Tag: digital savant

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Calamity

    Not my actual back, but this is my blog and I can pretend.
    Not my actual back, but this is my blog and I can pretend.

     

    Nothing major happened the last two weeks since I wrote that monster blog entry and promised myself that I would write much shorter entries more often.

    A few personal heroes died: Roger Ebert and Jonathan Winters. At home, lots of little horrible things happened that kind of destabilized things around here.

    The most significant was something I mentioned last time; our girls got a stomach bug. What I didn’t know at the time was that it would take a few days longer for them to fully recover and that the whole week after Easter was going to be a lot of changing work shifts and hoping that neither kid threw up at school and got send home. (That happened twice.) Luckily, my wife and I both fought off whatever the bug was, although we each had a dicey day where we thought we were getting it.

    Then my mother got it, much worse than the kids. Then my father in law got it. Then other members of the family reported other ailments. And this is right after I’d just been knocked on my ass for a full day with horrible allergies.

    Things were starting to go back to normal as the kids got over their bi-directional expulsion of bodily fluids and then suddenly I started getting a weird pain in my back.

    It wasn’t suddenly in one way: I began to feel some back issues right after South by Southwest and I thought a massage I got soon after had fixed most of it. But this one specific spot on my back kept getting worse and worse until finally it got to where I couldn’t stand for too long without a sharp pain mid-back, just to the right of my spine. It hurt to sit, it hurt to stand, it hurt even to lie down sometimes.

    Maybe it was from lugging a heavy laptop bag around during the festival or maybe I just pulled something at the gym. I had no idea what was up and it kept getting worse. So I saw a doctor.

    I don’t have a primary down here in New Braunfels, so I went through my insurance and just picked one at random. It turned out to be in a really nice house-like building that specialized in back pain, allergies and, I guess massage therapy.

    I won’t bore you with all the details, but the conclusion was this: they thought it was a muscle spasm and they injected a needle full of saline right the fuck in the muscle that was giving me problems. They warned me it would hurt and boy were they not lying. I stifled a scream as I stood there with a needle in me and my muscle spasming worse than ever.

    It started to feel better immediately and they prescribed me some anti-inflammatory meds and some serious muscle relaxer medicine that I can only take at night before I go to bed. That stuff knocked me out two days in a row and is not to be trifled with.

    The back feels a lot better but that spot of pain still comes and goes a little. I really don’t know how people who live with chronic pain do it. It’s at the point where all I want is to feel normal again and not have to worry about a physical problem getting worse and taking me out of commission. It seems like small potatoes given the health issues others have to deal with, but all this has been happening right around my 38th birthday and I am very aware that I’m at the stage where shit’s going to start breaking down, some of it irrevocably, and I should stop expecting my body to just stay the way it is forever without problems. There’s certainly more to come.

     

     

    As sometimes happens with this blog, I wrote the above and left it unpublished, planning to go back in the next day and add images and links to flesh it out.

    That was Sunday night. On Monday, Boston was bombed.

    I didn’t feel at all like going in and looking over what I wrote about back pain and a stomach bug and publishing it that night.

    Apart from something so significant making all of our problems look so much smaller, it just felt all too familiar to me and the gut-punch to the stomach never really goes away. Not after they figure out what happened, not after they find the person or people who did it, not after the punishment is dealt.

     

    Some new writing stuff: last week, my Digital Savant column was a sampling of reader emails about a column I did on technology gripes. The reader responses were so good, I rolled them together into a piece and gave my own feedback to their problems.

    Clay Shortall shows off some of the 3-D printing tools of his trade. Photo by Christina Burke, Austin American-Statesman
    Clay Shortall shows off some of the 3-D printing tools of his trade. Photo by Christina Burke, Austin American-Statesman

     

    This week’s column is about the future of 3-D printing and how quickly we may see it go mainstream. I think this is something that’s going to evolve really quickly and get into our homes a lot sooner than you might expect. Not everyone will need one that soon and it’s going to take a much easier learning curve, but I think it won’t be long before some version of 3-D printing becomes very, very popular and widespread.

    The last two Micro features were about Wi-Fi calling and Bitcoins.

    I had a few other things to say about Bitcoin on Twitter.

    I also had my first front-page story in a while, a Q&A on Google Fiber coming to Austin. (It was paired with the main Statesman news story, which you can find here.) There were rumors about it starting the Friday before the announcement and it snowballed into a pretty sizable national story by the time the official announcement happened. I was there and it felt a lot like a pep rally only instead of your football coach and principal, it was the mayor, the governor and a bunch of Google people telling us how lucky Austin is to be getting such a cool thing. We shall see how long it takes; if there’s one thing Austinites like to do is complain about things that don’t meet their expectations.

    And one other story I did was about Austin’s Rooster Teeth, who are going independent and closing in on 2 billion (yes BILLION) views on YouTube. There’s also a separate blog post with some more background info on their 10th anniversary.

     

     

    Our Space Monkeys addressed the situation in North Korea and dealt with breakfast cereal mascots.

    For my 38th(!) birthday, we kept it pretty low-key. We went to San Antonio for lunch, I saw a movie (The Evil Dead; it was fine, not great) with my brother and played “Zombicide” that night, which was lots of fun.

