Tag: SXSW

  • What’s next?

    New me, new cards

     


    Change is trauma, I guess, or at least a shock to the system you can’t really gauge without some perspective.

    Your body re-forms a lot of its own cells constantly as you move along in this world and in a decade you’re mostly not even physically the same parts. And I can imagine that a sudden change of environment, a big swing of emotions and priorities and goals must speed that along, the stress-shedding of even more skin and bone and follicle.

    Last year was all about change, the “Bulldoze” year, this year was “Foundation,” building on new ground and starting new things.

    It’s late April and there’s a bit of a lull right now. South by Southwest took up a lot of my energy in March (more on that below) and the weeks leading up to that and as soon as that was done, I dived into a big project for a publication I’ve always wanted to write for that I hope to post about here really soon. That took me into early April, then I had to finish up my taxes, which were incredibly complicated and weird for 2018, and then I was in the middle of some home appraisal stuff, preparation for a whole other project that I’m excited about and now it’s now and I’m taking a deep breath and resting a little bit and seeing where I am.

    Everything from like Halloween to Easter is a big blur, preparing from one holiday to the next, traveling a lot, spending as much time as I can with my kids now that I’m not rushing home from an office after 6 p.m. every night against traffic.

    I got past the bit where I was stressing out about money every day. Even after I knew that a contract I signed for 2019 was going to keep me financially OK, I was still worried about Christmas gifts, the costs of all these house things that needed repairing or improving, the ridiculous cost of having basic health coverage as a freelancer, and this looming fear that whatever I owed on my taxes for what turned out to be a windfall year (minus putting a down payment on a new house) was going to wipe me out.

    now it’s now and I’m taking a deep breath and resting a little bit and seeing where I am

    That didn’t happen, but I still have that nagging need to hustle, to keep accepting assignments that only pay $50-$100 just to keep income flowing instead of wasting time, just to cover dinners and dental visits, to hedge against some future costly emergency. Not every day anymore, but often enough that I can’t sit still for very long.

    There are days that are incredibly relaxed, when there is nothing due and no place to be when I can work on the shed/guest house that came with this house with my dad, putting up particle board and using saws and drills. Those are days when I can catch up on movies I missed when my life was too busy (shoutout “Civil War”), or to just go the gym and not feel rushed to get it all done in 45 minutes.

    But it’s not without problems. I get bent out of shape chasing invoices that don’t get paid for a long time, I always feel like I should be writing more, even when there’s no assignment in front of me, I have that fear of disappearing and being forgotten because I’m not pushing stuff out there like I used to.

    When I went freelance last year one of the first things I put on my to-do list was “Make business cards.” I played around with some designs on the Kinko’s website and wasn’t really happy with any of them. My brother, who’s much better at design than me, agreed they weren’t great and I just kind of put it aside. Truth be told, I don’t get asked for a business card very often, but the few times I did at interviews it was always that awkward, “Oh, I don’t have them yet, working on it…” and I wanted something to hand out, even if it was a happy face on a piece of lunchmeat (how great would that card be? But you’d have to keep them in a mini fridge you always carried around.).

    So after SXSW I used a coupon code I got from a very good Moo booth at the event where they gave out lots of samples of their stuff. I threw something together that I ended up really happy with. Sure, the fonts are all over the place and the photo could be sharper (it’s a picture of a picture), but it reflects me more than some simple modern design. They came so beautifully packaged in little ornate boxes that I felt spoiled, like I was treating myself to something I really didn’t deserve. Moo really makes lovely stuff, you should give them a try if you need cards or other printed stuff.

    The only thing on it I really wonder if I should have done differently is the title. “Technology Culture Reporter.” Is that what I still am, more than 20 years since I started using that title? Aren’t I doing a lot more than that? Is there room for me to list all those things? It it better not to pigeonhole myself at all?

    Maybe by the next round of cards, I’ll be something completely different.

    South by Southwest 2019

    Photo from me at the Henry Winkler acting workshop panel. He was magic.

    A month ago, it was South by Southwest, maybe, I don’t know, the 15th or 16th time I’ve gone (there were a few years in the early 2000s where my main job wasn’t so tech focused so I skipped some).

    I always thought that if I left my job at the Statesman, that would be the end of me being obsessed with SXSW every year and running around covering stuff. But a month before, I got asked to contribute as a freelancer for Austin360 and the Statesman’s business desk and to get badged up and so there I was, back in the mix. But it was really different this year in a lot of great ways.

    For one thing, I didn’t spend a couple of months planning and prepping and writing lots of previews and exhausting myself so much that by the time SXSW starts, I’m already burned out on the whole thing. It was nice coming in fresh, doing the things I was assigned to do (or other assignments I picked up for other publications on top of my initial list) and then spend the rest of my time actually enjoying SXSW.

    Ironically, I managed to get sick the day it all started with what we call the “SXSW Crud,” but a week earlier than usual, so I soldiered on with boxes of Kleenex and a very phlegmy cough, but managed to make it through.

