May you ever have luck… uh… killing 23 young people… MUCH LIKE YOURSELF?

Is that the tagline for Hunger Games? Already I’ve forgotten it from the movie trailer we put it through the paces of Trailers Without Pity for the movie adaptation of the popular book series The Hunger Games. It’s like “The Lottery” but with fewer rocks and more arrows and acne, right?

My brother, Pablo, recently read all the books but I’m still lagging behind. I can tell you that I loved the trailer, though, based mostly on my undying affection for Jennifer Lawrence after seeing her just be freakin’ amazing and heartbreaking in Winter’s Bone. I don’t get to see a lot of movies these days, but I saw that one and it knocked my fucking socks off. Put her in every movie and you will see the total Rotten Tomatoes score for the entire movie industry rise by about 20 points, I guarantee it.

This movie, this regulated amusement of famishment, is depresso-futuristic but not so shiny as to be off-putting. It looks like it might be really good, taking the source material seriously, with a little bonkers thrown in for good measure.

You can check out the video below or see it on TWOP.

We’re not sure what we’re doing next, but at some point we’ll get to that Prometheus trailer, I’m sure.

Illustration by Don Tate II / Austin American-Statesman

Good editors will listen to a writer babble for an hour and pick out the one or two useful things they said among dozens of ideas and tell them, “You should write that.”

Such was the case with an article that appeared in the Saturday paper, on the subject of how we’re purging our physical media as we move inexorably to digital media. We were talking about how overwhelming it is to see all the DVDs (with their hours of extras) sitting on a shelf knowing you’ll never, ever be able to get through all of them, even then ones you really mean to get to. That led to the idea of a story about purging all those things we think we need, but really don’t.

As much of an advocate as I am for abandoning that which we no longer need or want, I’m terrible at it myself. I have yet to do my own CD/DVD/book purging and the shelves in our upstairs office is a testament to that. But writing the article has inspired me to at least try to cut half of what’s up there. At the very least, most of the CDs have to go. I honestly haven’t touched most of them since I imported them to iTunes and that was years ago. I do admire people who’ve already been through the process.

The illustration was again by Don Tate II, who always manages to knock it out of the park with only a very rogh idea of what the story’s going to be like (I often don’t know myself until I write it).

The other story that ran on this, a particularly crazy week, was a Digital Savant column about steps you can take to protect your identity if you’re the victim of a data breach (say, as a Zappos customer when they were recently hacked).

I found out this week that I’ll be taking a brief work trip to Atlanta, Carolina has been sick again with couching and respiratory junk and two people I know scored jobs and are moving soon. I can barely keep up with all the changes going on, but I’m keeping busy and have no complaints myself apart from wanting my kid to get over her coughing fits and for all of us to get through allergy season.

A few days before Christmas, I took over a carload of gifts to my parents’ house. We weren’t going to be traveling to South Texas for the holiday — we haven’t gone the last few years, since Carolina was born as we’ve resisted long road trips with both kids — and my parents were going to deliver our gifts to members of the immediate family.

It was a weeknight, it was late and I had unloaded the gifts and was eager to get back home and get to bed.

My dad took me aside for a minute and asked me to think about something. He said he knew we weren’t planning to travel down this year, but that we should consider a trip sometime soon. He told me my grandmother, of course, wasn’t getting any younger and that she wasn’t always going to be around for us to see. Last year, she had traveled through town with my aunt, uncle and cousin and we got to see her right around the holidays. But, he said, she’d been a lot less mobile lately and was starting to have trouble remembering things and sometimes even recognizing people.

I knew it was true that we should make more of an effort to see her soon, but I also knew we weren’t changing our travel plans. I told him I’d think about it and I did.

I thought about it a lot more over the next two weeks when everything began to change.

Saturday was the trip down after two days of should-I/shouldn’t-I travel decision-making. Sunday was the trip back with my brother, but by then everything had deteriorated. In 24 hours, we went from watching warily, but hopefully, as my grandmother lay face-down on a hospital bed battling double-pneumonia and other ailments to holding out hope only that she would last a few more hours while her brother from Mexico traveled by bus to see her and say goodbye.

We said goodbye, too, knowing pretty well what was coming and how soon it might come. My brother cried. I cried. My whole family cried. I held her hand, which had gotten colder over that 24 hours. Her fingers and her face had puffed up from all the blood pressure medications they’d given her in an attempt to raise it. But it was still my grandmother. Her chest rose and fell as if she was only sleeping, as if it was her own breath and not air from tubes attached to a machine. We didn’t know if she could hear us, but we assumed that she could. I leaned in close, touched her back and said, “Goodbye grandma.”

She died that evening. Tuesday, we drove down, kids in tow, and we came back Wednesday. It was the first funeral I had been to in a really long time.

