Daily Screens
Bitchin' and Moanin'
Consider this the appropriate message for non-badge-holders to vent their rage. Comment away, my angry turned-away neighbors! OK, is it just me, or does there seem to be an abundance of full houses at this year's South by Southwest? Saturday, the badge line (including me) didn't make it in the door for Mister Lonely at the Alamo Ritz. That's not as big of an issue as the lovely folks who didn't bother to inform the remaining badge line, which waited very patiently for another 15 minutes ...

And, sure, Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay was a world premiere and much of the crew for the Louisiana shoot came from Austin, but did the suits really need to keep their real audience outside by claiming a couple hundred prime seats front and center? From the aroma both within (either that or a skunk got loose) and without the theatre, many potential fans may have been too baked to notice the slight.

I also heard from those with badges who were turned away from Baghead on Sunday. Is this is a positive or just a statement about the size of the Ritz? Your feedback is welcome ...

1:08AM Mon. Mar. 10, 2008, Joe O'Connell Read More | Comment »

Jeffrey Tambor Can Act, and So Can You!
Ladies and gentlemen, the honorable Jeffrey Tambor has graciously given me permission to overwrite this blog. Only then shall we verily find the truth within. Consider the challenge accepted as we learn how to act in 10 easy steps. Ready? Start your thespian engines …

Greta Gerwig and Kent Osborne are our model acting students. These two artistic poster children will laugh, cry, throw bottles across the room, and pretty much do whatever Tambor asks. He was on The Larry Sanders Show, folks!

Now on to those 10 easy (well, sort of) steps to success. Consider this the digest version until our potentate of pontification gets that book written. (He was on Arrested Development, my stars in waiting!)

12:33AM Mon. Mar. 10, 2008, Joe O'Connell Read More | Comment »

I Can Has Metrics?
Eric Nakagawa, he of I Can Has Cheezburger? and lolcats, had some helpful suggestions on how to know when you have a website that has become a runaway cultural success:

People mail you with helpful suggestions about how to change the site.
People mail you death threats if you change the site.
Journalists who have never visited your website call you for an interview.
Journalists who have taken the effort to visit your website still want to call you for interviews.
You have to re-size every image so it cuts down on bandwidth.
You give up re-sizing every image because you're getting 8,000 images a day.
You realize that people are downloading two terrabytes of funny pictures of kitteh.
Your ISP kicks you off before you're killing their servers.
You can't afford to grow the site because the hosting costs are bigger than your house rent, and you can't afford both.
You get measurable traffic from Denmark.
You can give up your day job.
You're making enough money to hire nine full-time staff to make funny pictures of kitteh.

5:30PM Sun. Mar. 9, 2008, Richard Whittaker Read More | Comment »

That's Pwnage
Live from the Screenburn arcade: all-female gaming clan The Frag Dolls. Last year, Morgan "Roulette" Romine and gaming twins Amy "Athena PMS" Brady and Amber "Athena Twin" Dalton took part in a great panel discussion on women in gaming. This time around, Valkyrie, Pyra, Mischief, and Calyber have been doing what they do best: pummeling all comers on Rainbow Six Vegas (it was supposed to be Vegas 2, but there were network issues.)

Don't get caught up in the "making grown male gamers cry" stuff: this has been equal opportunity pwnage. Score so far this weekend: Frag Dolls, every single bout; rest of world nothin' but air.

4:28PM Sun. Mar. 9, 2008, Richard Whittaker Read More | Comment »

How Soon is Now?
In one of those meta-moments, the panel discussion Scoop the Story on Your Blog just broke down so that everyone could go blog.

The moderators, panelists and guests split up into work groups that went off to do live blogging via Twitter and Utterz (which allows bloggers to post directly from their phone.) If you run to room five on the third floor before 4:30pm on Sunday, you can see it being done.

But does breaking from the blogging to come blog about the blog mean I'm missing the fun of the blogging?

My head hurts.

3:58PM Sun. Mar. 9, 2008, Richard Whittaker Read More | Comment »

Misery Business
At last night's world premiere of Bulletproof Salesman, director Michael Tucker asked an uncomfortable question: How do we define war profiteer?

Along with The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair (which debuted at SXSW 2007) and Gunner Palace, this is his third documentary about the Iraq conflict. Here he follows Fidelis Cloer, a German businessman who sells armored (or, as he prefers to call them, blast-proof) cars into war zones. The bigger the war, the bigger the contracts. In the Q&A afterwards, Tucker admitted to an uncomfortable truth: that he is a war profiteer himself. If he makes any money off one of his films, that definitionally makes him a war profiteer. But, then again, so is a firm that sells bandages into a conflict zone. What he said he hoped distinguished him from Cloer is that when he sat in a hotel room in Afghanistan waiting for something bad to happen, he felt guilty about it.

Bulletproof Salesman plays on Monday at 6:30pm, and Thursday at 7:15pm. Both screenings are at the Austin Convention Center.

2:46PM Sun. Mar. 9, 2008, Richard Whittaker Read More | Comment »

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"I Don't Think the Empire Had Wookies in Mind"
There is a Dark Side to web development, Derek Featherstone of Further Ahead argued this morning, and that is poor accessibility. He points to the moment in Star Wars Episode VI when Han and Chewie are trying to get the stolen shuttle past the Imperials, and Chewie can barely fit in the flight seat. Why? Because the Empire didn't make shuttles to fit people, they made people (well, Stormtroopers) to fit their machine. Real world designers don't get to do that. Well, except the really creepy ones.

Like a jedi master to a conference room full of padawans, he had some lessons to pass on. Tab-index is the Jar-Jar Binks of programming (it seemed like a universally appealing idea at the time); When your bosses see that people like Wookies (or whatever part of your system works), you end up with the The Star Wars Holiday Special; And don't be so proud of that technological terror you've constructed, 'cos that two-meter thermal vent will take you down every time.

12:57PM Sun. Mar. 9, 2008, Richard Whittaker Read More | Comment »

ScreenBurn Burns All
This is where all the action is. Day one at SXSW Interactive was simply a teaser to the events that happened today. The panels were more mentally engaging, the speakers seemed more alert and prepared, but most of all, the ScreenBurn Arcade 2008 ignited.

8:28AM Sun. Mar. 9, 2008, Carson Barker Read More | Comment »

Bandwidth Ain't Free
What is a bad website?

Sometimes it's just abut bad timing, like Kozmo.com burning through $283 million to try home-delivery too early. Or it's wasted resources, like pets.com, who frittered away $130 million on Superbowl ads)

Nah, the Worst Website Ever panel was looking for really bad ideas, like 3D-mail, where a bouncer throws your spam off Miami Beach. Which is real. Seriously. Less real, but brilliantly conceived, was PuppiesAndBabiesForRent.com (freelance developer Jeffery Bennett explained that it failed because "the majority of people who want to rent children aren't legally allowed near them. Plus, puppies think babies are delicious.") Then there was image search for the blind, downloadable scents, and hosting a mirror of the entire Internet on your servers. There was one point of consensus. If anyone uses the word "monetized', run for the hills.

6:44PM Sat. Mar. 8, 2008, Richard Whittaker Read More | Comment »

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