Terribly Happy

For a lot of years, especially since I moved to New Braunfels in 2004, summer has felt like I wave I’m trying to catch. The place I live has a lot of rivers and trails and one gargantuan water park, plus I’m short-driving-distance away from even more summer fun in Austin, Corpus Christi and lots of other place.

By the end of the summer, I’d always be regretful that I didn’t do more, that I allowed myself to be stuck in air-conditioned offices and commuting to work instead of taking more vacation or burning a mental-health sick day or two just to go swimming or get some sun. By September, I would always have this low-grade bummer feeling (“depression” would be too strong a word for it) that summer was gone and I let it get away.

Last summer was very different. A bunch of things in my life changed very quickly in the span of a couple of months from around June through September and summer became something really different, a way for me to cope with what was happening, and for me to remind myself that the sun, the water, the beach, that these things weren’t going to go away just because this time of transition was so scary and new.

I traveled a lot last summer, I got season passes for the water park, I tubed and went to South Padre Island, I tried not to get sunburned under the blazing Texas sun and mostly succeeded. When I didn’t, aloe vera.

This summer, one year after all of that, I’m trying to continue that appreciation with more visits to the water park, some yard work, several vacations that are booked. I had some financial stress the end of last year where I got really anxious about how I was going to make it through the holidays and this year, but it turns out the IRS doesn’t want all of my freelance money and that I am able to afford to not be afraid to do any real vacationing.

I still have no proper job (I still get confused on forms where “Unemployed” is an option, but “Self-employed” is not), but things have been busy with lots of freelance writing, ongoing radio stuff, and some really weird things that have fallen into my laptop’s lap that I would classify as “Miscellaneous income.” I helped a website do some online instruction for its users. I ghost-wrote a band’s biography. Someone I admire asked me to help them put together an application for an award program. All of these were not completely in my wheelhouse, but I enjoyed doing them and it was supplemental to some bigger-picture stuff I’m working on as well as continuing to contribute when I can to the Statesman and Austin360.

Lots of changes, but summer still feels the same to me as it did when I was a kid: big and inviting, with days that stretch out like yellow-orange taffy, but then gone too quickly, just a lingering taste on the tongue when it’s gone.

The other day I was on a tube ride with the girls at Schlitterbahn and it was the same day that word went out that the water park is being sold after 50 years of family ownership.

Whataburger is being sold, too, and it’s a little weird, but not unexpected or unusual, that these iconic Texas brands are going through these changes.

Schlitterbahn is in the town I call home and Whataburger is probably the fast-food restaurants I’ve eaten most in my life (I worked there in high school, so that throws the curve a little).

I know people who are freaking out because they love these brands and feel ownership of them as longtime customers, and I’m wary of change too. I also have friends who’ve made snide comments about them, dismissing their value, or implying that they did something wrong to deserve succumbing to market forces.

Not to tie myself to these corporate events too much, but I still get asked sometimes why I left the Statesman last year, how I could walk away from a dream gig at a place that appreciated my work, why I would basically succumb to market force to sell out my own voice at a big outlet to stay home and write articles for smaller outlets and do things like write bios for musicians and not be part of the media scene in the way that I had been doing for a really long time.

Apart from all the personal considerations that I won’t get into and a very pragmatic look at the situation, a big part of it was simply feeling that it was time for a change, a big one, and that staying in the gear that I’d been in was no longer good for me. It just felt like it was enough of that and time now for something else. Maybe I would have been laid off a few months later, maybe I would have stayed another 20+ years, but I stopped wanting that job to define my whole life, and wanted to know if it wasn’t too late to be something else besides a newspaper writer dabbling in a bunch of other things.

What if the dabbling is the thing?

Which is to say that even though there was some very cynical, ledger-based decision making for those companies and their family owners, I also get the immense relief that comes with walking away, with starting fresh, with not being in charge of the thing that you’ve been in charge of and mindful for and tied to whether it soars or sinks. It is nice, I’m finding, to make your own fortune and luck for a while. It’s nice to reset.

That’s what summer feels like to me now, too.

Like a good time for change.

By The Way

A while back, this would have been February, I got approached by The Washington Post about a travel project they were working, something really ambitious that involved local city guides from 50 different cities.

I agreed to work on a guide to Austin and spent the a big chunk of March and April revisiting old haunts, checking out some new ones and putting together a guide of old and new Austin restaurants, hotels, entertainment destinations and more for what ended up being called “By The Way” and which launched on June 18. The guide seemed like an easy enough assignment at first, but once I got started realized it was going to take a lot of legwork, double-checking, and, unbeknownst to me at the time, tons of design, editing and photography talent.

The Austin guide is up and I’m so impressed with how it turned out and feeling good about what I got to include. Photographer Ilana Panich-Linsman did such an amazing job, and I got to work with my former co-worker Ponch Garcia, who did some copy editing on the Austin guide. By The Way has a really great Instagram account and I’ve been enjoying learning about all these other cities that were covered around the world. The postcards, Instagram stories and logos created for these guides are so wonderful. They also have a weekly newsletter for By The Way worth subscribing to.

It’s my first Washington Post byline, which has me bursting with joy. I’m so glad I can finally talk about it — keeping it a secret these last couple of months was really, really tough.

ATX TV Festival

A lot of the writing I’ve been doing lately has been focused on entertainment, including some book, TV and movie reviews.

