Tag: walking dead

The vacationer
Quick caption sidebar: this is one of the images that came up when I did a paid image search for “Staycation.” I have NEVER had a stay-at-home vacation that looked anything like this. Why are they so happy? Because they DIDN’T go to Paris? Are they making fireplace toast? Is that a white people thing? This image just depressed me far more than having multiple staycations ever could. [/End of Sidebar]

“Where did you go on vacation?”

I felt like that was the wrong question even though it was asked of me multiple times. And not just by one person. Several people asked. And each time, I thought, “That’s not the right question. It should be ‘what did you do on vacation?’ Who cares where I went? I got some serious shit done! Right here! In my house!”

I didn’t leave my house very much is what happened.

But! It’s all right! I’m used to it! I have two kids. This is not a life you choose for jet-setting unless your children are Spy Kids. I don’t go to The Club. My life is boring sometimes, but in the best way possible.

So here is what happened: I ended up, with two months left in the year, with a lot of vacation time left to burn. I didn’t get sick this year, really, and the various times my kids had to go to the doctor always fell on days when I could work from home and knock out a quick appointment or had help from my wife, parents and in-laws.

We took a week of vacation for Disney World, but when you factored in work make-up days for stuff like South by Southwest, it was still a lot of vacation/sick days (which for us are rolled together into one big Ball of Time). So I’m in the middle of vacation time after having just taken vacation time in November and am looking forward to going back to work next week and then taking time off again.

It was a lot of time to burn.

It didn’t occur to me to book a trip or sign up for skydiving lessons or anything like that.

On my vacation, what I really needed to do was pick up boxes that had been boxing it up on the floor of my home office for months with no one to pick them up and deal with their content.

I needed to buy a new car, something I said I was going to do a year ago and that just seemed like too big a hassle to take on at any point in the previous twelve months.

And I still had things to write on the freelance tip (more on that below) and work-related emails to at least glance at even though I was “not working.” In fact, the first few days of my vacation, I exhausted myself just writing and organizing and them sleeping half a day away because I was staying up all crazy hours as if I was not a person who had to get up at 6:30 a.m. every day because my vacation did not mean my kids were on vacation. No, it was pretty much the opposite of that.

So it’s been a weird couple of weeks where my expectations of leisurely relaxation, iPad propped on belly and a continuous row of beers extending off into the distance, would keep me company as I hung out on the porch in unseasonably warm November weather.

Even that part didn’t quite work out. It was rainy and then super-fucking cold, the kind of weather where if I had been working I would have had trouble even driving in.

“Where did you go on vacation?”

I probably should have planned to go somewhere, all right! The whole concept of a vacation that lasts more than a few days was so foreign to me that it didn’t even pop into my head that there was enough time allotted to get on a plane and go see some stuff in a place that is not here. But that’s just it. I wouldn’t want to go on a vacation trip thing without my wife (who doesn’t have time off like I do and reminds me of it at least once a day with, “Must be NICE!”) or… OK, maybe the kids, too. If they’re behaving. Holy crap, that trip back from Disney World might have put me off of flying with children forever.

What else I did on “Vacation”:
Statesman writing stuff

I’ll keep it short, unlike last month’s barrage of stuff.

Digital Savant column took a short vacation as well, but there was a column that is running in Tuesday’s newspaper, my look at the state of social media in late 2013, from selfies to Snapchat and more.

On the Micro side, I advised a reader about large-format e-ink-based ebook readers.

Last time I mentioned we did a pilot episode of a new Austin culture podcast. The response was really good! My editors and other folks I worked with really seemed to like it and we’re planning what to do next. My hope is we can get moving in January to continue what we started, but we’ll see what happens. There’s a lot of logistics stuff that needs to be worked out. But I’m so glad people seemed to enjoy what we did and that a year of anticipation seems to have paid off. In related news, podcast co-host Tolly is pregnant! Congratulations to her and her husband who have a lot of great times (and little sleep) in store for them.

And that’s it! Vacation!

On Previously.tv

I think there’s only one more episode of How I Met Your Mother before they go on a little break for the holidays. My most recent Show-O-Matic about it is for this last season’s Episode 12, which was a gigantic ode to Robin’s Canadian heritage.

More significantly was the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead where lots of characters died and much mess was made of converging plotlines. It was a ton of work visually recapping in Particles form all the late-episode action, but somehow it all worked out. The show returns in February for eight more episodes.

In space with simians

New Space Monkeys! comics:

Only one, but it’s a Thanksgiving comic that I really enjoyed writing. (It was very little writing, honestly)

Last things

Carolina got a haircut (not pictured) and a medical degree.

We went to a comic book convention in Austin and THIS HAPPENED:

I can’t top that. Talk to you next time.
December 10, 2013
In conclusion
Child and tiny truck. Missing: one tooth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work writing

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

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

Digital Savant columns:
- I wrote a column asking people who do a lot of work in coffee shops for tips on getting the most out of the experience. The full text of the story is here and requires subscription.
- I thought this was pretty useful: ways to upgrade or replace your aging or ineffective tech, most of them for under $100 in a lot of different areas. (Full version of the text is here, subscription required.)
- I did a back-to-school tech gift guide last week that I was pretty proud of particular for the opening few paragraphs. It’s always hard to make these interesting year after year, so I took a different approach. The full text is here (but weirdly formatted) and over on MyStatesman for subscribers.
Digital Savant Micro features:
Other random stuff:

A lengthy blog review of the Leap Motion controller.

