Tag: red vs. blue

  • Holograms and happy fans

    Holograms from Zebra Imaging. Photo by Laura Skelding / Austin American-Statesman.

     

    My cat Cosa, who was sort of a star of this blog back when it was an online journal, died. I want to tell you about that and I’ve been writing that inevitable post, but there were some more developments and drama this weekend and I’m going to need a little more time. But a proper eulogy to a great, angry cat is coming very soon.

    Instead, I’ll share what I’ve been working on the last few weeks. The first thing is really neat, something I was thrilled to share with people because my mind got blown as I was researching it and I felt like I really learned a thing or three. I did a column about “real” holograms (not the Tupac/Coachella type of holograms that are actually just a mirror and projection trick) produced by and Austin company called Zebra Imaging.

    Zebra’s been around so long that one of my long-time coworkers was like, “Oh, THEM? What are they up to? They’ve been around forever!” It seems that the Tupac buzz has been good for them and that they’re coming out a long period of doing military stuff primarily and expanding into a lot of other areas for their truly amazing visual technology. Good for them.

    Emerson Henriquez, a fan of Spill.com I met at their annual Spill Dot Con event. Photo by me.

    The other new column runs in Monday’s newspaper and it’s about two very unique and fervently followed Austin websites, Spill.com and RoosterTeeth.com, both of which post very popular videos online and lots of other content that have earned this lots of fans. The success has led to real-world conferences that are bringing hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people together to celebrate their mutual love of the enjoyable things they put out into the world.

    I’ve known Korey and some of the other Spill.com folks since I moved to Austin in 1997 and although I’ve been so busy parenting and working that I never get to see them anymore, they were my first close friends in Austin. Korey also introduced me to Adrian Villegas and that led to the Latino Comedy Project, so there’s lots of memories and good times I associate with that bunch of very talented people.

    When I saw Korey and Martin, they looked at me like they were seeing a ghost (or at least a guy who hadn’t been around much at all for several years). I grew up thinking friends were the most important thing in life and it always makes me feel really guilty when I realize I haven’t tended to friendships like I should.

    But apart from that, I was glad I got to write an article about a site that we have really under-covered over the years as it’s gotten really popular. By the same token. the folks at Rooster Teeth are amazing people who have also been doing this online comedy/video thing for ages and have worked incredibly hard to earn the fans they have. It’s always a pleasure to let people know about it.

    I also got to see some neat tech at a Freescale event in San Antonio last week. There wasn’t much for me to write about, but I did take some snapshots. I also chatted with the Consumer ELectronics Association’s Jim Barry (really nice, knowledgable guy; I really enjoy speaking with him) for a piece that ended up running in the newspaper last week.

    And just yesterday, I attended an all-day conference called MomComAustin. It’s research for a writing project I’ve mentioned here before, as is a trip I’m taking to New York in August for BlogHer. I’m devoting a lot more of my limited free time to these things and what before felt like a very nebulous project is beginning to feel like real work, but in a good way. In a way that feels less like waiting and more like acting. I had great conversations, listened to some really good speakers and even though I was literally the only man registered to attend (a few women asked me what I thought of that or gave me a pat on the back for being there), everyone there was great and super helpful when I asked questions prix viagra ligne. I have lots of transcribing and organizing to do, but it feels great to have that information in hand instead of just making plans to get that information, you know? Any kind of incremental forward movement I can get I’m thrilled to get.

    Last thing I’ll mention for now is that tomorrow night I’m speaking at an ONA (Online News Association) Austin event about online writing with the incredibly talented and gracious Austin Eavesdropper Tolly Moseley. Tolly is someone I always enjoy chatting with when I run into her (I think we both have a bewildered, wide-eyes approach to writing and meeting other people, though I’m probably much crankier) and it was great of Rob Quigley, who is organizing this talk, to pair us up. We have some very entertaining, potentially embarrassing slides and stories to share.

  • At the word jam

    True story: I wrote an article, the column that has my face on it and runs in the paper on Mondays, that was part two of an occasional series we’ll do defining tech terms that are either confusing or that aren’t easily explained in the barrage of tech-related marketing that’s thrown at us every day.