For the last couple of years, I’ve had to miss the great ATX Television Festival due to travel and other obligations. This year, I had a chance to attend three of the four days and do some coverage for Austin360 of the fest. I wrote about a panel on inclusion and access, the new Comedy Central series Alternatino with Arturo Castro (which is great, watch it!), an upcoming animated Amazon series called Undone with animation from Austin, and a script reading of Wannabes, which is in production.

For the site Primetimer, which has taken the place of the much-beloved Previously.tv, I got to write up Los Espookys, which is a fantastic new HBO Spanish-language comedy you should seek out. The first episode is free online.

Other writing

For my former bosses the Statesman and Austin360, I wrote a few things including a family column about how my daughter and I have been using TikTok. For the business section, I did a Sunday centerpiece on weighing your options with cord cutting now that we’re in the age of dozens of streaming pay TV services.

Over on Book & Film Globe, I reviewed Howard Stern’s new book of interviews, Howard Stern Comes Again. (I liked it, but it took me a full month to get through it. It’s a LOT of words.)

I also reviewed Amazon’s Good Omens, and to prep for that, I ended up reading the whole book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Not sure how I missed that one in the ’90s, but the book was a delight and the TV show is a very good adaptation that only feels a little bit dated. In the windup to the show’s release, I also did a roundup of all the major (and some minor) characters on the show for Primetimer.

I’m all about streaming TV, so I also took a look at the brilliant second season of Amazon’s Fleabag (maybe you’ve heard of it from all the online hype?) and Netflix’s I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, which is essential, silly viewing for sketch-comedy nerds. For Primetimer, I also did a ranking of the 10 best sketches from that show.

I also helped say goodbye to the last episode of HBO’s Veep with a list of all of crimes, great and small, by Selina Meyers just from that last season.

On the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, I sang the praises of the Eisner-winning comic book series Mister Miracle and posted a dad’s theory that I believe may solve the book’s major mystery.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough, it’s the best thing I’ve read all year.

Texas Standard and two great podcasts

I’ve got your tech topics from Texas Standard! It’s been a busy couple of weeks with some actual tech news; summer is usually pretty slow in the tech industry, but there’s been no shortage of interesting things to talk about. Since the last time I posted, we’ve covered:

• Why tech companies be feudin’
• The comeback of virtual pets
• Budget flagship smartphones
• Ways to find streaming shows and movies across a bunch of different services
• Huawei’s struggles to keep operating in the U.S.
• Whether AT&T is prepared to be a big media business player
• The beginning of the end of the iTunes era
• What was most interesting about this year’s E3 game industry expo (including Keanu Reeves)
• What Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra is all about and what we should expect from it next year

I’m also working on a new batch of scripts and recordings for Tech Minute, you can find 150(!) episodes I’ve done on the TechMinuteTexas.com website.

On the same day this week, I also appeared on two great podcasts hosted by some of my favorite people.

On the TV podcast “Extra Hot Great,” which is hosted by the original creators of Television Without Pity and Previously.tv, we talked on Episode 256 about Los Espookys, Alternatino, Atlanta and lots of other shows. Seriously, if you’re a heavy TV fan/watcher, you really should subscribe to this podcast. It’s a great listen every single week.

Sarah D. Bunting, who is a co-host on EHG, also has a podcast called “The Blotter Presents” and even though I know fuck-all about true crime, she was still kind enough to invite me on the show to talk about two films based on New Yorker writer David Grann’s articles, Robert Redford’s acting swan song The Old Man and the Gun (which was really good!) and Incendiary, a really infuriating documentary about the famous Texas Cameron Todd Willingham arson case. I loved being on the show and you should subscribe to this podcast and its sister newsletter, Best Evidence, as well!

Other life

Like I said, it’s summer here and I’ve been trying to spend a lot of it in and on water.

I saw Mitski in concert again (but missed her Austin City Limits taping), celebrated Mother’s Day with lots of meats, mourned Grumpy Cat, made a fox friend, saw the Latino Comedy Project pull off an amazing Cinco de Mayo / May the 4th crossover show, saw a shitload of Marvel movies including Avengers: Endgame (three times!) and played a lot of Overwatch. Yes, I still play that.

New me, new cards

Change is trauma, I guess, or at least a shock to the system you can’t really gauge without some perspective.

Your body re-forms a lot of its own cells constantly as you move along in this world and in a decade you’re mostly not even physically the same parts. And I can imagine that a sudden change of environment, a big swing of emotions and priorities and goals must speed that along, the stress-shedding of even more skin and bone and follicle.

Last year was all about change, the “Bulldoze” year, this year was “Foundation,” building on new ground and starting new things.

It’s late April and there’s a bit of a lull right now. South by Southwest took up a lot of my energy in March (more on that below) and the weeks leading up to that and as soon as that was done, I dived into a big project for a publication I’ve always wanted to write for that I hope to post about here really soon. That took me into early April, then I had to finish up my taxes, which were incredibly complicated and weird for 2018, and then I was in the middle of some home appraisal stuff, preparation for a whole other project that I’m excited about and now it’s now and I’m taking a deep breath and resting a little bit and seeing where I am.

Everything from like Halloween to Easter is a big blur, preparing from one holiday to the next, traveling a lot, spending as much time as I can with my kids now that I’m not rushing home from an office after 6 p.m. every night against traffic.

