Terribly Happy

Our penultimate Trailers Without Pity for the year is for Tron Legacy, a sequel to Tron that brings back Jeff Bridges and, you know, light cycles and discs of Tron and stuff.

Sometimes, lost as I am in an adult world of mortgage payments and shitty diapers, I forget that once upon a time I was quite the nerd and my classmates didn’t let me forget it. It’s nice to know I can always dip into my nerd hurt reserves when the need strikes. This was one of those times.

As for my use of the word “Penultimate” above, here’s the deal: we decided in the spring that when our two years of doing videos for TWOP was up (and when the latest run of our contract expired) in late October, we’d stop doing Trailers Without Pity. We asked for a raise and didn’t receive it, which we kind of expected, but we were starting to feel things had run their course anyway and that we should wind it down.

We held off on a final decision all summer and, weirdly, the videos kept being fun to do and seemed easier to put together the longer we kept doing them. So we decided to keep the door open and it looks like what will happen is this: we’re going to take a long break after the next video (for Black Swan), and then return in January with new videos.

The show would be broken into smaller seasons (maybe 10-12 episodes per run) and between those seasons we’d take a few months off. What’s really been killing us isn’t producing videos every two weeks, it’s doing that indefinitely without breaks or vacations. We’ll see how that goes, but I’m excited to have a break for us to catch our breath and to come back fresh in the ’11.

So, enjoy this one and we’ll see you for one more in another two weeks.

As is made clear in the opening seconds of our new Trailers Without Pity, we sure do like boobies, so it wasn’t hard to muster up the … uh… mustard of enthusiasm for Burlesque, a Thanksgiving movie starring Christina Aguilera and Cher.

This is a movie I don’t think I’d go see, despite the flesh and Stanley Tucci on display, but hey, if it floats your boat, have a great turkey day big-screen turkey.

You can find our video here.

Next, we’re working on Tron: Legacy.

This morning:

(At the breakfast table)

Lilly: Knock knock.

Omar: Who’s there?

Lilly: Daddy.

Omar: Daddy who?

Lilly: No. Daddy you.

The End

Just a short update on some stories that ran in the paper today. I’ve had a really good few days with a bunch of stories I’d been working on or planning for a while suddenly appearing all in a row this week.

On the front page I had a story run about how the gubernatorial candidates in Texas for the November election are using social media. This was a story that had been on our budget for a while and that I was dreading. Whenever I write anything to do with politics and technology I always promise myself not to let myself get pulled into doing that again. My dread continued as I reached out to the campaigns and found that they were so busy it was tough to schedule interviews and get the ball rolling.

But then the last two weeks before the stories were due, the interviews started happening and then, to my surprise, I was given access to the candidates themselves. The last week leading up to the story running got exciting and once I had all my interviews done I was suddenly thrilled to be writing it since I actually knew what I was talking about after all the reporting I’d done. It’s a nice place to be where you have much more information than you could possibly fit into a long story. Over the weekend some edits were made that condensed a chunk of the story; I wasn’t thrilled with that, but overall I’m happy with the way the whole piece turned out.

The other story I had in today’s paper was some news we broke about South by Southwest Interactive starting up a Texas education-themed conference next March called SXSWedu. Not sure if I’ll be covering that myself or if people on our newsrooms education will be doing that, but it’s nice that we got the story first.

The next few says I’ll be visiting the Game Developers Conference Online and doing a little coverage at the Austin City Limits Festival on some of the behind-the-scenes tech stuff being shown off and seeing if the cell networks hold up (something we end up having to check up on every year, it feels like).

Aaron Sorkin. Photo by Ralph Barrera, American-Statesman

I also did separate interviews with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the movie, and actor Armie Hammer.

A condensed version of the interviews ran as one piece in today’s paper, along with the review.

