South by Southwest - part 3
SXSW Day 2 (part 2): Saturday, 8 March
As we walked from the parking lot to the convention center, I reminded Silona that we were supposed to pick up the flyers from Doryan about the Carnypocalypse party on Monday night. This is a whole subplot I should have mentioned before now. There was a party, see, being thrown on Monday night as a fundraiser for Silona's non-profit organization, the League of Technical Voters. Silona is known for throwing cool SXSW parties, although there was a bit of a soap opera this year because a dude named John L. that she used to be in business with, and who helped her throw these parties (memorably, a well-attended Steampunk themed party at Scholz's), she had split from because of various reasons. However, he was continuing to throw his own party this year, in competition with the one Silona wanted to throw. Doryan is a dude who knows how to organize these large-scale parties, and was still on Silona's team, and was responsible for getting the event catered, promoting the event, and recruiting the musical talent to make it a successful whingding.
I should mention that Carnypocalypse = Carnival games plus post-apocalypse Mad Max getups... but NO CLOWNS. There was to be a de-clowning station at the front entrance in case anyone came dressed as a clown or in clown make up. Apparently the owner of the club (Elysium) said that this was a non-negotiable condition for having the party there. No clowns OR NO PARTY. I hope this is as hilarious to you as it was to me.
The star attraction this year at the Carnypocalypse was this dude called Kid Beyond, the world's greatest beatboxer. There's this youtube link of him in action. Everywhere we went, Silona promoted this show and mentioned Kid Beyond. This always impressed people who knew who he was already, and if they didn't, she explained who he was in a way that made it sound like they damn well should be impressed that he was playing at her party. For free, because he wanted to help the League's cause by helping it raise some money.
Anyway, so there was a mess of flyers for this thing that Silona was supposed to be handing out while she made the SXSW rounds, to help generate a bigger crowd, even though they were fighting against the competing party that John L. was throwing that same night. The problem was, Doryan went to Houston to take care of some other party he was organizing (hey, it's what he does), so he supposedly left these flyers at his house, and told Silona to come get them whenever. Then Silona told me to remind her to go get them, which is something I'd been doing since Thursday evening at odd intervals, whenever I remembered. I had joked, only not jokingly, that I am currently serving as her interim personal assistant, until such time as she gets a proper one. I dedicate a few brain cycles to remembering to remind her about things and keep her running on schedule from one thing to the next.
When we got to the convention center, it had kind of an empty feeling. It was lunchtime, and everyone had filed out to forage for sustenance. The restaurant tucked behind the convention center, the Moonshine Grill, was clearly packed, with a line extending out onto the sidewalk. As we walked past, Silona mentioned that she was having an important lunch date there on Tuesday, with a rather fancy lady executive whose name and business I probably should omit just to be on the safe side. I added this lunch date to my mental reminder cycle, filing it as a somewhat low priority nudge item since Silona seemed to be on top of it and prioritizing it herself.
We came into the convention center and there was a moment's confusion about where to go. The festival was spread out over all four floors, with a certain hub of activity happening on the second level. Silona made a beeline for the escalator going up even as I started to mumble about wanting to see the Screenburn Arcade, a sort of trade show specifically about gaming that had just opened a half an hour ago, at noon, and was open just for the weekend. I'd been getting emails about this, and since I have been following videogame industry news and developments for the past year or so in my version of following something in earnest, it was a place I particularly wanted to make sure to stick my nose into. Silona herself used to work in the gaming industry, programming databases for MMOs in one of her many career incarnations.
We were halfway up the escalator when she realized that my mumbling about the Screenburn Arcade meant I really did want to go there, so she immediately turned around on the next landing and got on the down escalator.
"But wha er but whuh," I said.
"Well, you said you wanted to go to Screenburn, so let's go!" she said.
"Er. Okay," I said.
We were about halfway there, rounding the corner of the convention center, when we ran into some friends of hers, a common occurence already. The friend I remember was a young woman named Noelle, who reported having just gone rock climbing with Tantek.