    This second Digital Savant glossary includes words like “Airprint” and “animated GIF,” things that are common parlance to geeks and Internet bottom-dwellers like us, but that I get asked about by readers in emails and blog comments all the time. (I had to go and research, “3-D printer” to make sure I knew exactly what those are and, holy mac-n-cheese, that’s amazing! And a future source of legal problems, surely.)

    Soon after the column ran, someone who reads my stuff regularly told me, “I read your piece. Didn’t understand a word of it.”

    I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or what, but before I had time to let out, “But… that was… kind of… the point… of…” the moment had passed and I was left to go deflate.

    It was one of those, “Now why am I doing this again?” moments, which I’ve seemed to have a lot of lately. Weird bursts of deflated, defeated lack of purpose and paralysis mixed with (often Twitter-driven) bouts of self-congratulatory confidence and frenzied catch-up activity. Is this what it’s like to start going bi-polar? Is there a take-home urine test for that or something? A Facebook quiz?

    Anyhoo! The other thing I wrote this week that was in the paper was a preview of the new season of Red vs. Blue, which afforded me the opportunity to virtually chat with the folks over at Rooster Teeth, who are inspiring like a lot of people in Austin who just keep putting out high levels of creative stuff over a very long period of time until the Internet has no choice but to notice and to follow raptly. Anyone who has a modicum of interest in the Austin film scene or Internet video in general should be standing on their chairs and applauding that crew for what they’ve done.

    Interrupted…

    Everything up to this point I wrote last night. And in the middle of writing and previewing the post, the site went down. The entire host of the site went down. I waited a few minutes and the site, WordPress, everything… still down.  The editing page was still in the browser, so I copy/pasted the text into Google Docs and went to bed.

    Which led me to… maybe I wasn’t supposed to write this?  Or I needed to take another look? Or I just need a new webhost?

    Or perhaps just some perspective.  This has been a spectacularly up and down week.  My wife and I had a great three-day weekend that included a pool party, lots of eating out, lots of time having fun with the kids and then, boom, a weird stomach ailment that felled us both right as Memorial Day was ending.

    At the AT&T Spursachampionatorium

    Then I recovered enough to go to an NBA game in San Antonio and that was a blast even as I was struggling to climb up stairs to our seats and trying hard not to bring back on the headache that had been plaguing me all day.  The game and its screaming, dancing, San Antonio-puro-pienche-people crowd was, weirdly, restorative.  Even as I tried not to move too much, I was totally digging the scene and the great game and feeling very much at home.  It was wonderful.

    A friend mentioned a piece that ran on this site a while back in an article she wrote for Bitch Magazine about people asking you to do work for free.

    And then, today, I did a Skype session with some students visiting my alma mater in Oklahoma, journalists from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. It was very similar to a session I did last year for the same event and just like last time, they asked incredibly insightful questions about everything from blogging to curating content to the future of social media to how to handle news in a country where broadband Internet just isn’t spreading to people fast enough.  I actually had answers and insight and stories and even a few funny bits of experience to share.  The comments they posted immediately after the session to Facebook, the friend requests I got and the personal thanks some of them sent (again, immediately after; they’re young and super-quick) made me feel like I’d actually helped them figure some things out.

    Weird, wonderful week.

    And then I just got interrupted again. Diaper failure causes 2-year-old’s crib to be soaked in urine, requires immediate sheet and clothing changes. She was a trouper, smiling the whole time and cheering me on as I lifted up her crib mattress and “Daddy fix it.”

    The thing that’s hovering over what’s been a fitful couple of weeks is that a friend and I finally figured out what we need to be doing with a writing thing we’ve been working on for a long while and now we’re at the actual doing point and it’s scaring me.  There’s so much information we’ve collected and conversations we’ve had and things that we want to say and my brain can’t seem to hold and process and filter-distill and dispense it to my satisfaction. And that’s freaking me out. It’s making me think I need to print out pages and put things in an accordion folder and search-cloud-tag-up material and put stickers on papers and that I’m going to sit right back down with everything organized and still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing.

    So that’s what’s really troubling me. Because, except for stomach bugs that come and go, most everything else has been pretty awesome lately.