    Working with the Statesman team did give me the opportunity to go back and sit in on some planning meetings and to visit the newsroom again, something I hadn’t done since around October. I’ve been telling people that I don’t really miss the newsroom or the act of committing daily newspaper journalism, that what I’ve really missed are the people I worked with and the feeling that comes from being part of a large team working together to make something bigger than any one of us.

    That’s true; I miss the social part of my job, being able to look up from my computer monitor and seeing friendly faces of people I respect and admire.

    But when I visited, I didn’t expect the warm wave of nostalgia I got from just riding the elevator, the one I’d ridden thousands of times before. The little warm fuzzy from being recognized and greeted at the security desk, the temperature of the conference room and the scuff of the conference room chair on my legs. I was in that newsroom for more years than I’ve ever lived in any home in my life, and that’s probably going to remain true for a really, really long time.

    I don’t miss being there every day, but the thought that in a few years it may not exist — that the staff will move to an unfamiliar place as the building is razed or built out into something else — fills me with a lot of sadness. But I guess I’m learning how important it is to make new homes, to find new places you love, and to be out in the world more.

    I’m trying to explore more, to be less tied to locations and rooms, to feel as comfortable in wide open spaces than in bulb-lit interiors. It doesn’t always come natural for me.

    All I did for the Statesman at SXSW:

    CNN’s clubhouse at SXSW was… bogus

    In the lead-up to SXSW, I also got asked to double up on some panels and write different versions for the journalism organization Poynter. This was a much bigger challenge than I was expecting! South by Southwest is exhausting enough and when you find the time to sit and write something, it’s a small miracle, but then to start over and try to write the same thing again, the thing you just pretty much said what you wanted to say about, from a different angle… well, that was tougher than I thought it might be.

    So for Poynter, I offered a more journalism-focused take on the Trevor Noah panel, a more Poynter-iffic take on the panel about rural/Trump country reporting, and a third piece that wasn’t double-up for the Statesman, a very powerful panel about covering family separations at the border.

    SXSW activations, always a constant

    And because I wasn’t done overloading myself with work, I also did two pieces for a blockchain news site, Modern Consensus. I interviewed Austin’s Dave Sikora after he did a panel and I covered a “Blockchain deathmatch” panel that included Jimmy Song, whom I profiled a few months ago for Breaker Magazine. And for the Book + Film Globe site, I did a wrap-up of all the crazy SXSW activations including ones for “Game of Thrones” and “The Highwaymen.”

    We told her how much we loved “Russian Doll” and she was nice enough to take a pic with us.

    It wasn’t all work, though. I still got to have fun and hang out. Thanks to Jeana, who was not as shy as the rest of our group, I got to meet Natasha Lyonne at an afterparty for a premiere of “Booksmart” where Santigold played and Olivia Wilde celebrated a birthday.

    I ate a fucking lot of cheese. I gave good cookie advice. I bought a “Nancy” shirt that arrived in time to wear for at least one day of SXSW.

    There was lots more, but like every SXSW, it has already started to fade and compress and feel like one long fevery dream where everything happened all at once.

    South by South Rest

    Here’s the rest of other things I’ve been working on since February.

    For the aforementioned Book + Film, I did a review of Rooster Teeth’s Austin-made anime gen:LOCK which I really enjoyed. I finished off the season after this review was published and I thought it finished strong and left me wanting more. I also reviewed another Austin-made creation, Battle Angel: Alita, which I liked a lot less. Comment writers noted that I don’t seem familiar with the source material, and boy howdy is that true. I had major problems with the film version.

    I had much nicer things to say about the pretty perfect conclusion of Broad City. Most recently, I wrote a mixed-bag review of Donald Glover’s strange but also strangely compelling mini movie Guava Island, now available on Amazon streaming.

    For the Statesman, after SXSW, I wrote about a really great exhibit that took place at the Texas capitol building, “Refugee Is Not My Name.”  For the business section, I did a piece on Austin-made AR pet-adoption app “Furiends.”

    And, new freelance gig! I started writing some piece for Barnes & Noble’s Sci-Fi and Fantasy blog.  My first two pieces were a roundup of scariest Stephen King books that aren’t Pet Sematary and a roundup of six very funny comic books / graphic novels you should be reading.

    Wendi Aarons and I returned for our second piece together at McSweeney’s. It was timed to Equal Pay Day but ended up running a few days after that. It’s called “If Women Completed Work Based On Their Percentage of Wages Compared To Men.” I thought it came out really well.

    And for Texas Standard, I did a whole bunch of things, here’s that list of topics:

    I should also note that I’m still doing daily audio segments for Tech Minute Texas; the site has been updated with 30 more segments, so we’re up to 130 total and I’ve got more coming.

