Tag: digital savant micro

  • Voyage to the past

    Official 20-Year Reunion Photo

    10 years ago, I went to my 10-year reunion and it never even occurred to me that I was already writing on this site at the time and that of course I documented it. I sometimes forget I have this whole diary thing that dates back to 2000.

    But in a way, I’m glad I didn’t read what I wrote before I flew to Oklahoma City on Saturday for a super-quick round-trip 20-year reunion. I’m glad that the fog of parent brain and 10 years passed made me go into it with no expectations other than that at least two good friends of mine would be there and that I really wanted to see them.

    Because it turned out to be a weird night in a lot of little, wonderful ways.

    I can’t imagine there is anyone who goes to a 1o- or 20-year reunion and doesn’t find it a little strange, unless you live in the place you went to school and are in close contact with all the people who came up with you. I imagine reunions have always been a little weird, a mix of the people you remember clearly, the people you remember but never really spent much time with even when you were in close daily proximity and then the people who unfortunately completely left your brain and don’t return in memory even when the older version of them is standing right there in front of you.

    And then there’s the Facebook effect. I’m pretty sure a lot of people didn’t come to the reunion specifically because they feel they already get the nostalgia/curiosity hit they need from The Social Network and that a $400 plane ticket and accommodations aren’t going to add much to their mental picture of how their peers ended up.

    I went alone. My wife has no interest in going to her reunion and had much, much less interest in going to mine and I completely agree with that decision. Unless you’re into people-watching and hearing second-hand stories of glorious old inside jokes, it’s just an uncomfortable thing to be the spouse at these things unless your relationship is new and you’re still in the figuring-out-your-mate stage where everything is a window into their past and personality. If you’ve been with something for 15+ years, it becomes more of the same shit that you’ve heard hundreds of times, more like.

    The reunion did make me more aware than ever of the strange things constant online contact (again, mostly Facebook) have done to us. There were people at the reunion who spoke as if they interest nearly every day and the people that I do actually talk to on Facebook seemed like people I’d seen around within the last few months, not 10 whole years. When the night was winding down and people were saying their goodbyes, it wasn’t, “I’ll see you in 5 or 10 years,” it was, “I’ll post some pics and tag you” or “I’ll let you know on Monday what I find out.”

    The people who want to stay in touch are still in touch. Even the people we didn’t really want to be in touch with necessarily all the time we’re still talking to.

    Me, Marcus, Candace and Jeremy
    Me, Marcus, Candace and Jeremy

    I’m not saying that’s good or bad; for me it’s nice in a lot of ways and only negative once in a blue moon. But it is different, it is weird and I’m not sure that my generation has figured out what to do with it beyond simply ignoring it and moving on.

    I did have a good time, though. It took place in a strange and awesome building in downtown Oklahoma City (I went to school in nearby Midwest City) at some eccentric rich person’s house. I mean rich like having the kind of money where you say, “Screw it, I’m putting cars in the living room and getting poker playing dog throw pillows. And putting a DJ on the rooftop!” It completely blew away our 10-year reunion, which was in a boring ballroom that nobody remembers.

    I’m glad I went, the expense was worth it and at the end of the night, I had gotten to spend (not enough) time with some very close friends I never get to see. Sometimes just a few minutes of that is worth the money and the trouble.

    Some photos and Tweets from that night:

    This was, no joke, the entrance to my 20-year reunion. It turns out it's a freight elevator to an amazingly eccentric rich person's house. Bruce Wayne, maybe.
    This was, no joke, the entrance to my 20-year reunion. It turns out it’s a freight elevator to an amazingly eccentric rich person’s house. Bruce Wayne, maybe.

     

    Marcus and dog mentioned in Tweet below
    Marcus and dog mentioned in Tweet below

     

    Nope, nothing weird about this!
    Nope, nothing weird about this!

     

     

     

    Work stuff and monkey stuff

    I was on vacation for a week when the Digital Savant column and Micro didn’t run, but it’s been nearly a full month since I’ve updated, so here’s what I’ve had in the paper in the interim:

    Colin Anawaty, left, and Jason Bornhorst are co-founders of Filament Labs. Photo by Mark Matson for the American-Statesman
    Colin Anawaty, left, and Jason Bornhorst are co-founders of Filament Labs. Photo by Mark Matson for the American-Statesman

     

    I wrote a column about how complaining on social media about a product or service doesn’t always reward you with a happy ending (though it does work for some people). Last week’s column was about whether health- and fitness-related apps can really change your habits and make you a better, happier person. A MyStatesman account is required to view that article, but I also wrote a free blog post with supplemental information on the topic.

