• The dead (virtual) children problem

    There’s a segment on the Extra Hot Great podcast called “Tiny Triumphs” about little victories that we have in our lives. I was blessed to have one this week; I wrote a piece for CNN.com that was published early this morning and appears to have struck a nerve. As of this writing, it’s earned more than 700 comments and I’ve gotten lots of e-mails and Tweets from people who read the piece. That hasn’t happened before, even with the piece I did on Facebook and religion.

    The editor I work with at CNN e-mailed me to tell me that at one point today it was the 3rd-most-popular piece of content on the entire site.

    Last week, a trailer for the video game Dead Island was released (my brother Pablo sent me the link) and it earned near-universal praise on gaming blogs (and some mainstream ones as well). But something about it just didn’t sit well with me and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t have a problem with just this trailer, but with several video games that are using the deaths and torture of children as central plot points.

    I pitched the column to CNN and they were able to get it published pretty quickly. I don’t know if what I wrote is right or wrong, I just know that the best stuff I write typically comes from a strong feeling I have and the need to explore what that feeling means and where it came from. This was the rare piece where I got to do it for a very popular site and get the idea out in front of lots of people.

    I’m embedding the original trailer below. Warning: it’s VERY gory and potentially disturbing. It’s also well-crafted and haunting, an amazing piece of work. And there’s part of the problem.

  • TED and then some

    The makers of the ‘Livestrong Austin Marathon and Half-Marathon’ App. Photo by Jay Janner, Austin American-Statesman

    This post is about a week overdue, but that’s probably a good thing because there’s a lot more to add. Last week, a “There’s a Creator for That” feature ran in the Statesman about the Livestrong Austin Marathon and Half-Marathon app (the marathon itself happened yesterday; I’m running a bit late).

    I also had two more pieces in the paper that day, one about Google’s campaign to make its Places and Hotpot services take off in Austin for Tech Monday and the other a reverse-publish of a blog post I wrote about digitizing our old VHS tapes.

    Last week, I hosted a live chat with organizers of South by Southwest Interactive and then wrote about Saturday’s TEDxAustin conference. I didn’t go last year, but this year we made the effort to attend and the Statesman was able to pay for my ticket. We did a pretty extensive preview of the event and today I posted a very lengthy wrap-up. Tried to explain not just TEDxAustin, but the whole TED phenomenon and why it’s taken off so quickly.

    We weren’t allowed to bring laptops, digital cameras, video cameras or anything larger than a cell phone and even texting and Tweeting were discouraged during the speaking portions of the day. That made for an interesting reporting challenge since I’m so used to covering conferences live, but it also freed me up to really pay attention, take careful longhand notes and really think about what I thought of the event before I posted something two days later.

    Right now things are in a weird balance between me being very much a homebody — I’m loving being here with the girls, taking them to the park, going to the local Children’s Museum, catching up on TV with my wife when they go to bed and playing video games or watching my own shows after everyone else is in bed.

    But for TEDx, I had to spend an entire Saturday away from home; it was also the day after we went to Austin for a concert. As I left Saturday morning, Lilly followed me to the door and told me not to go. Carolina is old enough now to recognize when I’m here or when I’m gone and she’s been especially affectionate lately. The older they get the more I miss them when I’m not here and more valuable the time seems when I’m not off working. It’s made it a lot easier to turn down extraneous projects, unpaid speaking gigs and anything else that takes me out of the house when I’m needed.

    But then tonight, I attended a Town Hall for SXSW Interactive and got home late. Carolina was asleep and Lilly was already curled in bed, waiting for me.

    In just a few weeks I’m going to be gone 24/7 for practically an entire week. I wish I could say I’m completely pleased that the fest is growing and drawing more and more attention every year. It’s my home turf and I get very competitive covering the fest; I love that I’m usually in the top tier of reporters covering the event and rarely get scooped in mid-March. But I’m also a little resentful that Interactive is expanding in both directions, with pre- and post events that are stretching it from 5 days to at least 7 and as many as 11 depending on how we choose to cover it all. Four nights away from home are hard. Six I’ve never even tried before. I’m a little worried.

    I’ll take time off after the fest and probably a day or two beforehand to make up for the long hours, but as my wife is fond of saying, I’m not 25 anymore.

    I can’t deny, though, that at events like TEDx and SXSW, I love being around people. I love seeing friends who are in from out of town and people I only ever see online through Twitter or Facebook. I love staying out late and seeing people speak and having a few drinks and getting to process it all and put it back out there in writing.

    Maybe it’s good that I have a job where I can compress nearly a year of that fun into about a week. It’s exhausting, but it’s also a lot of fun and maybe necessary given what the rest of the year is like.