"Aha, evidence of Tantek's existence," I said. If you recall back to the first part of this narrative, Tantek had eluded us once before already, at the orientation panel. Silona had commented on how it was unusual to have gone this long at SXSW without meeting him. Clearly he was on the go.
I should pause for a moment and mention something about the level of instantly updating connectivity being plied here by Silona and the network of friends, associates, and online acquaintances she maintains. Not content merely to Twitter (actually, to tweet, I suppose one says) their whereabouts via their phones and Blackberries, they were all subscribed to Dodgeball, such that SXSW-specific Twitters were being broadcast to the whole company of them constantly. This is how Silona was already following Tantek's movements even without tangible evidence of his presence in Austin, because Dodgeball was constantly sending updates to her phone in the form of text messages by way of Twitter about where Tantek was and what he was up to.
I asked about Tantek having somehow gone rock climbing after being in Austin less than a day, as if this were somewhat weird from my point of view, and thus humorous. The humor was lost on Silona and Noelle, who found it to be perfectly normal behavior for Tantek, who loves rock climbing and knows Austin's rock climbing gyms well, and always makes a point to make a beeline to them when he gets here. Presumably he knows all the rock climbing walls in all of the major geek cities around the world.
I zoned out for a few minutes while Silona caught up with Noelle, and then I heard her say, "We were just heading to Screenburn." That was my cue to start sidling sideways towards the Screenburn entrance. Thus eventually extricated, we headed towards the open doors and the gaming world beyond.
Immediately, we ran into old friends of Silona's, three or four of them in a cluster right at the entrance. I think they all used to work at Origin or something like that, and were now there at Screenburn representing the International Game Developers Association. I asked them a little about what they were doing and what the point of the group was. It seemed mainly to be about having a big picnic during the summer where everybody shows up and drinks beer and plays frisbee, which didn't sound so bad. Silona took a moment to tout my IF authoring credentials to the guy, and tell me that I should join the IGDA.
For all the IF fans out there, here is the walkthrough transcript of the story so far.
>TELL SILONA ABOUT FLYERS
>ENTER CONVENTION CENTER
>S. S. S.
>U
>D
>S. S. S. E.
>Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z.
>E. E.
>ENTER SCREENBURN
>Z. Z. Z. Z.
>ASK GUY ABOUT GROUP
>Z. Z. Z. Z. Z.
Behind the guy we were talking to was the first of the many Rock Band setups I saw during the convention. My friend dfan works at Harmonix and wrote some of the code that makes Rock Band awesome, and so I've been following Rock Band's success for months now but I haven't gotten to actually play it myself yet. It was an open rotation for players to wander in and out, and at that moment they were looking around for a drummer to join in.
"Are there any drummers here? Anyone? Anyone?"
As it happens, I am I drummer and have been wanting to find out how well I'd do drumming in Rock Band, but for some reason the situation there was making me feel hesitant and shy, and so I didn't speak up. I let someone else take the seat at the drum set, and Silona and I left this area to explore some more.
(Just in case my writeup of Day 5, Tuesday, is indefinitely delayed, I will inform you now that I played Rock Band a bunch that day, while Silona was off at her lunch appointment at Moonshine Grill, so don't feel too sad for me not playing it now.)