    Life

    When I wasn’t working, I celebrated a birthday, did a long-ass 8+ mile hike for a waterfall in Arizona, ran a 5K with my daughter,  got confused for a dog, adopted three fish as pets, got into a fight with Build-A-Bear, celebrated Manu Ginobili’s retirement, made a really dumb video nobody saw, saw Kacey Musgraves in concert and got excited for Latino Comedy Project’s upcoming new show. I’m not in it, but I backed the project and can’t wait to see how it turns out.

    These have been good months and I can’t wait for summer.

  • Jimmy Song’s Bitcoin faith, ‘Russian Doll’ and other recent writing from a time vortex

    Jimmy Song photo
    Photo by me, for Breaker Magazine

     

    I was warned, repeatedly, that freelance life was a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, particularly in regards to working with editors and with getting paid.

    Five months into my post-job life, I am finding that’s not only true, it’s fuckahellatrue, like so true it makes all other reality a fiction. You know that movie The Truth About Cats and Dogs? This freelance stuff is more true than even that film, my apologies to Janeane Garofalo, just speaking my truth.

    The rhythm is what has been throwing me off, the sense that deadlines are much more fluid, that the time between the time I turn something in and the time that it’s published can stretch and stretch (to months, even), that I can get paid for something I wrote within two or three days, or two or three months.

    These are not novel concerns, these aren’t new issues, every freelancer I know is a choir in no need of preaching to on this. But for me, someone who spent 21 years adhering to schedules and budgets and deadlines and calendars, it has sent me into an existential time dread.  Someone who cares about me deeply recently pointed out that I seem to have lost all sense of time, and that’s not inaccurate. Sometimes the weekdays just fly by because I have no deadline to wake up early, no deadline to get assignments done and plenty of “Overwatch” and “Apex Legends” to play.

    Not that I’m wasting my days doing nothing (my Netflix viewing is up like 80 percent, though, make of that what you will), but I’m working in shorter bursts, not sitting at my desk soaked in the monitor glow all day.  I don’t keep up with Twitter as much as when it was in my face for 8-10 hours a day. I answer emails on the go, sometimes I’m not even at home or in Texas when I do.

    I had a week recently where it felt like nobody was responding to emails I’d sent and pitches I’d made, where I didn’t have any urgent writing pending apart from some long-term deadlines I’m in the middle of, and I didn’t even have any thoughts worth Tweeting.  There began to be a sense that I was disappearing, that I was losing the thread of myself and what I was supposed to be doing outside the normal family/house/pet obligations. It was a weird displaced feeling, but not completely unwelcome. At the height of my time at the Statesman, when I was putting out stories and podcasts on top of all the freelance stuff I was doing, I sometimes got tired of hearing my own voice, got tired of being the carnival barker peddling my own warez all the time.  I wanted quiet, I wanted to stop talking, I wanted to retreat into myself for a little while and be still.

    And now I’m getting some doses of that and… it’s an adjustment. Be careful what you wish for, right?

    But then that quiet is broken up by responses and publishing and money in the mail, and suddenly I’m back into it.  It was just temporary.  And now I’m talking again.

     

     

    I woke up this morning determined to get going early, to make this week count. And to my surprise, I saw that a story I’ve been working on since last year was suddenly published.

    Breaker Magazine is a New York online publication that pushed out lots of news and culture stories about the blockchain and Bitcoin scenes.  I got hooked up with them last summer by a mutual friend and in the fall, I started working on a profile of Jimmy Song, an Austinite who was making waves in that world with some very strong (and often brutal) opinions.  I met up with him and found him to be super nice and easy to chat with, a contrast to his sometimes spiky online hot takes, and a fascinating subject.

    The story went through some significant edits and a major rewrite, resulting in more rounds of interviewing.  I’m so pleased with the result; it’s been a long time since I went through a process like that, the kind of edit where you begin to question your own self-worth as a writer, but I was so lucky to have editors who could see the finish line and what the story could be.

    I think Jimmy is something more people in Austin’s tech scene should know about.

    Elsewhere in the Omar-verse, I’ve been keeping busy writing culture reviews for Book + Film Globe and additional stories for the Statesman.

    The great Natasha Lyonne. Credit: Netflix, yo

     

    I did a review of the excellent Netflix series “Russian Doll.”  Honestly, I could have written another 5,000 words about the nuances and greatness of this show, but it was written the weekend the series debuted and I was trying really trying hard to keep any spoilers out of it because it really is something best viewed fresh. The review seems to have resonated with people who were unsure about investing time in the show. A Facebook friend wrote, ” I literally went from zero to 100% in terms of interest in this series,” so that was nice to hear.

    In other Netflix-related writing, I reviewed the last bunch of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” episodes for Book + Film Globe.  I had given up on the show early in Season Three, but decided to catch up over the holidays and I’m glad I did. Despite some of its faults (and I get why people started to turn away from the series), I think it ended well and that the stuff it was good at (dense joke writing, absurdist characters) vastly outweighed the problematic. If you fell off, too, I really think it’s worth finishing.