I got past the bit where I was stressing out about money every day. Even after I knew that a contract I signed for 2019 was going to keep me financially OK, I was still worried about Christmas gifts, the costs of all these house things that needed repairing or improving, the ridiculous cost of having basic health coverage as a freelancer, and this looming fear that whatever I owed on my taxes for what turned out to be a windfall year (minus putting a down payment on a new house) was going to wipe me out.

now it’s now and I’m taking a deep breath and resting a little bit and seeing where I am

That didn’t happen, but I still have that nagging need to hustle, to keep accepting assignments that only pay $50-$100 just to keep income flowing instead of wasting time, just to cover dinners and dental visits, to hedge against some future costly emergency. Not every day anymore, but often enough that I can’t sit still for very long.

There are days that are incredibly relaxed, when there is nothing due and no place to be when I can work on the shed/guest house that came with this house with my dad, putting up particle board and using saws and drills. Those are days when I can catch up on movies I missed when my life was too busy (shoutout “Civil War”), or to just go the gym and not feel rushed to get it all done in 45 minutes.

But it’s not without problems. I get bent out of shape chasing invoices that don’t get paid for a long time, I always feel like I should be writing more, even when there’s no assignment in front of me, I have that fear of disappearing and being forgotten because I’m not pushing stuff out there like I used to.

When I went freelance last year one of the first things I put on my to-do list was “Make business cards.” I played around with some designs on the Kinko’s website and wasn’t really happy with any of them. My brother, who’s much better at design than me, agreed they weren’t great and I just kind of put it aside. Truth be told, I don’t get asked for a business card very often, but the few times I did at interviews it was always that awkward, “Oh, I don’t have them yet, working on it…” and I wanted something to hand out, even if it was a happy face on a piece of lunchmeat (how great would that card be? But you’d have to keep them in a mini fridge you always carried around.).

So after SXSW I used a coupon code I got from a very good Moo booth at the event where they gave out lots of samples of their stuff. I threw something together that I ended up really happy with. Sure, the fonts are all over the place and the photo could be sharper (it’s a picture of a picture), but it reflects me more than some simple modern design. They came so beautifully packaged in little ornate boxes that I felt spoiled, like I was treating myself to something I really didn’t deserve. Moo really makes lovely stuff, you should give them a try if you need cards or other printed stuff.

The only thing on it I really wonder if I should have done differently is the title. “Technology Culture Reporter.” Is that what I still am, more than 20 years since I started using that title? Aren’t I doing a lot more than that? Is there room for me to list all those things? It it better not to pigeonhole myself at all?

Maybe by the next round of cards, I’ll be something completely different.

South by Southwest 2019

Photo from me at the Henry Winkler acting workshop panel. He was magic.

A month ago, it was South by Southwest, maybe, I don’t know, the 15th or 16th time I’ve gone (there were a few years in the early 2000s where my main job wasn’t so tech focused so I skipped some).

I always thought that if I left my job at the Statesman, that would be the end of me being obsessed with SXSW every year and running around covering stuff. But a month before, I got asked to contribute as a freelancer for Austin360 and the Statesman’s business desk and to get badged up and so there I was, back in the mix. But it was really different this year in a lot of great ways.

For one thing, I didn’t spend a couple of months planning and prepping and writing lots of previews and exhausting myself so much that by the time SXSW starts, I’m already burned out on the whole thing. It was nice coming in fresh, doing the things I was assigned to do (or other assignments I picked up for other publications on top of my initial list) and then spend the rest of my time actually enjoying SXSW.

Ironically, I managed to get sick the day it all started with what we call the “SXSW Crud,” but a week earlier than usual, so I soldiered on with boxes of Kleenex and a very phlegmy cough, but managed to make it through.

Working with the Statesman team did give me the opportunity to go back and sit in on some planning meetings and to visit the newsroom again, something I hadn’t done since around October. I’ve been telling people that I don’t really miss the newsroom or the act of committing daily newspaper journalism, that what I’ve really missed are the people I worked with and the feeling that comes from being part of a large team working together to make something bigger than any one of us.

That’s true; I miss the social part of my job, being able to look up from my computer monitor and seeing friendly faces of people I respect and admire.

But when I visited, I didn’t expect the warm wave of nostalgia I got from just riding the elevator, the one I’d ridden thousands of times before. The little warm fuzzy from being recognized and greeted at the security desk, the temperature of the conference room and the scuff of the conference room chair on my legs. I was in that newsroom for more years than I’ve ever lived in any home in my life, and that’s probably going to remain true for a really, really long time.

I don’t miss being there every day, but the thought that in a few years it may not exist — that the staff will move to an unfamiliar place as the building is razed or built out into something else — fills me with a lot of sadness. But I guess I’m learning how important it is to make new homes, to find new places you love, and to be out in the world more.

I’m trying to explore more, to be less tied to locations and rooms, to feel as comfortable in wide open spaces than in bulb-lit interiors. It doesn’t always come natural for me.

All I did for the Statesman at SXSW:

• A preview of South by Southwest Gaming, which I actually got to attend with my daughters this year. We had a great time!
• Coverage of Priscilla Chan’s talk with CNN’s Poppy Harlow. As I say in the piece, there were no bombshells from Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, but I thought she did a great job once she stopped reading from her prepared remarks and spoke off-the-cuff about her very significant life experiences and the work the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation is trying to accomplish.

