap-as-free comic addressing the soon-to-explode controversy concerning the Space Chimps movie. You don't want to miss it.

In other news, I had a review in the paper yesterday of the Video Games Live concert I went to cover on Friday. (I'm linking to the longer version; the print one was trimmed a bit.) If you like videogames and the concert tour comes to your town, you should definitely check it out.

Speaking of games, Videogamey.com is back from summer vacation with new entries twice-daily, Monday through Friday.

Not much else to report right now. I've been crazy busy at work, but I'm takin some vacation time in a few weeks.

Also, Lilly is walking with the aid of a walker toy, which I know is what's supposed to happen next, but is so mind-blowing to me that it may require its own entry. She's almost a year old. Fuck, man. I can't even be believing this.

I did a segment on NPR yesterday related to the coupons story from a few weeks back. You can hear it online.

Usually if it's not breaking news related to tech, I never know when these things will air after they're recorded, but this one was on the air hours after I was in the studio yesterday. And it was online about an hour or two after that, neatly edited with all of my "Ummms" and stumbles edited out. Those guys are pros!

The person I usually deal with at "All Things Considered" told me that they're adding a regular tech segment to the broadcast (they mentioned it on the radio broadcast). I'm hoping I'll be doing more segments like this for them.