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

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

Las Vegas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How hungover I was: tried to pour coffee and missed.

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) August 13, 2013

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

All the stuff I posted earlier about gambling and being hungover was totally made up, my lawyer has advised. #SXSWV2V

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) August 13, 2013

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

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

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

Creeping me out, you guys… https://t.co/JQNRSGNmOn

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) August 12, 2013

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

Previously

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

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

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

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

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

Those space monkeys

We’re still updating the space-faring adventures of Bobbo, Meany and the crew in weekly fashion and their Twitter account has been pretty active of late.

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

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

They are:
- A comic about the Leap Motion controller’s gesture controls.
- A comic about Emoji, the language of silly cartoon texting.
- A comic about my favorite TV show called “Caking Bad.”
- A comic about Elon Musk’s proposed HyperLoop in which we insert the word “Poop.”
- A comic about the infamous Miley Cyrus twerk from this year’s VMAs.
We’ve been nothing if not extremely topical.
September 2, 2013
All of the lights

This year, for some reason, I got really into our Christmas lights.

We had bins in the attic of lights including some we bought last year in the post-Christmas sales, but except for the ones we put on the tree or around the house, I never messed with trying to set up lights outside.

It always seemed like too much of a hassle and I never had enough time as Christmas chugged, Polar Express-style, toward us at high speeds. (See also: why we haven’t sent out a family Christmas card in a few years.) It seemed exhausting and a little dangerous (what happens when it rains? Does your house just explode in a shower of sparks?) and I just had no solution.

But maybe it was a sudden burst of energy I was having at the end of the year, or a restlessness of not doing enough stuff outside with my hands that got me going, but I made the decision to put up lights. Or lay them on the ground. Or something. There were going to be lights, dammit!

So I started setting up the lights. In my mind, we had all the stuff necessary to do this stashed away, including extension cords, electrical posts, plenty of lights that all matched and (imaginary) items that would hold everything in place perfectly. It was all in the bin just waiting for me to set things up.

In reality, it was a mismatched heap of tangled indoor lights, one shady-looking green electrical post that looked like it might shock me if I looked in its direction and maybe one set of six 3M sticky tabs that probably wouldn’t work with our stucco and stone outdoors.

So I bought lights. And then I bought more lights. And then I bought some extension cords. Then I bought a bunch of hooks and adhesives and a holiday staple gun that shoots staples as well as plastic staple protectors, as if the stapler were afraid of getting a loathsome disease and is blowing through dozens of tiny little condoms.

They also keep you from stapling through the electrical cord and killing yourself, I think, so sure, why not. Staple condoms.

I set up a line of big bulb lights (not LED, it turns out, but the old school ones that burn you if you try to touch) along the yard. I didn’t have stakes or clips or anything to hold them down. In fact, three different gigantic stores told me they had sold out of crates and crates of these. So, I tried to make some makeshift stakes by tying the lights to some skewers and you can image how shitty and lame and ineffective that turned out. So the lights were basically just lying on the ground in a loose row, ready to be tripped on or blown away by a strong wind. Success!

I had better luck with a set of tiny globe LED lights that I stapled up around the garage. Near the stucco is a spongy border and that turned out to be perfect for the staples. I set everything up, brought my wife and the kids out to see the glory of my gorgeous lights.

Half of the set that I had just put up didn’t come on. I had forgotten to check before I put them up.

Another trip to the store. More lights, Lots of cursing.

I finally found some stakes at the grocery store and I was able to lock down the lights around the sidewalk, or at least keep them from wandering off.

When it was all finished and I taped up the ends with Duct Tape to keep water out, it all looked really nice even if it was a pretty simple setup with nothing for the bushes or in our yard. We have the lights down the sidewalk, some lights around our garage, some lights going around the side of the house, a little LED tree and bear in the doorway and that’s about it. Next year, maybe we’ll add some stuff to the yard, but I felt pretty manly-man enough with just this first effort.

I couldn’t tell you why I needed to to this this year. I think it’s that the kids (now 3 and 5) like it and the things I used to really not care about seem to matter a little more when there are kids involved.

All this happened before recent events in the news made that even more clear to me. It’s so easy to just let the holidays fly by and to try to get through it and look forward to days off and a new year. But this year, I’m trying to enjoy it moment-by-moment and not let is rush past too quickly before I’ve gotten to really let the glow of the lights illuminate the darkness a little.

Recent writing stuff:

I’m finally on vacation through January, but here’s what’s run recently (and one thing that’s running tomorrow that’s pretty significant).

In the Digital Savant column, I did a piece going over my 2012 tech predictions from last year and then looked ahead and made more predictions for 2013. Will those pan out? Wait a year and find out! One neat thing was getting to see the word “Omarstradamus” in display headline type in the paper.