CNN’s clubhouse at SXSW was… bogus

• I made a lot of fun of CNN’s not-very-well-executed ’80s themed clubhouse. I wrote it all on my phone while standing in line for a keynote and I think the piece reflects that.
• I haven’t seen Good Omens, which hits Amazon in May, but I enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s panel, particularly the advice he gave for writers. “Finish.” Much more important even than starting.
• Wrote up Kara Swisher’s hilarious interview of Kathy Griffin. I didn’t know what to expect, but holy crap, it may have been the funniest thing that happened at SXSW this year. Seriously, if you have time, watch the full video yourself.
• I was never a big Trevor Noah fan; I stopped recording/watching The Daily Show when he took over. But I was very impressed with Noah and crew at their SXSW panel and the Trump Twitter Presidential Library exhibit was a huge highlight for me at SXSW. Here’s the write-up of the panel I did for Austin360.
• A write-up of Henry Winkler’s excellent acting studio panel. I hadn’t seen more than the first episode of HBO’s Barry at the time, but I’ve since fixed that egregious mistake. What a fantastic TV series.
• I covered a panel (twice!) about how reporters are covering rural areas, particularly those considered “Trump country.” The consensus on the panel was that national media needs to do better on this.
• Jessica Brillhart’s great keynote on VR (not just video, but audio, too) was fascinating.
• And lastly, I wrote about attending a panel on the shifting economics of podcasts. They’re getting huge, y’all.

In the lead-up to SXSW, I also got asked to double up on some panels and write different versions for the journalism organization Poynter. This was a much bigger challenge than I was expecting! South by Southwest is exhausting enough and when you find the time to sit and write something, it’s a small miracle, but then to start over and try to write the same thing again, the thing you just pretty much said what you wanted to say about, from a different angle… well, that was tougher than I thought it might be.

So for Poynter, I offered a more journalism-focused take on the Trevor Noah panel, a more Poynter-iffic take on the panel about rural/Trump country reporting, and a third piece that wasn’t double-up for the Statesman, a very powerful panel about covering family separations at the border.

SXSW activations, always a constant

And because I wasn’t done overloading myself with work, I also did two pieces for a blockchain news site, Modern Consensus. I interviewed Austin’s Dave Sikora after he did a panel and I covered a “Blockchain deathmatch” panel that included Jimmy Song, whom I profiled a few months ago for Breaker Magazine. And for the Book + Film Globe site, I did a wrap-up of all the crazy SXSW activations including ones for “Game of Thrones” and “The Highwaymen.”

We told her how much we loved “Russian Doll” and she was nice enough to take a pic with us.

It wasn’t all work, though. I still got to have fun and hang out. Thanks to Jeana, who was not as shy as the rest of our group, I got to meet Natasha Lyonne at an afterparty for a premiere of “Booksmart” where Santigold played and Olivia Wilde celebrated a birthday.

I ate a fucking lot of cheese. I gave good cookie advice. I bought a “Nancy” shirt that arrived in time to wear for at least one day of SXSW.

There was lots more, but like every SXSW, it has already started to fade and compress and feel like one long fevery dream where everything happened all at once.

South by South Rest

Here’s the rest of other things I’ve been working on since February.

For the aforementioned Book + Film, I did a review of Rooster Teeth’s Austin-made anime gen:LOCK which I really enjoyed. I finished off the season after this review was published and I thought it finished strong and left me wanting more. I also reviewed another Austin-made creation, Battle Angel: Alita, which I liked a lot less. Comment writers noted that I don’t seem familiar with the source material, and boy howdy is that true. I had major problems with the film version.

I had much nicer things to say about the pretty perfect conclusion of Broad City. Most recently, I wrote a mixed-bag review of Donald Glover’s strange but also strangely compelling mini movie Guava Island, now available on Amazon streaming.

For the Statesman, after SXSW, I wrote about a really great exhibit that took place at the Texas capitol building, “Refugee Is Not My Name.”  For the business section, I did a piece on Austin-made AR pet-adoption app “Furiends.”

And, new freelance gig! I started writing some piece for Barnes & Noble’s Sci-Fi and Fantasy blog.  My first two pieces were a roundup of scariest Stephen King books that aren’t Pet Sematary and a roundup of six very funny comic books / graphic novels you should be reading.

Wendi Aarons and I returned for our second piece together at McSweeney’s. It was timed to Equal Pay Day but ended up running a few days after that. It’s called “If Women Completed Work Based On Their Percentage of Wages Compared To Men.” I thought it came out really well.

And for Texas Standard, I did a whole bunch of things, here’s that list of topics:

• If you should be worried about DNA kits
• YouTube’s major problems protecting kids online
• Delivery robots!
• Paid/subscription podcasts are coming (by the way, I did sign up for “Luminary”)
• SXSW 2019 highlights
• Videogaming in the cloud
• Apple’s late entry into streaming TV
• The gender pay gap in tech
• The rise of TikTok
• Why self-driving cars are taking so long.

I should also note that I’m still doing daily audio segments for Tech Minute Texas; the site has been updated with 30 more segments, so we’re up to 130 total and I’ve got more coming.