The rest of Screenburn wasn't all that exciting. It was much like any trade show, and wasn't even kind of gussied up with arcade lighting or something. It would have been more fun if it had been dark with a lot of neon or something, but instead it was just brightly fluorescent. There were small companies with game wares or game support stuff (there was a gaming database group, I think, trying to make a thing like Wikipedia but just for videogames, which I hope I'm not unkind in saying is kind of redundant). In the middle was a board and collectible card game area, where some upraised tables were serving the needs of MtG and D&D Miniatures players. The far side of the area was taken up by upraised platforms, upon which sat benchlike desks, upon which were installed banks of computers, all hooked up to some kind of competitive multiplayer shmup or another. There were also smaller stations where players faced each other one on one, looking like (if you're 1970s old school like me) two people ready to play Battleship against each other. Or, actually, it looked something like what I've seen in Star Trek movies and episodes where two people face off in some kind of advanced videogame, which I guess is exactly what it was. Reading the body language of the paired players, though, I got a little confused, as it didn't seem like they were reacting to each other. Even though they were paired at a station, it looked asynchronous, like one guy would be really intense and making frantic moves, and the other guy would be looking relaxed like he was waiting for some action to happen. Maybe they weren't going head-to-head at all, I'm not sure. I possibly could have asked, but that whole area was a little intimidating. It was clearly meant for people who knew what the hell the deal was. There was an air of Very Serious Gaming going on. There was also a lot of media coverage, with cameras being trained on various players.
I wended my way back to the front and found Silona. She was hungry. I'd had breakfast, but she hadn't eaten anything yet. Getting her some lunch seemed to be an agreed upon next step, except she also really wanted to find out where Barcamp was going to be that day.
This would be the third official Austin Barcamp. If you don't know what Barcamps are, they're a spontaneous conference-like get-together done as a reaction to Tim O'Reilly's Foo Camp, which was really exclusive. People figured out that all you need for a conference is a space to go, a bunch of people, and some topics to talk about, and Bob's your uncle. The fancier Barcamps even give out swag and name badges. Silona has been going to a number of Barcamps lately, because they're happening everywhere. This Austin Barcamp was happening during SXSW on purpose, and a lot of people she knew were going to be there and/or expecting her to be there, so she really wanted to make sure to go there.
Word was that Barcamp was apparently happening quite a distance from downtown, somewhere on 6th Street, but nobody was quite sure where. Noelle had had a vague idea where it was supposed to be -- and of course Tantek was supposed to be there today at some point -- but there was a lot of disagreement among the many people Silona polled that morning as to where exactly it was.
We got back to the corner of the building where we'd run into Noelle earlier, and suddenly Silona split off, heading for a guy who was standing near a massive pile of Lego bricks. I was soon to find out that his name was Thor, and that Silona had been wanting some brain-share with him for a while. She started innocently enough by asking if he knew where Barcamp was going to be, and his answer was much the same as everyone else's. There seemed to be a fuzzy quantum field of uncertainty as to the location -- later resolved as being the existence of a party thrown by someone of Barcamp ilk also along 6th Street also that afternoon also inviting the same crowd who would go to Barcamp -- but for now, we still didn't know exactly where it was going to be.
Thor was a friendly fellow, with a cute wife and quiet little baby parked nearby. Apparently he was rather Important in Silona's eyes, being something of an intense expert in one of her primary fields of interest -- Transparent Government. They talked a little bit of e-politics, and a little bit about Silona's open source social network / Connect the Dots concepts, and the conversation delved deeper and became more involved by the minute. Meanwhile, I was aware that she had been really, really hungry fifteen minutes earlier and was burning dozens of calories a second while chatting animatedly with Thor. So I started making all of the "Okay we're leaving now, gotta go" body language I could.
Convention Center, Southwest Corner
The southwest corner is a busy nexus of activity, with conventioneer traffic flowing in and out of the doors to the south. A number of already-exhausted looking young attendees are sitting cross-legged on the floor, backs to the walls. Directly to the north are some escalators and, farther beyond, a coffee bar and the larger auditoriums. Directly to the east is a long corridor leading to the Screenburn Arcade and Conversation rooms.
There are some chairs and tables set up here, occupied by people and their mostly Apple-branded laptops, all customized with crazy stickers like a hippie's car bumper.
There is an enormous pile of loose Lego bricks in the corner, occupying about 24 square feet of floor space under the slanted sweep of the escalators. Currently, nobody is playing with them.
Thor is here.
Silona is here, talking to Thor.
Your shoulder is starting to ache.