    For Austin360, I followed up my Paul McCartney concert column with something a little bit less emotional, a story about how bad I am at organizing all my digital photos and videos. Here’s a little clip from that video I describe in the story:

     

    I also wrote a more newsy daily story for the business section about Retro Studios taking over development of Nintendo’s “Metroid Prime 4.” A big deal for gamers!

    On the “Texas Standard” radio show, we’ve done segments about smart watches and health, about why Instagram is doing so well (plus viral egg photos), Apple’s recent security/privacy woes, and a follow up on that Austin360 photo organizing piece.

     

     

    Things are pretty good! It looks like I’ll be covering South by Southwest again for the Statesman next month and I have some other projects and pitches in the pipeline.  Thanks to everybody who’s been supportive.

    If you’ve made it this far, all three of you, I want to ask — would you be interested in an email newsletter of stuff like this and some additional writing/recommendations/multimedia?

    I’ve been mulling doing that (and maybe cross posting it here).  I definitely wouldn’t charge for it, at least not until I felt it was something worth paying for, and maybe even then I’d just do it as as additional content.

    Some of my favorite online writers have been doing really interesting stuff with their email newsletters and I wonder if that would give me incentive to update more often.

    Anyhoo, if you have thoughts, let me know!

  • Things Conclude

    Photo by Anne on Flickr
    Photo by Anne on Flickr

    I’ve seen the world / I’ve kissed all the pretty girls / I’ve said my goodbyes” – The Unicorns

    I don’t think it’s unusual to be good at beginnings, OK at middles and not-so-great at endings. Rarely do I struggle with first words, but saying goodbye or ending on the right note or not knowing when to stop is often my undoing.

    Since last time, I was looking forward to getting through to the other side of several things, of finishing off a set of assignments so I could get back to things being normal (which is not really a thing, this “normal” time, but I mean relatively speaking). I was looking ahead to South by Southwest Interactive being over in mid-March. I was looking forward to wrapping up the last few episodes of The Walking Dead Season Four and the last season of How I Met Your Mother for Previously.TV as both shows sprinted to the finish. (Who could have know that of the two, HIMYM would have the more controversial, darker conclusion?)

    My birthday was coming and I was kind of looking forward to just getting past that and saying goodbye to 38 without giving it as much thought as I did last year, when I felt time rushing at me and very little of what I wanted to accomplish completed. It’s different this year. The two things I wanted most to bring into the world last year have both come to be. Instead of approaching this birthday with dread that so much was left to do, I was able to look back and feel a little more on-track. That was nice. But it was still kind of a so-long to an age and a time.

    I didn’t know that there would be a lot more goodbyes than I was anticipating. I didn’t know, for example, that Television Without Pity, my online home for so many years for writing about gay alien superheroes, among other wonderful things, was going to be shut down. For the last few years, I hadn’t been recapping, only working on videos with my brother (which, unfortunately, appear to have not survived the death of TWOP online; maybe we can get them back up somehow) and doing a once-a-year tech gift guide. But it was still the place from which so many wonderful things sprang, where I found a big hunk of my online voice and where I made a lot of good friends. That news stung. You begin to take for granted that things don’t last forever when something like that looms so large you can’t imagine it gone. For a while, it looked as if all the recaps, all those years of work from so many writers, were just going to disappear. It took me a few days to remember that, oh yeah, Pablo and I did more than 100 videos for them as well. Where were those going to go?

    I had those things in my head rolling around as SXSW receded into memory and the stuff with TWOP was getting so much attention recently and occupying my thoughts. Then I got a call from my wife. She found our cat, Rico, near our front door. He was gone, suddenly, this sweet, bold, cat who was the active adventurer of our three (then two, now one).

    Not to make this the Dead Cat Journal, but I feel like this just happened, like I just buried a beloved friend. It was almost two years ago, but it hit hard. Cosa was a few years older, crankier, filled with strife and struggle. Rico was a happy cat, fun and carefree and completely independent. He seemed ever young and immortal.

    MY car.

    My daughter is about to complete first grade. My brother and I decided to take a short break from our Space Monkeys! comic for about two months to work on some other stuff and recharge our batteries. This month, I celebrated my 10-year wedding anniversary, which like a lot of things with us, always seems to fall in the middle of the week with a celebration planned later. We ended up making up for it with a fun weekend trip to Austin (away from the kids).  These three things aren’t real conclusions, but they are at least commas in the action, pauses to reflect in a stream of activity.

    I don’t really know what to make of all the actual endings, though. I know that the things I care about most continue. I don’t know what to do for Rico’s brother, Diego, but I hope to make him a happy cat who doesn’t grieve for long. Our Shots podcast continues, and it’s been fun and rewarding in so many ways. But that, too, is due for a turn: my co-host Tolly is soon to have a baby, so there’ll be a lot of tap dancing and filling-in with guest-hosts while she’s gone, but that’s not the same as a conclusion, but another pause in the conversation.