    This week’s column was about civic hackathons and the impact they’re making on the Austin community. Like the last one, it’s on MyStatesman, but I’ve been told a few times via Twitter by readers that it’s also available elsewhere on the web. I have nothing to do with that if that’s the case.

    The Micros recently were about movie-related apps Anything After and RunPee, a definition of the digital locker concept UltraViolet, what to do with old VHS movie tapes  and an explainer of Google+ Hangouts. We’ll be doing a Hangout on Tuesday to coincide with a column that runs that day in the paper. (Info on that in the Hangouts Micro.)

    I kept busy with a few other stories and blog posts: there was a story about Austin tech guy Whurley and his UnGrounded innovation flight to London; a story about the Win8 version of the ACL Access app and Dell’s involvement with that; a post about coping with the end of Google Reader; a post about an Austin-made orthodontics app called Mighty Brace (which will run next week as a “Raising Austin” column in expanded form); and a short story about family mobile company Famigo.

    Vacation sketch

    Space Monkeys! has rolled along with a new comic about parking problems and, because Pablo and I were both traveling, two vacation-themed sketches over the last two weeks, one themed to Costa Rica, the other themed to my Disney World trip.

    A bit’a meta 

    Wow, that’s a lot for having been on vacation. Speaking of which, I wrote a huge chunk of blog about my Disney World trip, which happened before my reunion, but this blog post is already far too long so I’m splitting it into two blog entries.

    The good news is that it’s already written, but I’m saving it for next week to time it to my next column, which ties directly in with that trip.

    Sorry for the long break. It’s just been busy-as-crazy around here and I’m excited that I’m very close (days close) to finishing up a huge writing project that I’ve been working on since December. It’s been a lot of that and very little blogging here, but that ratio should change soon as I get done. Hope to tell you more about that in just a bit.

  • Moves

    Changes

     

    This seems like a good transition time, what with all the graduations and weddings and new jobs and people up and moving across the country that I’m seeing.

    Add to that the birthdays and the births, the deaths and the cancers; right now feels like the opposite of those increasingly few times when you go a few days wondering if anything’s happening. Boredom doesn’t really feel like an option anymore if I’m paying attention. It’s just this incoming stream of stuff, stuff, stuff and it’s sometimes tough to allocate the appropriate amount of attention and care and congrats +/- sympathy when it’s so much at once. The extreme emotions can cancel each other out and you’re just left with a feeling where you’re not sure in which direction to aim your being and be present. Sometimes, unfortunately, it ends up being not in any one in particular.

    I haven’t had any of those things listed above except a birthday last month. The only real transitions for me have been some relocating at work. We’re all changing desk locations due to a large-scale building renovation, not just me. I posted something about it online when I was moving my stuff into boxes to transport a few dozen feet and someone on Google+ assumed I’d lost my job. Funny thing, Google+ always feels a little disconnected like that.

    The desk move wasn’t bad at all. We have new carpet, I purged a bunch of stuff and have a neat desk again (but for how long!?) and my new spot is a lot less isolated than my against-the-wall former work home.

    The other move at work was more recent; we’re switching blog software, which was a big dreaded thing many of us were worried about that not seems like much less of a big deal in that it works and it not that difficult to use. The old blog and archives are up and we’re hoping there’ll be a solution to moving them over, but for now, the new blog home looks nicer and solves some of the quirky problems we had before (like not being able to use Chrome to blog with or our links showing up as garbled teases on Facebook) while introducing some new quirky problems that are not as visible to readers.

    I wish I had some stories to tell you about the last few weeks, but they have been boring in the most happy way. I’ve been spending more time than usual at home with the kids and as frustrating as that can be in small moments (“No, Carolina, no, put the pen down, no, don’t write on the cabinets, stop, please, no, put down the pen, give me the pen, HERE, THE PEN, HAND ME THE PEN, STOP WRITING, OK, why are you crying, I’m sorry, here’s the pen back, NO STOP WRITING ON THE CABINETS!”) it is also kind of wonderful in hundreds of completely boring ways that amount to me watching my kids do their thing and just charm me and warm my heart.