>I
You are carrying a canvas swag bag. The canvas swag bag contains: a heavy video camera, a few SXSW pamphlets, a breakfast bar, and a foam earplug.
You are starting to feel hungry.
Eventually I said, "We have to get Silona some lunch," and business cards were exchanged, and Silona took a step away from Thor, and then he made some last comment, and then somehow the conversation rebooted and went on another seven minutes.
"I am really hungry!" Silona insisted as we finally were on our way.
"Yes, let's get you some food," I said. "Where should we go?"
"I don't know," she said.
"Me either," I said.
We walked outside. It was very windy and a little on the chilly side, and somewhat overcast. Silona complained about this, wanting warmth and sunlight from Texas now that she had been to Boston and New York and Washington DC for most of February and the first week of March.
It was probably at this point that she pulled out her Blackberry and reported that someone had finally Twittered (in response to her Twitter-conducted query) where Barcamp was going to be: way the hell down at the GDS&M building near 6th and Lamar, the long, long end of walking distance from the convention center. We weren't sure whether we really wanted to walk all the way there, but it was possible, so we headed west on 6th Street in that direction, expecting to find somewhere to eat along the way.
"Oh yeah," I said. "Don't forget about picking up the flyers."
"Oh shoot," she said, only with an I instead of two O's. She's more demure in my retelling, you see. She said we might as well go ahead and do that after we eat. I said okay, because then it'd be done and I could free up the brain cells that I was dedicating to remembering to remind her to get them.
"Okay, so we'll eat, then go back and get the truck, then go to Barcamp, then get the flyers. Or should we get the flyers and then go to Barcamp?"
"Whichever. Oh, but we need to do Dorkbot this afternoon," she said.
"Oh. Dorkbot. That's today?"
Oh yeah, Dorkbot. She was very insistent about Dorkbot. I think it's because Dorkbot is important to Maker Faire, which is another thing that she's heavily involved in when she's not doing six hundred other things. I'd already accompanied her to a Maker Faire Town Hall meeting a month earlier, where she basically set up and chaired the meeting, and set up a wiki to keep everyone organized. One of the participants at the town hall was the Dorkbot group, which brings their many robotic gimcrackeys and tesla coils into service for the fun and entertainment of all concerned. They were going to have a tent set up across from the convention center that afternoon and evening with wacky things going beep and whirr and crackle, and the Maker Faire people were going to be there, and so it was a high priority to be at Dorkbot.
"Yes. So lunch, then we get the flyers, then we go to Dorkbot," she said.
"What about Barcamp?" I asked.
She made an exasperated noise of some kind.
"Okay, so we get lunch, then we do Barcamp, then we get the flyers," we agreed.
"Then Dorkbot."
"Then Dorkbot!" she said. "And then we do Film stuff."
"Film stuff, eh?"
"Yes."
Silona had been telling me very seriously that she wanted to dedicate the evening to Film stuff. She was still on this mission to try to crack into the Film scene on my behalf, to try to find out the cool film parties to go to, to meet some influential Film people and start promoting me and my $5,000 miracle film, The Krone Experiment. Even though she didn't completely like the design of the new business cards I ordered, she happily took a bunch of them so she could hand them out to people she met and chatted with, friends or new acquaintances. She wanted to spend the first weekend of SXSW trying to do Film stuff with me, so that she could spend the next three nights going heavy on the Interactive stuff that she normally prioritizes. This was a conscious decision on her part to ignore some fairly exclusive and interesting parties in favor of trying to get a foothold somewhere where she didn't have an in.
At the same time, I think I was starting to be interested by her world, and these swanky parties she was not going to go to. We still didn't know where any of the film parties were, but she did know where all the Interactive ones were. Maybe it'd be better to go to a party we knew about than no party at all.
After a slow start, it was going to be a long and busy day.
The cold wind was blowing at our backs, from behind us to the east, from the other side of the highway. It was another ominous rumble of foreshadowing, but we held hands tightly and pretended not to hear it.