Life

When I wasn’t working, I celebrated a birthday, did a long-ass 8+ mile hike for a waterfall in Arizona, ran a 5K with my daughter,  got confused for a dog, adopted three fish as pets, got into a fight with Build-A-Bear, celebrated Manu Ginobili’s retirement, made a really dumb video nobody saw, saw Kacey Musgraves in concert and got excited for Latino Comedy Project’s upcoming new show. I’m not in it, but I backed the project and can’t wait to see how it turns out.

These have been good months and I can’t wait for summer.

Photo by me, for Breaker Magazine

I was warned, repeatedly, that freelance life was a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, particularly in regards to working with editors and with getting paid.

Five months into my post-job life, I am finding that’s not only true, it’s fuckahellatrue, like so true it makes all other reality a fiction. You know that movie The Truth About Cats and Dogs? This freelance stuff is more true than even that film, my apologies to Janeane Garofalo, just speaking my truth.

The rhythm is what has been throwing me off, the sense that deadlines are much more fluid, that the time between the time I turn something in and the time that it’s published can stretch and stretch (to months, even), that I can get paid for something I wrote within two or three days, or two or three months.

These are not novel concerns, these aren’t new issues, every freelancer I know is a choir in no need of preaching to on this. But for me, someone who spent 21 years adhering to schedules and budgets and deadlines and calendars, it has sent me into an existential time dread.  Someone who cares about me deeply recently pointed out that I seem to have lost all sense of time, and that’s not inaccurate. Sometimes the weekdays just fly by because I have no deadline to wake up early, no deadline to get assignments done and plenty of “Overwatch” and “Apex Legends” to play.

Not that I’m wasting my days doing nothing (my Netflix viewing is up like 80 percent, though, make of that what you will), but I’m working in shorter bursts, not sitting at my desk soaked in the monitor glow all day.  I don’t keep up with Twitter as much as when it was in my face for 8-10 hours a day. I answer emails on the go, sometimes I’m not even at home or in Texas when I do.

I had a week recently where it felt like nobody was responding to emails I’d sent and pitches I’d made, where I didn’t have any urgent writing pending apart from some long-term deadlines I’m in the middle of, and I didn’t even have any thoughts worth Tweeting.  There began to be a sense that I was disappearing, that I was losing the thread of myself and what I was supposed to be doing outside the normal family/house/pet obligations. It was a weird displaced feeling, but not completely unwelcome. At the height of my time at the Statesman, when I was putting out stories and podcasts on top of all the freelance stuff I was doing, I sometimes got tired of hearing my own voice, got tired of being the carnival barker peddling my own warez all the time.  I wanted quiet, I wanted to stop talking, I wanted to retreat into myself for a little while and be still.

And now I’m getting some doses of that and… it’s an adjustment. Be careful what you wish for, right?

But then that quiet is broken up by responses and publishing and money in the mail, and suddenly I’m back into it.  It was just temporary.  And now I’m talking again.

I woke up this morning determined to get going early, to make this week count. And to my surprise, I saw that a story I’ve been working on since last year was suddenly published.

Breaker Magazine is a New York online publication that pushed out lots of news and culture stories about the blockchain and Bitcoin scenes.  I got hooked up with them last summer by a mutual friend and in the fall, I started working on a profile of Jimmy Song, an Austinite who was making waves in that world with some very strong (and often brutal) opinions.  I met up with him and found him to be super nice and easy to chat with, a contrast to his sometimes spiky online hot takes, and a fascinating subject.

The story went through some significant edits and a major rewrite, resulting in more rounds of interviewing.  I’m so pleased with the result; it’s been a long time since I went through a process like that, the kind of edit where you begin to question your own self-worth as a writer, but I was so lucky to have editors who could see the finish line and what the story could be.

I think Jimmy is something more people in Austin’s tech scene should know about.

Elsewhere in the Omar-verse, I’ve been keeping busy writing culture reviews for Book + Film Globe and additional stories for the Statesman.

The great Natasha Lyonne. Credit: Netflix, yo

I did a review of the excellent Netflix series “Russian Doll.”  Honestly, I could have written another 5,000 words about the nuances and greatness of this show, but it was written the weekend the series debuted and I was trying really trying hard to keep any spoilers out of it because it really is something best viewed fresh. The review seems to have resonated with people who were unsure about investing time in the show. A Facebook friend wrote, ” I literally went from zero to 100% in terms of interest in this series,” so that was nice to hear.

In other Netflix-related writing, I reviewed the last bunch of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” episodes for Book + Film Globe.  I had given up on the show early in Season Three, but decided to catch up over the holidays and I’m glad I did. Despite some of its faults (and I get why people started to turn away from the series), I think it ended well and that the stuff it was good at (dense joke writing, absurdist characters) vastly outweighed the problematic. If you fell off, too, I really think it’s worth finishing.

For Austin360, I followed up my Paul McCartney concert column with something a little bit less emotional, a story about how bad I am at organizing all my digital photos and videos. Here’s a little clip from that video I describe in the story:

I also wrote a more newsy daily story for the business section about Retro Studios taking over development of Nintendo’s “Metroid Prime 4.” A big deal for gamers!

On the “Texas Standard” radio show, we’ve done segments about smart watches and health, about why Instagram is doing so well (plus viral egg photos), Apple’s recent security/privacy woes, and a follow up on that Austin360 photo organizing piece.