I loved both of my grandmothers. My grandfathers both died before I was born (my grandmother on my mom’s side remarried when I was little and that’s been my grandpa for as long as I can remember). She took care of me a lot when both my parents worked and we lived in South Texas, but my other grandmother, Diamantina, typically watched me on weekends. She didn’t live that much farther out, but we didn’t see her as often.

I usually had the run of the small house when I was there. I was the only grandchild and I remember running up and down the narrow main hallway, jumping on beds, probably driving everybody nuts.

My grandmother’s house in Mercedes, Texas, is small and cramped and there’s a lot of stuff in it. It was never Hoarders, but in such a tiny space, even a small amount of clothes, photos, mementos, a TV and DVDs would begin to fill up the area pretty quickly. Sometimes my grandma had dogs, at one point she had chickens in the backyard, there always seemed to be cats outside wandering around. She loved animals.

When I was there, I wouldn’t want to leave when my parents picked me up. I just wanted to stay there and live an unstructured life in this tiny, stuffed house which was filled with old mementos of people I didn’t know (my dead grandfather, especially). There were always snapshots on the paneled living room wall. Pictures of my aunt and uncle, my dad, assorted Mormons in their crisp white short-sleeved shirts, nearly all of them taken right out there on the front yard, the metal rails or the pink of the brick visible.

Also in the living room: stuff I imagine my dad sent when he joined the Air Force including a pillow I would always see. It always made me imagine where he bought it and how he sent it home. Was it from basic training in San Antonio? Probably.

Diamantina rarely spoke English, unless it was in little phrases, a word here or there. When I was little, living in South Texas, I spoke Spanish about as well as most other little kids living there, but once I hit school, I know that started to go away. I’d get embarrassed and not want to speak it, even though that was really the only way to communicate with her. So she spoke a lot, and I spoke very little and I think my aunt and uncle, who always seemed to be around, helped fill in the gaps.

Like most grandmas, she was always trying to get me to eat, always telling me she loved me. She called me “Omarsito” and blessed me all the time. Even when I was very little, she seemed impossibly old, not terribly mobile, with glasses and crispy orange hair and some illness that was always bothering her. (It was diabetes for years and years; I never imagined when I was growing up that in the distant year of 2012 that she would still be relatively healthy as an 84-year-old woman).

I think a lot now about what it is to be loved from the moment you’re born by someone and for that love to never ever stop until that person stops living.

How many people have loved me that way? A handful?

She did.

We moved around a lot with my dad in the Air Force. At one time, we lived overseas for three years. We probably saw her twice in that whole time (we took a long trip about midway through that assignment, I believe). I didn’t think about it at the time probably at all, but I wonder now what that must have been like for her, to have her son and her grandkids on the other side of the world. There was no Skype, no online chat. We were just away, for a really long time. She was in that small house and when we returned, there she was, still unconditionally loving us.

But that’s just one perspective.

When I got to the hospital that Saturday, my grandmother was already face down on the sports hospital bed, one that could be easily adjusted into a bunch of different positions. She was already unconscious, having been sedated to conserve her energy. She was on a respirator and my family was already skilled at reading the heart rate, the blood pressure, the respirator percentage and asking lots of questions. There were lots of tubes going all over the place, several drips, just a lot of machinery breathing for her, listening and recording.

I brought a book because I expected to be in the waiting room for hours, but that didn’t happen.

Instead, I spent more time than I expected in the hospital room itself, sometimes with my dad, or with my aunt and uncle or with my brother.

One of those times, a male nurse came in and began changing out the drips. He read the situation instantly, asking if she was our grandmother. We said yes.

“We all love our grandmas,” he said and told us in an economical few sentences about his grandmother, whom he’d grown up with. He said she was in her mid-90s when she finally got sick enough that she could no longer speak. But when she saw her grandson, he said, a tear fell down her cheek for him.

He said a little prayer for us and that was when I lost it. And when my brother lost it. We sat in our chairs on opposite sides of the room, our grandmother lying between us.

When we left the next day, my brother and I, we knew the hours were short and that there was nothing more the doctors or the family could do. My family was waiting for my great uncle, my grandmother’s brother Juan, to arrive via bus from Mexico. At that point, everyone just wanted him to make it to the hospital and for my grandmother to hang on for at least that long.

My aunt and uncle, who both work in medical professions, knew what was happening and nobody wanted my grandmother to suffer. She was shutting down, her medicines to keep her blood pressure going were maxed out and ineffective and it was going to get worse.

We all cried together in that room harder than we had since I arrived.

It felt strange leaving before it was over, but I had to get back to my family knowing that we were going to turn right back around and drive back to attend a funeral soon with our girls. My brother needed to get back for some work, too.