To be continued
As we walked from the parking lot to the convention center, I reminded Silona that we were supposed to pick up the flyers from Doryan about the Carnypocalypse party on Monday night. This is a whole subplot I should have mentioned before now. There was a party, see, being thrown on Monday night as a fundraiser for Silona's non-profit organization, the League of Technical Voters. Silona is known for throwing cool SXSW parties, although there was a bit of a soap opera this year because a dude named John L. that she used to be in business with, and who helped her throw these parties (memorably, a well-attended Steampunk themed party at Scholz's), she had split from because of various reasons. However, he was continuing to throw his own party this year, in competition with the one Silona wanted to throw. Doryan is a dude who knows how to organize these large-scale parties, and was still on Silona's team, and was responsible for getting the event catered, promoting the event, and recruiting the musical talent to make it a successful whingding.
I should mention that Carnypocalypse = Carnival games plus post-apocalypse Mad Max getups... but NO CLOWNS. There was to be a de-clowning station at the front entrance in case anyone came dressed as a clown or in clown make up. Apparently the owner of the club (Elysium) said that this was a non-negotiable condition for having the party there. No clowns OR NO PARTY. I hope this is as hilarious to you as it was to me.
The star attraction this year at the Carnypocalypse was this dude called Kid Beyond, the world's greatest beatboxer. There's this youtube link of him in action. Everywhere we went, Silona promoted this show and mentioned Kid Beyond. This always impressed people who knew who he was already, and if they didn't, she explained who he was in a way that made it sound like they damn well should be impressed that he was playing at her party. For free, because he wanted to help the League's cause by helping it raise some money.
Anyway, so there was a mess of flyers for this thing that Silona was supposed to be handing out while she made the SXSW rounds, to help generate a bigger crowd, even though they were fighting against the competing party that John L. was throwing that same night. The problem was, Doryan went to Houston to take care of some other party he was organizing (hey, it's what he does), so he supposedly left these flyers at his house, and told Silona to come get them whenever. Then Silona told me to remind her to go get them, which is something I'd been doing since Thursday evening at odd intervals, whenever I remembered. I had joked, only not jokingly, that I am currently serving as her interim personal assistant, until such time as she gets a proper one. I dedicate a few brain cycles to remembering to remind her about things and keep her running on schedule from one thing to the next.
When we got to the convention center, it had kind of an empty feeling. It was lunchtime, and everyone had filed out to forage for sustenance. The restaurant tucked behind the convention center, the Moonshine Grill, was clearly packed, with a line extending out onto the sidewalk. As we walked past, Silona mentioned that she was having an important lunch date there on Tuesday, with a rather fancy lady executive whose name and business I probably should omit just to be on the safe side. I added this lunch date to my mental reminder cycle, filing it as a somewhat low priority nudge item since Silona seemed to be on top of it and prioritizing it herself.
We came into the convention center and there was a moment's confusion about where to go. The festival was spread out over all four floors, with a certain hub of activity happening on the second level. Silona made a beeline for the escalator going up even as I started to mumble about wanting to see the Screenburn Arcade, a sort of trade show specifically about gaming that had just opened a half an hour ago, at noon, and was open just for the weekend. I'd been getting emails about this, and since I have been following videogame industry news and developments for the past year or so in my version of following something in earnest, it was a place I particularly wanted to make sure to stick my nose into. Silona herself used to work in the gaming industry, programming databases for MMOs in one of her many career incarnations.
We were halfway up the escalator when she realized that my mumbling about the Screenburn Arcade meant I really did want to go there, so she immediately turned around on the next landing and got on the down escalator.
"But wha er but whuh," I said.
"Well, you said you wanted to go to Screenburn, so let's go!" she said.
"Er. Okay," I said.
We were about halfway there, rounding the corner of the convention center, when we ran into some friends of hers, a common occurence already. The friend I remember was a young woman named Noelle, who reported having just gone rock climbing with Tantek.