    Sometimes I post videos or photos when they do something particularly visual, but it doesn’t come close to capturing what it’s like when they really turn on the magic. Maybe they’re singing along to a song or making a little gesture I’ve never seen before or saying something random and hilarious (My wife: “Omar, get the stuff out of the car.” Lilly: “Yeah, OMAR, get the stuff out of the car!”).

    There’s a trade-off, of course, there always is. I don’t think about moving my family to another city because that’s off the table. That’s something we decided pretty firmly once the kids were born. I don’t travel much away from the kids, maybe only once or twice a year. My going off to do stuff like working on videos or attending conferences (especially on weekends) or taking advantage of attending really cool stuff in Austin just doesn’t happen as much anymore. I miss an awful lot. I turn down a lot of things and beg off a lot on things that are not entirely unreasonable.

    When they were much smaller, it was a lot harder to do that. I really did feel like I was exchanging my youth and Good Times for boring, frustrating babysitting. Now it’s really not hard to make those decisions. I think about what it’ll mean not to be able to tell them goodnight myself or how being away for an entire weekend means I can’t take them to the park or the zoo or Schlitterbahn, or the Jumpy Place or even just the Donut Palace on a Saturday morning (their new favorite hangout) and how I would feel if my dad was always gone.

    Wanting to be here and having to be here can be two very different things, but sometimes they go together and you feel like you’re spending your time well.

    Work and other stuff

    I mentioned earlier that I moved to a new blog for Digital Savant. Here’s the link for the new blog and the address for the old blog where the archives are still housed for anything older than last week.

    HTC One

    Last week’s column was a big review piece featuring four smart phones, the BlackBerry Z10 (the one without the physical keyboard), the HTC One, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Nokia Lumia 920.

    It was a little crazy having four extra cell phones in the house. If I had them turned on at the same time, one Twitter reply or email would set them all chiming at once, which begins to make you feel like a hamster responding to the ring of a bell.

    This week’s column was a roundup of travel apps. I don’t travel a lot, so I relied on the wisdom of my friends and co-workers who do. It turns out they had great suggestions and I plan to use some of these apps when we go on a big family trip this summer.

    The Digital Savant Micro for the last two weeks included one about Adobe’s Creative Cloud (their subscription service) and “Rougelike,” a genre of computer role-playing games I’d only heard about recently even though they’ve been around a while. I also did one recently about gesture recognition, like the air swiping you find (but which doesn’t work very well) on the Galaxy S4 phone.

    3-D printers discussed by monkey and sloth

    The “Space Monkeys!” are still at it on our comic strip site. Meany pumped some iron in this strip and the possibility of self-reproducing 3-D printers were taken to their logical conclusion in this strip.

    Lastly, this has nothing to do with me, but my former wonderful bosses who founded Television Without Pity have gotten back together to launch a brand-new TV site, Previously.TV. Just a week after it went live, it’s already got some must-read regular features and if you know what the original TWOP was like, you won’t be surprised by the sharp writing and the gorgeous site design.

    Postscript

    This seems to keep happening: I write a blog post (like the one above), sit on it a day to add images and fine tune it, and then something happens that seems to render everything I wrote less important (or beside the point, at least).

    Tonight, it’s the horrifying tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma, a place where I still have friends and just up the road from where I lived for years in Norman and in Midwest City. I watched the awful dark clouds churn at work on a live video feed and when I saw what it looked like, I knew it was going to be bad.  Even without seeing where it was touching ground and what damage it was doing, it looked like the end of the world. It wasn’t going to be anything but devastating.

    This happened before after I’d moved away, in 1999, and for months I heard stories about the devastation and the loss. The 1999 tornado apparently passed less than a half mile from where my family lived when we were there.

    Tonight, the death toll in Oklahoma is at 51 and many of those are children. There’s nothing I can say or offer. As with the 1999 storm and even further back to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, I feel the same helpless sorrow.  It somehow makes it a little better to know that Oklahomans will respond the way they always have to these horrible events. They will respond with strength and grace and they will rebuild. It’s also a little worse to know that. Why should the people of Oklahoma, some of the finest people I’ve ever met, have to suffer through this again.