We drove back and I played the funniest podcasts I could find to take our minds off what was happening. We laughed a lot on the road trip back, my brother and I. I had driven down by myself and as much as I like quiet time, it felt so much better to have someone in the car with me.

I remembered when I was very small and a great grandmother of mine had died, that there had seemed to be rules about not listening to music or telling jokes or carrying on for a period of time after it happened. I think those rules have always been in my head for some reason and I asked my brother later if he had ever heard that. He hadn’t. Maybe someone had mentioned that in my 4-year-old presence and I misunderstood. But it felt good to laugh on that trip and forget about the horrible thing that was happening. I’m pretty sure my grandmother, who loved music and jokes and pop culture, would not have wanted us to be miserable because of her.

After I got home, she was still holding on.

But not that much longer. She was gone in a few hours by that evening.

As the viewing and the funeral the next morning, I learned that my grandmother had a much larger community of people who cared about her than I had imagined. She had participated in choir, traveled, worked several jobs that I’d never heard about, had helped found a local church and had been a mom/grandma figure to lots of people in her town.

I’m filled with the usual regrets. I should have asked more questions, should have listened more, should have been more curious more often.

What hurt most was that we didn’t see her one last time over the holidays. It would have been very difficult to make that trip given what we had going on, but it wouldn’t have been impossible. We thought there was more time.

But my uncle mentioned that she got to see our girls over Skype in December and that made me feel a lot better. She’d seen the girls in person last year, too.

Every time I think of her now, I still imagine her in that house in that town that I saw less and less often over the years and I wonder how it was I thought that she would be there forever, always waiting, always ready to bless me, to call me “Omarsito,” to be my grandmother, someone I loved.

Thirteen years have apparently not mellowed us out on the idea of seeing the first of the George Lucas Star Wars prequels if our latest Trailers Without Pity video is any indication. Our summation of the unfortunately titled, Star Wars Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace in 3D is that things that suck in the first place are going to suck just as much (if not more) when another dimension of suck-depthening is added on.

The weird thing is that after a long while of being completely indifferent about Lucas and Star Wars (after having been obsessed as a child), I’m actually really digging Jedis and Sith right now as I play the remarkable Austin-developed MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’m at about level 16 in the game and I just was given a spaceship by the galactic Jedi Council like I’m the luckiest learner’s permit-carrying teenager in the galaxy. It’s a lot of fun.

Check out the video below. Next time we’ll be talking about the first movie for The Hunger Games.

Illustration by Don Tate II / Austin American-Statesman

Even though I was out of the office most of last week, the Digital Savant column rolls along, this time with something we thought would be a fun idea; defining some of those jargony tech words that pop up so much in coverage of events like the Consumer Electronics Show.

So if you’re wondered exactly what “Droid” means or why there’s no such thing as an “iTouch” music player, you should check out the article.

Next week’s column will be about protecting your identity when breaches like the Zappos hack attack occur.

This has been a strange and terrible week, but then on the other hand I spent a lot of time with family and we took our first road trip with the kids (it was torture going one way, not so bad coming back).

Being out of the mix in the middle of the week — and not during a holiday — was weird and made me feel dislocated. It was the week of the Consumer Electronics Show and I found myself completely out of that news bubble for a few days and then struggling to catch up days later.

On Monday, I had a column published which was basically a review of Ultimate Ears custom earbuds. I spent a few weeks thinking about it (the fitting I describe in the column happened, I believe, back in November) and was really happy with the way the piece turned out right after I wrote it. Then a few days later, it was completely forgotten as I had other things to deal with and I barely noticed when it ran in the paper. (I got a few really nice emails about it, but nothing like the reaction we got with the Dyson vacuum piece.)

As it happened, the Klipsch earbuds I describe in the article broke right as I was wrapping the column up and sending it to my editor. They were still under warranty so the company sent me a brand new pair,after I called tech support, then emailed them a copy of the gift receipt and described what went wrong. The package arrived today — brand new earbuds, new packaging, everything. I was super impressed; it’s a two year warranty and I’m still only six months into owning them. I didn’t even have to send in the broken pair of buds.

The other thing that ran in the paper this week of mine was a reverse-publish of the blog post I previously mentioned, my tech resolutions for 2012.

I haven’t really written anything yet about my grandmother, but I’ve been thinking about her a lot and trying to wrap my memories together somehow into some thoughts that make sense. But it’s hard; I don’t really know where to begin.

I know I say this every three or four episodes, but this is honestly my favorite Trailers Without Pity we’ve done in a while. I found the trailer for The Grey, an Alaskan wolf-fighting movie, to be hilarious on its face and it wasn’t hard for us to put together a video combining a Liam Neeson job interview (“No, not basically like dogs at all!”), Muppet-looking creatures with glowing eyes and the obligatory cannibalism joke.

