Alison, Rose, and Hetty – 87, 101, and 102 years old respectively – may be ready to “go to sleep for good,” as Hetty puts it, but in the meantime they’re quite adept at entertaining themselves wholeheartedly. As such, they make particularly engaging subjects for Jocelyn Cammack's candid look at life’s final chapter. As residents of a North London assisted living facility, their days are filled with diversions both ordinary (tai chi, crossword puzzles) and extraordinary (anti-war protests). Against this backdrop, they share their views on Tony Blair, religious fanaticism, men, sex, and the quantum soup, all the while taking shots at the vagaries of old age: “I have such disgusting eating habits,” laments Rose. “I either put nothing into my mouth or drop it on the floor, and it’s really quite revolting.” There’s nothing comfortable about the topic of aging, and on screen, it’s generally confined to comedic vehicles of the Grumpy Old Men variety. That’s why this lovely film is a rare treat – and a testament to the power of unflinching documentary-making to be both uncomfortable and comforting at the same time. Wednesday, March 18, 4:30pm, Alamo South Lamar

Although Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson was the Tuesday keynote speaker for the Interactive portion of South by Southwest, his concepts of the Long Tail and the freeconomics of his upcoming book, Free, have had perhaps more theoretical impact on the emerging digital music economy than any other writer today. His conversation with doubtful venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki was spirited, but left the question open of whether the model of Free, proven to have worked in a limited capacity already, will be able to generate money for the more general economy. Music, of course, is ground zero for many of these ideas. Anderson’s declaration that “Free is the best way to maximize your reach” may be true, but the important aspect of that equation for artists and their business partners (be they labels, managers, or agents), is converting that attention and reputation to money.

Oh, SXSW-Interactive-enormous-pit-of-Lego, how we have missed thee. The annual building block extravaganza has become one of the high-point stress relievers of the festival (moreso even than free beer at the trade show happy hour or finding a particularly monotonous speaker at a panel to dose through.) Even one noted Texas political reporter (who shall remain nameless, and no, not someone from the Chronicle) was seen happily constructing some kind of multi-headed space ship. Much less stress than covering a voter ID bill in the Legislature. Check out the gallery for more images.

People will say things online they would never say IRL (in real life). Author/sex blogger Violet Blue's panel Sexual Exploitation, Sexual Expression and Self-Defense discussed at length the most famous example of this, the case of Lori Drew and Megan Meier. The two families lived down the street from each other, and Lori's daughter and Megan had a falling out. Lori, along with an 18-year-old boy and some other unnamed teenagers, created a MySpace account for an imaginary boy, "Josh," who first made friends with Megan, then became her online boyfriend. The story ends when "Josh" told Megan the world would be better off without her and she should kill herself, which she did a few days later. The mom, Lori Drew, was convicted of a federal misdemeanor for violating MySpace's terms of service. As the blogosphere is exploding with social networking sites like MySpace, and teenagers and everyone else are spending more time in these online communities, the issues of online sexual harassment and regulation to prevent it are more pressing than ever.

Liz Henry, a wheelchair and crutches user and Web Producer for BlogHer Inc., led Monday's panel Hack Ability: Open Source Disability Tech. Liz needed a projector for her laptop so the audience could see her presentation slides. There was not one in our room 19B, so someone in the audience borrowed one from the “What Makes You Smile” people next door who were raising money for cleft palate surgery for poor kids. Other audience members threw a white tablecloth over the curtain in the back of the room for a projection screen. When the slides were showing backwards, others pitched in to backwards-read their way through the setup menus to get the slides to show in the correct orientation. Hacking the room for the presentation to work drew everyone together and was a powerful illustration for the talk.

SXSW isn't a marathon, my colleague Kate X Messer recently joked: It's a death march. As the official print sponsor of the festival, the Chronicle gets hit by the South by tsunami around early February, and we don't come up for air until the end of March. But just when we think we're about to collapse from the strain and the sensory overload, along comes that blessed pick-me-up, the Austin Chronicle's SXSW Film Bash. Last night's party at La Zona Rosa, which featured Austin band the Black and White Years, was a blast. Don't believe us? Click on the photo for our gallery of smiling, happy, sloshy faces.

"I always wanted to make a movie about bugs," producer/director Jessica Oreck explained after the first SXSW Film Festival screening of her debut documentary Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo on Sunday. Growing up in Louisiana and Colorado ("There's less bugs in Colorado," she lamented), "My parents say that before I could walk, I was always catching cockroaches." These days, her collection includes spiders, millipedes, praying mantises, stick insects, hissing cockroaches and even a rhinoceros beetle. Since Japanese culture shares her obsession with everything with six, eight, or 750 legs, this film was "this perfect project," especially since it allowed her to meet noted author, philosopher, and fellow entomologist Dr. Takeshi Yoro. The only downside was that Japan has so many gorgeous insects. She admitted to wondering, "Everything, I'd say, can I smuggle this back?" Fortunately, she added, cameraman Sean Williams talked her round. So where did the title come from? Williams gave the credit to a poet friend of theirs. When they told him about their film about bugs in Japan, "he presumed it was a monster movie." Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo screens again Tuesday, March 17, 12pm and Saturday, March 21, 3pm, at the Alamo Ritz.

Nate Silver might be the ideal dinner guest: A political expert with an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball careers. Silver (read Wells Dunbar's interview with him here) delivered the SXSW Interactive keynote address on Sunday. He's revered amongst election wonks because of his number-crunching website fivethirtyeight.com. For people scared off by concepts like "regression analysis", "inferential process" and "rolling trendlines," he's the guy that predicted last November's election in March. For sports fans, he's the guy that created the PECOTA predictive algorithm (the bane of fantasy baseball leagues everywhere.) However, conference attendees now probably know him as the guy that admitted he wished he'd studied more programming, so he he could do more site maintenance himself. Politics and baseball, as he pointed out, both have long seasons. Baseball fans, however, don't tend to write a player off because of one foul ball. Policy wonks, he said, tend to thank him when he reminds them that "one poll coming out in June or July means almost nothing."

For starters, let's just say it's much, much worse than we previously assumed. All of it: writing, publishing, journalism, the relationship of a writer of words to a world where words are increasingly devalued or re-valued in new and arcane ways that nobody quite understands yet. Hard times for the literati: incoming. Those of us looking for some comfort from Austinite-by-way-of-Italy and Wired magazine's "Visionary-in-residence", former thrower of the best SXSW interactive parties ever, and the man behind Mirrorshades, author-futurist Bruce Sterling, didn't find much to smile (or even scowl) about at his annual SXSWi pow-wow. For one thing, Sterling looked physically older, tired, and sounded, despite some audience-tweaking snarkasm, downright melancholic. This was not the relatively optimistic Hacker Crackdow cyberpunk Sterling, and listening to what he came to say was a sobering and borderline unnerving experience. (Although, it must be noted, Sterling continues to remind us how important it is to be optimistic and proactive, especially in times of severe economic crises.) According to Sterling, it's not a good time to be a writer or even tangentially aligned to the literary arts. The SRO audience -- Web 2.0 Twitterers and pomo journos alike -- exited Conference Hall A wearing the glazed expressions of people who were just informed they have boarded the wrong train and are not, in fact, heading off to some sort of digital Walden Pond but are instead scheduled to disembark at the literary equivalent of Treblinka. So not good. With that in mind, we've culled the least disturbing topics from Sterling's talk and broken them down into what will be three different raw, mostly unexpurgated-Sterling blog posts, of which this is the first. Brace yourself.