Tag: comics

  • Wintry mix

    Nobody's house in Austin looked anything like this during our "Snowpocalypse"
    Nobody’s house in Austin looked anything like this during our “Snowpocalypse”

    Here are three short things and then everything else I’ve been working on.

    Ice

    As I’m writing this, we are getting past a very brief ice/snow storm that in central Texas was treated as apocalyptic. At first, people were calling it “Snowpocalypse” ironically because all we ever get is a dusting of snowflakes and maybe half an inch of ice in our worst winters, but then more than 200 people got into car accidents and suddenly it doesn’t seem like such a joke.

    Transplanted northerners who live here think the whole thing is silly but they’re also smart enough to stay the Hell off the roads because people here can’t drive even when it’s 70 degrees and sunny. I used to think we had pretty decent drivers compared to other parts of the country but that was before smart phones. Now I don’t trust anybody on the road; I just assume they’re all texting and playing Angry Birds as they drift out of the lanes at 80 mph. Trust me. I commute more than 100 miles roundtrip. I see this shit every damn day.

    The ice meant we stayed home with the girls. We took turns doing work-from-home shifts as we alternated entertaining/feeding/keeping warm the daughters. After much pre-production, they finally got bundled up and went outside into the wintry expanse of our backyard which was pretty iced over. It wasn’t the wintry wonderland they were promised by dreams of Frozen-like snowfall (more on that in a minute). But they were enchanted anyway, especially Carolina, who hasn’t really ever seen snow and was too young to appreciate icicles and crunchy grass last time we had this.

    By the afternoon, they were completely stir crazy from being inside the house too long. Before dark the ice was already gone and it was just a cold day.

    I really don’t know how people who deal with months of snow do it. Not the de-icing the car part or the driving on snow. I lived in Oklahoma, which isn’t that much further north, but gets tons more snow. It never bothered me and I actually prefer it to the 110-degree summers here.

    But having kids in cold weather is stressful. You always imagine they’re going to throw over the covers and wake up chilled in the morning or that an icicle will fall off the roof and pierce them in the eye. I guess summer has dangers, too, but they’re dangers I grew up with and that we’re used to dealing with. Sunscreen, A/C, lots of shade and trips to cool swimming pools.

    Winter is… what? Hot chocolate, lots of Netflix and clothes layering?

    Ice explorers (not much ice)

    Imminent launch

    Last time I wrote here, I was about to go back to work after several vacation weeks and was full of nervous energy about what was ahead.

    Part of it was that I was returning to writing my weekly column with absolutely no idea what I was going to write next, which is always a scary leap of faith that tends to work itself out. That’s exactly what happened. After a few days of fumbling and catching up on email, the ideas started coming and now things are pretty much scheduled more than a month out as things should be in the months before South by Southwest Interactive arrives. (I felt the cold chill of something walking over my grave as I typed that.)

    The thing I was most excited to get back to was preparing to launch our podcast. We did a pilot/test episode back in November and as cobbled together as it was, we all really liked how it turned out and everyone agreed we should do more of them.

    By the time you read this we may have already recorded our first new episode. It’s going to be called “Statesman Shots” and it will have its own blog and will be a weekly show about Austin culture hosted by me and by the charming and wonderful Tolly Moseley. You’re going to get sick of hearing me talk about how great Tolly is, but everyone who has met her through working on this agrees: she’s the best. Funny, nice, full of great stories, curious about culture and possessed of a great voice made for broadcasting.

    It turns out that putting together a podcast for work (as opposed to doing one myself in the garage) is a shit-ton of work and involves lots of moving parts. I’ve basically become a project manager, something I haven’t really done since my days as an editor, but I’m so determined to make Shots work that it hasn’t been a bother at all. It’s been fun to geek out about audio quality, to talk about how the podcast will work in the context of everything else we do (including ways to get things that come out of it into the print edition) and planning ahead.

    I want you to hear it and that will be something that can happen very, very soon. It’s hard to believe that it’s taken a year and a half for Tolly and I to turn this into a reality, but I’m so glad neither of us gave up on the idea and that the talented people I work who are helping make it happen believe in it, too.

    As soon as we have the first new episode and videos posted (oh yes, there’ll be videos, too), I’ll put up a blog entry about it here. It could be as soon as Thursday or Friday.

    Thinkery

    This was a very small thing, but something I haven’t forgotten since last week.

    We went to the Austin children’s museum, which moved and was renamed The Thinkery. (Try explaining that name to a four-year-old. Not possible.)

    It was great, just the right amount of learny stuff mixed with fun, running-around stuff and the kids didn’t take a moment to overthink any of it, they just dived in and grabbed and jumped and did whatever was called for in each area as if there were specific microchips in their brains that were activated in each new environment instructing them what to do and how it was to be done.

    There was one big playroom with big, foamy objects to climb on and toys to bounce upon. I noticed right next to it was an area that was closed off and meant for infants and toddlers. There were soft toys like giant carrots strewn on the floor of that area and kids were having a great time.