I loved the movie, but had a problem with how Zuckerberg was portrayed. Making him meaner and colder than he is in real life makes for a much more entertaining movie and certainly a more dramatic one, but I was still bothered a little, enough to point it out in the review and to bring it up in different ways to Sorkin and Eisenberg, who both had very good reasons for approaching the story the way they did. But, having met Zuckerberg briefly and having seen him speak live several times, I’m pretty confident that a large swatch of his personality and his goals simply don’t come across in the movie. Not to take anything away from Eisenberg. I think he does a great job playing a character. It’s just that the character is not exactly Zuckerberg, at least not the Zuckerberg of the last few years. I think the movie also betrays Sorkin’s inability to see much that’s positive in what Facebook has become.

That’s his prerogative. Facebook is gigantic and growing and scary.

This was the first movie review I’ve written in a long time and I really enjoyed getting back to it, if only briefly. I worked very hard on making it well-written and I hope it comes from a slightly different point of view than most of the ones I’ve seen.

The other thing that ran in the paper today was a short story that’s been prompting some discussion on Twitter and might only be of interest if you’re in Texas and into politics. It’s about Twitter and the gubernatorial election.

It’s a walk-up to a much longer, more detailed piece about how Texas Governor Rick Perry and his November challenger, former Houston mayor Bill White, are using social media in their campaigns. That story, which I’ve been working on for weeks, is scheduled to run in Saturday’s paper (whups, it moved to Monday), hopefully on the front page (fingers crossed). I’ll link to it when it hits the Web.

Other updates: Lilly has started dance classes at her daycare. Carolina is driving us nuts because she wants to crawl everywhere, grab everything and put all foreign objects in her mouth. Not much else to report. Keeping busy, trying to get enough sleep at night, still missing summer, looking forward to the holidays.

Photo by Mark Matson, for Austin American-Statesman

I looked up from my computer screen and summer was over. This makes me sad every year because even though we spent lots of weekends at Schlitterbahn and I even went tubing for the first time in years (with Glark and his nephew on the Colorado River), I always react with shock when it gets to be September and I realize I didn’t spend as much time as I wanted in water, on a beach (we didn’t go to any beach at all this year) or doing other outdoorsy stuff.

It’s happened every year since we moved to New Braunfels in late 2004. I always imagine the summer will involve me working from home every day and typing from next to the water at Landa Park and taking afternoon dips in the Comal and then spending my evenings at Schlitterbahn. It never quite works out that way for myriad reasons.

I’ve noticed that I tend to be a lot busier at my day job in the summer. Maybe it’s because lots of other people go on vacations and we’re often short-staffed in these months or maybe I just work better under harsh sunlight. But it’s when I tend to do a lot more stories for the front page and when I came back roaring after my annual post-SXSW Interactive exhaustion.

I did a column for this week’s Tech Monday about an upcoming Clean Energy Venture Summit and in yesterday’s paper was a pretty length piece about Fantastic Arcade, a new indie video game festival in Austin spinning off from the very famous Fantastic Fest for films.

Haven’t done NPR lately and the CNN articles I did early in the summer are the only ones I’ve worked on. Yet the despite of extracurricular work, it feels like I’m busier than ever and at night, after the girls are in bed, I just slump on the couch with exhaustion, unable to get myself to the computer to do my own blogging or to update other sites or do much of anything but trying to catch up with the overfull DVR or to try to avoid snacking into the wee hours.

Speaking of the girls, Carolina is now crawling and seems much more adventurous and prone to grab things and put them in her mouth than her older sister did. Lilly turned 3 last month and is taking a dance class at her daycare that she loves.

I’m trying to get my energy level back up so I can think about what I want to do next, especially if we stop doing Trailers Without Pity, like I mentioned in the last blog post. Pablo and I really want to start doing our comic again, but even that is a time commitment that might be difficult for us to coordinate. He’s got his own set of projects he’s working on (like doing recaps of Undercovers for TWOP) and his own social life to keep up with.

If it sounds like I’m bitching about being tired and having no time, I’m really not. I’m thrilled that things are busy at work (as opposed to being boring), my daughters are happy and healthy, and I’ve actually had time over the summer to read books, catch up on TV shows I’d been meaning to watch and to do things like take walks outside every evening and pay my bills, which is always nice.

I just wish summer had lasted a little longer and that I’d gotten myself into deep pools of water a little more often.