    TWOP certainly continues in spirit (and then some) at Previously, which in one of those weird, perfectly apt course-corrections of the universe, received a flood of traffic and new forum activity after the TWOP announcement.

    Except for the situation with Rico, which is just sad (it took us a while to finally tell the girls and they were crushed for only a few seconds before asking if they could get new pets), the other goodbyes seem like opportunities to reevaluate, to use some of the free time (and vacation time) to figure out what other things I want to be doing and bringing ahead with me and what things I want to leave in the past.

    Most of the things I’ve been happiest with have bubbled up from restless energy and, after several months of working at full speed, I’m looking forward to feeling a little bored and then breaking out of that.

    The end of TWoP

     

    End of TWOP
    A last message at TelevisionWithoutPity.com
     

    My online life really started with Television Without Pity. So much happened in the more than 13 years I wrote for them. I spent years with Smallville. I met so many of my favorite people. I made videos with my brother, more than 100 of them. And even toward the end, when I was really just doing a holiday tech gift guide for them annually, it still felt like home, a place I’d always want to come back to and check in with, a place I knew I could always go back to if I wanted to.

    I said my goodbyes in a forum thread that included farewells and thanks from the staff past and present. I know there’s probably much more to say, but I feel like I left my heart and my tears in that post.

    Recode broke the news about TWOP being shut down.

    The archives will be preserved, at least for the recaps. The site went dark in early April and the forums will shut down after May 31.

    Previously.tv

    Part of the weirdness of TWOP shutting down has been that the site’s original creators, who went on to create Previously.tv, suddenly have this huge influx of new forum posters (the forums, as luck would have it, had just gone live a few weeks before the TWOP announcement) and of displaced writers, a lot of whom have a new place to pitch their ideas.

    All of this happened on my last week of writing about Season Four of The Walking Dead and the week of the last episode ever of How I Met Your Mother.

    It was also the same week that I got to be a guest on my favorite podcast, Extra Hot Great, in a first-ever Skype-remote third-coast extravaganza! We of course talked about those two shows and a lot more and I came THIS CLOSE (fingers squeezed together) to winning game time and then completely choked on my own hubris and exhaustion. Not to spoil it. I won’t tell you who DID win, so go listen to it.

    As part of that podcast, I also appeared on four EHG Minis that week, including one about reality show shop challenges, one about documentary TV reboots (shoutout to cranky Mr. Wizard!), a Mini about actors on cancelled showed who should be picked up by other shows and a Mini about the way TV shows get cities we lived in wrong (in my case, Austin and The Real World).

    And then here’s all the Walking Dead Particles and HIMYM Show-O-Matic write-ups (all screen shots AMC TV and CBS, respectively):

    Walking Dead S4E12: Beth and Daryl get drunk-ass

    Walking Dead Season Four, Episode 12: Beth and Daryl hang out and drink moonshine and stuff and it’s not at all weird or overly sentimental.

    (I missed Episode 13 because of South by Southwest, but Tara Ariano did an awesome job subbing that week)

    Walking Dead S4E14: Lizzie's folly

    Walking Dead Season Four, Episode 14: The one where THEY WENT THERE with Lizzie and Mika. Boy did this one bum me out for days. I think this might be the most disturbing episode of the whole series so far.

    Walking Dead S4E15: Shut up, Glenn

    Walking Dead Season Four, Episode 15: Glenn is all schmoopy about Maggie, blah blah blah, tunnelcakes.

     

    Walking Dead S4E16: Terminus among us

    Walking Dead Season Four, Episode 16: Terminus is among us and it’s some crazy-ass shit in there.

    A half-season that started off kinda slow and got good and crazy toward the end.

     

     

     

    And now for that other show that’s not quite as good at killing off characters:

    HIMYM S9E19: Oh no, don't do this!

    How I Met Your Mother, Season Nine, Episode 19: The one where they hint that something in Ted and The Mother’s future might be VERY WRONG OH NO WHY DIDN’T WE KNOW BETTER THAN TO STOP WATCHING RIGHT THEN AND THERE!?

    I didn’t do Episode 20 because of SXSW, but read Tara’s write-up here.

    HIMYM S9E20: Oh cool, I like that guy.

    How I Met Your Mother, Season Nine, Episode 21: Ted and The Mother’s first date, the actual wedding and Gary Blauman in a weird and random episode that should have flagged us to the misery ahead.

    HIMYM S9E21: Jeez, FINALLY.

    How I Met Your Mother, Season Nine, Episode 22: The penultimate episode strains and strains to tie things up, which we’ll soon learn was mere misdirection.