Things are pretty good! It looks like I’ll be covering South by Southwest again for the Statesman next month and I have some other projects and pitches in the pipeline.  Thanks to everybody who’s been supportive.

If you’ve made it this far, all three of you, I want to ask — would you be interested in an email newsletter of stuff like this and some additional writing/recommendations/multimedia?

I’ve been mulling doing that (and maybe cross posting it here).  I definitely wouldn’t charge for it, at least not until I felt it was something worth paying for, and maybe even then I’d just do it as as additional content.

Some of my favorite online writers have been doing really interesting stuff with their email newsletters and I wonder if that would give me incentive to update more often.

Anyhoo, if you have thoughts, let me know!

MOD Bikes co-founder Dor Falu Korngold. Photo by Nick Wagner for the Austin American-Statesman

I am keeping busy! I’ve had several people ask me (online because I’m not out in public as much) “What are you working on?” or “what are you doing since you left the Statesman?” Still writing! Wrangling invoices! Pitching stuff! Going to the gym once in a while. Binge-watching Netflix shows!

Of course, I worried a lot the month or two after I left my job of 21 years that the writing assignments would dry up and I’d be forgotten like a crunchy, fallen and browned Autumn leaf but it turns out I’m one of those perennial plants that just chugs along all year. I have to be very careful when I spell that word, “Perennial,” because I know that spelling it wrong turns it into something referring to penises, and that is NOT what I want prospective employers to see on this site, unless they are paying for that sort of advertising. It wouldn’t be ideal, but a man’s got to eat, hopefully not with funds made from penis-related ad money.

THIS POST IS NOT GOING GREAT, SORRY.

What this is supposed to be is an update on stuff I’ve been writing, so here goes that:

In the Dec. 4 print edition of my old stomping grounds the Austin American-Statesman, they’re publishing an interview I did with Dor Falu Korngold, the founder of a new Austin shop called MOD Bikes. E-bikes are super interesting to me, and we talked a lot about how they fit into an Austin transportation scene dominated by electric scooters. You can read the story online here.

Netflix

I’ve been writing a lot of things for Book and Film Globe, including a review of the new Netflix movie “Cam.”

A few weeks ago, I wrote an impassioned plea to comics artist/writer Chip Zdarsky to bring back “Kaptara,” a comic that only ran five issues and that I thought was hilarious and wonderful. Sadly, I don’t think it’ll be back anytime soon after its great 2015 run. He did respond on Twitter, and that was nice.

I also did a review of a graphic novel about Hedy Lamarr, you can find that here.  Want to dig in more? Here’s all the stuff I’ve written for that site. I have something coming up soon about “Avatar,” so keep an eye out for that, please.

This one’s different: a Q&A with a drone expert about how they can be used in agriculture! The subject of the interview was Neil Marek and the story was for “TNLA Green,” a magazine from the Texas Nursery and Landscape Magazine.

From TNLA Green magazine, photo by Phil Kline

I’m still doing weekly radio segments for “Texas Standard!” You can find them all here including recent ones about Black Friday shopping and bad Microsoft Windows updates.

Speaking of audio, I’ve got about 15 more audio segments up on Tech Minute Texas. There’ll be a total of 100 one-minute segments on there soon and it’s looking like I’ll be doing 100 more in 2019! Hooray!

Thanks to my good friend Wendi Aarons, I had a pre-midterm elections co-byline on McSweeney’s, which was a huge bucket list item I was finally able to check off.

And lastly, for 512tech/Statesman, I did a review of the Aquio smart speaker/water bottle. This was the last of four reviews I did for the Austin Central Library’s Tech Petting Zoo partnership, and while I’m sad to see that conclude, I’m so thrilled that these devices are still there at the library for people to try out. I just visited again last week and it’s all in place. If you live in Austin, please check it out, it’s on the fifth floor of the library. That’s it for now! I have some more stuff in the pipeline for December and January and hopefully some news about some other projects coming, so stay tuned for that.

Thanks to everyone who has reached out to see how I’m doing or to offer freelance gigs, I’m truly grateful.

At the Austin Central Library Technology Petting Zoo

Holograms from Zebra Imaging. Photo by Laura Skelding / Austin American-Statesman.

My cat Cosa, who was sort of a star of this blog back when it was an online journal, died. I want to tell you about that and I’ve been writing that inevitable post, but there were some more developments and drama this weekend and I’m going to need a little more time. But a proper eulogy to a great, angry cat is coming very soon.

Instead, I’ll share what I’ve been working on the last few weeks. The first thing is really neat, something I was thrilled to share with people because my mind got blown as I was researching it and I felt like I really learned a thing or three. I did a column about “real” holograms (not the Tupac/Coachella type of holograms that are actually just a mirror and projection trick) produced by and Austin company called Zebra Imaging.

Zebra’s been around so long that one of my long-time coworkers was like, “Oh, THEM? What are they up to? They’ve been around forever!” It seems that the Tupac buzz has been good for them and that they’re coming out a long period of doing military stuff primarily and expanding into a lot of other areas for their truly amazing visual technology. Good for them.

Emerson Henriquez, a fan of Spill.com I met at their annual Spill Dot Con event. Photo by me.

