Terribly Happy

"Sweet" John Muehlbauer, from my tablets story. Photo by me.

I feel a bit like I lost my Eye of the Tiger (I blame the stupid, eyeless tiger) for a while after South by Southwest Interactive, as I wrote before, but things seem to finally be ramping up again. After months of feeling too tired and overwhelmed to pitch outside of work, I’ve had a few things start to materialize (more on that later) and at work, I’ve had two section-front stories appear this week that I think turned out really well.

The first is a story is an advice/how-to piece on transitioning to a tablet like the iPad 2 from a laptop or desktop computer. This is probably not a full-blown trend yet, but I’m starting to hear of people ditching their heavy laptop on business trips in favor of a tablet or just finding they have less use for a full-blown computer the majority of the time. We were hoping we were a little ahead of the curve on this. I think by the holidays, we’ll see a lot more of this going on as that market grows. This piece ran in Sunday’s Life & Arts section.

Austin writer Gabrielle Faust. Photo by Zach Ornitz, Austin American-Statesman

On Tuesday, another piece I wrote about how Austin celebrities like horror writer Gabrielle Faust, HDR photographer Trey Ratcliff and Jojo Garza of the music group Los Lonely Boys manage their connections and correspondence with fans online appeared in the paper.

The common thread I heard in my interviews was that it scales up really fast and becomes unmanageable in a short amount of time unless a famous person devotes staff or a significant amount of time to it. (Even then, it can get beyond their control.) Something to think about for those who are gaining popularity online with their art or business.

Lilly at Schlitterbahn.

When we made the list of some of the summer movies we would be covering on Trailers Without Pity, I was alarmed to see so many superhero movies. I didn’t think there was any possible way we’d have much to say about them (and, honestly, I really stopped watching them after Dark Knight. I mean, who’s gonna top that?).

But then I saw the trailer for Green Lantern, which is genuinely weird. And not really in a bad way. This movie has big, glowing green balls for how out there it seems to be. I thought Thor looked nuts, but this looks even stranger.

Which is all to say we had more fun than usual with this one. I might even go see it! (OK, probably not). Enjoy our Trailers Without Pity video for it!

I hate rushing reviews for tech stuff.

This is a bit antithetical to what the industry is like now. Everybody wants their hands on a gadget first and to put out the earliest review (usually right when an embargo lifts) and rack up those page views from curious Googling readers.

But given the kinds of stuff we’re talking about — tablet PCs, smart phones, stuff that you really have to live with a while to get your head around and really sort usefulness from novelty, I just don’t think you can review something like an iPad or a radically new kind of phone in a few hours or even a day or two. So I tend to play with stuff over time and then realize that a month has gone by and I still haven’t written anything about (insert name of gadget). Right around the time the PR people start e-mailing me, asking, “So, uh… are you ever gonna review this thing and mail the product back?” is when my crack timing, motivation and work ethic kick in and I write the damn thing. Sometimes I write two in the same article just to clear the decks.

So, here’s some recent stuff that ran in the paper. I did a review that appeared as a Sunday secondary taking a look at the Motorola Xoom tablet and the T-Mobile G-Slate. I liked them both for different reasons, but not as much as the iPad, which should be no surprise to anyone who’s spent some serious time with an iPad or iPad 2. The article in the paper was reverse-published from a Digital Savant blog entry from a little while ago.

A bit of a companion to that is a first-impressions I did of the BlackBerry PlayBook this week.

I’ve got a more detailed story about migrating to a tablet running June 11 that’ll offer tips, app ideas and more to those thinking about moving away from a laptop or desktop to something a little more portable.

Also had a review of the new Mortal Kombat game, which I quite liked. Spent a lot of nights trudging through that story mode (which was ridiculously awful/awesome) and getting back my moves from all those years of Kombo muscle memory.

And on Saturday, I wrote a lengthy “Raising Austin” column about kids, security and Facebook. I got to talk a little about a trip I took to Dallas last year to speak at a panel for Jewish Family Services on the topic and to tie it in with some recent news. Sometimes I do speaking stuff or freelance and worry that it won’t be useful for anything but making a little money, but other times it pays off in other ways and helps me a lot at my day job.

That’s about it for now. Summer has kicked off her in New Braunfels and we went to Schlitterbahn three times in one weekend. That is how the Gallagas roll when it is hot outside and we have season passes.

The last episode of Smallville aired last week and the final Television Without Pity recap was just posted yesterday. My friend Tippi Blevins did a fantastic job taking over recapping duties after I left two years ago and she was gracious enough to let me have the last word.

I did watch the finale (OK, I skipped big boring chunks of it, but watched most of the show) and I was still in the process of catching up with about half of this season’s episodes on the DVR. But it was a little bit of a comfort to see that very little had changed in this big, 10-season-long run of cheese.

You can read the full recap here. The part that I contributed to the recap, attempting to sum up 10 years of the show, starts here.

A short excerpt:

If Smallville was, for all of us long-suffering close-watchers, the story of missed opportunities and not-quite-theres, it was also at times a place where expectations were so low that small pleasures (John Glover’s purr; Allison Mack’s sunshine grin, Cassidy Freeman’s class) broke through like rainbows in the proverbial Dio dark.

What I’ll miss most was the heady mix of cheesy earnestness and patent absurdity (and, of course, the Gay that was unintentional until it clearly wasn’t) that made recapping the first few seasons so much fun. The platitudes, the cows, the sweet, coppery-tasting anvils.

Smell ya later, Clark Kent.

I don’t know what we were thinking taking on the new J.J. Abrams movie (with Spielberg on deck) Super 8 as our latest Trailers Without Pity video. How can you snark on something that looks so purely good? Perhaps you have to find humor in your own squeeing fannishness, which is what we tried to do. It doesn’t hurt when you’ve got period clothing, probably aliens and Kyle Chandler from Friday Night Lights. That is a good way to sell me a movie ticket.

At least it’s not a superhero movie. (At least we don’t think it is. What a bummer it would if Superman jumps out of that wrecked train.)

Check out the video on TWOP or view it below.