It was a lot of fun to do this one. It went up on Television Without Pity last week, but I didn’t have a chance to post about it till now.

You can see the video on TWOP or view it below.

Programming note: my grandmother, Diamantina Gallaga, passed away over the weekend. I’m working today and calling upon my awesome powers of compartmentalization to get through the afternoon. I recognize the weirdness of posting about a funny online video even as my family is mourning. I’m clearing the decks of work and ephemera to get everything off my plate for now. For those who’ve already reached out of offered their well-wishes, my brother Pablo and I really appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Happy New Year!

This was a 2012 of firsts. It was the first time I didn’t make it to midnight. In between watching and mocking the Rockin’ Eve With a Corpse, a Plastic Man, Jenny McCarthy and Fergie, I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic as I lay on the floor with the laptop and I literally fell asleep on the computer, my online Twi’lek avatar running fruitlessly into a wall. It was kind of pathetic. This was at 11:30 p.m. I gave up and went to sleep without observing the ball drop (I have two and I can see that whenever I like). (My wife and the kids had gone to bed hours earlier.)

It was also the first time I didn’t feel like I was missing out on going out and getting drunk. Staying home and lying under tons of blankets sounded way, way better.

(I’m boring. It’s OK. I’ve grown into it nicely.)

My vacation unfolded nicely and slowly over about 10 days. I wrote furiously in the two weeks leading up to vacation so that I wouldn’t have to think about work while I was gone and for once, that all worked out OK. I set up my work mail on my phone for the first time recently and rather than being an annoying distraction, it was actually nice to be able to peep in, delete messages and come back to work today without 1,000 unattended emails.

The column that ran in the paper on Monday was written more than two weeks ago, but it was a look ahead to some new stuff emerging in Austin (a neat little locator device for the iPhone, the City of Austin’s revamped website, the great website and app Make Pixel Art), and it was nice to cover three topics in one piece.

My first day back at work was productive and not nearly as stressful as I was expecting. I got myself organized, deleted even more emails and responded to the ones that needed attention, and got back to the business of being at work again. It was nice to put on actual pants that don’t have a drawstring and to hop into my car and drive purposefully toward a lucrative destination.

I even had time to write a list of tech resolutions for the blog.

I was pretty low key over the break, allowing myself to be really low-energy and in Ultra Chill mode. But now I’m ready to burst with energy again and do a bunch of stuff.

READY? LET’S GO.

No, not the Twitter account, just my now-annual attempt to gaze into the future of personal tech. It was Monday’s Digital Savant column, written ahead of vacation, predicting what I think might happen in 2012 in technological areas important to our lives such as:

• What’s the deal with Netflix?
• And Facebook? What’s up with THAT?
• OH MY GOD, WHAT ABOUT APPLE!? We should have asked about Apple first! Tell us, O Oracle!
• Will I die? Please be honest.

Incidentally, here were my 2011 predictions. I’m so glad I didn’t predict we’d be in flying cars by December like I had originally planned.

I have another column coming next Monday that I wrote before the lengthy vacation into which I am currently nuzzling my warm puppy nose.

In the paper this week, I also had some blog pieces reverse-published including this write-up of Grande Communications’ new TiVo Premere box and a review of Sony’s 24″ 3D Display.

Mostly this week it’s been quiet and I’ve been trying to rest up after a really, really busy weekend with family and with the girls. One break in the vacation that was a surprise, though, was that I got a call on Friday to appear on NPR’s Tell Me More. The live segment was produced on Tuesday morning and you can hear/read the whole thing on this page. It’s about Amazon’s Price Check app and small retailers. I had a whole page of notes about how the app works, where the tech comes from and who else is doing stuff in this area, but we didn’t really get to any of that. Instead, I got to say, in a nutshell, “Yeah, I can see why business owners would be upset.” Very different pace than All Things Considered or At Issue with Ben Merens, but the behind-the-scenes of it was that they run a very tight to-the-minute ship even though it sounds pretty free-flow. Even when things like this are unpaid (and the only time I’ve ever been paid for radio stuff was with All Tech), it’s still a good lesson to see how these shows work and to get a sense of what their producers do or don’t know about tech culture and trends.

The girls I mentioned before have been running us ragged, fighting over new toys and getting up at all hours of the night, completely wired and destabilized for the holiday season. They went back to daycare yesterday and I’ve been enjoying the relative daytime quiet before they come home and it turns into something out of Mad Max to get them bathed, fed and to bed.

On the other hand, it was nice not to have deadlines and a bunch of stuff to write and to be able to just hang out with them or with family without stuff hanging over my head like most years. Why was I thinking I’d be doing a bunch of work this week? That was dumb. I’m going to go run through like 20 hours of sitcoms, read some books and do some baking instead. Who wants cookies?