"Aha, evidence of Tantek's existence," I said. If you recall back to the first part of this narrative, Tantek had eluded us once before already, at the orientation panel. Silona had commented on how it was unusual to have gone this long at SXSW without meeting him. Clearly he was on the go.
I should pause for a moment and mention something about the level of instantly updating connectivity being plied here by Silona and the network of friends, associates, and online acquaintances she maintains. Not content merely to Twitter (actually, to tweet, I suppose one says) their whereabouts via their phones and Blackberries, they were all subscribed to Dodgeball, such that SXSW-specific Twitters were being broadcast to the whole company of them constantly. This is how Silona was already following Tantek's movements even without tangible evidence of his presence in Austin, because Dodgeball was constantly sending updates to her phone in the form of text messages by way of Twitter about where Tantek was and what he was up to.
I asked about Tantek having somehow gone rock climbing after being in Austin less than a day, as if this were somewhat weird from my point of view, and thus humorous. The humor was lost on Silona and Noelle, who found it to be perfectly normal behavior for Tantek, who loves rock climbing and knows Austin's rock climbing gyms well, and always makes a point to make a beeline to them when he gets here. Presumably he knows all the rock climbing walls in all of the major geek cities around the world.
I zoned out for a few minutes while Silona caught up with Noelle, and then I heard her say, "We were just heading to Screenburn." That was my cue to start sidling sideways towards the Screenburn entrance. Thus eventually extricated, we headed towards the open doors and the gaming world beyond.
Immediately, we ran into old friends of Silona's, three or four of them in a cluster right at the entrance. I think they all used to work at Origin or something like that, and were now there at Screenburn representing the International Game Developers Association. I asked them a little about what they were doing and what the point of the group was. It seemed mainly to be about having a big picnic during the summer where everybody shows up and drinks beer and plays frisbee, which didn't sound so bad. Silona took a moment to tout my IF authoring credentials to the guy, and tell me that I should join the IGDA.
For all the IF fans out there, here is the walkthrough transcript of the story so far.
>TELL SILONA ABOUT FLYERS
>ENTER CONVENTION CENTER
>S. S. S.
>U
>D
>S. S. S. E.
>Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z. Z.
>E. E.
>ENTER SCREENBURN
>Z. Z. Z. Z.
>ASK GUY ABOUT GROUP
>Z. Z. Z. Z. Z.
Behind the guy we were talking to was the first of the many Rock Band setups I saw during the convention. My friend dfan works at Harmonix and wrote some of the code that makes Rock Band awesome, and so I've been following Rock Band's success for months now but I haven't gotten to actually play it myself yet. It was an open rotation for players to wander in and out, and at that moment they were looking around for a drummer to join in.
"Are there any drummers here? Anyone? Anyone?"
As it happens, I am I drummer and have been wanting to find out how well I'd do drumming in Rock Band, but for some reason the situation there was making me feel hesitant and shy, and so I didn't speak up. I let someone else take the seat at the drum set, and Silona and I left this area to explore some more.
(Just in case my writeup of Day 5, Tuesday, is indefinitely delayed, I will inform you now that I played Rock Band a bunch that day, while Silona was off at her lunch appointment at Moonshine Grill, so don't feel too sad for me not playing it now.)