The other new column runs in Monday’s newspaper and it’s about two very unique and fervently followed Austin websites, Spill.com and RoosterTeeth.com, both of which post very popular videos online and lots of other content that have earned this lots of fans. The success has led to real-world conferences that are bringing hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people together to celebrate their mutual love of the enjoyable things they put out into the world.

I’ve known Korey and some of the other Spill.com folks since I moved to Austin in 1997 and although I’ve been so busy parenting and working that I never get to see them anymore, they were my first close friends in Austin. Korey also introduced me to Adrian Villegas and that led to the Latino Comedy Project, so there’s lots of memories and good times I associate with that bunch of very talented people.

When I saw Korey and Martin, they looked at me like they were seeing a ghost (or at least a guy who hadn’t been around much at all for several years). I grew up thinking friends were the most important thing in life and it always makes me feel really guilty when I realize I haven’t tended to friendships like I should.

But apart from that, I was glad I got to write an article about a site that we have really under-covered over the years as it’s gotten really popular. By the same token. the folks at Rooster Teeth are amazing people who have also been doing this online comedy/video thing for ages and have worked incredibly hard to earn the fans they have. It’s always a pleasure to let people know about it.

I also got to see some neat tech at a Freescale event in San Antonio last week. There wasn’t much for me to write about, but I did take some snapshots. I also chatted with the Consumer ELectronics Association’s Jim Barry (really nice, knowledgable guy; I really enjoy speaking with him) for a piece that ended up running in the newspaper last week.

And just yesterday, I attended an all-day conference called MomComAustin. It’s research for a writing project I’ve mentioned here before, as is a trip I’m taking to New York in August for BlogHer. I’m devoting a lot more of my limited free time to these things and what before felt like a very nebulous project is beginning to feel like real work, but in a good way. In a way that feels less like waiting and more like acting. I had great conversations, listened to some really good speakers and even though I was literally the only man registered to attend (a few women asked me what I thought of that or gave me a pat on the back for being there), everyone there was great and super helpful when I asked questions prix viagra ligne. I have lots of transcribing and organizing to do, but it feels great to have that information in hand instead of just making plans to get that information, you know? Any kind of incremental forward movement I can get I’m thrilled to get.

Last thing I’ll mention for now is that tomorrow night I’m speaking at an ONA (Online News Association) Austin event about online writing with the incredibly talented and gracious Austin Eavesdropper Tolly Moseley. Tolly is someone I always enjoy chatting with when I run into her (I think we both have a bewildered, wide-eyes approach to writing and meeting other people, though I’m probably much crankier) and it was great of Rob Quigley, who is organizing this talk, to pair us up. We have some very entertaining, potentially embarrassing slides and stories to share.

A Tweet of mine that got posted on a sign during the SXSW Interactive craziness. Photo by Rob Quigley

I’ve been approaching this blog post with a weird trepidation that’s gotten worse the longer I’ve put it off. Typically when I have a column run in the paper or something significant I had published to share, I post it here right away. But for what feels like two months straight, almost everything I wrote about was related to South by Southwest Interactive and it got to be so exhausting posting and posting and posting about that elsewhere that I just had no gas left to come over here and repeat myself. So a month and a half of columns, two big pieces I wrote for CNN, literally dozens of SXSW-related blog posts, a major profile I did for the Statesman and more has just fallen through the WordPress cracks of non-updates around here.

How badly have I been procrastinating on this? I DID A MANUAL UPDATE TO WORDPRESS that had been nagging me for months just so I’d have an excuse to do something else before starting this post. I FTP’d my ass off just to delay the inevitable. “I can’t write the SXSW post,” I thought to myself, “not with an old version of WordPress! That would be disgusting!”

Don’t get into a procrastination contest with me. You will lose. Eventually. Years from now.

So in order to make this as painless as possible, I’ll just run through all the content. Please bear with me. I don’t expect anyone to go through and click and read through all of this material. It’s a giant mountain of writing and some of it is by now out of date and of no real use to anyone but me for the purposes of having it all in one place.

But despite all my grumbling about how much work it was and how exhausting I feel after it’s over, SXSW Interactive really was pretty great and magical and worthy of note, or we would never put the kind of effort we do into covering it the way we do. I have to keep reminding myself of that and remembering that I actually thought we did a better job this year and I had more fun and less frustration than in 2011 covering the event.

So here we go. Strap in!

Columns

On March 3rd, I profiled the opening keynote speaker of the festival, Baratunde Thurston, who recently published a very funny book called How To Be Black.  He was a great phone interview and I got to see his keynote and a much smaller party event where he was just as charming, super-smart and insightful.  So glad I got to meet him this year.

I wrote a column for CNN that got a lot of attention at the fest called “The Changing Culture of SXSW.”  I wrote a similar piece for the Statesman last year, but I got the feeling that a lot of newcomers to the fest (and perhaps CNN readers) weren’t as familiar with the fest’s origins and how it’s evolving.

I also got to write a lighter piece specifically for newcomers at CNN with tips for first-timers to the fest.  Coolest part of that one was that the story made it to the top-of-the-page center spot on cnn.com for a little while. (Screen shot above).

On March 11th, we did an interview with Jennifer Pahlka that ran as a Digital Savant column.  She founded Code for America, a group that’s doing some amazing stuff nationwide with city data and an army (or brigade) of volunteers and fellows. She also delivered a keynote at SXSW Interactive.