    My daughters didn’t even give that space a glance. They walked right past it without any inkling of curiosity and went straight to the big-kids area.

    It left my breathless for a moment. I know they’re not toddlers anymore. Lilly’s long past that. I know it. But Carolina was just a baby. She was just in diapers. Lilly grew fast, but her move from infant to toddler to little girl seemed to take ages. Carolina, on the other hand leapfrogged through those stages impatiently, never clinging to them the way her sister did. She never looked back in her race to be like her sister.

    It was a weird moment that they didn’t notice, but that made itself loud and clear to me. I don’t have toddlers. My toddlers are long gone. And it’s way past time to treat them as if they were.

    Lilly at Thinkery

    Carolina at Thinkery

    Statesman stuff

    In addition the podcast stuff, which is taking up more and more time as we get close to launch, here’s what else I’ve been writing in January.

    As soon as I got from vacation, I wrote my annual Omarstradamus column, predicting 2014’s year of technology trends. I also took a look back at my 2013 predictions to see how I did.

    Over my vacation, I got pretty obsessed with the movie Her (which I got to see early) and the British TV show Black Mirror, which aired on DirecTV. I jumped at the chance to write a story comparing their opposing views of the near future.

    My next column was about wearable tech, inspired by my finally breaking down and buying a Fitbit device. I’m still wearing it and I’m getting better about remembering to turn it on/off for sleep and using it as a motivator for exercise, not just as a pedometer. I also did a short follow-up blog post with a few more observations.

    Last week’s column was about a Saturday I spent at Data Day Texas, a conference for data geeks where I was in way over my head. That’s not such a bad thing! Turns out I still learned six things worth passing on.

    My disc-less disc adventure with Redbox

    Micro features in January included one about Austin e-lending library help, an explainer on dual-boot devices, about what’s going to happen when Microsoft stops support Windows XP and a recent one about ways to watch the Super Bowl online and on an iPad or smart phone.

    For the Digital Savant blog, I had some South by Southwest Interactive news, including speakers added to the lineup such as Julian Assange, Mindy Kaling and Neil deGrasse Tyson (!).

    I also wrote about my weird adventure renting games on Redbox. Or rather NOT renting games because every disc I rented turned out to be a piece of paper put there by a PlayStation 4 disc thief. It turns out it’s a huge nationwide scam that shows no signs of going away. So I’m not renting anymore, obviously.

    And like I said, there’ll be lots more to share once the podcast gets going.

    Previously.tv

    Credit: Cartoon Network
    Credit: Cartoon Network


    The Walking Dead     is still on hiatus (but not for long).

    For now, I’m still writing about How I Met Your Mother’s wildly erratic last season. Their new Slap Bet episode was a huge disappointment but then the episode right after that (which featured bugs with boobs, follow the link to see) was a big return to form. Conclusion? Every episode is a crapshoot.

    My favorite thing I got to write was a “Get on board!” about the animated show Rick and Morty, another recent obsession. I’ll be talking about it a little bit on the first new podcast as well.

    Space Monkeys!

    Blackfish comic

    Lastly, our monkey friends have kept on keeping on after the holidays.

    We made a comic about Her and its implications for future man/sloth-computer romance.

    We also did a comic featuring the return of Anything But Mini-Me, a child we have not abandoned in the story.

    And most recently, Meany embarked on the creation of a documentary, inspired (or angered, at least) by Blackfish. He might be the only character around who can find a reason to be mad at orcas.

    Other stuff

    If you made it this far… wow, congratulations! Here are some other random things happening:

    • I was on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Central Time to talk about tech that came out of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. The MP3 audio is here directly.
    • The Mexcentrics, the new sketch troupe I worked with last year, has a new show coming in February! We wrote it in a blur through December and early January and it’s already in rehearsals. I really dig the poster for it.
    • What I’ve been playing: I finished Super Mario 3D World, which was just absolutely fantastic. I’ve been playing Brothers, I finished The Banner Saga (which my next column is about) and I’m still trying to find time to dig into Gone Home and other games I missed playing through in 2013.
    • I’m sure there’s a lot more I’m missing, but that’s all I can think of. The kids are doing great (they got to go to the San Antonio Zoo in addition to The Thinkery this month and have been having lots of adventures around here).

    That’s it! Thanks for sticking through a long update.

  • Outside

    Outside

    I’m starting writing this at the very end of 2013 (local time) and it won’t be finished until 2014.

    I don’t really do resolutions or Best Of lists here or anything more reflective than what’s in my memory. I don’t go back and read old blog entries or skim what I wrote over the year on this site the way I do with year-end stuff I do for work. Maybe I should. Maybe there are weird personal patterns to be discovered, things that would be painfully obvious about repeated habits if I only put in the study time.

    But right now I’m less reflective about what happened in 2013 (which was a mixed bag for sure, but I got out pretty well unscathed compared to lots of my friends and co-workers) than just trying to figure out how to start ’14.

