It may be seem like an eternity of tinnitus and day parties ago, but during the interactive component of SXSW, the annual ScreenBurn Arcade had some serious buzz moments. There was a lot of player interest in the Nvidia GeForce 3D Vision system, which uses the built-in depth information in games to create a stereoscopic 3D image (How good is it? Well, it's sure no Virtual Boy.) SXSWi even had its own little Metallica moment, with a hands-on demo of Bionic Commando, developer GRIN's reboot of the classic Capcom franchise from the '80s. The game, being developed for PC, XBox 360 and PS3, doesn't ship until May, but the multi-player deathmatch mode demoed was smooth and intuitive. [video-1]

Although SXSW Interactive is over, the smell in Exhibit Hall 2 still lingers. That's because EH2 played host to the free-to-all arcade known as Screenburn. It took me back, as my father was (and still is) a gamer. When I was a kid my brother, father, and I played co-operative shoot-em-up games, shouting such gems as "In your face!" and "Dead! Dead! You're Dead!" at each other, while never taking our fingers off of the keyboard. But honestly, I got nothing on the kids who were playing in the Screenburn Arcade. You could tell they had been playing for hours on end, perhaps because their tech-dweeb parents were attending panels in other areas of the convention hall. So why is this in the GP?

Every morning at SXSW Interactive, SX staffer Ari Styles led a yoga class for attendees. She led us through gentle stretches, deep breathing, and at least one hard pose designed for strengthening. Each day's exercises were different, though each day had a theme of yoga poses to help people who spend most of their time sitting in a chair and working with a keyboard. As we lay in Savasana nearing the end of each class, Ari spoke briefly (“Letting go... letting go... let go.”) to lead us into deep relaxation. Finally, as we sat in prayer pose, she ended with a spoken gratitude practice. This was a really beautiful place to connect IRL and to feel better both mentally and physically throughout the festival. Looking back over Dr. Keely Kolmes' list of five things we can do now to improve our mental health from her Therapy 2.0: Mental Health for Geeks panel, Ari's yoga class gave us four of the five things! Here's the list again, from an earlier post: 1. weekly gratitude practice 2. breathing and mindfulness practice 3. connecting with others 4. exercise 5. thought tracking See you all at yoga next year at SXSWi 2010!

Psychiatrist Keely Kolmes and writer Thomas Roche presented this Tuesday afternoon core conversation, which felt much like sitting in an AA meeting or other group therapy session. One after another, for almost an hour, audience members described their experiences with a relatively new category of neurosis – Information Anxiety caused by information overload. One young woman said she feels she has lost the capacity for solitude and she wonders if it is gone forever. She recently noticed that it has become extremely unusual for her to take a walk or drive the car without checking email and twitter during the walk or drive. She feels that she doesn't have a sense of wholeness unless someone else is validating her experience fairly constantly throughout the day. Others talked about feeling terrible guilt when they didn't electronically check in constantly, about sitting and tweeting in the same room with people they could be talking to. One man felt that the increased capacity to understand comes with responsibility, which feels like a great weight. Several people spoke of boundaries – how technology helps us hide and gives us a false sense of intimacy which can cause problems in online relationships.

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.

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.