I didn’t have a column in the paper on March 19th due to SXSW Music coverage, but the day before, I had a pretty large wrap-up of the festival in the Sunday paper detailing some changes this year and some of the hype and money pouring into the fest.

That set the stage for the next week’s column, in which I more overtly ask the question, “Are we in a social media and apps bubble that’s about to burst?”  I get to use the column as an outlet for my anxiety sometimes.

And this week’s column was about a big trend we saw at the fest, a bunch of financial services and mobile payment add-ons that count point to where we’re going as far as paying for stuff with our phones instead of with traditional cash or credit.

News and other articles

SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest. Photo by Julia Robinson, for the American-Statesman

Had a bit of an early scoop when I found out from Apple that they weren’t planning to do another pop-up store at this year’s SXSW.

My favorite thing I wrote leading up to the fest was a profile of SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest that ran on the Saturday of the fest.  It was a story I was surprised we’d never written before in all our years of covering the fest.

A few days into the fest, the story broke about “Homeless Hotspots.”  We ended up running a piece in the next day’s paper about the topic, which ended up being one of the most talked-about things at Interactive (especially by people who weren’t at the fest).

We ran daily stories in the metro section wrapping up what was going on, like this one.

In the weird lead-up to the fest, Apple announced the new iPad and I ended up being mentioned in a CNN story about it because of a Tweet I wrote while it was being announced.

I did a preview of this year’s Screenburn Arcade event for the Austin360 print section, which had a very cool cover on it (you can see it below: from Street Fighter x Tekken.)

Austin360 cover by Adrian Zamarron.

And then there were perhaps 100 or so blog entries that our staff wrote.  It was a great team this year and I was thrilled to have a great mix of staffers, freelancers and editors working with us and contributing so much writing, photos, videos and more to the Digital Savant blog.

I don’t even know where to begin as far as the daily stuff goes because it’s all just a blur, but I interviewed Segway inventor Dean Kamen, got a nice swag bag, took some pics at ScreenBurn, caught an important mom blogging panel, met Tobey Maguire and saw Leonardo DiCaprio at a party (weird story), watched Kevin Smith go way over his allotted time, got terrified by Ray Kurzweil, saw Al Gore interview Sean Parker, caught Jay-Z, Sleigh Bells and Major Lazer all on the same night (crazy!), and got the scoop on this year’s 27 percent jump in attendance before anybody else.

I also received one of the weirdest voicemails of my life right after the fest ended.

That’s far from all that I wrote and just a fraction of what the whole staff produced in the five days of Interactive.  Looking back on it nearly a month later, I’m kind of amazed.

Photo by Vivien Killilea, via Getty Images Entertainment, provided by Mobli.

Personally

I only told a few people this last year and one of them, eventually, was my editor, but I think a week or two after 2011’s festival I swore to myself that this was the last year I was going to put myself through this, that somehow I was going to get out of covering the festival in 2012, no matter what.

As with having a second kid when you start to forget what having the first one entailed, I stopped thinking like that by the time March 2012 arrived and I’m glad.  This year’s fest was busier, larger and crazier than the year before, but I think I did a much better job balancing work and fun. In 2011, the ratio was completely out of whack and I went home feeling like I’d burned myself out and missed it all with my head stuck in a laptop.  This year, I made sure to devote lots of evening time to friends I never get to see, to be more open to ditching things on my schedule that weren’t absolutely necessary and, as always, resisted trying to set too many appointments and driving myself crazy trying to get from place to place.

On the Sunday of the festival, I forced myself to miss a panel and instead go see a band I’d been wanting to check out live, Wild Child, at a tiny, practically empty live show.  That turned out to be one of the biggest highlights of the entire fest and it was a completely private moment away from from the throngs.

One of the nights of the fest I got to see Eugene Mirman, Kristen Schaal and other comedians do stand-up for a Bob’s Burgers event.

I took my bike to the fest this year.  First of all, I forgot I had a bike.  I had to pump the tires and wipe off the dust and ride it to make sure the damn thing still worked.  Work it did.  I even bought a fancy bike lock, transported the bike to Austin and rode it around.  The first two days of the fest, it rained, so that was useless, but the rest of the festival it got me where I needed to go much faster, and was a nice way to end each night, crossing the Lady Bird Lake bridge to the newspaper parking lot when I’d usually be trudging back on foot.

I took care of myself more.  On two nights of the fest, I stayed at my brother’s new apartment in Austin instead of commuting back to New Braunfels.  I made a point of finding decent food to eat and drinking tons of water instead of just skipping meals like I usually did.

And I brought more phone chargers and gear (like a simple plastic bag to put in my bike seat when it rained) that saved me lots of headaches.

Mostly, though, my editor and I just planned the crap out of the festival.  We went through 1,000+ panels multiple times, had scads of Google Docs we shared and just really got our heads in the game a lot earlier than we usually do (and our planning usually begins in January).  We were just better prepared this year and that preparation paid off, especially when we were thrown curveballs. (In case you haven’t figured it out by now my editor Sarah is really organized and great at planning.)

Good experience, pretty amazing festival, and I don’t even feel exhausted or burned out talking about it.

But talk about it I will stop because it’s practically all that’s come out of my mouth for months and that needs to end.  Until, you know… January of 2013.

A few more pics: