Terribly Happy

He's just not that into (seeing) you

Every now and then we hit on something in the column that I don’t think is being written about much elsewhere and which I fight as hard as I can to get right. This week, the Digital Savant column was about the false intimacy we have with texting (which is as popular as ever and actually still growing in the U.S.).

It’s couched in a column that seems like it starts out saying, “Yay for texting, here’s why it’s not going away) but then takes a bit of a left turn to talk about cheating, the way we communicate with loved ones, why voice calls still matter (even as we make less of them) and then, in a sort of coda, a short bit about our wedding anniversary last week. (Which, per my wife’s request to be mentioned as little as possible online, I didn’t really talk about. Aha, but she didn’t say I couldn’t mention her in a column for the newspaper. Loophole!)

I mentioned that I was writing something along these lines last week on Twitter and Facebook and I got some really helpful, thoughtful responses that did help shape what I ended up writing. It’s one of those topics that everyone has an opinion about as I learned today when a reader emailed me:

“It’s just cool to become a gibbering idiot who is no longer obligated to spell correctly and string together coherent thoughts.”

Indeed, sir. Thx 4 the msg.

Slightly longer versions of my reviews of the Nike+ FuelBand (beautiful, baffling), the Xbox Live game “Fez” (indie, retro, cool) and the Swivl for camera phones (rotatin’ follow-you action).

Last week was pretty busy at work. I broke the news about the follow up to Wizard101, Pirate101 from the Austin developers at KingsIsle Entertainment. (The version that ran in print is a little different.)

And I did a mostly-photos preview of the new Austin Microsoft Store in the blog.

Things got even busier later in the week with the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Festival, a new thing in Austin that we covered. I ended up writing up The Divorce Show, Aziz Ansari’s fantastic headlining performance, the Theme Park improv show featuring Laraine Newman, Oscar Nuñez from “The Office” and performers I’d seen years and years ago in the sketch troupe “Totally False People.” Saturday night, my coverage ended with Wanda Sykes, which was also great. Aziz Ansari ended up Tweeting a link to the review of his show, which brought us a nice little surge of traffic.

Still doing reviews over at Kirkus every week or two of children’s apps. In fact, apps were part of a discussion I had with Patrick Jordan, who does a weekly blog feature called “What’s On Your iPad.” I told him what’s on mine for a feature he ran last week.

And I saved probably the biggest news for last. Because I work for a large company that owns several large papers and is in the process of consolidating lots of things across them, my Digital Savant column will be appearing in the other ones as well. That means the column will run more regularly in Atlanta, Dayton and Palm Beach.

In Palm Beach, it started two weeks ago with a flourish. They interviewed me for a very nice introduction piece and ran a past column of mine that I suggested would be a good intro to the Digital Savant column. The first column brought me some very nice emails from South Florida from people either needing tech help or offering their own opinions about everything from LINUX to what devices are best for people suffering from disabilities like multiple sclerosis.

All that recent activity made me exhausted enough for a bad crash early this week. I got several pieces of bad or weird news on the same day, including one about a writing project that I was rapidly losing confidence about (one thing about that; when a writer loses confidence in one piece of writing it can often trigger a chain reaction that leads to thinking you can’t write ANYTHING, EVER AGAIN. That can be dangerous.). It took pep talks from several wonderful people in my life including my writing partner, my wife and my two daughters, who each suddenly became angelic and nice to their dad for once and then things were fine again. I got a good night’s sleep and then today, the day of my 8th wedding anniversary, everything seemed fine again.

It’s been a weird combination lately of big changes at work (not for me specifically but for the paper and the company in general), always feeling pressed for time at home and having gone on a jag of writing so much in a short period of time that the words began to ran together and I stopped processing. Add lack of sleep to that and things get worse really quick.

Now my priority is resting up, getting back into the exercise routine and getting recharged because it’s almost summer, I have a few big tasks ahead of me and I’m gonna need every ounce of energy I’ve can generate. (Just not Nike Fuel points because I’m starting to think those are just useless.)

This is it, our last Trailers Without Pity video of our fourth season, for Christopher Nolan’s Batman finale, The Dark Knight Rises.

Pablo is a much bigger expert on Batman (and comics in general) than me, so he took the lead on writing this one and I jumped in, Robin-like, when I could to offer my own assistive heroics.