    HIMYM S9E23: How to Mess It All Up

    How I Met Your Mother, Season Nine, Episode 23/24: The finale. Holy moley did they miscalculate on this one and how much people would hate what they saw in the last few minutes. I’m not even going to spoil it or go into it, just Google, “How I Met Your Mother biffed ending” or “HIMYM wtf?” or “HIMYM what the shit went wrong!?” and you’ll get an idea. Or better yet, read what I wrote. I think I was surprisingly kind in my write-up given that I watched every single episode of the show and felt the ending completely negated a lot of what came before. But it’s over. And we never have to speak of it again.

    Ginsberg done lost it!

    And in a really fun one-shot, I subbed for an episode of Mad Men and it happened to be the nuttiest one of this half season 7, the one with the nipple and the threesome and all the insanity.

    I plan to come back for the next season of Walking Dead because those Particles are super fun to do, and hope to write some other stuff here and there this summer. Go check out Previously if you haven’t already. There’s so much great stuff posted all the time.

     

    Statesman stuff (non-SXSW)

    "Titanfall," a game I wrote about

    Stuff I have been writing since March for the Statesman that didn’t involve South by Southwest Interactive or Statesman Shots:

    And in a nice break from all the tech stuff, I got to write a few reviews for the Moontower Comedy Festival. One was a review of Maria Bamford, whom I’d never seen live and who, I thought, was revelatory.

    Then there was Fred Armisen’s thing that wasn’t really a full performance, but more like a good hang? Is that even a thing? Can you get paid to be a good hang in front of people? Because that’s a career I could really get behind.

     

    SXSW insanity

    #SXSW in one photo. #360sxsw

    It’s been more than a month, so I won’t rehash everything about SXSW Interactive. It’s the busiest work time of the year for me and, this many years later, I still throw myself fully into the thing even as it expands in both directions (starting earlier, ending later as it bleeds into SXSW Music).

    This year, one of the interesting things was that Fast Company did an oral history of Interactive and I was one of dozens of people they interviewed about the fest. I’m quoted in a fun wrap-up they did and in the full e-book they released before the festival (iBooks version; Kindle version).

    That sort of set the tone of the festival a bit; a lot of it seemed to be spent looking back on how the fest feels now compared to its early years and looking ahead wondering if the tremendous growth has damaged its future.

    The main pieces I wrote as previews of SXSW Interactive 2014 included a SXSW 101 for newbies that ran as a Digital Savant column.

    During the fest, we ran a photo essay (also as a column) showing some of the visual highlights.

    I had a front-page story covering the Edward Snowden talk with a video wrap-up about it as well.

    Other keynotes I covered included Chelsea Clinton, Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Mythbusters” co-host Adam Savage, 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki, and opening speaker Austin Kleon. I also interviewed Austin Kleon right before the festival about his new book, Show Your Work, and about the talk.

    Panels and other coverage stuff:

    Daft Punk but Latino

    My wrap-up of the festival for the paper that ran two days after the fest concluded was about how SXSW Interactive this year struggled with the signal-to-noise ratio.

    We broke some news about attendance dropping at Interactive for the first time in many years, but due to a numbers snafu from the festival, that turned out not to actually be true; the festival actually grew another 7 percent in 2014.

    And later on, with a little more perspective, I wrote 10 lessons to take away from this year’s festival (plus two bonus lessons on the blog post about the column).

    I probably missed one or two things, but honestly, at this point, who the fuck cares? If you even came close to making it through that list, you care a lot more about my coverage of the fest at this point than I do nearly two months later. It feels like a fever dream, honestly. A really fun one.

    Titanfall is here. #sxsw #sxsw360

    The George Takei story

    Here is the story that goes with that video, in brief.

    During SXSW I got offered an interview with George Takei, who was in town promoting a new online show he was working on called Takei’s Take. He was also doing a panel that I was going to have to miss and we kept going back and forth on whether we could schedule something or not.

    After lots of wrangling and dealing with downtown traffic congestion, I was able to make it out for a very short window we had with him and one of our new videographers met me there. As we got ready to sit down on the rooftop of a building pretty far away from all the SXSW action, I told our videographer pretty much everything I knew about Takei, from random Star Trek trivia to how much I’d learned about him from his years as an announcer on The Howard Stern Show. Who knew how he’d be in “Real life,” but on that show, at least, he was an extremely good sport, a guy comfortable enough to talk about his personal life, his penis preference, life with his husband Brad and, on an unexpectedly poignant radio documentary on Stern’s network, his time as a child in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II.

    We sat down with George finally, who was as warm, welcoming, sharp and gregarious as one would hope. The video is the bulk of the conversation and I think he was pleased to get questions about the musical he’s working on. And I’m pretty damned sure nobody else interviewing him that day got him to sing. (Around the 9:30 mark) I’m adding a line to my resume’s list of skills that says, “Got serenaded by George Takei.”

    Here’s what is not in the video: I asked George if he’s sick of people coming up and doing impressions of his voice and he said not at all, he finds it flattering. He may have been acting polite and secretly despises it but when I intoned in my best Takei voice the word, “Musculature,” he gave out a hearty laugh that didn’t seem faked.

