Tag: the walking dead

Wintry mix
Nobody’s house in Austin looked anything like this during our “Snowpocalypse”

Here are three short things and then everything else I’ve been working on.

Ice

As I’m writing this, we are getting past a very brief ice/snow storm that in central Texas was treated as apocalyptic. At first, people were calling it “Snowpocalypse” ironically because all we ever get is a dusting of snowflakes and maybe half an inch of ice in our worst winters, but then more than 200 people got into car accidents and suddenly it doesn’t seem like such a joke.

Transplanted northerners who live here think the whole thing is silly but they’re also smart enough to stay the Hell off the roads because people here can’t drive even when it’s 70 degrees and sunny. I used to think we had pretty decent drivers compared to other parts of the country but that was before smart phones. Now I don’t trust anybody on the road; I just assume they’re all texting and playing Angry Birds as they drift out of the lanes at 80 mph. Trust me. I commute more than 100 miles roundtrip. I see this shit every damn day.

The ice meant we stayed home with the girls. We took turns doing work-from-home shifts as we alternated entertaining/feeding/keeping warm the daughters. After much pre-production, they finally got bundled up and went outside into the wintry expanse of our backyard which was pretty iced over. It wasn’t the wintry wonderland they were promised by dreams of Frozen-like snowfall (more on that in a minute). But they were enchanted anyway, especially Carolina, who hasn’t really ever seen snow and was too young to appreciate icicles and crunchy grass last time we had this.

By the afternoon, they were completely stir crazy from being inside the house too long. Before dark the ice was already gone and it was just a cold day.

I really don’t know how people who deal with months of snow do it. Not the de-icing the car part or the driving on snow. I lived in Oklahoma, which isn’t that much further north, but gets tons more snow. It never bothered me and I actually prefer it to the 110-degree summers here.

But having kids in cold weather is stressful. You always imagine they’re going to throw over the covers and wake up chilled in the morning or that an icicle will fall off the roof and pierce them in the eye. I guess summer has dangers, too, but they’re dangers I grew up with and that we’re used to dealing with. Sunscreen, A/C, lots of shade and trips to cool swimming pools.

Winter is… what? Hot chocolate, lots of Netflix and clothes layering?

Imminent launch

Last time I wrote here, I was about to go back to work after several vacation weeks and was full of nervous energy about what was ahead.

Part of it was that I was returning to writing my weekly column with absolutely no idea what I was going to write next, which is always a scary leap of faith that tends to work itself out. That’s exactly what happened. After a few days of fumbling and catching up on email, the ideas started coming and now things are pretty much scheduled more than a month out as things should be in the months before South by Southwest Interactive arrives. (I felt the cold chill of something walking over my grave as I typed that.)

The thing I was most excited to get back to was preparing to launch our podcast. We did a pilot/test episode back in November and as cobbled together as it was, we all really liked how it turned out and everyone agreed we should do more of them.

By the time you read this we may have already recorded our first new episode. It’s going to be called “Statesman Shots” and it will have its own blog and will be a weekly show about Austin culture hosted by me and by the charming and wonderful Tolly Moseley. You’re going to get sick of hearing me talk about how great Tolly is, but everyone who has met her through working on this agrees: she’s the best. Funny, nice, full of great stories, curious about culture and possessed of a great voice made for broadcasting.

It turns out that putting together a podcast for work (as opposed to doing one myself in the garage) is a shit-ton of work and involves lots of moving parts. I’ve basically become a project manager, something I haven’t really done since my days as an editor, but I’m so determined to make Shots work that it hasn’t been a bother at all. It’s been fun to geek out about audio quality, to talk about how the podcast will work in the context of everything else we do (including ways to get things that come out of it into the print edition) and planning ahead.

I want you to hear it and that will be something that can happen very, very soon. It’s hard to believe that it’s taken a year and a half for Tolly and I to turn this into a reality, but I’m so glad neither of us gave up on the idea and that the talented people I work who are helping make it happen believe in it, too.

As soon as we have the first new episode and videos posted (oh yes, there’ll be videos, too), I’ll put up a blog entry about it here. It could be as soon as Thursday or Friday.

Thinkery

This was a very small thing, but something I haven’t forgotten since last week.

We went to the Austin children’s museum, which moved and was renamed The Thinkery. (Try explaining that name to a four-year-old. Not possible.)