The column for Monday, Christmas Eve, is a roundup of all the apps you should download if you happen to get a new smart phone or tablet. It’s impossible to list anything even close to comprehensive, especially if you’re trying to include more than just iOS and Android, but I tried to focus on stuff people who are new to these kinds of devices might need. Even trying to narrow it down, it was a pretty impossible task to cover all bases, but I think the list is a good start for most people.

I included Fairway Solitaire, the mobile game I’m currently addicted to. Please don’t download it. It will eat your life.

Other stories I wrote since the last blog entry: a piece about the Statesman’s new digital offerings, a story about top Austin searches on Google for 2012, a review of the full first season of the brilliant “Walking Dead” video game and a write-up of two Austin-made games, God of Blades and Arcane Legends, that are worth a look on iOS.

For Digital Savant Micro, I wrote about why you might need a dual-band router, what the Hell Snapchat is and what a “Chromebook” laptop is all about.

I was also on the radio last week, talking about holiday tech gifts (it’s a bit late for that, I know, but maybe you’ll get some ideas for post-Christmas gift exchanges) with The Daily Circuit on Minnesota Public Radio. You can hear the full audio by following the link. The other guest was Dana Wollman from Engadget.

The last thing is that Carolina turned 3 on Friday. As much as Lilly keeps us on our toes constantly, it’s Carolina who makes us laugh, who always does or says something completely unexpected, and who seems to always have mischief and smiles in her eye for everyone she meets.

I’m not sure if it’s a phase or if it’s just part of her personality that she constantly tells us she loves us. I hope it lasts a good long while.

December 23, 2012
Turtle back

If you have been the parent of a kid older than 2 or 3, you probably have experienced the thing where the kid lies down on the floor and doesn’t want to do anything.

It usually happens as you’re trying to get them ready for school/day care or when they’ve had a bad sleep night. They’re tired and frustrated and revert to a state where they not only don’t want to remember how to put on socks, they won’t even stand upright. It’s incredibly frustrating for the parent, but sometimes, if I’m not going crazy at that moment, I try to imagine how frustrating that moment is for the kid. Their emotional range hasn’t caught up with their inability to process certain kinds of stress and they just turn baby.

They flop on their back and, like the turtle, can’t seem to right themselves without help. So they wail and cry or kick or get mad at you when you do try to help and basically nobody’s happy. It sucks, to the BIG TIME.

I’ve experienced that a lot on the parental side lately in the months since our sleep schedule changed, but I also have finally had time off enough this week to realize that I’ve been doing some of that myself.

The last few months I’ve been the upended turtle, flapping around, but not really doing anything, expecting someone to help right me and just sort of letting out these little weak turtle bleats.

They go, “Behhhhh. Behhhh.”

It sounds fucking disgusting and the worst part of hearing it is knowing it’s coming out of my own turtle mouth.

So that’s what I’m working on right now. Trying not to feel so stuck and overturned and waiting for something to happen and going “Behhhh” and having one sock on and the other sock across the room because I flung it over there in frustration. Things feel like they’re not moving at all, at least relative to all the movement in the world, but then I have to remind myself that I’m the turtle, the one on its back, the one that’s not moving.

And that’s what needs fixing.

Behhhh.

I’m on a little four-day weekend for Thanksgiving, but work continues and there’s been a lot of writing still going on there.

The new stuff is:

I did a pretty sizable holiday tech gift guide for last Sunday’s newspaper. This year it was focused on gaming, led by Nintendo’s Wii U. I don’t have a lot to say about the Wii U itself. For the first time since maybe the GameCube (including portables), Nintendo didn’t sent a review unit to try out ahead of the launch, which is a little weird, so my only hands-on with the device was in a little trailer the company brought into town. I’m not buying one myself because, frankly, there are lots of other games to review that I don’t have time to get to and I think, based on my limited time with the demo and what I’ve been reading from reviewers who did get hardware, Nintendo has released a product that wasn’t ready for retail. We’ll see how it’s faring after the holidays.

I also did a tech gift guide, as I do every year, for Television Without Pity. It’s more of a photo gallery, with text by me, but not focused just on video games.

One thing I’ll add to both of those guides: at the time I wrote them, only four of the five episodes of The Walking Dead: The Video Game were out. Since then, I played the last episode of the first season and I can only recommend it even more. It made me cry, it broke my heart, it’s an absolutely high-water mark in video game narrative and character work. Such a great accomplishment.

This week I also wrote about three other games I’ve been playing a lot (including the fantastic Penny Arcade/Rain-Slick Episode 3, which I actually completed) and I got to witness Chris Roberts achieve $6.2 million+ in his crowdfunding venture for the future game Star Citizen and posted a really lengthy interview with “Epic Mickey 2” game developer Warren Spector.

The day I did that interview, Warren Spector was kind enough to invite me to his house(s) to see some of his amazing collection of artwork, movie geek wares and Disney stuff. What I learned is that if Warren Spector ever invites you to his house to see any of his collections, you go, no matter what. It was inspiring and very cool.

On the Micro feature, I briefly defined Quora, the Q&A website.

November 24, 2012