Conventional wisdom holds that gaming and tech industry types are not the masters of social skills. An overgeneralization, yes, but I unashamedly identify with that demographic and embrace my awkward “charm” in social settings. Five years of South by Southwest attendance has taught me that the festival doesn’t suffer charmers for long. And while individuals may be kind, the mob is ruthless. I decided to make a concerted effort this year to network and schmooze – both words that until this point needed air quotes for me to even say.

I decided to attack SXSW head on and address my inability to schmooze at a networking party at Shangri-La on the Eastside. My initial plan was to ask a stranger if they had a “pick-up line” to meet people and then use that line on the next stranger and so on until I was slapped silly or basking in the attention of industry bigwigs.

Filmmaker Magazine has a Q&A up on their site with filmmaker and former Austinite Tommy Pallotta, who, among other things, produced A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life. Pallotta is world-premiering a new doc, American Prince, at SXSW 09, but the bulk of the interview, interestingly, is actually about his decision to jump ship from social networking sites. "Recently I got rid of my Myspace, Facebook, and Linked In accounts because I think that being able to control information about yourself will be the new commodity of the future." Read the whole interview here.

SXSW Interactive may end, but some bits keep going, like the Unnamed Exquisite Corpse Movie, which made its sorta, kinds debut.

Taking its inspiration from the old surrealist thought experiment, it brings a new meaning to film-making as a communal experience. Quick skinny: a cast and crew has two weeks to make five minutes of a film. When they're done, they send the last minute of their segment to another cast and crew, and one instruction ("Use something pink." "This actress is pivotal." "There needs to be a fake eyelash.") and see what they come up with. Confused yet? The film makers are betting you won't be by the time it's completed.

"We hope that there will be a through-line, and that there will be a wonderful, watchable movie," said moderator and executive producer Meghan Scibona of Small Media XL. "Actually, we've all watched the first 20 minutes and we're shocked about how well it works as a short."

"It's gone somewhere exciting and interesting," said projected innovator Jason Nunes of Adobe Consulting, "and it's not a mess yet." With four of a planned twenty segments in place, the group plans to send push the experiment as far as possible by getting international collaborators.

The SXSW Interactive party at Scholz Bier Garten brought together a disparate mix of people last night, among them artists, musicians, gamers, futurists, and various techno-friendly types, as well as a few robots, which made their way through the crowd like children who couldn't find the right grownup's leg to hug.

There was also music, free food, masked revelry (admission was free for anyone in costume), and a Maker Faire-esque contingent of groups showing off their pet projects, which included a machine that printed words on ping pong balls; a video game with a curvy, wrap-around monitor; and some of the miniature sets, props, and characters from John P. Funk's short, stop-motion film "Quest for the Dark Planet."

Such oddities are apparently par for the course at these parties, thrown annually by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which seems to have made a lot of friends in its 18 years of crusading for free speech, intellectual property, and privacy rights on the Web.

If there's a keeper image from this year's SXSW interactive festival, it may be Mark Cuban and Michael Eisner agreeing to pose for an on-stage photo with a Flat Eric (ask your six-year-old niece, she'll be able to explain it.)

It was a little bit of a double-act, and they knew what the crowd can be like (Cuban: "We've learned a lot from the Mark Zuckerberg interview." Eisner: "I'll just be saying yes and no." Cuban: "And I'll be talking about myself a lot.") The former Disney CEO was there nominally to talk about his new project, Tornante, but everyone really wanted to know the one thing that he knows better than most: how to make money off content. Which is good, because he admits he knows little about the tech (he even forget to turn off his Blackberry and had to be told nicely by the staff that he was causing the blbvlvlvlvlvlvlvl noise on the PA.)

But seriously. About that money.

There's emotional and creative burn-out to blogging. After a while, it's just hard work, but you're in the zone, and you keep doing it. Add being in a war zone onto that, and you never get to complain about updating MyBlueHamster at blogspot again.

Dr. Carlos Brown, now a surgeon at Austin's Brackenridge Hospital, choked up guiding SXSW attendees through Trapperlos M.D., his blog of his time as a U.S. Navy trauma surgeon in Ramadi in Iraq. There's something slightly surreal about the way he put music to images of life in the operating room: but it was the little things that made life bearable for his family, like letting his daughter know that he had a birthday cake; or when he and his family, separated as they were, could all wear Star Wars costumes at Halloween; and the less grisly memories (like drinking one of the two beers he was allowed during his tour.)

Brown (who has since resigned his commission) calls the blogging experience an essential part of his time there. But he did note that the military has now started cutting back on access to YouTube and MySpace. "People who came after me had a much harder time running a blog, and I guess I got lucky."

Remember Minority Report? Remember the uber-cool control gloves that Tom Cruise used? Remember thinking "I wish I had those?"

The guys at Cynergy Labs were displaying their prototype in the Interactive Trade Show of a real version of the technology. The great/scary thing? They actually work. Running Windows Vista on a Mac, the demonstrators digitally (pardon the pun) manipulated a series of images on a test grid, from a 3D map of the Louvre to a stack of snap shots. The shocker for everyone that was expecting some super-duper high tech solution is that the backbone of the sensor system is a WiiMote. That's exactly the kind of innovation that Enspire's Patrick Sanchez talked about in the interactive issue. Apparently, Microsoft are very, very interested in the results.

Now if we can juuuuuust get that funky projected display Cruise had as well …

If you happen to have access to the SXSW Interactive Trade Fair on the fourth floor of the Convention Center, don't forget to drop by the Austin Chronicle booth/chill-out zone. Yes, come meet some of the delightful people that bring you your favorite local publication (plug, plug.) And if that's not enough encouragement, we have free Snowballs and Ho Hos.

Remember, if you don't eat them, we have to. No, seriously, we have a Snowball-stuffing contest after SXSW. And it's not a pretty sight.

What's the greatest thing about SXSW? The music? The films? The panel discussions? The mounds of free schwag that everyone ends up having to tote home?

NO! It's the huge pile of Lego that is the SXSW Interactive Playpen. Guests are invited to decompress from the strains and rigors of the festival (and trust us, one can only consume so many hors d'oeuvres before life becomes terribly tiresome) by playing with Lego. Lots and lots and lots of Lego. Builders can even take photos of their handiwork and upload them for the chance of winning a t-shirt.

Of course, it's not the same since they started making all these ultra-specialized shapes of blocks (the rot set in when they released the first oneXone block, I tell ye), but what engineer's heart does not soar at the sight of this much Lego?

Click on the image above for our own photo-gallery.