It was great, just the right amount of learny stuff mixed with fun, running-around stuff and the kids didn’t take a moment to overthink any of it, they just dived in and grabbed and jumped and did whatever was called for in each area as if there were specific microchips in their brains that were activated in each new environment instructing them what to do and how it was to be done.

There was one big playroom with big, foamy objects to climb on and toys to bounce upon. I noticed right next to it was an area that was closed off and meant for infants and toddlers. There were soft toys like giant carrots strewn on the floor of that area and kids were having a great time.

My daughters didn’t even give that space a glance. They walked right past it without any inkling of curiosity and went straight to the big-kids area.

It left my breathless for a moment. I know they’re not toddlers anymore. Lilly’s long past that. I know it. But Carolina was just a baby. She was just in diapers. Lilly grew fast, but her move from infant to toddler to little girl seemed to take ages. Carolina, on the other hand leapfrogged through those stages impatiently, never clinging to them the way her sister did. She never looked back in her race to be like her sister.

It was a weird moment that they didn’t notice, but that made itself loud and clear to me. I don’t have toddlers. My toddlers are long gone. And it’s way past time to treat them as if they were.

Statesman stuff

In addition the podcast stuff, which is taking up more and more time as we get close to launch, here’s what else I’ve been writing in January.

As soon as I got from vacation, I wrote my annual Omarstradamus column, predicting 2014’s year of technology trends. I also took a look back at my 2013 predictions to see how I did.

Over my vacation, I got pretty obsessed with the movie Her (which I got to see early) and the British TV show Black Mirror, which aired on DirecTV. I jumped at the chance to write a story comparing their opposing views of the near future.

My next column was about wearable tech, inspired by my finally breaking down and buying a Fitbit device. I’m still wearing it and I’m getting better about remembering to turn it on/off for sleep and using it as a motivator for exercise, not just as a pedometer. I also did a short follow-up blog post with a few more observations.

Last week’s column was about a Saturday I spent at Data Day Texas, a conference for data geeks where I was in way over my head. That’s not such a bad thing! Turns out I still learned six things worth passing on.

Micro features in January included one about Austin e-lending library help, an explainer on dual-boot devices, about what’s going to happen when Microsoft stops support Windows XP and a recent one about ways to watch the Super Bowl online and on an iPad or smart phone.

For the Digital Savant blog, I had some South by Southwest Interactive news, including speakers added to the lineup such as Julian Assange, Mindy Kaling and Neil deGrasse Tyson (!).

I also wrote about my weird adventure renting games on Redbox. Or rather NOT renting games because every disc I rented turned out to be a piece of paper put there by a PlayStation 4 disc thief. It turns out it’s a huge nationwide scam that shows no signs of going away. So I’m not renting anymore, obviously.

And like I said, there’ll be lots more to share once the podcast gets going.

Previously.tv

Credit: Cartoon Network

The Walking Dead is still on hiatus (but not for long).

For now, I’m still writing about How I Met Your Mother’s wildly erratic last season. Their new Slap Bet episode was a huge disappointment but then the episode right after that (which featured bugs with boobs, follow the link to see) was a big return to form. Conclusion? Every episode is a crapshoot.

My favorite thing I got to write was a “Get on board!” about the animated show Rick and Morty, another recent obsession. I’ll be talking about it a little bit on the first new podcast as well.

Space Monkeys!

Lastly, our monkey friends have kept on keeping on after the holidays.

We made a comic about Her and its implications for future man/sloth-computer romance.

We also did a comic featuring the return of Anything But Mini-Me, a child we have not abandoned in the story.

And most recently, Meany embarked on the creation of a documentary, inspired (or angered, at least) by Blackfish. He might be the only character around who can find a reason to be mad at orcas.

Other stuff

If you made it this far… wow, congratulations! Here are some other random things happening:
- I was on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Central Time to talk about tech that came out of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. The MP3 audio is here directly.
- The Mexcentrics, the new sketch troupe I worked with last year, has a new show coming in February! We wrote it in a blur through December and early January and it’s already in rehearsals. I really dig the poster for it.
- What I’ve been playing: I finished Super Mario 3D World, which was just absolutely fantastic. I’ve been playing Brothers, I finished The Banner Saga (which my next column is about) and I’m still trying to find time to dig into Gone Home and other games I missed playing through in 2013.
- I’m sure there’s a lot more I’m missing, but that’s all I can think of. The kids are doing great (they got to go to the San Antonio Zoo in addition to The Thinkery this month and have been having lots of adventures around here).
That’s it! Thanks for sticking through a long update.
January 26, 2014
November bounty

This entry has taken a few weeks to write.