    I spent a lot of 2012 in a weird, spiraling kind of panic. Not a mid-life crisis, I don’t think, but definitely hearing the ticking clock of aging more loudly and realizing I wasn’t happy with what I was doing with my writing. I got really lucky; the only way I’ve found to dig out of a hole like that is to get busy with something new you’re excited about. It turned out I had three things start to form at the end of last year. The relaunch of Space Monkeys! (both the website and the comic, rebuilt and relaunched on Jan. 1, 2013). An idea for a novel that I thought I could actually finish this time (it was completed in June). And a podcast that Tolly Mosely and I wanted to do together.

    In terms of concrete goals accomplished, 2013 worked out really well. Once the novel was complete, I was able to let myself start doing some regular freelance again, something I really missed while I was head-down the first half of the year.

    But as the year closed and I had some vacation time to rest up and slow down, I came to realize something. I spent a lot of this last year closing myself off.

    I’m a bit isolated living outside of Austin anyway, but this year, I really retreated into myself more than I probably ever have. I worked from home more and I didn’t socialize as much. I missed lots of happy hours, stopped asking friends out to lunch and did a lot more communicating over social media and email than in person.

    Some of it was intentional. I had a goal of writing every night from January to June no matter what. That didn’t always happen, but when I missed a night, I would try to make up for it the night after. That didn’t leave a lot of time for making plans to go out. I mean, I went out. I went to concerts and South by Southwest and some comedy shows. But each time I did that, at least from January to June, I associated it with having to pay a time-and-effort price later.

    More often than not, I would sometimes see something on the events calendar I would have normally jumped at the chance to do and just say, “Nope.” Can’t do it. Not enough time or energy. Going out felt like a hassle much of the time. So I stayed home more.

    I have some friends this year (on social media, of course) who’ve chosen a word for 2014. For some it’s a goal, for others it’s a theme like “Connect” or “Happy.”

    Mine is just “Outside.” Not camping, God forbid, I mean just getting outside of my own head and having more real-life experiences and conversations.

    It’s so much easier to never leave your desk, to just post stuff to Twitter like thousands of tiny notes in bottles that may or may not reach the right eyes. I’m becoming old enough that it’s becoming a real challenge to make new friends and maintain ties with old ones.

    I just know that retreating further into my own headspace isn’t what I want to do with this new year.

    I think the podcast may help. It’s something I think will be great fun and something I hope people will want to listen to because we plan to fill the guest chair with really smart, insightful people Tolly and I want to engage with in conversation. But I think one thing that’s been driving the effort on my end is having a place to talk about stuff, out loud, every week with other people in the same room.

    That seems like a lot of hoops to jump just to yap my mouth, but maybe that’s just the age we’re living in.

    I honestly don’t know what to expect next in 2014. The literary agent has the first few chapters of the novel and I’ll be emailing soon to see what the status is on that. I’m hopeful, but I won’t be devastated if I have to move on and figure out what to do next if the answer’s not what I’d like.

    The podcast (fingers crossed) will begin regular production toward the end of January and we’ll be working very hard to get that on its feet.

    I hope to keep writing for Previously and to do a little more freelancing elsewhere as well as some shorter-form stuff here. Blogging has become really difficult. I used to knock out three entries a week back in the day and now it takes me multiple days to do one. (Sometimes weeks. They grow if I don’t tend to them, like ragged fingernails.)

    Honestly, this is the first year that I’ve looked at the blog (which I used to call a journal) and thought, “Maybe I won’t be doing this by the end of next year.” Maybe the blog will stop at some point. That seems to be the way things are going, right? Less blogging, more… I don’t know… other kinds of saying what’s on your mind.

    This is all just about writing stuff and work. I haven’t even talked about the challenges of being a dad, which is wonderful and sometimes demoralizing. I sometimes wonder if I’m a good enough parent, if the kids are picking up bad habits and unhealthy emotions and whether there will ever be enough time to do it right or if we just put too much pressure on ourselves instead of having fun and being present.

    I think I could do a lot better, but I also know that trapping myself in my head obsessing doesn’t help anybody. I think taking action outside my head, allowing myself to do stuff and make stuff instead of turning everything inward is the way to go.

    So that’s what I’ll be doing. That’s really what I’m working on.

    Statesman stuff

    Because of my extended vacation, I haven’t had a whole lot written for work lately, but the week I was in the office, I did write a piece that ran on Christmas Eve about last-minute (and post-Christmas) stuff to do related to tech gifts. It’s probably too late to be much use for you, but probably worth keeping bookmarked somewhere for next year.

    Twitch

    I did a Digital Savant Micro explaining the video game broadcasting service Twitch as well and some blog entries about my friend Korey Coleman’s new post-Spill.com Kickstarter project and top Google searches in Austin for 2013.

    The column returns to its weekly perch starting next week with some 2014 predictions from Omarstradamus and with Micro in tow.

    Monkey stuff

    New Year's

    Our Space Monkeys tried to gain science-based super powers, exchanged Christmas gifts and counted down to the New Year.

    With some major WordPress help from a friend/professional, we were able to restore some functionality on the site we’d lost. Hundreds of blog posts related to the comics weren’t appearing on the site, so once they were gone from the home page, they were pretty much lost forever to anybody but us. We fixed that and one example of a blog post that I would have hated to lose is one in which I talk about our first year back doing the comic.

    The comic has been the very definition of a passion project for me and my brother. We don’t make money on it and the audience is still pretty small, but we really do enjoy it and have found working together on it to be really rewarding.

    Previously.tv stuff

    Just one thing: I wrote about the last episode of How I Met Your Mother before the show went on winter break, an episode called, “Bass Player Wanted.”

    Other stuff

    In completely random order:

    • We got some really great medical news about our older daughter. It’s not something I’ve ever written about publicly, but it’s something we’ve been dealing with for a few years that, unless something unanticipated happens, we’ll no longer have to worry about at all. This happened right before Christmas, good news of the sort that made presents seem redundant.
    • Carolina turned four. She had a birthday party earlier in the month, but for her actual birth day, we kept it pretty low key with bowling. It’s very easy to love and become attached to your first-born, but Carolina has developed her own personality and way of doing things that make her absolutely charming to everyone she meets. She’s chatting and funny and so loving, you almost forgive her when she breaks things and creates a constant  little cloud of chaos at home. Almost.
    • I spent a chunk of my vacation playing Super Mario 3D World, which is just fantastic, and went back to the PS4 to give Killzone: Shadow Fall another try. To my surprise, I liked it a lot more the second time around. It’s a very mediocre game that looks great on the new hardware, but sometimes a mediocre game with lots of eye candy is exactly what you’re in the mood to play.
    • Our Alamo Drafthouse movie theater finally opened! We went and saw American Hustle and though my wife wasn’t wowed by the food (mine was good), the movie experience was fantastic. The remodeling they did of that formerly crappy theater is remarkable and having it so close by makes me want to go see movies all the time.
    • I caught up on the entire run so far of Saga. It’s brilliant. Go read it. You can get back issues on Comixology for only $1.99 each or just grab the trade paperbacks that’ll get you up to issue 12. (They’re at issue 17 now.) I’m now reading Doctor Sleep, which is also great.

    The rest in photos:

     
    Birthday girl

    Lilly the pizza eater

    Bowling booth

    On Christmas

    Christmas day

  • ‘Breaking’ free

    Frank Ockenfels / AMC photo
    Frank Ockenfels / AMC photo

     

    If I look back over the last few weeks a few months from now, I will probably remember it as the period in time when I was completely obsessed, along with a lot of people I know, with Breaking Bad.

    It’s a great TV show, one that clearly has ascended into a piece of art that, assuming things go well (or horrifically) on Sunday, will be remembered and discussed for a very long time.

    I know that for my part, it’s affected my sleep and probably my stomach and emotions way too much. It’s been like having a family member who has been very sick for a very long time or being at a job that you know won’t last. You know something bad is coming your way down the road and you both dread and welcome the end to come, if only so you can move on with your life and get some relief.

    That’s how I feel about Breaking Bad. It’s been a joy to watch. There has been some really smart writing, great performances and even some real laughs. But these last few episodes have been so grim and hopeless, the explosion we all knew was coming (and that poor, sage Mike Ehrmantraut predicted) has happened and it has been absolutely stomach-churning.

    So, as much as I like to think I’m above letting one TV show affect me, it can’t be a coincidence that the last few weeks have felt strange and anticipatory and kind of frozen.

    There are plenty of other factors for that, probably; the school year has started, a project I want to do at work has been stalled for a little while and I hit a major rough patch in editing my big fiction story I’ve been working on (that rough patch, thank goodness, has passed).

    But I bet I’ll look back at this month and think, “Oh yeah, that was when Breaking Bad was ending. We were all a mess.”

    One bright side: I was asked to write a story at work about the ways that the Internet helped fuel the survival and growth of Breaking Bad. It runs in Sunday’s newspaper, just in time for the series finale. All that heartache from watching the show was worth it!

    [This might be a good place to note that the Breaking Bad story and the columns I mention below are subscriber-only on MyStatesman.com. You can now get a 99-cent day pass and read them all at once. Do that!]

    Other stuff…

    …that happened this month in no particular order:

    Throwin' shade at the parade
    Throwin’ shade at the parade

     

    • We had a gymnastics party for Lilly birthday (which we pushed back the party on a few weeks for after school to start) and that went pretty great.
    • She also lost a second baby tooth on the day I’m writing this. It’s like living near a leaky nuclear power plant around here.
    • I went to an Electronic Dance Music concert (more on that below in the Space Monkeys! section). I was the second-oldest person there. The first-oldest was 60 and sat the whole time.
    • I also went to a game night at my brother’s place in Austin and got to play Cards Against Humanity and Zombicide with a group of really good players. That was super-fun.
    • Progress on the fiction project: I’m about 50 pages from finishing an edit/revision/second draft. It took about 6-7 months to write the first and has taken more than three months to get it to a second draft, far longer than I was expecting. I guess that’s par for the course, I just didn’t know since I’ve never gotten this far on something of this length.
    • Met Doug Benson at Fantastic Arcade!
    • Parade!

     

    Work stuff

    Columns: This was a great idea from our editors that I ran with: Why is surveillance video that we see on the news so crummy? Shouldn’t that shit be HD by now? “Zoom in. Enhance!” No? Not really. That column explains why.

    I traveled to Belton, Texas, for a column about education. In this piece, I ponder whether a piece of software like the Austin-made interactive whiteboard tool LiveSlide gives us a glimpse of what classrooms of the future will be.

     

    These are some comics of mine. I LOVE "Hawkeye" and "FF."
    These are some comics of mine. I LOVE “Hawkeye” and “FF.”

     

    If print and digital comic books are peacefully coexisting, what happens in the future? I’ve gotten a little obsessed with collecting comics again this year and this column talks about what happens to the collectibility of comics when they’re all digital. (Spoiler: as of now, the two concepts are not compatible.)

    After a lot of online discussion on the topic, I wrote a column asking “how risky is it to post photos of your kids online?” Bonus: the blog post for this column had some extra content.

    Here are the last few Digital Savant Micro features: What is GitHub?

    A reader asked for some one-eared wireless headphone options for listening to audiobooks.

    What is biometric scanning?

    What are some of the best ways to transcribe to digital the audio from a meeting?

    Videos: I covered the great indie video game fest, Fantastic Arcade and shot video there.

    Austin game developer Richard Garriott had an auction for some of his stuff!

    Random: I covered the new Apple product launch with lots of Tweets included in the post.

     

    On Previously

    Last time I mentioned that I had written a few pieces for the excellent website Previously.tv. Since then I wrote a piece about the ubiquitous host, stand-up comic and Nerdist empire builder Chris Hardwick. The best thing about the piece is an amazing graphic that Glark worked up to go with it. How great was it? Hardwick himself took note:

    It looks like I’ll be doing regular coverage of the new season of a very popular show for the site soon. It’s a show that people are dying to see return.

    On Space Monkeys!

    General Bastid

    This has been a bit of an off month with our comic. First, we had a calamitous incident in which we updated a theme for our comic only to realize after the fact that it was a major, major revision that would involve a lot of work just to get our site looking the way it did before the theme “upgrade.”

    We still don’t have it quite right, but we’re still working on it and are learning such wonderful, time-consuming WordPress things like how to make a child theme and how to troubleshoot troublesome Typekit fonts that don’t appear when they should.

    Fun!

    Due to some of that and also just a lot of work that Pablo and I needed to catch up on this month, we took a two-week break, our first vacation all year after posting a comic every single week since the top of January. The comic will return next week on Oct. 3 and new comics will post on Thursdays thereafter.

    Since last time, we posted a comic about hipsters and comics about hipsters!

    We posted a comic about our trip to see Major Lazer in concert, and I described the experience in some detail in a blog post called “Old Man at the Show.”

    Part of the problem with our website issues right now is that blog posts we write to go along with the comic aren’t appearing with comics in our archive. The blog/news post that goes with the comic does appear, but not additional posts that Pablo and I might have written. That’s a bit of a problem and we’re still trying to get help from the person who created the theme/comics plugin we’re using.

    If, for instance, you missed the latest comic and tried to find the blog post I wrote to go with it, you would have missed this amazing Vine video I embedded in the blog:

  • The House for Strangers

    [dropcap]I[/dropcap]n 2001, I bought a house. It was a crazy time. 9/11 had just happened and we were all exposed tooth nerves walking around trying to Make Sense of It All with no idea of what the future might be. We did strange things.

    I was only 26. I had a very great editor who told me, “The interest rates are insane. It’s never going to be like this again. You need to buy a house.”

    A very tiny picture taken a very long time ago.
    A very tiny picture taken a very long time ago.

    So I did. I’m really impressionable that way.

    The house was not very large and it was not very new, but I didn’t know that then, I just knew that this incredible home with a gigantic backyard perfect for parties was suddenly mine and all I had to do was not go totally broke paying to move in. After that, things would be fine. And then they were.

    I didn’t stay long in that house. Just a few years later, I got married and we moved further south and we kept the house as a rental property, managed by a company that made sure all we had to do was stay paid up. It got stressful when we’d lose tenants, but things always worked out and I always maintained that all the expenses helped us on our income taxes. (We found out later that it really didn’t, but it was nice to have that illusion for so long as we were losing money.)

    We thought about selling the house. Many, many times. There were times when we were paying double mortgage and had fetuses growing in bellies (OK, just the one belly) and my wife was all, “WHY DO WE STILL HAVE THIS MONEY PIT!?” and I would remind her that the actual movie The Money Pit had a happy ending and she wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the night.

    Good times.

    Then the housing crash hit. I don’t know if you heard about it. Fucking dire wolves attacked the housing market and chewed it up, ruining it for everyone! Yes, they were supposed to be extinct. That’s why everyone was so surprised. Well, except for economists who predicted the housing collapse in books like, The Fucking Dire Wolves Are Coming! and Paradise Lost: The Housing Market is About to Be Chewed Up BY FUCKING DIRE WOLVES, WHY WON’T YOU LISTEN?!

    Every time the subject of selling the house came up, I would raise my hands diagonally at about a 45-degree angle and say, “The housing market. What are you gonna do? It’s a terrible time to sell. Dire wolves.”

    [quote float=”right”]Dire wolves![/quote]Then the housing market got good. Then it got really, really good. Then we decided to sell the house.

    Part of my reluctance to sell it was that I had always fantasized about moving back to Austin and maybe expanding the house. The yard is so enormous that wouldn’t be impossible. But the neighborhood we lived in never really got into renovation and expansion projects and at some point in our stay in New Braunfels, my wife decided we should die here.

    Usually when your wife tells you you’re going to die somewhere, it’s pretty ominous and you should probably not be anywhere near that spot from then on. But the conversation was actually quite pleasant. It went like so:

    Rebecca: After this, we should build one more house in New Braunfels and then that’s it.

    Omar: What do you mean “That’s it?”

    Rebecca: That would be our last house. That’s where we’d retire.

    Omar: You mean that’s where we’ll die?

    Rebecca: You first.

    The thing is, I actually found all that comforting. We have a plan. That’s a little story I trot out whenever someone asks me why I’m not trying to get a job in New York or D.C.. I tell them it’s because I already know where I’m growing old and they back away slowly and then go subtweet about it.

    Did I mention we are selling a house?

    I took you on that detour to get you to here, where I am in the middle of trying to fix up a house to sell right before we take a big family trip, which is like trying to ride a roller coaster while painting a house, which incidentally is something that costs close to $3,000, I just learned.

    I was never a big DIYer when I lived in that house. I’m still not. I barely have time to write my own blog posts. So it was with dismay that we saw how dated the fixtures and ceiling fans look and other bits of wear and tear that accumulated in the time since I lived there.

    The yard is still spectacular. The back patio, with its Saltillo tile and tin roof, is still wonderful and I miss it a lot. The backyard has so many trees and so much shade that it was always 10 to 20 degrees cooler than everywhere else in the summer. We visited the house recently in the middle of a rainstorm and I imagined myself sitting there with my cup of coffee in the morning using my laptop back when Wi-Fi was a new and wondrous thing of no wires.

    I am buying ceiling fans at Lowe’s and talking about paint swatches and remodeling bathrooms (by proxy; we have people) and fixing fences and yards. We’re making a house beautiful for people we don’t know yet, picking out items for a place we’ll never live, trying to make it nice but not so nice that it’ll impose our style on someone who might find it crappy. It’s a weird, tricky balance, trying to spend enough to make the house desirable but not spending so much that we defeat the purpose of selling.

    So that’s what’s been on my mind. I miss the house but I’m also eager to be rid of it. In the years since we moved out, we’ve replaced a roof and a furnace, put in new carpet, made endless small plumbing repairs and gotten stressed about house issues for a place we don’t even live. We don’t need it anymore and we haven’t needed it for a while. But letting go of something you love that you think you could love again is never easy. Now I just hope someone loves it just as much as I once did.

    [hr]

    Other new things happening

    I have a new editor at work, which is exciting and fun.

    I mentioned a family vacation. I’ll have a lot more to say about that soon. It involves a whole world of Disney stuff. You can probably guess.

    I’m still painting miniatures, this time a set for my brother while I await my Zombicide stuff to arrive in the fall.

    I am so cool.
    I am so cool.

     

    Also, I am now buying comic books on eBay, so instead of having a midlife crisis where I buy sports cars and unsuccessfully solicit blowjobs from waitresses, I seem to be going the other way, continuing to do things I stopped doing as a teenager before there was such a bay as eBay.

    And lastly, my older daughter finished kindergarten, which seems unreal and far too soon, but then again, she’s worked really hard this year and come a long way and is thrilled to be going to first grade. She did great.

    [hr]

    Work stuff and monkeys

    Of course, I have articles to share.

    Meany at the discoI wrote a meditative column about whether our use of technology is making us speak less. I’m not sure there’s a definitive conclusion there, but certainly the ways we use our voices is changing, at least.

    And this week’s column was about our changing TV viewing habits, a column prompted by the debut of Arrested Development’s fourth season on Netflix. I also did a bonus blog with a few more thoughts on the subject.

    There were also new Digital Savant Micro features on the Xbox One and on Gmail’s new tab-focused design changes.

    A note on some of those MyStatesman.com stories. Our paywall goes up soon for reals as our free preview ends. That means links I post here to articles will often require a subscription to read. Blog posts won’t be affected, but most of my weekly stuff that runs in the newspaper will.