    Took the girls to the Children’s Museum this last weekend and they painted these for you:

  • Post-fest

    Honestly the best thing I saw at SXSW, maybe?

     

    The hardest blog posts to write, I’ve found, are the ones you don’t want to write but feel you have to write.

    Someone else has already wordplayed a term, “Oblogatory,” out of this, right? I’m afraid to Google it and fall down a rabbit hole.

    In fact this whole blog entry should have been called “Rabbit holes” because for the last few weeks, I’ve been allowing myself to slip down into them in order to not talk about South by Southwest Interactive.

    You guys, you have no idea how much I don’t want to talk about SXSW anymore. Last week, at a meeting with one of my editors, I fretted that I honestly have no idea whether I should keep mining the festival for stories and trends or move on in case readers are just completely sick of SXSW.

    And that’s the weird part. I’m not really sick of it. I had a pretty great time at the festival and I’m not one of those people who gets online and bitches every year about how it’s not the same as it used to be or that last year’s was so much better or whatever. Every year is different, even if some things stay the same on the reporting/working side of things and I found lots to be excited about and keep me busy.

    But it was the busy that really killed me this year. Some years, I have so much fun and so many cool things happen that they far outweigh the sense of work and I end up feeling euphoric about the experience. This year, as seems to happen on odd-numbered years, I came out more exhausted than exhilarated, my body a wreck from carrying a heavy laptop, walking and biking in rain, and just keeping incredibly long hours with not enough sleep.

    This was a problem even after the festival. The way it usually works is that I spend weeks gearing up, work the five days (Friday-Tuesday) straight through, come in to work Wednesday to write a wrap up and then take a few days off to rest and recuperate.

    Things went fine until I went in to work that Wednesday when the fest ended and was completely paralyzed, buried under a mountain of blog posts, essays and emails about the fest that I felt I had to get through before I could properly articulate what it all meant.

    Distractions kept coming up and by midday I wasn’t even close to getting through that stack. And then the day ended, my deadline passed, and still I had the barest flicker of an idea of what I had seen that could tie it all together. My brain was shutting down, having been scheduled to detach from the festival by day’s end. It ran away without me.

    I spent that night at home barreling through and writing anyway, trying to make something cohesive out of an experience that has gotten bigger than my ability to write authoritatively about it, at least in that moment.

    The column, much longer than budgeted, was turned in and pushed through the system to be published the following Monday.

    That Thursday night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept waking up, remembering things that should have been in that column, threads I should have followed and memorable bits I forgot to include. Then I would remind myself, half-awake, that the column was already too long and nothing more would fit. But my brain wouldn’t stop working. It just whirred and whirred.

    And that really scared me.

    It’s why instead of writing a bunch of follow-up articles and blog posts related to the fest, I’ve tried to move on, mostly unsuccessfully. Two months+ of obsessing about one thing and trying to outpace everyone else in somehow mastering it as a subject hollowed me out this year. It’s taken a while to not feel antsy even thinking about it, honestly.

    So enough about that. I’ll link later on in this post to most of the stuff I wrote/was a part of during the festival, but honestly, I can already use another break from talking about SXSW.

     

    Things that are not SXSW:


    Video games

    Post-fest meant I had some free time to do things like vacuum the filthy floor, which accumulates child-crumbs on the daily, and to finally play some video games for the first time in months.

    I finally got my hands on a Nintendo Wii U which is great in some ways (some of the games are OK, I love the overall design) and terrible in others (sloooooow menus, very limited GamePad connectivity range) and really cumbersome update/install processes that seem to come up with every single new game you insert or buy online.

    I also played a bit of Tomb Raider (much better than I was expecting), a great downloadable game called Bit.Trip Runner 2, Lego City Undercover and most of all BioShock Infinite, which is taking up most of my gaming time right now. BioShock was my favorite game of 2007, though to be fair, Team Fortress 2 came out that year and I’ve spent many more hours on that. But that’s only to say I’ve been waiting a long time for a proper follow-up after I was let down by BioShock 2, which I didn’t bother finishing.

    Infinite is gorgeous and brave in a way that so many games aren’t and I’m enjoying just falling into that world and taking my time with it.

    Kickstarter and tabletop gaming

    e552933abbf07c4ced415b7f0f4721bc_large

    Speaking of games, I seem to have developed a quick-spreading intense addiction to both Kickstarter and to tabletop/board games all of a sudden, mostly due to one great game called “Zombicide.”

    My brother owns it and was part of the original Kickstarter last year.  We’ve played the game a few times and I really have grown to love it. It’s complex and takes forever to play, but it’s just really well-designed, has gorgeous miniatures and just really puts you in the mindset of trying to survive a zombie apocalypse; it’s basically a high-end Walking Dead board game.

    This year, they rolled out a much more ambitious Kickstarter campaign for a Season Two game and an expansion.  At first, I was just going to let it go by because my brother was planning to get it anyway and he’s the only person I play with. But he said, “What if I move someday?” and that got me thinking I should get my own copy and then I decided I should just get all three and then the stretch goal items hooked me in even more and before I knew it I had pledged a couple of hundred dollars to a game I’m not even sure I have room in the house to store.

