Tag: previously.tv

  • ‘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:

  • In conclusion

    The littlest cheese truck!
    Child and tiny truck. Missing: one tooth.

     

    As every summer ends in New Braunfels I always lament that I didn’t go swimming enough or that I didn’t go tubing or enjoy all the fun, outdoorsy stuff there is to do here. By October, I’m full-on bitter about the cooling weather and how it means no more swimming.

    I somehow forget that I’m not really that outdoorsy and that even though I love swimming, I hate being out in 105-degree heat and get cranky if the air conditioner doesn’t stay well below 77 degrees in the house.

    This summer is different because instead of somehow feeling like I lost the time due to summer lethargy, it’s actually been jam-packed with activity for me and for the whole family. There’s been more travel than I’ve done since before the kids were born, the conclusion of something I’d been working on for a while (or at least the next phase of work on it), a door opening for a new site that I had been wanting to write for but that I hadn’t been able to commit time to and, honestly, the best summer I’ve had with my girls yet.

    That’s been kind of of the showstopper around here. Several times a week my wife and I will exchange a look as our daughters are calmly playing together or doing something completely new and we’ll say, “They’re getting bigger.” They’re growing up. They’re not babies or even toddlers. Our Lilly turned 6 a few weeks ago. Only a few days later she lost her first tooth (no worries; it was painless and she didn’t even notice it was gone until I pointed out the gap). As I write this, she’s completed her first week of 1st Grade. Her sister, the curly-haired wild child, is still destructive and prone to bursts of turbo energy that exhaust us all, but she has also grown sweeter and kinder and more in love with us and her sister than I could have hoped.

    She’ll make a huge fuss about taking something to school (a toy, a paper with writing on it, anything) and after giving up on trying to convince her she shouldn’t, I’ll find out that she only wanted to take the item to school to show it to her favorite teacher because she can’t keep something she loves to herself and wants to share.

    This summer we got to take the girls to Disney World, we were able to make a beach trip, Lilly went on a bunch of field trips with her older-kids daycare to places I’ve never even seen, I went to Las Vegas for my first work trip in a very long time (more on that in a bit), my wife did some work traveling and I attended my 20-year high school reunion. We sold our damn Austin house, relieving years of stress.

    I haven’t been tubing yet (there’s still time!) but as Labor Day approaches and the summer winds down, I don’t feel like I missed much. In fact, I feel like I’m ready for things to calm down and conclude. It was a great summer, but not for all the reasons I usually expect.

    Double decker shopping

    Work writing

    A really busy couple of weeks at work. Here’s what was in the paper and online.

    Sam Killermann, one of the working-at-coffee-shop experts I spoke to for my story. Photo by Deborah Cannon / Austin American-Statesman
    Sam Killermann, one of the working-at-coffee-shop experts I spoke to for my story. Photo by Deborah Cannon / Austin American-Statesman

     

    Digital Savant columns:

     

    Sony SmartWatch

     

    Digital Savant Micro features:

    Other random stuff:

    A lengthy blog review of the Leap Motion controller.

    A silly blog post suggesting new names for Microsoft’s SkyDrive.

    A blog post about a new Austin-based video commenting tool called FrameBuzz.

    Las Vegas

    Work trips are super stupid-boring, so I won’t subject you to the details of a trip I took for Vegas, but I’ll just say that because of the nature of my beat and the nature of working at a newspaper with a limited travel budget, I don’t take a lot of trips to cover stories outside of Austin.

    Since last year, when it was announced that South by Southwest Interactive would be doing a conference in Las Vegas, my then-editor and I assumed I would go, but even a few months before the event in August, I still had my doubts that I would actually go. Things have been so busy this summer that I began to like the idea of just not going but when my editors approved my travel plans, I started to get excited about it again.

    I’m so glad I went. Not only where there plenty of things to write about before the SXSW V2V, as the Vegas conference was called, but I had a lot more fun there than I was expecting, a combination of knowing a few people from Austin and other places that I got to hang out with, a really upscale venue with killer hotel rooms (The Cosmopolitan) and an overall laid back and accommodating vibe that wasn’t as crazy or as hectic as the SXSW I’m used to in March in Austin. No matter how wild things might get or how late I stayed out, I didn’t have to worry about a 45-minute drive home, which is always in the back of my mind at SXSW Interactive.

    As I tried to make clear in my stories, there’s a lot of change happening in downtown Las Vegas and techies are beginning to take notice that there might be some big opportunities there (MyStatesman version here).

    As for what I actually wrote, I did a Digital Savant column about how the event came together and a Sunday business story about the Downtown Project aspects that helped draw SXSW to Las Vegas.

    After the event was over, I did a wrap-up of the overall event. (MyStatesman version here.)

    I also shot a video at V2V that was expertly edited quickly by Emma Janzen. You can find that below.

     

     

    Other highlights from Vegas: playing blackjack with friends one night drinking endless Manhattans (my new favorite get-drunk-quick drink!) and woke up to the worst hangover I’ve had since my 20s and maybe ever. I literally could not look at a computer screen for several hours.

    And then I thought about how that might look on Twitter.

    I went to Ellis Island for karaoke and had the time of my life. Vegas is the perfect karaoke city.

    I finally got my ass to the pinball museum, which was pretty great but won’t replace the soft spot in my heart I have quickly developed for Austin’s Pinballz.

    I had my doubts about The Cosmopolitan because the first impression it gives is pretty douchey, but my goodness the rooms are enormous and the dealers are super friendly and the restaurants there are incredible. Highly recommended, just don’t let the freaky lobby freak you out like it did me:

    I put a whole mess of Vegas photos on Flickr. You can view the whole album here. I put a few of them below as well.

    Inaugural #SXSWV2V sushi and fried chicken and Google Glass meetup!

     

    Chris, Claire, Sweet John and Me.

     

    My power

    Steve Case keynote @ SXSW V2V

    Previously

    I mentioned the launch of Previously.tv a while back, a site created by the founders of Mighty Big TV / Television Without Pity and featuring lots of alumni as contributors.

    It’s a wonderful thing to be able to write for people you love and respect and enjoy working with, but even after the launch, I hadn’t approached them about contributing to the site because I was trying to force myself to stop freelancing and to finish the novel I started before the start of the year. With that finally done in late June and me pretty far into the second draft/editing of it (about 210 of 360 or so pages), I finally sent a query and was thrilled to be welcomed aboard.

    My first piece for Previously ran last week and was an “I Am Not a Crackpot!” suggesting that the part of Marc Maron in the TV show Maron should be recast.

    This week, I wrote a story about The Walking Dead’s lead character Rick Grimes for the site’s Career Week and I’ve got another piece in the pipeline.

    It feels wonderful to be a part of that team and if you’re not already checking out that site and making it part of your daily reading, you’re missing some really fun, creative TV writing. I mean, this Tales of the Gold Monkey post alone… my God. Consider it indispensable for the coming fall TV season.

    Those space monkeys

    Screen Shot 2013-08-31 at 12.35.04 AMWe’re still updating the space-faring adventures of Bobbo, Meany and the crew in weekly fashion and their Twitter account has been pretty active of late.

    Also, we’re about to hit 300 “Likes” on Facebook. More of those are always good, hint hint.

    It’s been so long since I’ve updated this blog (mostly lethargy, but also I didn’t feel like I had much to say till now) that if you haven’t kept up, you’ve missed five whole new comics!

    They are:

    We’ve been nothing if not extremely topical.

     

  • 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.