We have two more videos to go in the season after this one before we take a summer break.
In other programming notes, I haven’t updated the site much due to South by Southwest earlier in March. I had been planning a big wrap-up blog post detailing it all and linking to everything I wrote during the fest but even that task has seemed so daunting that I’ve honestly just been avoiding it. That post will come in some form, but I’m so tired of talking about SXSW that I’ve been taking any opportunity to avoid it for the last two weeks. I’d love for everything to go back to normal and not feel like I owe any more wordage, but I also don’t want to just skip it and leave all those links uncollected, especially the weekly columns that are still going without any mention of them here. Maybe in a day or two when the weekend gets here. How hard have I been working to avoid it? I’ve been writing on a different project nearly every night, I read an entire book (The Hunger Games) and have done literally hundreds of drawings in Draw Something instead of doing that blog post. I work very hard to avoid work sometimes.
Thanks for watching the video. We’ve still got Spider-Man and Dark Knight coming up.
A bit late to posting this given all the SXSW madness (which I’ll post about very soon when I’m caught up on rest), but we worked on this video early to get it out of the festival fray and it’s been a on the TWOP site for several days now.
I mean, what can you say? Prometheus is an Alien prequel from Ridley Scott with perhaps the most genuinely scary and disturbing trailer we’ve seen in a while from a guy who knows how to create amazing things on screen. Something would have to go very wrong for this one not to at least be intriguing and full of thrills and the only thing I think could take it down is if it takes itself far too seriously to really dig in to the primal fears that made Alien work so well. Again, judging from the trailer, I don’t think it’s going to go that way and I can’t wait to see it. Our Trailers Without Pity video for it I hope gives you a sense of our anticipation.
We’re hitting the end of our fourth season of these videos. We’ll be doing two more big summer movies and then taking a hiatus until the fall. Enjoy!
Is there such a thing as superhero fatigue? What? Are you insane?! Superheroes don’t get fatigued! This is why they are superheroes. Oh, you mean for the audience? Oh, well, sure that. I had that like four years ago and it’s only gotten worse.
Despite my not having seen Thor, Captain America, Iron Man 2 or anything else pretty much besides Dark Knight, we still felt qualified to discuss the Joss Whedon superhero collective filmThe Avengers, which brings a bunch of Marvel heroes together into one big enchilada (minus the salsa). (Pablo has seen them all and is much more versed [or ” ‘versed” as it were when discussing Marvel] than me.)
Our latest Trailers Without Pity video discusses whether the power of Whedon is enough to deftly balance so many franchises and decades of expectations. We’re gonna say… “maybe?”
We have not one but two more superhero summer movies we’re doing after this one. Can you guess what they are?
Where to begin? Crazy season in my life starts around mid-February and doesn’t let up until mid-March. For about a month, my life revolves around South by Southwest Interactive and somewhere in there I’m also celebrating my brother and mom’s birthdays and trying to enjoy the suddenly awesome spring weather that only lasts a few weeks before the crushing summer heat returns.
I start thinking about how I’ll handle my DVR duties (MUST. WATCH!) when I’ll be gone for five or six days, how we’ll juggle the kids’ daycare and my middle-of-the-night commuting and even what I’ll be packing in my work bag, which became the subject of last week’s Digital Savant column.
(No column this week due to the Oscars).
I haven’t followed my own advice and purchased a little power strip yet, but I plan to do that tonight. The other thing I plan to do differently this year is to take my bike. The one I never ride that’s been sitting in the garage forever. I bought a fancy bike lock and checked to make sure the tires aren’t flat. I plan to dust it off, lube it up and ride (we’re still talking about the bike here). So if you see someone in downtown Austin in two weeks swinging wildly on a bike with a heavy work bag causing imbalance, that’s probably me. Say hi.
Have a lot more pieces about the fest in the works including some stuff for CNN.com.
I’m trying to spend as much time as possible at home with the kids because I know I won’t be seeing them a lot in mid-March. When I wasn’t looking, Carolina went from the pre-verbal baby to a kid who can repeat pretty much any word and who’s talking nonstop and grabbing EVERYTHING. Grab grab grab, baby STOP! OK, not a baby, but STILL. Toddler, QUIT!
If you made a 1990s time capsule and asked me to put 100 things in it, I’m not sure I would have even remembered to put American Pie in there. It’s one of those movies that was a thing at one time and now it’s not really a thing at all other than a thing that happened and that we all sort of forgot about despite its wide influence and Zeitgeisty moment.
Which I guess is a good enough reason to bring it back for at least one more go-round, but as we say in our new Trailers Without Pity video, American Reunion seems kind of desperate and unnecessary. The fact that they got all the original cast members back kind of says something about their availability, you know?
My own 20-year reunion comes up next year and that just seems like an insane, unimaginably large number. I’m old, I just realized. Next time: we’ll be doing Avengers next.
This is what I look like in the 'Star Wars' universe. Hey, shut up, Bantha are DELICIOUS!
Back in August, we started running Digital Savant in the paper once a week (a lot of it generated by the long-running blog that I write) as a column. Work-wise, it’s not a whole lot different, perhaps just a little more structured than writing the same kinds of topics on the blog and with a firmer weekly deadline. Sometimes I’m so caught up in updating the blog and working on other stories that I forget that the column runs in the paper on Mondays and that once a week newspaper readers are subjected to my grinning face, often way too early in the morning.
But it’s been nice to have that routine. I was initially dreading it and, in truth, there are some weeks when my Wednesday deadline looms and I think, “This is going to be embarrassing for all involved,” but it usually turns out OK, and sometimes better than OK. Sometimes I’m really pleased at how the columns turn out and that they definitely have a voice and a point of view that isn’t otherwise represented in the paper. (That point of view I’ll call “Extreme goof dad nerd” until I come up with a better description.)
I haven’t posted about the last two columns because I took a trip to Atlanta or a social media panel that I was moderating (I found out a week before that they wanted me physically present; I thought I was going to be beamed in somehow via Internets and telephonies and magicks). Someone emailed me, “How are your travel arrangements coming” and I stared stupidly at my screening, thinking, “My what?”
Going to Atlanta was lots of fun since I never get to travel, but I’m still catching up with everything that this brief 36-hour trip pushed aside.
So here’s the two columns that ran recently.
The first one is a sort-of review/set of impressions about the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I’ve been playing pretty regularly since the holidays. In the column I make clear how much of an MMO newbie I still am. I found a way to embarrass myself even in an online game where I don’t know anyone.
It’s very tough to review an MMO, impossible, really. It would take months, if not years. The best you can do is relate some of your own experience and compare it to other gaming experiences you’ve had.
On Saturday, I attended TEDxAustin and followed it up with a big, detailed blog post rundown of it. It really was an inspiring day, full of great ideas and speakers who are out there kicking ass and (presumably) creating big-data ways to take names and do something with said ass-kicking/name-taking database. I’m still processing what I can take away from the experience personally, but one thing I hope to do is just get out of my own head a little bit and get out there in the community more. I feel like I’ve been living the last two or three years in a hidey hole, trying to hold down the parenting fort and the work fort and several other forts that perhaps are not build up to code and Tweeting or writing from behind a protective screen. It needed to be that way, but perhaps that isolation is going away a little.