The rest of Screenburn wasn't all that exciting. It was much like any trade show, and wasn't even kind of gussied up with arcade lighting or something. It would have been more fun if it had been dark with a lot of neon or something, but instead it was just brightly fluorescent. There were small companies with game wares or game support stuff (there was a gaming database group, I think, trying to make a thing like Wikipedia but just for videogames, which I hope I'm not unkind in saying is kind of redundant). In the middle was a board and collectible card game area, where some upraised tables were serving the needs of MtG and D&D Miniatures players. The far side of the area was taken up by upraised platforms, upon which sat benchlike desks, upon which were installed banks of computers, all hooked up to some kind of competitive multiplayer shmup or another. There were also smaller stations where players faced each other one on one, looking like (if you're 1970s old school like me) two people ready to play Battleship against each other. Or, actually, it looked something like what I've seen in Star Trek movies and episodes where two people face off in some kind of advanced videogame, which I guess is exactly what it was. Reading the body language of the paired players, though, I got a little confused, as it didn't seem like they were reacting to each other. Even though they were paired at a station, it looked asynchronous, like one guy would be really intense and making frantic moves, and the other guy would be looking relaxed like he was waiting for some action to happen. Maybe they weren't going head-to-head at all, I'm not sure. I possibly could have asked, but that whole area was a little intimidating. It was clearly meant for people who knew what the hell the deal was. There was an air of Very Serious Gaming going on. There was also a lot of media coverage, with cameras being trained on various players.
I wended my way back to the front and found Silona. She was hungry. I'd had breakfast, but she hadn't eaten anything yet. Getting her some lunch seemed to be an agreed upon next step, except she also really wanted to find out where Barcamp was going to be that day.
This would be the third official Austin Barcamp. If you don't know what Barcamps are, they're a spontaneous conference-like get-together done as a reaction to Tim O'Reilly's Foo Camp, which was really exclusive. People figured out that all you need for a conference is a space to go, a bunch of people, and some topics to talk about, and Bob's your uncle. The fancier Barcamps even give out swag and name badges. Silona has been going to a number of Barcamps lately, because they're happening everywhere. This Austin Barcamp was happening during SXSW on purpose, and a lot of people she knew were going to be there and/or expecting her to be there, so she really wanted to make sure to go there.
Word was that Barcamp was apparently happening quite a distance from downtown, somewhere on 6th Street, but nobody was quite sure where. Noelle had had a vague idea where it was supposed to be -- and of course Tantek was supposed to be there today at some point -- but there was a lot of disagreement among the many people Silona polled that morning as to where exactly it was.
We got back to the corner of the building where we'd run into Noelle earlier, and suddenly Silona split off, heading for a guy who was standing near a massive pile of Lego bricks. I was soon to find out that his name was Thor, and that Silona had been wanting some brain-share with him for a while. She started innocently enough by asking if he knew where Barcamp was going to be, and his answer was much the same as everyone else's. There seemed to be a fuzzy quantum field of uncertainty as to the location -- later resolved as being the existence of a party thrown by someone of Barcamp ilk also along 6th Street also that afternoon also inviting the same crowd who would go to Barcamp -- but for now, we still didn't know exactly where it was going to be.
Thor was a friendly fellow, with a cute wife and quiet little baby parked nearby. Apparently he was rather Important in Silona's eyes, being something of an intense expert in one of her primary fields of interest -- Transparent Government. They talked a little bit of e-politics, and a little bit about Silona's open source social network / Connect the Dots concepts, and the conversation delved deeper and became more involved by the minute. Meanwhile, I was aware that she had been really, really hungry fifteen minutes earlier and was burning dozens of calories a second while chatting animatedly with Thor. So I started making all of the "Okay we're leaving now, gotta go" body language I could.
Convention Center, Southwest Corner
The southwest corner is a busy nexus of activity, with conventioneer traffic flowing in and out of the doors to the south. A number of already-exhausted looking young attendees are sitting cross-legged on the floor, backs to the walls. Directly to the north are some escalators and, farther beyond, a coffee bar and the larger auditoriums. Directly to the east is a long corridor leading to the Screenburn Arcade and Conversation rooms.
There are some chairs and tables set up here, occupied by people and their mostly Apple-branded laptops, all customized with crazy stickers like a hippie's car bumper.
There is an enormous pile of loose Lego bricks in the corner, occupying about 24 square feet of floor space under the slanted sweep of the escalators. Currently, nobody is playing with them.
Thor is here.
Silona is here, talking to Thor.
Your shoulder is starting to ache.