    But the best part was after the interview when I was handed a small temporary tattoo of George Takei’s face and I told him, “I know just where to put this!”

    And, very naughty, he purred, “Oh, and where would that be?!”

    So I fired back, “Wouldn’t you like to know!”

    And of course, he said, “Oh MYYYY!” with perfect timing.

    We both laughed and he went off to get his stuff to leave.  Then a few seconds later, as he was passing on his way out with a small entourage, we said goodbyes and I called out after him, “You BEHAVE, George!” He left with that delightful guffaw ringing in the Austin air.

    And that’s my George Takei story. I don’t think it could have gone any more perfectly.

    I made this gentleman sing to me and we kinda flirted. #360sxsw #sxsw

     

    Shots

    I don’t know what to add since last time about Statesman Shots, the podcast that Tolly Moseley and I started, except to say that I’m so in love with the show it’s really become my favorite thing about my job right now and the thing I look forward to working on most every week.

    It’s still a baby podcast, a small show with a small audience as it’s only a few months old. We’re cheap; we haven’t spent much money at all on the show (just time and staff resources and some freelance money) and there’s been no marketing of it at all outside of our editorial department.

    That makes me a little nervous, but I also know that we’re putting out a really great show every week and that the people who have found it and have listened to it (or watched the videos) seem to get what we’re doing and enjoy it.

    I think it’s hard to convey, especially over social media and other short-form places, how much we’re packing into each episode, how wide-ranging the discussions are and how much ground we cover in about an hour.

    My big new year’s thing for 2014 was “Outside,” of getting out of my head and into the world a little more.

    I still spend a lot of time at home and in the office, but with “Shots” I feel a lot more connected to the community and for an hour each week (and during all the prep time and post-recording discussion that goes on), I feel like I’m getting to put out there stuff that’s on my mind and to connect with smart, entertaining people. It’s a real gift and I can only hope that the love and care we’re putting into it and the fun we’re having comes across and transfers well.

    Here’s all the episodes we’ve done since last time I blogged, two long months ago, with a little behind the scenes.

    Episode 7: Dale Roe on Austin comedy  — We didn’t have any videos this week because of a massive memory card failure, but it was still a great pre-SXSW episode with a lot of discussion about comedy. And I got to do my Hank Hill voice.

    Alyssa Vidales, who shoots and records our stuff and edits it beautifully, took this photo:

    Episode 8 with Peter Blackstock and guest co-host Addie Broyles — I had to miss this recording because of SXSW, but Tolly did a great job taking the reigns with fill-in co-host Addie Broyles to talk about SXSW Music, robots and the future of food. Little did we know how crazy SXSW Music would actually be.

    Episode 9 with Statesman music/entertainment editor Sharon Chapman — Sharon is incredibly busy and had to have been super exhausted right after SXSW Music weekend when we recorded, but she was kind enough to join us to talk about the tragic accident that happened that weekend. It was a very heavy topic to discuss, but Sharon was a great guest and her pop culture savvy is evident through the whole episode.

    Episode 10 with fitness writer Pam LeBlanc — This turned out to be a really fun one. Pam is one of those people who completely loves her job and her enthusiasm for getting out there and trying new things and experiencing what Central Texas has to offer is inspiring. We recorded this right as I was deciding to take up a new personal training program that has turned out really well. I was getting really tired of feeling like my body and my lack of exercise were getting out of control. I loved the discussions we had about camps in this episode.

    Episode 11 with happiness expert (and UT McCombs School of business professor) Raj Raghunathan — this was our first big risk in having on a guest we’d never actually met before. We went back and forth on whether this was a good idea and it turned out great. Two things convinced us we should try it: we couldn’t resist the idea of having a happiness expert speak with us and Prof. Raghunathan’s videos online showed he was a good speaker with personality who wouldn’t freeze up on camera. He was a really entertaining guest.

    Episode 12 with Brian Gaar — It would probably embarrass Brian to hear this, but we were actually very nervous about it because Brian is becoming a very successful and respected stand-up comic and Twitter superstar. We began to think there was no way he’d bother with our goofy podcast even though I’ve known him as the guy in the newsroom I geek out with over new Nintendo releases. So we held off on asking him on for a while because of this. Moontower Comedy Fest presented a good opportunity and Brian didn’t hesitate for a moment to say yes. Once we knew he was on board, we knew he’s be great on the show and he did not disappoint. I finally got to see Brian perform live and it was a huge treat. He has a new comedy album you should check out.

    And a post I wrote about the addictive games 2048 and Threes!

    Episode 13 with Matthew Odam on Austin food culture — This is another one we held off on for a while, but mostly for logistics. As a restaurant critic, Matthew doesn’t prominently show his face in print or on video, living in a state of pseudo-anonymity on the public scene. Since we shoot video with each episode, we had to figure out how to have him on without showing his face. We ended up shooting him from over the shoulder but at one point, we even considered pixellating him. In the end, we thought it would be too distracting to do it that way. I love the “Name Tolly’s Baby” segment, which is one of the first videos I feel really gelled visually with what we do, along with the one about dream desks.