Wait, what, Robin’s not in this Batman series at all? Well, shiiiiiiit.

The video concludes our endless recent slog through superhero movies, but it’s also significant in that it caps off 13 episodes of our fourth season of Trailers Without Pity. And, truth be told, this might be the last video we do in the series.

We still enjoy doing them and they’ve only gotten easier over time as we’ve streamlined the production process, but with Pablo moving to Austin a few months ago, the getting together we do to record audio has gotten much, much harder to coordinate. No joke, we recorded the audio for one of the videos this season in the front seats of my car at the top of a parking garage. That’s how hard it’s been for us to schedule time/location on these.

So instead of coming back in two or three months, we may just have to wind it all down and move on to other stuff, like that comic we’ve been neglecting for so long. I’ll keep you posted on what happens, but in my mind, right now, this is probably the last Trailers Without Pity we’ll do. Thank you all for watching.

Aziz Ansari. Image courtesy NBC.

It seems like the subject of comedy has been coming up a lot lately in my life, reminding me of how much I miss writing and performing for the stage (or for live-action video).

On Monday, my Digital Savant column was about how stand-up comics are using social media and other technology to attract fans, sell their own productions or even generate material. I spoke to several local comics who will be performing at the new Moontower Comedy and Oddity Fest as well as Aziz Ansari, who was nice enough to do a short phone interview with me for the piece to talk about his online special, “Dangerously Delicious.”

I’ll be covering some of the Moontower shows this week for the paper. My colleague Dale Roe did a piece in the paper advancing the festival that looked back at the Austin comedy scene, including some previous festivals like the Big Stinkin’ fest, which was the first big gig we ever had in the Latino Comedy Project.

The LCP, incidentally, is about to put on a brand new show in May called “Los Abengers.”

My understanding is that some of my other comedy friends are also doing a different comedy show that’s being put together and it just got me thinking how fun it was to write together and to go through the process of editing and revising sketches. (Sometimes it was frustrating and tough, but the parts I remember best are just laughing and laughing, all around the table.) I’ve offered to write stuff from afar, but of course, it’s not the same as being at writing meetings and rehearsals and doing the work to get stuff on its feet. With the way my life is right now (kids, commute, other writing commitments), it’s just not possible to do that. But I do miss it.

I still have sketches that were written and never produced and a few ideas for new sketches, but the whole point of a sketch troupe is the collaboration, the whole being more than the individual parts, and doing something like that remotely, shooting in scripts by email or Google Docs and not being able to participate beyond that seems weird and maybe wrong. But we’ll see.

Other stuff going on recently: I did an interview with Dennis Tardan for his BlogTalkRadio show. We just talked about writing, inspiration, trying to be creative, all that. It was nice to talk about writing and not have it just be about stuff related to technology. He asked some great questions and the interview took place on a day off when I was able to lie on the couch and relax and really focus on the conversation.

I covered the International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT over the weekend and blogged about it for Digital Savant. It’s always an inspiring conference with lots of great idea.

Soon I’ll be posting the last Trailers Without Pity video of the season (and if I’m being honest, perhaps ever). But more on that in the next post.

I’m always amazed that something as popular as Facebook has so much wrong with it. It works, sure, in ways that Twitter didn’t for a very long time (like just being available most of the time) and that MySpace never did (still and always ugly, forever and ever). But so much stuff is impossible to figure out or changes at a moment’s notice or simply doesn’t work across all platforms.

Anyway, you get what I’m saying if you’ve ever been a heavy user (or a slightly-more-than-casual one) over in Zuckerbergville. This week’s Digital Savant column was an attempt to answer some of those nagging, weird questions about how to do things that should be a lot more intuitive on a site that serves so many. I didn’t have answers for all the questions that friends were kind enough to contribute, but I did learn a lot while writing it.

I also did a blog post this week about PC gaming optimization tips (more interesting than it sounds!) based on the habits of those on the pro gaming circuit. It made me pine for the days when I used to crack open PC cases and install my own mother-ba-boards and Riz-NAMs, but not enough to give up my Apple laptop and go back to those endless tinkering hours.

Carolina discovers that cracking cascarones on herself eliminates the middle-man.

Just a little gallery of images from last weekend’s Easter festivities. Click on any of the images to enter the gallery.