Not because it’s long (well, it is, but I’m pretty fast), but because things kept happening all through November that in a slower month all would have warranted their own lengthy write-up. A few things I’ve been working on and planting seeds on for a good long while (one of them for more than a year) finally started to bear fruit and all of a sudden I was busy tending to them.

These things definitely fall into the banner of “Good problems to have,” but it’s made summing up what’s going on a little difficult. On the one hand, I’m thrilled that a story I was working on for a long time and a podcast project I was beginning to worry would never happen have finally gone public. I can talk about them without setting up expectations that don’t pay off.

That said, I’m so far behind on putting it all together in context that they already seem like they’re in the rearview mirror.

But it’s still remarkable to me that those two projects, which just seemed impossible and daunting a few months ago, are now real. And then there was another goal of mine for this year, to write for a website I really admire. I’m now writing for them every week and couldn’t be happier about.

Last week, I started a vacation for an unseemly amount of time due to not getting sick or taking much vacation this year and I’m working on making the last major thing on my year’s to-do list, getting the novel I finished over the summer, into the publishing process.

That’s a big one, a big, scary task that has been looming since the thing was finished. I didn’t really have a guide for what to do next besides work on a second draft and start seeking a little bit of feedback. But publishing seemed like a whole other obstacle course, one I had no experience with whatsoever. So I fretted. And waited. And ended up doing not much at all and moving on to other things.

I figured out I was actually scared to even try to move it forward. The other things that have happened this month finally gave me the confidence to say, “Fuck dat noise” and to try even if it means rejection and doing some hard work on my own to make this happen. It never occurred to me, in all my worry since finishing the thing, that it might not necessarily be a series of rejections. Maybe someone will want it. What then? I never even considered that and skipped ahead in my mind to the part where it was already rejected and I was bouncing back from this imaginary turn-down.

I’ll talk about that one more later when something has happened. Right now I actually am in the waiting phase, but if feels good to have the ball on someone else’s court instead of spinning my wheels alone in mine.

Here are the other things that have happened over the last month. There’s lots to share.

Francis Tsai

Photo by Ralph Barrera / Austin American-Statesman

[Note: I wrote this part a few weeks ago right after the story was published in early November]

Things have been a little emotional around here lately.

Let me back up.

Everything’s fine, the kids are good, there’s no family strife or hidden personal drama I’m secretly alluding to.

The emotions were work-related. I was working on a story for a very long time for work, since summer, and it finally came time to write the story for an early November publication. The story got moved once when it became clear that there was no way I could finish it to run in September.

So here I was, at this desk, having worked on a million other things and procrastinated two work days away when I was supposed to be finishing this big story. I ended up here at home, at my desk alone, writing and writing and writing with a 50-page stack of typed-out notes and the Internet to help me double check a few things that weren’t in the notes.

At about 2:30 a.m., I had a draft that was close to what I was going for, but in those hours I was finally locked in, finally putting words together that had only been little fragments in my head for weeks and weeks, I would write and go over the notes and stop and then start and write some more and in that process, reliving some of it and giving new life to other parts that weren’t previously evident, I cried several times.

It wasn’t bad, ugly, hurt crying, it was good, cathartic, embracing crying. It was seeing connections come together that I hadn’t been able to verbalize before, putting together lines and quotes that had resonated with me before but now on screen, they felt more powerful. I would tell the sister of the subject late that I cried a lot not because it was a sad story, but because I was so inspired writing it.

Anytime I’ve ever written something that made me cry as I was writing it, the response has usually been good. It usually means I’m on to something and that I’m not just doing little dumb verbal gymnastics around the word court. It usually means that what I’m writing is more truthful than normal and that what’s coming of me is making my body hum and my brain let loose.

It’s good. It was good crying. But I was so glad when it was finished.

* * *

That’s not the end of a story like that, of course. Even in that first draft, it was the longest single piece I ever wrote for the Statesman and it wasn’t over.

My editor gave it a really good, thorough read and worked her magic to re-order some things to make them more clear and to resonate properly. (This is what a good editor does; I would not have seen these good moves on my own.) I answered questions and cleared things up in the story, I added a few new chunks based on a very late interview with a doctor and, the hardest part, was I worked with my editor on a new ending because the first draft felt incomplete and didn’t land where it should. That meant making the story even longer, but I was given the rare leeway on this one of not really having a word-count limit.