    Separately on the blog, I wrote about a cool civic tech expo, a plastic surgeon live Tweeting a procedure, and an Austin-made app for the website A Beautiful Mess.

    Our favorite monkeys in space were mystified by “Shelfies,” panicking at the disco, and engaged in a discussion about TV binge-viewing.

    Give our monkeys a Facebook like or a Twitter follow, would you?

    And that’s it! Please hope for me that the house sells so I can stop buying hardware and embarrassing myself.

  • I Disappear

    I’m about to disappear into the hidey hole of South by Southwest Interactive, tomorrow in fact, which is not new. It’s become so routine, in fact, year after year that at my house we don’t even panic and scramble over it, we just know that those five days, Daddy is gone and we need a little extra help and planning.

    But there’s some weirdness that this is the most public I’ll be all year, out from around 10 a.m. till probably 1 or 2 a.m. every night, meeting new people and seeing old friends. But at home, I’m just gone and disappeared. It’s like SXSW Interactive, for one week of the year, is a second family and I’m all Charles Kuralt up in there.

    And then I’ll be so exhausted when it’s over I’ll stay home and miss all the Music fest stuff as I hibernate. My kids already think I’m some kind of bear, so perhaps this will comfort them.

    ANYHOO!

    Here’s all the stuff I’ve been working on the last few weeks. I’ve been writing and typing so much for so long lately that I truly feel my fingers might fall off and it was all I could do to round this up, but I know that if I don’t do it now, on the eve, it will have to wait till after the festival and the hole will be much, much deeper.

    Here’s the roundup and thank you for your patience. I’d like to write more essays here but the truth is that I feel like I’m spending lots and lots of time writing either for work or for the other projects I’ve mentioned that there’s barely anything left but fumes by the time I’m done. I’m hoping things will settle down in a few months because some of these things are winding down or eventually they’ll be completed.

     

    Work stuff

    I hadn’t written anything for CNN in a long while for lack of me pitching them any ideas, but they were kind enough to let me write about SXSW Interactive as I was already gathering intel for the Statesman and doing lots of interviews.

    CNN-SXSW 2013

    My article, which was actually written almost a week ago, was about whether the hype at SXSW Interactive is dying down and if the festival has peaked (and whether that’s a good thing.) Since the article was sent in, my email inbox has a’sploded and now, I fear, the hype is even bigger/worse than last year. Somehow I had forgotten that people like to knock on our door at the very last minute with news and information and that this always makes life harder for everybody. But I think there’s still some good insights about the fest from the people I interviewed.

    For the Statesman, of course, things have been hugely busy leading up to the fest.

    This Thursday, I did a big Life & Arts story on free official events at Interactive.

    Tardar Sauce (aka Grumpy Cat) Photo by me

    In a very strange series of events, I met Grumpy Cat, the Internet meme sensation and even took a photo and shot a Vine video (below).

    Emma Janzen and Tina Phan on our staff did a great video and I make a short appearance getting all cat-love on poor Grumpy Cat.

    Further back, I did a Digital Savant column rounding up reviews of an Acer W700 Windows 8 tablet and the great Studio Ghibli-animated game Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. This week’s column was also about SXSW Interactive, a preview of the first two keynotes from adventurous entrepreneur Elon Musk and design guru Tina Roth Eisenberg.

    The recent Micro features were “What is jailbreaking?” and “What is Google Glass?”

    Speaking of Google Glass, I was on NPR’s On Point With Tom Ashbrook recently talking with Amber Case and Ben Chigier about wearable computers and user interfaces. It’s a full hour, but there was lots of great discussion and questions from readers. (An emailer told me I talk too fast and that they could not listen to me.

    And from the random files, I interviewed LeVar Burton about a Holodeck project AMD is working on as well as Demand Media CTO Byron Reese about his upcoming SXSW presentation.

    I also drew a very ugly picture of what the PlayStation 4 might look like.

     

    Non-work stuff

    The new sketch show that I helped write, Pulga Nation featuring the Mexcentrics, opened tonight.

    It’s weird not being there for the opening and with the festival starting, not even being 100 percent sure I’ll be able to see the show. I caught a rehearsal the other night and all the nights spent in theaters rehearsing during the 10 years of Latino Comedy Project came flooding back and I remembered how much I missed it.

    It’s a mix of people I’ve worked with for many, many years and new people. It’s exciting and fun and seeing words that I wrote up on a stage again, especially when the words are coming out of the mouth of my friend Patti, who makes me laugh always, has been a thrill. The show runs through Saturday. If you’re in Austin, please try to catch it.

    Grumpy MeanyOur Space Monkeys continue to thrive. Their Twitter account is starting to take off and the new comics, I think, have been really good. And we’ve been consistent, posting every week, no exceptions.

    New comics include one about the horrible game Aliens: Colonial Marines, a strip about an evil Higgs boson particle and this week’s comic about Grumpy Cat (kind of a coincidence, that). I also did a surprise birthday ¡Pescados del Mar! comic for my brother, drawn in my own horrible scrawl.