    If I think about it too much, it just makes me hurt and hurt. Right now, it’s just heartbreak. I’m waiting and hoping they find more of those kids.

    Please help if you can.

  • Comedy!

    The audience is listening

    This week, I’ve been thinking about audiences. What it means to have one, what it’s like to not have one at all and whether it should matter either way when you’re writing.

    For a long time, when I was working with LCP, I was writing and performing. Sometimes I was performing in things I didn’t write, but a lot of times, I was writing stuff for myself that I knew nobody would bother with if I didn’t do it myself and push to get it in a show.

    I don’t really miss performing. I mean, I do, but not the being on stage in front of a bunch of strangers part. If I really wanted to do that more, I would agree to more speaking engagements or make an effort to hit some open-mic comedy nights. The performing part, though, the feeling of connecting with an audience and being heard — honestly, I get that from writing for the paper, from posting here and over at Space Monkeys! (where the audience since we relaunched this year is tiny, but suddenly growing and gaining traction). I never wanted to do stand-up comedy (the touring, the empty rooms, the clawing your way up always struck me as sad). But I’ve always had a need to connect with people with words, no matter the medium.

    And, not to sound ridiculous, but I get the same Dopamine hit from social media, specifically Tweeting. The few times that I’ve gotten retweeted 50 or 100+ times just for tapping out something fleeting that crossed my brain has often felt as good as when I used to put on ridiculous costumes and project the shit out of some jokes on stage on a Saturday night. That probably sounds silly but I would have probably given up on Twitter ages ago if there weren’t some truth to that. It’s less risky physically; I don’t have to worry that I’m going to walk on stage with the wrong hat on or flub a line. On the other hand, Tweeting something stupid could get me fired. So it’s not without a similar element of danger.

    I’ve been writing a couple of things for a while now that have not seen an audience yet and it requires so much more motivation to keep the energy going when you know that what you’re writing it’s not going to get read for a really long time, if at all. You have to believe in some way that somebody’s going to see it even if it’s just a future version of yourself.  Sometimes the idea that it needs to get out there and reach someone in some form is enough motivation to knock another three or four pages out late at night when I just want to go to sleep.

    Recently, a creative person I greatly admire showed me a piece of art they worked on that, for dumb reasons that are specific to their industry, will probably not be seen by anyone outside of the very small group of people who worked on it and a few close friends.  Maybe forever. What I saw was complete. It was fantastic. It was something I’d post on Twitter and share with the world if I could. But it’s not out there and, realistically, might never be.

    If I made something really good, something I believed in and poured my heart into and I couldn’t share it… that would really break my heart, I think. It’s happened to me before, but not really with anything as big and complete and audience-ready.

    I didn’t know whether to feel lucky to be one of the few people who got to enjoy this wonderful little thing or to be sad for everyone who won’t.

    I thought about all that a lot over the weekend as I helped cover the Moontower Comedy Festival. It brought back all of those years in the sketch troupe trying to build an audience, touring around the country, worrying constantly about whether the stuff we thought was funny was going to work for an audience and stressing over reviews and box office. Sometimes that audience was small but made up for it in big laughs. Other times the size of the audience was huge and scary and organic; it made the nerves sharper and the performances bigger. I don’t know how long we would have stuck it out if there had been no laughs and no people to see us. It wouldn’t have been 10-15 years, that’s for sure.  Now I’m in it again, on a much different scale, but it’s exciting to see a new group of people (much younger people for the most part) learning those ropes. It makes me happy seeing that.

    It’s a little weird to be a writer who has different-sized audiences for different things I work on. I know when I write a comic that there’s a sliver of people who will see it. I know when I write for the paper that the print and online audience is made up of a lot of people I’ll never see or hear from. We know they’re there, but in terms of feedback, they’re invisible to me. And then there’s the social media audience where you get more immediate feedback, but that’s not always how it happens. Sometimes I’ll run into someone who follows me on Twitter or is a Facebook friend and they’ll mention something I wrote months ago, a quick 140 characters that I forgot about five minutes after it was posted. And it reminds me that we can’t really know where our words go, how far they travel, who absorbed them.

    Maybe in the future we’ll know exactly that information. It’ll all be quantifiable and you’ll never have to wonder if you touched or made laugh more people than you imagined. That idea is amazing, terrifying and a little sad all at the same time.

    Here are the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Festival reviews I wrote in my wild week of going out and seeing comedy stuff. (Actually, it was only two nights, but it feels like a wild and crazy time any time I get out of the house past 8 p.m.)

    The fantastic: Dana Carvey made me all nostalgic and warm; Godfrey completely blew me away and Chris Hardwick showed me he’s just as great a stand-up comic as he is a TV host and podcast nerd.

    The pretty good: Amy Schumer did not blow the doors off the joint but she was appropriately filthy for a midnight slot; Fortune Feimster was new to me and totally charming.

    The bad: I didn’t review this one, but it sounds like Janeane Garofalo was just not funny, which if you’ve listened to her on any podcasts in the last year or two sounds about right.

    As an unexpected bonus to the festival, two days after it was over I got to see a live recording of one of my favorite podcasts, Professor Blastoff. Tig Notaro and Kyle Dunnigan are two of my most-adored comedians right now (they’re writing for Amy Schumer’s show on Comedy Central) and their guest was Doug Benson, who brought a mean streak to the usually jovial, light-hearted podcast. Something about the chemistry worked and it was just an incredibly fun time, especially for a Monday night. I bought a T-shirt.

    Here are the recent work things I’ve been working on:

    Two of the students I interviewed for my story, Laura Plascencio (left) and Michael Alvarez. Photo by Mark Matson for the American-Statesman
    Two of the students I interviewed for my story, Laura Plascencio (left) and Michael Alvarez. Photo by Mark Matson for the American-Statesman

    I wrote a Digital Savant column about the Globaloria video game design program, which has some future stars in the East Austin High School Prep program. Really enjoyed meeting those kids, talking to the teacher in the story and learning more about how the program works.

    Microsoft Surface

    My column this week was a big wrap-up review story on Microsoft’s consumer products like the Surface tablets, Office 2013 and Office 365 plus their Windows Phone 8 software and Windows 8 itself. It was a lot of ground to cover, but I’ve been using these products for a while now and I think I got a good sense of what’s working and what needs work.

    The recent Micro features were about paywalls (intentionally timed; it’s now behind a paywall) and a Micro defining “Oculus Rift,” basically a VR headset for gaming.

    My next column is about my crippling Kickstarter addiction. You can read a preview/blog version here.

    You may notice that the stories I’m linking to now take you “stubs,” incomplete versions of the stories that you can read in full on the new MyStatesman.com website. Here’s more info about that.

    For now the site is free, you just have to register.

    Glassholes

    Since last we talked, our Space Monkeys! dealt with email overload (or did the opposite, actually), were horrified by sorority email profanity and played with Google Glass (now with time travel!).

    Please check them out and if you have a sec, vote for the comic on TopWebComics if you would or at least throw us a Like on our Facebook page.

    In case you’re wondering, my back feels a lot better, but that awful fiery spot still flares up once in a while (today, for instance). I’ve been using a heating pad and I still have some muscle relaxer left. It may be another trip to the doctor or at least a massage therapist soon.

    A bigger pain in my back this week was that my WordPress theme somehow got corrupted so instead of finishing this blog entry last night, I was playing around with custom.css and function-what-have-you and other messy, bloody innards of this site trying to get it to look the way it did before with the theme re-installed.

    It’s most of the way there, but menus/navigation are still missing and I haven’t cracked those weird WordPress nuts yet. If you’re a WordPress genius and want to help, let me know. I don’t want to stay up late again tinkering tonight.

  • Real life

    Cloudy

     

    For the last couple of years, I’ve been nose-to-the-grindstone writing stuff for work and for freelance that was almost exclusively tech-related. Even the fun, goofy stuff I wrote for CNN last year was all based in the real world, all of it structured as commentary or essay even if it wasn’t completely meant to be taken as super-serious.

    Even when I was recapping TV and doing the movie trailer videos, those were grounded in the reality of what I was writing about. These weren’t universes I created, I was talking about them more like a reporter, telling you what they were about from an outsider’s perspective.

    mexcentricsNow, outside of work, the bulk of my writing for the last few months has been fiction. I’m working on two things that I’m alternating between apart from writing comics about monkeys in space and just finished revisions on a sketch comedy show going up in March that I was able to work on with some close friends. Then there’s another thing that may or may not happen in the audio world, but fingers crossed because it would be a lot of fun, I think. If I’m not posting here (he said, looking at the date of the last entry), it’s because I’m doing those things most every night.

    It’s really different writing the fiction things. Fun and freeing and putting me in a mindset that I’d neglected for a long while. It’s fun to float between worlds like this and, being that I never got into drugs or heavy drinking, the only way I really know how to do it.

    Real real life has been kind of sweet lately. The kids have gone from pitiless marauders of the fall to more manageable sweethearts of the spring. We booked a big family trip for later this year. I’ve gotten to see and catch up with more friends in the last month and a half than the previous six months combined, which was one of my big New Year’s not-so-much-a-resolution-but-just-something-I-want-to-do things. But, like you, I deal with toxic people sometimes or walk away in a stupor due to layers of bureaucracy or hear about something on Twitter that is so dumb, so asinine that I can’t help but talk about it like everyone else.

    Real life is beautiful and magic, but it’s also random and mundane, sometimes at the same time and finding beauty and magic in all that is the challenge. (And, really, why we write.)

    I wouldn’t call it an escape hatch, exactly, but more like a really diverting puzzle that you’re continually trying to solve. When pieces lock together, it’s so satisfying that it makes all the other stuff so much easier to deal with.

     

    Work stuff

    Busy couple of weeks leading into some insanely busy of weeks coming in March for South by Southwest Interactive.

    Two pieces I wrote after the whole Total Frat Move thing got a really nice response.

    First, I was lucky enough to catch a Tweet in passing last month from a woman named Vicki Flaugher, who was getting ready to shut down her account and give up social media. It was completely by chance that I was about to write a column on that very idea and when I asked if she’d chat with me, she was open and honest about why she needs to take a break from Twitter, Facebook and everything else.

    The column got a good response from other people who feel overwhelmed by their daily online rituals. Vicki ended up writing a follow-up piece for Bulldog Reporter where she said some very kind words.

    The girls outside

    Another column that got some positive response (and one negative Letter to the Editor) was one I wrote about the challenges of raising girls in a tech-heavy house when sometimes I just want them to go play outside or put down the iPad. My wife, who usually reads or sees most photos or text I’m going to put online about our family in advance, didn’t get a chance to read this one before it got published and I was scared to death that she was going to tell me she didn’t agree with my point of view or that she thought I was overestimating the amount of thought we’ve given it. It turns out, to my relief, that she liked the story and so did other folks in our family who were thrilled to see a photo of Lilly and Carolina in the paper. (I cropped it so you can barely tell, but Carolina on the left there is lifting her shirt and sticking out her belly in an obvious homage to Tracy Morgan.)

    Photo by Ricardo B. Brazziell / American-Statesman
    Photo by Ricardo B. Brazziell / American-Statesman

    I did a roundup of places to play video games and tabletop games in Austin. It was a lot of work putting it together, but as part of my research, I got to spend an afternoon playing video games at Pinballz and that was an incredible amount of fun.

    Last week, the column was a roundup of South by Southwest Interactive 2013 stuff we know so far. In about three weeks, the fest returns and I’m going to be covering it again. I’m trying to stay positive and not get too overwhelmed, but it’s pretty much taking over everything right now and I’m riding that wave.

    Photo by me for the American-Statesman

    And the new column that just went up is about the ongoing influence of SimCity, which will have a new version out next month. I spoke to some Austin students who used SimCity 4 Deluxe to build a city 150 years in the future. Then they built a physical model of that city and are taking it to Washington D.C. to compete in a Future City competition.


    Digital Savant Micros have been published on the topics of “What is Facebook’s Social Graph?” “What is Vine?”, “Who has the best wireless service in Austin?” and “What is a sound bar?”


    I had a humorous Twitter spat with Verizon about unused data and I covered TEDxAustin 2013, which once again was worth spending a Saturday listening to people inspire you and get you to think about big ideas. The post I wrote is so comprehensive it took me two days to write, which perhaps is overkill, but recapping for so long at TWOP blessed and cursed me with endurance and a need to finish what I started.

    Wow, seeing that list all put together just made me really, really exhausted. Excuse me while I go take a small nap before SXSW Interactive starts.

     

    Other stuff

    Meany and the zombiesI mentioned last time that the monkeys from space that we do comics about started a Twitter account.