We fixed, we tweaked, we tightened up, I cried one or two more times re-reading the drafts, and then, when the text was finally in a form we were happy with, I worked on other things like photo captions, uploading artwork, stressing about what the web presentation would be and helping make sure there weren’t weird, stray errors that got into the online muck.

And then it finally, finally appeared online and in print and it was emotional all over again. For the few hours that it was out there and before I started hearing back from people who read the story or, most importantly, from the family who’d trusted me to tell their story, I was kind of a wreck. I didn’t know what to do with myself; it was very much like going out in public naked, putting all of yourself out there, and hoping that the feedback wouldn’t be, “Put that away, it’s horrible.”

The very short version is that the feedback was all positive. There were no glaring errors to fix, no hurt feelings from sources who felt they weren’t portrayed accurately, no drive-by ugliness from online commenters taking pieces they didn’t like out of context.

And then, after that very emotional weekend of waiting and expecting and hoping nothing went wrong, I felt happier, lighter, less stressed because it was over. Every other thing in front of me, all the other assignments still due, seemed so much easier and do-able in comparison.

So here it is. I’m really proud of this one and I promise it’s worth your time. My Sunday Statesman profile of Francis Tsai, a remarkable artist whose family allowed me into their home to tell his story. There’s also a photo gallery with some of his great art and lots of photos from Ralph Barrera. (The story is behind a paywall, but we have a 99-cent day pass. As I told people online when it ran, if you don’t feel the story is worth your 99 cents, I’ll happily refund you a dollar.)

And lastly, here’s the video Ralph shot for the story:

Statesman Shots: a new podcast

The other big project was one that was hatched more than a year ago, as I explain in this Digital Savant blog post. Tolly Mosely is someone I’d been wanting to work with and we both loved the idea of doing a podcast together.

Because of how busy we both are, it wasn’t something we thought we could produce/record ourselves, but with some help from the Statesman, it actually grew into something even more ambitious: an Austin-centric culture podcast that will also have a video component.

We recorded the first episode of a podcast called “Statesman Shots” (or just “Shots” for short) with special guest Joe Gross, a guy who knows a lot about everything Austin culture-related.

You can see a video below to give you a flavor of what the podcast is like or just listen to the whole thing here via SoundCloud or as an MP3/AAC download.

Other Statesman stories

I did a column about the future of consumer drones, which if you can get past the part about how some drones kill people, are actually super fun and make you want one if you get to see one in person.

Here’s a video that went with the story:

I did a blog post following up on the column with suggestions from readers on how they’d use drones. Fun!

For Halloween, I debunked a bunch of scary technology urban legends involving stuff like laptop battery life and gadgets getting wet. Bonus debunking here on the blog.

I did a column on the ways that Dell Children’s Medical Center is using apps and video games to help treat kids in areas including bedwetting and obesity.

Last week, I praised the virtues of episodic games like Kentucky Route Zero (pictured above), The Walking Dead by Telltale games and also their new The Wolf Among Us.

And most recently, my annual holiday tech gift guide ran in the Statesman. Sometimes I try to stuff it with off-the-radar esoteric stuff, but this year, I decided to keep it simple since there are way too many options and a lot of my readers just want to have some of that mess narrowed down to nuts and bolts.

On Digital Savant Micro, we explained OS X Mavericks, talked about what’s going on with Amazon MatchBook, introduced our readers to Twitter custom timelines, talked about a new concert-going app called “Jukely” and explained Bitstrips with the help of this visual aid:

On Previously.tv

Still covering The Walking Dead and How I Met Your Mother for Previously, which has been a lot of work, but a ton of fun.

I’ve started doing a few animated gifs on the Walking Dead ones and really having fun with the “Particles” format.

Here are the recaps for Season Four’s Episode 2, “Infected”; Episode 3, “Isolation”; Episode 4, “Indifference”; Episode 5, “Internment”; and Episode 6, “Live Bait” featuring a very worn out The Governor and Episode 7, “Dead Weight,” which goes in the direction we probably knew was inevitable with The Governor. Only one episode left before the holiday break and then the show returns in February for eight more.

How I Met Your Mother has been more of a trudge, but I’m hoping it picks up toward the home stretch. New Show-O-Matic features were written for Season Nine’s Episode 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. The most recent, Episode 11, was all-rhyming and I wrote the recap accordingly.

It’s kind of crazy how much great stuff goes up on that site every day. If you aren’t reading, you should at least be listening to the “Extra Hot Great” podcast, which has been fantastic.