    Episode 14 with Nancy Flores on several Latino entertainment festivals and other topics — Nancy was proposed as a guest from the very beginning and said she was interested, so it was just a matter of figuring out the best week to have her come in. With two big Latin-American-themed festivals coming up, the timing was good. Also, and this is delicate to discuss, I feel strongly we need to have a pretty diverse roster of guests on the show and up to this point we hadn’t discussed at all much related to being Latino in Austin. (And I take the blame for that since it’s not something I don’t always feel qualified to discuss as I float between being connected/disconnected to that part of my cultural makeup). (The first video also tells the story of my bummer birthday flat tire fiasco.)

     

    Episode 15 with screenwriter and blogger Lauren Modery on hipsterism and more — this was another case of a news event taking over the discussion and working out, timing-wise. A well-known local blogger died in a pedestrian/drunk driving accident and it was someone Lauren knew. We were able to take up a discussion that had been happening all weekend on Twitter and in local blogs and try to put it in a larger context. On a story I worked on about podcasts, I had watched Lauren get interviewed, so it was in the back of my mind that we should have a different conversation than the one she’d already had with someone else.

    Episode 16 with nonprofits guru (and fun pal) David J. Neff — Tolly and I both know and have worked with David on stuff and knew he would get our vibe quickly and keep up. I give David a hard time online a lot because he’s silly that way, but he’s actually one of the smartest, get-shit-done do-gooders I know in Austin. Whenever I feel a social group needs to get together for something, Dave is always near the top of my invite list. Shots was no exception. Of all the videos we’ve done, I think the zombie survival one below is my favorite so far.

    A post I did about one of my picks on “A Toast,” the TV show Silicon Valley’s first five episodes.

    And lastly, a new “MasterGIF Theatre” related to the Star Wars stuff we did.

    If you’re not into all these videos and don’t want to go through all the blog entries, you can grab the audio of these episodes directly from iTunes and/or SoundCloud. Please subscribe, please download, please rate the show. We really need your support!

    We’re also on Facebook and Twitter, ready to talk with you about pretty much anything.

    Space Monkeys

    Monkeys discuss TVOur monkeys took a multi-week hiatus during and after South by Southwest as both Pablo and I were so busy in March. Then we got back on track, but decided, two months later, to take a real official break until early July. So here are the last comics till then!

    The monkeys returned after SXSW with a comic about Titanfall, which we had both been playing. We actually worked up a SXSW-related comic, but by the time it would have been finished, too much time had passed and it seemed like it wasn’t going to work.

    There was also a comic based on the shitstorm that followed the finale of How I Met Your Mother. I’m not exaggerating. I believe actual shit flew in the air in a storm of bad feelings from fans.

    We did a comic about scholarships, donors and kidneys. It all ties together neatly!

    The General got himself into a scrape by saying, “Oh, HAIL no!” So don’t do that.

    Bobbo and Meany tried Google Glass, with disastrous results.

    And Bobbo played a videogame about sloths. He found he liked it a lot.

    Expect the comic to return around July 10.

     

    Other random stuff

    A few more random things.

    Here’s a photo I love of the girls from a month or two ago:

    Rides.

     

     

    This was taken around midnight as my birthday was starting when I went to see Wild Child at Emo’s. Fantastic show.

     

    Watching Wild Child perform as my birthday rolls in. Doing this one right.

     

    Ralph Barrera and I accepting Barbara Jordan Media Awards for a story we worked on with Tina Phan, a profile of artist Francis Tsai.

     

    At the Barbara Jordan Awards with Ralph Barrera. Also winning: Tina Phan!

    Probably my favorite picture of the girls right now:

    Yesterday, Easter part 1

    And one more, how I felt after SXSW concluded, taken at the Museum of the Weird, on a day when I get to hang out with Rob and Schuyler, two of my favorite people.

    Me, when #SXSW is over. #360sxsw

    Super resemblance, right?

    There’s more, there’s always so much more, but I’ve been working on this blog entry for two months, the longest I’ve ever let one slide, and it’s time to put it to bed and, I hope, come back more often and much shorter.

    Sorry for so much, but it was a pretty eventful two months, right? I always feel like I should be doing more even when the evidence suggests I’m already dong way too much, and I’ve been in one of those strange moods pretty much this whole year, trying to decide on one more thing I could be doing that would be fun and challenging and special.  I’m still working on last year’s thing and trying to get that out somehow, but I don’t want to just stall and not move forward. I have an idea or two and now that this blog post is done, don’t really have an excuse not to tackle it.

    That’s probably why it took two months. Nothing like working hard as a means of procrastination.

    See you soon.

  • 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.

  • 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.