    You guys, the Kickstarter was so exciting. I downloaded the Kickstarter app and started checking it every day for updates and new stretch goal items and it was just such a sorely-needed rabbit hole for me to fall into at the time. The campaign finally ended on (Easter!) Sunday at more than $2.5 million, making it break the record for a Kickstarter board game project. Last I checked there were over 30,000 comments from geeks completely obsessing over every detail of the game, its components and its (incredibly generous) stretch goal prizes.

    I won’t get the games until September, but I’ve also fallen into a sub-rabbit hole of looking into how I’ll paint the figurines. Suddenly I’m researching acrylics and brushes and X-Acto knives and watching paint tutorial videos.  I’ve also been playing the “Penny Arcade” card game and I gave my brother a copy of “Cards Against Humanity” for his birthday.

    I’ve unwisely mentioned this ugly new hobby to a few people (which I haven’t even started; I’m in pre-hobby mode). A co-worker astutely noted that this was also a hobby of the 40-Year-Old Virgin. Other friends expressed sorrow and chagrin at the way I’ve managed to find a new geek low on the eve of my 38th birthday. Hey, better late the never! Now go away. I’m gonna be painting some zombies. I may dip them in Army Painter dark shader.

    Disney World

    Here we go...

    We booked a trip for June to Disney World. I’ll have a lot more to say about this soon, I’m sure, but we waited until the girls were both potty trained and until they were old enough to appreciate the trip.  It’s crazy expensive, but we’ve been planning to do this pretty much since Lilly was born so we’re just going to hand over the wallet and enjoy it.

    Easter: a stomach bug intrudes

    Easter weekend was great except for the part where Carolina threw up four times in one day. She rallied enough to enjoy the first of two big Easter egg hunts and you wouldn’t have known she was sick (except for the puking), but by the next day, she was tired and much worse for wear, having gotten gunshy about eating anything.

    She seemed to be getting better but then Lilly threw up and suddenly we had two sick kids in the house and the terror of worrying that we’d get it too.

    So far, so good on that front. The girls are recovering, we haven’t gotten sick ourselves (yet! hope not!) and after juggling our work schedules around and waiting through a day when no more puking happened, they should be back at school soon.

    Like I said, it didn’t seem to slow them down during Easter:

    Cascarones '13

     

    Lilly makin' faces

     

    Carolina gets aggressive

     

     Writing stuff

    It sure doesn’t look like it around here, but I’ve actually been writing every night, even when I’ve been feeling sick from brutal allergy attacks. The only time I didn’t write was during SXSW and that was, of course, lots of work writing.

    I hit a writing milestone this week, the halfway mark on something I’ve been working on since December, and that filled me with hope. It’s probably the most sustained amount of time I’ve spent on one writing thing in a really long while and I just keep thinking, “If I can just keep writing three pages a day, it will get done. Just three more pages. Three more pages.” I tell myself that every night, even when I’m nearly falling asleep at the keyboard.

    Screen Shot 2013-04-02 at 11.10.56 PM

    The comic plugs along, proudly posting every single Wednesday even during crazy festivals that may draw my and Pablo’s time and attention away.

    Since last we spoke, Meany has tried some terrible stand-up comedy, our Kickstarter addiction was turned into a comic and we addressed the cute sloth from the movie The Croods.

    The sketch show/play I helped write, Pulga Nation, that I mentioned last time went really well. I didn’t think I’d get to see it, but it turned out the Friday night of SXSW Interactive allowed me enough time to slip away and catch 20 minutes of the early show and the entirety of the late-night show. I was thrilled to see it and so tickled to hear two audiences laugh at these jokes we wrote. There was a talk-back after the first show in which a person asked me why we killed off an elderly character so soon in the show. The same person told me afterward that the same sketch I wrote did not need a blowjob joke. “But that was the best part!” I said brightly. The man was not amused and shot back, “No, no it wasn’t.”

    Blowjob joke notwithstanding, the production did very well and we’re already meeting to talk about what’s next. I don’t know if the show will be re-mounted, toured or what, but it sounds like everyone involved wants to keep working together and that there’ll be more Mexcentrics in the future. So that’s really good news.

    Really, I’ve been good except for the parts where I was so sick I had to stay in bed for most of a Saturday because of allergies or the part where my daughters have been vomiting as if for comedic effect. Spring came early and it’s filled me with hope and purpose in some ways and frustration and impatience with the parts of my life that don’t feel like they’re keeping up.

    Anyway, here’s the SXSW coverage and other Statesman stuff I was busy writing since the last update. It’s a long list. Strap in!

    Some Vines I shot at the fest (Mashable listed me in ones to follow during SXSW):

    And a few more photos, ending with my encounter with Grumpy Cat.

    LEGO Man

     

    My beautiful work lawn

    Daniel Tiger + Curious George

    Peter Sagal, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer

    Guitar Shawn is guitaring, probably named Shawn

    Tina, Me, Emma and Grumpy

    Damn, girl, you’re telling me.

     

  • 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.