Space Monkeys!

New comics!

We did one about the popularity of sloths on Etsy.

There was also a Halloween strip in which sexy costumes go awry.

Bobbo and Meany tried to terraform a planet the hard way.

The new Thor movie was discussed.

And most recently, gravity failed on the ship, requiring a call to tech support.

You can continue supporting the comic by following our space-faring friend on Twitter or Liking the page on Facebook.

And, you know, reading the comic itself.

Everything else

The rest of what’s been going on I’ll go over in some quick photos:

Our girls had a great Halloween. They dressed as a pretty friendly witch and a Rapunzel mouse. This was the first year that nobody cried over candy and costume woes or complained that walking hurts, so I guess they really are growing up.

Wurstfest was great except for the part where I had a stomach bug and had to miss part of it (covered in the podcast). The girls went four times this year, which is a record for us.

I got to see an amazing concert: Janelle Monae at ACL Live. My wife couldn’t make it because it was on a weeknight, but my brother and I got to go and it was just an astounding concert. Here’s a quick video. We had really great seats.

I also saw the Eric Andrew Show Live which… wasn’t as great. I love the TV show, but the live show was just clips from the series and throwing things at the audience with a good stand-up comic opener and some audience embarrassment. Still a fan of Eric’s comedy (and when the show was sold out when I tried to buy tickets, he Tweeted me back that he’d sneak me in. The Tweet got me in even though I never got on the list!).

Much more fun was Wizard World Austin. My wife and I went with our friend Andy and although we only got to be there for a few hours, we had fun people-watching. And the only money we ended up spending was on these two photo ops (and autographed photos):

We missed Stan Lee, but we did get to eat some of his birthday cake:

And that was pretty much late-October and November. I’m enjoying my vacation, but much busier than I was expecting. I hope your holidays are great and one of my goals (the same as earlier this year) is to post more often around here and not just about stuff I’m working on for other places. Hope to have some shorter stuff to share in December when things slow down even more.

November 26, 2013
The Worry
Screenshot: AMC

Navel-gazey post ahead. Please beware.

I think I worry about stuff a lot less than some of the people in my life, but I do worry. Worrying can be useful. It can be one more ingredient in the rocket fuel that makes you get off your ass and do things. It’s a powerful motivator if you don’t let it overwhelm and paralyze you.

I think I do a good job masking my worry, especially around my kids or on social media, where I don’t really let myself indulge in much angst.

But I worry. Not all the time and sometimes not even very often. It’s rare that I lose sleep, lying awake, thinking about the stuff that has to happen and the things that aren’t happening. But once in a while, maybe once a month, those nights do happen and those worries do get the better of me.

What do I worry about? Things that other parents worry about. Things that are specific to my job. Things that are specific to my personality and my own unrealistic goals for myself.

But I can be more specific.

Stream-of-consciousness mode ON:

I worry that I don’t spend enough time with my kids. That they spend more time at school and daycare than they do with their parents and that this time that we have with them at this age is going to be gone soon and we will have lost that part of their childhood forever.

I worry that I haven’t been a good enough parent and that, especially with Lilly, who had to suffer us figuring out how to be parents the first time, that we’ve somehow damaged her emotionally.

I worry that so much change has happened at work that I no longer fit in there. That I haven’t adapted as well as I should have and that the changes coming are going to make things worse for me. I worry that I’ve stayed there too long, but I also worry about what life would be like if I left. I worry that I’m not doing my best work and that people are being kind by not telling me so.

I worry that the thing I spent the last year writing is unpublishable. I worry that even if I self-publish and promote the crap out of it, no one will want to read it. That it will be this foolish thing that only I care passionately about, so much so that I couldn’t see how terrible it was as I was writing and editing it.

I worry that I’ve recently taken on too many things at once, but also that I haven’t taken on enough and have allowed myself to get lazy and complacent with age.

I worry about my parents. That I also don’t spend enough time with them and that at any moment their health could deteriorate. And the health and well being of other relatives and friends who are going through pain or divorce or job transitions.

I worry about an upcoming deadline that I feel unprepared to meet and a story that feels too big for me to tell properly. I worry that I won’t do the story justice and that everyone will be disappointed with what I write and that I will have screwed up a story that, when I describe it to people, all agree is an amazing story.

I worry that my commute is a huge waste of time and that it’s ruining my health.

