My apologies to the fine folks at 2K Sports in taking so long to post my review of their baseball sim MLB 2K8, but honestly it has taken me this long to try and figure out their new pitching mechanism. This glitch-ridden and almost unusable new mechanic makes playing this game as frustrating as your worst workday of the year. After a month or so of trying to get this new technique down and throwing countless "meatballs" I simply gave up and reverted to last year's pitching scheme. The new system is supposed to mimic how the actual pitch is thrown but has a serious learning curve and flat out doesn't work most of the time. Unless I am a complete idiot (which is debatable), I would have to imagine that most other gamers have had the same experience with this piece of crap "improvement." The new fielding mechanism isn't much better and the new batting system only works on the power swing and doesn't even respond to the contact swing. Lame!

I wandered into the Movie Store on Saturday night with an itchy, already defeated feeling. I didn't know what I wanted, and walking into a video store without knowing what you want is like the inverse of going to the grocery store hungry. Instead of everything looking good, nothing looks good. Unless, of course, you wander in to find the Movie Store is unloading its entire VHS inventory, for super-cheap, and instead of having to make one decision, you can make ten instead.** At $3 per tape, I felt a little bit kid-in-a-candy-store... and at five tapes for $10, I figured it'd be like throwing money away to stop at four... and with those kind of savings, why not really make a go of it? (I might gently lean toward compulsiveness. I'm also seriously regretting not adding The Pirate Movie to the pile.)

The tables are turning on local documentarian (and SXSW 08 alum) David Modigliani, who'll be in Crawford this weekend scouting locations for his upcoming Rolling Roadshow screening of Crawford, his intimate portrait of a town turned upside down by Dubya. So it's not entirely coincidental that Modigliani will be there this weekend – in case you hadn't heard, a certain First Daughter is getting hitched. Naturally, the national media's setting up camp in Crawford – and a few of 'em are turning the camera on Modigliani ("a taste of my own medicine," he told me). MSNBC will air a live interview with him at 9:40am on Saturday; while Inside Edition will run a segment on the film on Monday. The New York Times also plans to run a story in Monday's edition.

The Los Angeles Film Festival has been awfully good to Austinites in recent years – Steve Collins' Gretchen won Best Dramatic Feature in 2006, Chris Eska's August Evening in 2007 – and now in 2008, we've got two shots at taking home the top prize. The just-released lineup features two homegrown films (happily, not in competition with each other): PJ Raval's Trinidad (codirected with Jay Hodges and exec-produced by Matt Dentler), examines Trinidad, Colorado, "the sex change capital of America," and will premiere in the Documentary Competition, while "fractured romance" I'll Come Running (from Chron contributing writer and friend Spencer Parsons) will premiere in the Narrative Competition.

Austin-based animator Brad Neely has had Warner Bros. on his back (for screening Harry Potter with his own fast-and-loose-with-the-facts narration) and the viral masses at his feet (for his giddily nonsensical Founding Father rap, "Cox & Combes' Washington": "he had a pocketful of horses/ fucked the shit out of bears"). So what's he gonna do next? Own the entire month of May, that's what. Every Monday in May, Superdeluxe.com will premiere a new installment of Neely's new opus China, IL, and all four episodes put together will premiere TV-side on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block on Sunday, May 25 at 10:45pm. The first episode, titled "Romeo + Romeo," started streaming yesterday. It's three minutes of high-speed, ejaculate-obsessed nutterness that turns weirdly tender when man/child Baby Cakes makes up a song about a dead women he's besotted with: "Boom boom yeah / got so much in common / except that I'm a person still." He says boom boom yeah, I say boom boom yeah.

John Pierson was clearly delighted. It took three years but now the guest he had most wanted to book was finally in the house. Since beginning his Master Class at UT three years ago, Pierson has tried to get South Park's co-creator Matt Stone to visit with his Austin students. But the timing has never been right due to the congruence of UT's spring semester and Comedy Central's spring season. The stars aligned, however, in 2008 and Stone was able to hop on a flight right after completing work on the 12th season of South Park and make an appearance in Pierson's final class of the semester. Stone and his creative partner in South Park, Trey Parker, never work more than a week ahead on each episode of the show. This is part of what makes it impossible for the two to get away from L.A. while the season is in progress. Stone confesses they "get bored" pretty quickly, and that's part of why they like having only a week to produce a show. Mostly, though, it's "procrastination" that takes them down to the wire.

Did you catch the shoutout to our favorite local music and film and techie extravaganza on 30 Rock last night? When the writing room schlubs try to get some respect from the Teamsters (headed by Brian Dennehy, looking rather slimmed, no?), Lutz (John Lutz) blows their case with the wincingly on-point: "I know what driving the long haul is like! After my junior year at Oberlin, we road-tripped to South by Southwest!" Even 30 Rock's throwaway lines feel perfectly crafted. If you aren't watching this show yet, you should really start. Second best line of the night? "I was hit by lightning as a child. They made a movie about me." Watch the whole episode now on NBC.com or check it out soon on Hulu.com.

The ballroom at the Omni Downtown is a small room to contain a lot of genre-defining authors, but this weekend the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America held their annual Nebula Awards there. From a cinematic view, the big win was Guillermo del Toro for his script for Pan's Labyrinth. Even though he couldn't be there, he thanked those he called “Not my peers but my mentors (…) from the bottom of my cholesterol-clogged heart." For the geek-out crowd, the big guest was new SFWA grand master Michael Moorcock (even novel of the year winner Michael Chabon seemed pretty overwhelmed when he found himself between Moorcock and SXSW regular Bruce Sterling). Moorcock's speech concentrated on how often science fiction and fantasy novels, even though they are regularly pillaged for the screen, are regarded as second-tier literature by the critical establishment. As if to prove the point Chabon, whose novel Wonderboys has been adapted for the screen and has another (The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) on the way, thanked his editors for not realizing that his last novel was "at its dreaming, counterfactual core a work of science fiction." The absence of del Toro possibly meant that one possible argument was avoided: it would have been interesting to see what the ever-feisty Moorcock, possibly the most vociferous critic of J.R.R. Tolkien, would have had to say to the newly-announced director of The Hobbit. Full 2008 Nebula winners' list below the fold

Never let it be said that Tim League is one to fear signing off on reams of liability insurance forms. He's already overtaken the late, great William Castle in the Ballyhoo Department by orders of magnitude (you'll remember his Amityville Horror stunt, the "House of One Million Flies," or, as we like to recall it, the "Ohmygodgetitoffmegetitoffmegetitoffme Shack"), but for yesterday's sold-out local premiere of Jon Favreau's Iron Man, the Alamo Kingpin topped not only himself but also the roof of his theater, literally, when he hired Eric Scott of Denver-based GoFast! Sports and Jet Pack International to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a) mad genius Robert Downey, Jr. isn't the only (formerly) high guy associated with the newly forged Marvel Studios comic book franchise, and b) Motorhead is relatively quiet when compared to a guy in a jet pack hovering 20 feet over your head.