>I
You are carrying a canvas swag bag. The canvas swag bag contains: a heavy video camera, a few SXSW pamphlets, a breakfast bar, and a foam earplug.
You are starting to feel hungry.
Eventually I said, "We have to get Silona some lunch," and business cards were exchanged, and Silona took a step away from Thor, and then he made some last comment, and then somehow the conversation rebooted and went on another seven minutes.
"I am really hungry!" Silona insisted as we finally were on our way.
"Yes, let's get you some food," I said. "Where should we go?"
"I don't know," she said.
"Me either," I said.
We walked outside. It was very windy and a little on the chilly side, and somewhat overcast. Silona complained about this, wanting warmth and sunlight from Texas now that she had been to Boston and New York and Washington DC for most of February and the first week of March.
It was probably at this point that she pulled out her Blackberry and reported that someone had finally Twittered (in response to her Twitter-conducted query) where Barcamp was going to be: way the hell down at the GDS&M building near 6th and Lamar, the long, long end of walking distance from the convention center. We weren't sure whether we really wanted to walk all the way there, but it was possible, so we headed west on 6th Street in that direction, expecting to find somewhere to eat along the way.
"Oh yeah," I said. "Don't forget about picking up the flyers."
"Oh shoot," she said, only with an I instead of two O's. She's more demure in my retelling, you see. She said we might as well go ahead and do that after we eat. I said okay, because then it'd be done and I could free up the brain cells that I was dedicating to remembering to remind her to get them.
"Okay, so we'll eat, then go back and get the truck, then go to Barcamp, then get the flyers. Or should we get the flyers and then go to Barcamp?"
"Whichever. Oh, but we need to do Dorkbot this afternoon," she said.
"Oh. Dorkbot. That's today?"
Oh yeah, Dorkbot. She was very insistent about Dorkbot. I think it's because Dorkbot is important to Maker Faire, which is another thing that she's heavily involved in when she's not doing six hundred other things. I'd already accompanied her to a Maker Faire Town Hall meeting a month earlier, where she basically set up and chaired the meeting, and set up a wiki to keep everyone organized. One of the participants at the town hall was the Dorkbot group, which brings their many robotic gimcrackeys and tesla coils into service for the fun and entertainment of all concerned. They were going to have a tent set up across from the convention center that afternoon and evening with wacky things going beep and whirr and crackle, and the Maker Faire people were going to be there, and so it was a high priority to be at Dorkbot.
"Yes. So lunch, then we get the flyers, then we go to Dorkbot," she said.
"What about Barcamp?" I asked.
She made an exasperated noise of some kind.
"Okay, so we get lunch, then we do Barcamp, then we get the flyers," we agreed.
"Then Dorkbot."
"Then Dorkbot!" she said. "And then we do Film stuff."
"Film stuff, eh?"
"Yes."
Silona had been telling me very seriously that she wanted to dedicate the evening to Film stuff. She was still on this mission to try to crack into the Film scene on my behalf, to try to find out the cool film parties to go to, to meet some influential Film people and start promoting me and my $5,000 miracle film, The Krone Experiment. Even though she didn't completely like the design of the new business cards I ordered, she happily took a bunch of them so she could hand them out to people she met and chatted with, friends or new acquaintances. She wanted to spend the first weekend of SXSW trying to do Film stuff with me, so that she could spend the next three nights going heavy on the Interactive stuff that she normally prioritizes. This was a conscious decision on her part to ignore some fairly exclusive and interesting parties in favor of trying to get a foothold somewhere where she didn't have an in.
At the same time, I think I was starting to be interested by her world, and these swanky parties she was not going to go to. We still didn't know where any of the film parties were, but she did know where all the Interactive ones were. Maybe it'd be better to go to a party we knew about than no party at all.
After a slow start, it was going to be a long and busy day.
The cold wind was blowing at our backs, from behind us to the east, from the other side of the highway. It was another ominous rumble of foreshadowing, but we held hands tightly and pretended not to hear it.
To be continued