    The comic is chugging along. We did one about zombies and another about that cute little Iranian monkey that was blasted the fuck into space against his will. And we did one about poop, which with us is kind of a given.

    This weekend, my wife went on a business-related trip (the business in this case is Zumba, but that’s a story for another blog entry, maybe, perhaps) so I watched the girls on my own, which was terrifying at first and then pretty OK in the end. We theorized on the phone about whether the girls behave better when one of us isn’t around because they’re not competing for the attention of two parents at the same time or if maybe having one parent out of town freaked them out just enough to be obedient. Whatever happened, this weekend was not the crazy, Mr. Mom comedy of hijinks I thought it would be. In fact, it was kind of wonderful.

    The big mistake I made was watching Eraserhead for the first time on Hulu, which put a bunch of Criterion Collection movies out for free (free if you don’t mind annoying, tone-shattering commercials every 10 minutes). I’m a huge David Lynch fan and this was the only movie of his that I hadn’t watched all the way through.

    Well, that was a big mistake. Not because the movie is bad (it’s brilliant) and not because I didn’t like it (I found it incredibly disturbing yet weirdly relatable), but… well… mewling tiny worm baby and terrified father. It did not exactly set the best tone for me for the weekend.

    But then we went to the bounce castle warehouse and the kids ran around for three hours while I sat and read and all was well.

  • 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.

  • Deep into ’13

    My name all fancy

    Hello!

    The last time we talked, we had just announced the re-launch of “Space Monkeys!” and I was about to go back to work after a lengthy vacation that was both stupid-lazy and incredibly productive. Those were good times.

    Things settled back into the work groove where a lot of things are up in the air as more changes (these are positive ones, I think) come our way. Our newsroom is getting remodeled, so there is exciting new carpet to look forward to and I’m almost caught up after being really far behind on emails and column ideas after I was away.

    At home, I’ve tried really hard to keep up the momentum that started at the end of 2012 to move forward into this year a bit spring-loaded. I feel like I stumbled creatively in 2012, especially the latter half of the year, and since November, I’ve really been pushing to get back on track.

    That’s been going well. The comic re-launching has given me something recurring to focus on and the two other things I’m working on (three if you count a March sketch comedy show I’m helping write for Teatro Vivo) have kept me writing every night instead of crashing out, watching TV or wasting time playing iPhone games.

    Usually when I’m working full time, I have to be mindful to save energy to do the things I want to do on my own. Lately, it’s been the opposite. I’m trying to maintain my energy and focus at work to match the things I’m suddenly really excited about on the writing-for-me side.

    Just producing pages every night makes me feel like things are happening and getting done, even if they’re pages that only one or two other people get to see right now. That’s OK. I feel like I’m building a little bit at a time and I can see the structure of what’s being made. That helps immeasurably to keep me going.

    Photo by Julie Jacobson / Associated Press
    Photo by Julie Jacobson / Associated Press

    At work, I’ve had two columns run since I got back. Last week’s was a how-to on getting rid of duplicate files (songs, documents, photos) you probably don’t need to save space and keep organized. Tomorrow’s column is a sum-up of the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (which I did not attend because except for SXSW Interactive, I don’t do those gigantic press release-driven expos anymore), giving percentage odds on whether a lot of the technology will really matter in our lives this year. I’m proud of that one because I was able to get like three poop jokes into one paragraph, which I’ve never been able to do in 16 years at the paper. Times are changing, I think!

    Photo courtesy of Microsoft Games
    Photo courtesy of Microsoft Games

    The Digital Savant Micro features recently were a piece defining the game “Minecraft,” which apparently every pre-teen is mandated to be playing right now, and one running tomorrow offering advice on how to clear off and donate an old PC

    I also had a few updates about SXSW Interactive (Aisha Tyler is coming!) on the work blog.

    And I spoke at a country club to a women’s group about technology which was, no joke, perhaps the highlight of my week. (Photo at the top of this blog entry.) It is very nice to be treated like a visiting dignitary by ladies who lunch and the food they serve at these things is no joke. It was nice to make those connections and they told me if I ever have a project or book or something to promote, to please come back and share it with them. “How do you feel,” I asked, “about comics detailing the comings and goings of homicidal monkeys from space?”

    I’m pretty sure they love me.