    And because I hate to leave the girls out, here’s a Vine I posted of them playing at a gymnastics center for the first time. Those children lost their damn mind having so much fun.

    I’ll be back after SXSW, post-hibernation.

  • Total Work Moves

    When your job involves a lot of constant deadlines, you have a lot of, “If I can just get through this week…” moments. Sometimes it’s a whole month and last year it actually got to the, “If I can just get to mid-December…” point.

    Last week, I knew that I had a very large story due for the Sunday paper and that as soon as that was done I was going to have to turn around and produce my weekly column, too. I spent about a week trying to knock out smaller assignments and to get everything else out of the way so that freight train could pass without any interruptions.

    Things worked out fine, like they always do. I knew this, inside, that things would work themselves out one way or another.

    But there’s always that scary moment when you wonder if you really have any idea what you’re going to write and if it’s going to come out in what my mom sometimes calls a chorro (a flood or torrent in Spanish, or if you’re being gross, a diarrhea) or if you’re just going to sit there and wait and nothing magical happens.

    Luckily, as happens most of the time when I’m under pressure, it was the chorro.

    pnWTB

    This is a weird story, so bear with me. One of the articles I wrote last week ran in Sunday’s paper. It’s about a very popular website called Total Frat Move. That website, which is based in Austin, has turned into a very successful web empire which spawned a book that is already a New York Times bestseller and will likely become a movie.

    I met with the guys who run the site a few weeks ago thinking it would be no more than a short blog post or book write-up. An editor instead suggested I do it as a Sunday lead story. Then the pressure started and I tried to figure out a way to say something more than “Here’s a website, here’s a book.” I transcribed my interview notes and did a lot of online reading. I read the book itself, which was kind of a disturbing and problematic read for me being that I have two daughters I hope will go to college one day. There’s a lot of ugly humor on the site and in the book, stuff that even in the guise of being a joke or satire is still really rough to read for even a jaded-ass, South Park-watching vulgarian such as myself.

    I tried to convey that in the story, a story that ended up being much longer than I anticipated and written in a tone that tries to be neutral in the face of material that we would normally not highlight and put in front of our readers.

    Clearly, it wasn’t what the subjects of the story expected:

    https://twitter.com/WRBolen/status/295745186548568064

    But I’m kind of proud of this weird, long story I wrote. I don’t know that anyone else would have written it the way I did and sometimes that’s a pretty significant kind of victory when you stick words next to each other for a living.

    The other piece I wrote last week was a Monday column about taking a break from or giving up social media completely as Vicki Flaugher is doing.

    Like anyone who’s been using social media for more than a few years, I’ve fantasized about massively pruning the number of people I connect to, taking a long break or just walking away. The work I do doesn’t really allow for not using social media and most of the time (OK, half of the time), I really do enjoy and get a lot out of these online connections. But it can be tiring, stressful and time-wasting.

    elWnQ_immzfGcL_8J7wUngpCxj4wa3lz3aZyVvRHxFI

    Speaking of exhaustion, last week, I wrote a column about transmedia storytelling, specifically authors who are mixing book writing with online game worlds, interactive games, real-world events and other new media. This is not new, of course. Authors have experimented with this kind of stuff even through the early days of computers and CD-ROMs and all through the Internet era. But the sheer ambitious some of these authors are showing in carrying out their vision is inspiring and a little intimidating.

    I say this as someone who’s spent the last couple of years trying to write a Goddamn Book™. The idea that instead of working on one book or two, you just up and say, “How about 7 or 10 plus an MMO?” makes me want to go down a gigantic popcorn bowl of amphetamines. (No, not really, it actually makes me want to nap.)

    Photo by me! Austin billboard

    Other bits: I wrote about a woman who won a billboard from Ben & Jerry’s for an Instagram photo she shot. In the Digital Savant Micro feature, I defined “Gorilla Glass” and explained Facebook’s Social Graph.

    Bobbo and Meany

    We’re still diligently working to revitalize our “Space Monkeys!” franchise after that very long absence.

    Comics come out every Wednesday, like these two recent ones.

    In addition to the Facebook page I’ve mentioned, they now have a Twitter account, too, where Bobbo and Meany talk about ship and space stuff. Give ‘er a follow, why not?

    Other random things that happened recently:

    I bought a swing set for the girls. That’s an adventure I’ll probably write about in full after it’s set up.

    We went to the circus! It sounded like it might be terrible but instead it was the opposite of terrible, which is CIRCUS AWESOME! Seriously had a great time and these daughters of mine loved it.

    I wrote 50+ pages of something in less than a month which must mean I’m pretty excited about it. If it keeps on at that pace, I hope to have some news of it to share by summer.

    Started playing around with Vine and made this video:

    Took this picture of the girls on a beautiful walk around the neighborhood:

    January walk

    So it’s been a good January. A good year so far.