  • Trailers Without Pity: Sucker Punch

    Not much to say about this one except that I assumed, like I sometimes do, that something that looks so dumb and ripe for parody would be easy to make fun of. Then I started scripting and realized that the trailer was already so ridiculous on its face (and its fishnet-clad legs, especially) that there wasn’t much more to do than recount the silliness.

    Not to say it might not be a good movie, but… OK, let’s not kid ourselves. This probably won’t be a good movie. But it might be interesting to look at, like a mysterious orange puddle in the street or a car accident where you aren’t personally involved. Let’s hope!

    So, here’s our Trailers Without Pity for Sucker Punch.

    Next we’re tentatively doing Scream 4.

  • Spoken word

    I’m not gonna lie, I missed podcasting.

    I’ve been listening to so many of them in recent months, from Extra Hot Great to Kevin Smith’s stable of ‘casts (Tell ‘Em Steve Dave is really surprisingly good) to Comedy Death Ray and the very irregular Out of the Game.

    I was also feeling a bit of malaise with Digital Savant, I think, trying to figure out ways to keep it fresh and keep myself from feeling like I’m just shoveling text every day.

    So, with some software setup help from Glark, I recorded my own first attempt at a podcast with Wesley Faulkner, a test run of what a Digital Savant podcast might sound like. The self-imposed criteria was that it be under 20 minutes, easy to edit (it took less than an hour, including sticking in images and other iTunes-friendly metadata) and that it be loose and fun.

    I love talking to Wesley; he’s a good friend and he was such a huge help helping me get this done. I owe him.

    In the future, I’m hoping to keep the format as 1-on-1 interviews, but with the same fun, goofy tone of Digital Savant. My bosses at the Statesman seemed to like it and there’s even the possibility that we may put it up on iTunes once I’ve got a few more episodes under my belt. That may be a a problem with South by Southwest Interactive coming up. Overall, I’m pleased with the result given it was all done with my aging Macbook, two cheap USB mics and just a few pieces of software in addition to GarageBand. You can download the podcast-formatted AAC version here or download it as an MP3 here.

    The other thing that happened this week is that I broke a little news about Google in Austin and the first of some video reviews I did with Kirkus last week have started appearing on YouTube. You can view two of those below.

  • Story times

    Yesterday, a segment I recorded for NPR’s All Things Considered about children’s storybook apps (a subject I’ve been knee-deep in since about last August) aired. We scripted and recorded it a few weeks ago and in the time I was waiting for it to go live, I became increasingly convinced that it would be met with disapproval from the same NPR commenters who think it’s crazy to have sensors monitor the health of senior citizens or that iPhones are destroying civilization.

    I wasn’t disappointed! The comments on the NPR page for the piece have ranged from a smattering of “Hey, it’s fine” comments to a more consistent drumbeat of readers and listeners who think I’m destroying my 3-year-old’s imagination and rotting her brain and eyes with these dangerous apps.

    Memorably, one commenter suggested we let Lilly sleep with the iPad under her pillow or on her chest so she gets cancer. He later said he was joking, but despite my love of dark, disturbing humor, this one didn’t strike me as particularly humorous. Maybe I should lighten up!

    Anyway, this time I had decided not to respond because I knew the comments were going to be as wild and vicious as the ones that accompanied the CNN.com piece I wrote about religion and Facebook.

    But then I responded to one commenter’s question about CD-ROM adaptations and, well… let’s just say you shouldn’t wish cancer on my kid, OK?

    Apart from all that expected mess, it was nice to be back on the air after a long break and very cool to see Lilly’s face on the front of NPR’s website and to hear her voice on the airwaves. I thought she did wonderfully and the audio is something I’m already coming to treasure.

    The other stuff I’ve been working on, apart from gearing up for SXSW Interactive, are a possible podcast I may start doing at work for Digital Savant, trying to go to the gym more often (we have a new fitness center at work), shedding our VHS tape collection and doing more stuff with Kirkus Reviews on the iPad app front. Or as the commenters see it, ruining my daughter’s life.

    You know, tomato, to-mah-to.

  • Trailers Without Pity: Battle: Los Angeles

    And we’re back! The first new episode of Trailers Without Pity of 2011, for the space alien invasion movie Battle: Los Angeles, has been posted on TWOP.

    This kicks off our third season of the web show. We’ll be doing fewer episodes per season (12-15 or so instead of a gajillion) and taking breaks in between seasons so we don’t get burned out and exhausted. You can see our complete Trailers Without Pity Episode Guide with the entire video archive. That’s a lot of damn videos.

    I like a good alien invasion. I thought War of the Worlds was fantastically terrifying and dug me some Cloverfield. I’m surprised there aren’t more movies like this. Then again, ask me in two months and I’ll probably tell you this was a huge mistake and that the market is oversaturated. Such is my wont.

    We should be back next time with Sucker Punch in two weeks.