Terribly Happy

A few months ago, I wrote a foreword for a book by two men I don’t know. As people I don’t know go, they’ve been great to deal with. They wrote a book about a frankly fascinating topic (what happens to all your digital schtuff after you shuffle off this analog coil) and, based on the premise alone (and a sample chapter or two), I was thrilled to contribute. It was all done over e-mail and couldn’t have been a more pleasant experience, especially for something so firmly rooted in the discussion of death.

The book is out and you can find it here and here, among other places. In fact, on Amazon, you can read the entire two-page foreword in their book preview. But if you go and do that, you owe it to the hardworking authors to at least buy the book, so please do if you can.

Warren Spector at his Junction Point office. Photo by Deborah Cannon/AMERICAN-STATESMAN on Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2010.

More than three years ago, I had lunch with my then-co-worker Lilly Rockwell and game developer Warren Spector, who’d just sold his company to Disney. Warren was happy to meet us, but was clearly excited about a project he was completely unable to tell us about. We knew it was something big, but at the time, we had no idea what.

Last summer, the leaks started happening and the world started figuring out that Warren’s project with Disney was Epic Mickey, a bold reinvention of Mickey Mouse (and, it turns out, the rebirth of a long-forgotten animated character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the precursor to Mickey).

Today, a story my editor and I have been talking about for more than a year finally appeared on the front page of the Statesman. Sometimes sitting on a story for that long can suck the wind out of it or put so much pressure on it that you wish it would just go away. That happened once or twice as I was putting it all together, but in the end, I couldn’t be more pleased that we were able to tell Warren’s story (and that I was able to work on it with Brian Gaar, who wrote a separate piece for the business section about the development of the game).

We also ran a photo gallery online and our videographer Jenny Jones shot a great video (below). Stories like this make me feel incredibly lucky to do what I do. Some people here in town regularly do amazing, world-changing things and when I’m fortunate, I get to write about it.

Video, by Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon, is here:

It’s Thanksgiving in two days and, like I said last time, things seem to be accelerating grimly, spinning outward as if by centrifuge, instead of settling into tedium and sugarness, like my famous (OK, Luby’s famous) sweet potato casserole.

I spent the end of last week finishing up what I thought would be a front-page story (in the end: not so much) about a University of Texas study about how students and recent grads are using Facebook. S. Craig Watkins, who led the study, is one of the smartest, most interesting people I get to interview regularly and it’s always fun to catch up on what his thoughts are on the state of social media and tech.

For several weeks before that, I’d been working on a holiday tech gift guide for the Statesman, an annual tradition that always ends up being more work than I remember from the year before. We focused on Internet-video-on-your-TV products like Apple TV, Roku and the Logitech Revue with Google TV. I’ve tried two of those three products and am curious about the third (Apple TV), especially since iPads and iPhones can now do a neat trick with it.

There’s also a helicopter that flies around and shoots video. You’re welcome!

Another annual tradition is a similar gift guide I do for Television Without Pity. It’s more a photo gallery than a story, much shorter and with some different items. If you like things like Karaoke Revolution Glee, you may like this guide.

This week, I’ve been finishing up a profile of game designer Warren Spector, who is releasing Disney Epic Mickey next week. The reporting for that story has been pretty epic itself; I’ll tell you more about it after the story runs on Sunday.

What was I talking about again? Oh, right! Sweet potato casserole! I gotta get on that for Thursday.

It’s been a really busy two weeks, at work and at home.

Off stage, out of sight, we were dealing with a family medical issue that had us feeling worried and vulnerable all of a sudden. Then we got some good news that made things not-so-scary, but we’re still reeling from having even dealt with the problem in the first place. It’s something I really hope to write about soon, but I promised I’d hold off until we had some kind of resolution and we’re just getting there.

Even with some of the sick time I had to take off, things actually seemed to speed up at work. As the holidays approach, our deadlines are getting tighter and I seem to be just writing and writing and writing.

The biggest surprise and bright spot recently was that CNN.com approved of a crazy, weird column idea I had months ago about Facebook theology. I pitched it tentatively, sure it would be a strange and unwelcome fit, but the editor I work with over there took a chance on it and ended up liking the result. The piece ran on the site today and this time at least I was prepared for abusive comments and ridicule. (Sample comment: “No disrespect to the author, but this is the dumbest idea for a news article I have ever read.” Right. No disrespect.) It actually hasn’t been as bad as I was expecting and the article has been shared more times on Facebook already than the previous two columns I wrote over the summer. And how adorable is that illustration up there? I really like it.

The CNN thing made up for having to try to explain to people why I’m not on NPR every week anymore (short answer: I don’t actually know and am afraid to ask). After a rough couple of weeks, it was a nice boost I really needed.

On the Statesman front, I had a story on the front page today about Gowalla’s big parks deal with Disney, did a story recently about Texas State professor Cindy Royal’s online war of words with Wired over a recent boobalicious magazine cover, a review of the Xbox 360 Kinect that ran in Tech Monday (longer, more exhaustive blog version here) and a Tech Monday column about next week’s Austin intellectual property summit.

As of this writing, I have another A1 story scheduled for Saturday (fingers crossed), tech gift guides running Sunday in the Statesman and later on Television Without Pity, a profile of Epic Mickey game designer Warren Spector and a Season for Caring story about an amazing Austin family I am lucky to have met. Shit got really busy lately, I’m telling you.

And on top of all that I’m working on an iPad-related writing project with an Austin company that I’ll tell you more about soon. Busy times, but it’s not all work. I’m watching tons of TV after Lilly and Carolina go to bed at night, trying to finish Franzen’s book Freedom (50 more pages!), listening to great podcasts on my way to and from work and trying to enjoy life right now. I looked back on the summer and realized I was really having a hard time adjusting to our new reality (having a toddler and an infant in the house) and was really crabby a lot of the time.

Given the recent things that have happened, I’m letting myself enjoy the situation a little more and trying not to stress out so much. I know that if I don’t relax and enjoy it, I’m going to regret missing out on some really wonderful times with my girls.

Our last Trailers Without Pity video for 2010 is for Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, a harrowing look at the world of ballet that’s due in theaters in December.

In the video, we learn that ballet is as brutal as pro wrestling, that Aronofsky is like a cuddly, beloved version of Lars von Trier and that ballet + malaise = ballaise.

The plan is to return with new videos in January. In the meantime, I want to create a episode guide blog post that lists all the Trailers Without Pity episodes we’ve done so far with links to all of them. I think we’re up to almost 60 episodes dating back to October 2008. Look for that in the next few weeks if things don’t get too busy and overwhelming around here.

Wurstfest '07. Photo by me.

I’m lucky to have an editor who reads my stuff (even on Twitter) and recognizes that when year after year I proclaim how much I love something, at some point it’s probably a good idea to assign that to me as a story for the paper.

That’s how I ended up writing a piece about Wurstfest for Thursday’s Austin360 section of the paper as a cover story. By completely coincidence, the year I was assigned to write this story is the 50th year of the festival here in New Braunfels and they had a lot of special things planned for this year including a giant mural and a visit from a German dignitary.

The story was a lot of fun to write and you can tell where I was cutting loose a bit from the normal reporting/writing; as I was writing, I imagined the people I had interviewed from Wurstfest seeing the article later and crying, “What the crap is this!?” to the parts of the piece that were a little more personal.

Then I imagined them banning me from the festival, me screaming at the gates, and being forevermore labeled as a “Sausage Interloper.” That’s a real thing in Germany, right?

Seriously, I do hope that doesn’t happen because we plan to go at least 3 or 4 times starting Friday. Bonus: in the print version, my wife got a full photo credit for a picture she took of Lilly and me on the carousel.

Other stories I wrote for the Statesman this week: on Monday, I had a piece run about “Dream Closet,” an iPhone app that helps you organize your closet from Austin company Appiction. And on Thursday, we published a special 24-page pink section in support of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. I did a short story about Komen Austin’s social media efforts.