I worry that I spent too many years writing for other people instead of writing for myself or creating new things and that it’s too late for me to change course on that.

I worry that I missed an important window when I should have struck while the iron was hot and that instead of focusing on what was in front of me I should have been planning ahead and seizing the moment.

I worry that I haven’t given close friends much attention in a long while and that they must think I don’t care.

I worry that I don’t sleep enough and that many of my other worries stem from that.

I worry that the things I care about and that I’ve worked toward won’t matter in a couple of years, culturally, and that I’ll suddenly feel a generational shift that will signal that I am too old to be relevant.

I worry that the technologies that I advocated for years are actually messing up everyone’s lives, or at least making people more obsessive.

I don’t worry about actual zombies (or zombies falling from the ceiling), but I do worry about whether we’re overdoing it on zombie culture.

I worry that putting all this in a blog is a bad idea, but I worry more that not posting it would be something like being dishonest. I’ve tried not to go back and re-read and second guess myself. In an hour I may feel differently and some of these worries won’t even apply anymore. But when I wrote them, I was feeling them.

I worry about running in circles.

I’m sure there’s more, but I worry that’s all I can think of right now. The nice thing is that I don’t worry about all of these things at any one time. I mean, except for when I’m rounding them up for a blog post and seeing them all together. Then it’s really shitty, let me tell you.

OK, moving on to happier things:

Stories

Credit: The Fullbright Company

New stuff I wrote in the Statesman:

A Digital Savant column about video games to play that aren’t Grand Theft Auto V.

Weirdly, that full column appeared on the LA Times website.

Here’s a column I did about TV spoilers online inspired by the cranky people who were trying to avoid Breaking Bad spoilers last month. The blog post I did to go with that had lots of feedback from social media friends on how to handle online spoilers.

The Baylor Lariat had a full version of that one as well.

And this week’s column was about ways to juggle multiple digital gadgets. That one also ran in full on the website Hispanic Business.

In Digital Savant Micro, I defined “All-in-one computers,” and answered a reader question about printing from an iPad.

Elsewhere, I wrote a story about Bitcoins right after the recent Silk Road arrest, wrote about some new stuff related to the crowdfunded Austin game Star Citizen and dropped some news about SXSW Interactive 2014 panels and speakers.

Previously

I mentioned last time that I was doing some writing for the fantastic TV website Previously.tv. What I didn’t mention was that I’ll be regularly covering not one but two TV shows, How I Met Your Mother and (wait for it…) The Walking Dead!

Screenshot: CBS

HIMYM will be run through the Show-O-Matic and you can already find my first three write-ups for the third, fourth and fifth episodes of the final season.

For The Walking Dead, I’m doing “Particles,” which are an extremely challenging and cool way of recapping a show. They’re told in short stories, often with photos/screen grabs. The one for the season premiere was an awful lot of work, but I attribute that to the learning curve of adjusting to a new way of doing something. I’m hoping I’ll be a lot faster as it as I keep learning. I’m thrilled with the way that one turned out and can’t wait to do more.

Space Monkeys!

We did a comic and blog post about Gravity (with a guest appearance by Sandra Bullock).

We also did a comic about the last episode of Breaking Bad (no spoilers, we promise) and there’s a blog post to go with that, too.

Our latest is about fantasy football with an emphasis on fantasy. And there’s a blog post.

We fixed most of the website issues we were having, but we still haven’t fixed the problem of old blog posts not appearing with comic posts. I’ll let you know when we figure that WordPress conundrum out.

Everything else
- I went to ACL Fest, but only for one day before it got rained the Hell out. I didn’t take photos like last year but I did shoot a Vine video of my brother attempting to eat a “Tiffwich”:
The Tiffwich challenge, attempted by Pablo G https://t.co/c2SfJaI6VH

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) October 11, 2013
- Due to worky obligations I also missed the Atoms for Peace show. My brother and his friend Graham were second row. Lesson: BEING OLD SUCKS.
- I did get to see the Wild Child album release party, which for me trumped anything on the ACL lineup. We got warpainted by singer Kelsey:
- At the same time that The Cure were playing ACL Fest, our water heater sprang some leaks. Lots of things got wet, much garage organizing was done and long story short, I found a bunch of old photos. I may post some of them. They are kind of hilarious.
- Despite my worrying above, the girls are doing great. They got to go on a bunch of carnival rides and ride ponies at the county fair, which if you’re a nearly 4-year-old or 6-year-old is pretty much the ultimate.
October 17, 2013