Gorgeous black tulip from the Dallas Arboretum

For the past several days we’ve been hosting Jey’s parents during their U.S. holiday. It’s been a wonderful time, and I’ll update with details and pictures later in the week, as I’ve just gotten a new Canon Powershot (while I wait for a repair to my Nikon SLR).

My main project for the past several months has been preparing the house for this week, and this morning I realized — it’s done. The curtains were hung, the extra towels bought, the clutter (mostly) hidden away. I’ve been putting down all my project ideas into a notebook for weeks, and now I can actually open it and map out what I will work on.

Off the top of my head, first on the list is: make a dress from a tshirt (and post tutorial), make a little camera case (and post tutorial), lay out plan for metalworking study…lots of things tumbling about but I’m trying to exercise some restraint.

I also thought it would be interesting to document what media I’m consuming each week (and maybe compare it to levels of productivity). Or is that too wordy and against my ideas for curation, which involves editing for clarity in presentation? Oh well:

This and last week, we finished Veronica Mars s1 and Carnivale s1, an early screening of ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’, and the documentary ‘Who the (bleep [I don't know how to pronounce that little bleepy symbol thing except to just say 'fuck']) is Jackson Pollock?’ I also read ‘To Say Nothing of the Dog’ and started Naomi’s new book, ‘The Lessons’. At night we’ve been watching Arrested Development on the ipad. We watched the Jonathan Creek Easter special. And we’ve started watching the new season of Doctor Who.

So what have we been up to? It can kind of be summed up in our recent travels —
Utah, for the #goforth game. El Paso, for family. Portland, for us. And Austin for work. There’s too much to cover in detail so I’ll leave it at that broad picture for now.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative [or creation] there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have believed would have come his way.

– W. H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

Jey’s sister and her husband are traveling around California this week and next, so we’re going to head over to San Francisco on Friday for our own mini-vacation and to visit with them.

In preparation, we’ve been watching films set in SF and the Bay area, starting with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

The first time I ever saw Vertigo was on a theatre screen in San Antonio, as part of a weekly classic films screening that I used to attend with my friends Francisco and Denise. It was at a theatre where they allowed alcoholic beverages, and guy in the row behind us got drunk and cackled through the entire film. Especially at parts with dramatic zoom-ins and tortured expressions. So there was definitely a narm element happening.

Less so this time around, though — I was caught up just as much as ever in the classic Hitchcock tension, and was quite pleased to recognize some of the San Francisco landmarks in the film, such as the Palace of Fine Arts (the place where I met Jey for the first time).

Gorgeous.

I also found this excellent Google Map which has a marker for every location in the film. I’d been wondering if the redwood trees they visit were in Muir Forest, but it turns out they had actually traveled to Big Basin State Park, south of the city.

Screencaps via.

Google map via.

Once we dropped the keys in the overnight deposit I felt a weight slipping away from my shoulders. I lived in that apartment for three years or so and learned a lot about myself while I lived there, and I’m glad to move on, though I did feel quite sad when I locked the door for the last time.

It also feels great, though. Like turning the page of a book to find a new chapter heading with one of those lovely illuminated letters to start it off.

Now I have to unpack the items from boxes that are piled up in every room of the house and have no time to do it (in fact I’m skipping something tonight so I can actually be at my house for more than an hour before going to bed, a rare opportunity). I’m imposing a two week deadline for this stage of things. I am going to try to organize a yard sale with our neighbors two weekends from now, so if I haven’t found a place for things inside the house, out it goes to find a new home.

At the same time that all this insane busy madness is going on, I keep seeing the most amazing and inspirational artwork and projects. It’s driving me crazy to not be able to sit down and start my feeble first steps toward creativity. But I have to be patient and take one step at a time, frustrating as it is to stretch things out so far. I’m finding myself in a weird struggle between achieving balance and attacking stuff with all my energy and focus. How can I sit serenely on a park bench surrounded by nature and appreciating the leaves and birdsong when I’m also dying to dance around and sling paint while shouting, ‘Help! I want to create!’?



Anyway, I’ve been thinking about collections and curating a lot lately, because I don’t really collect anything. But while I’m pondering that, my thoughtful mother has provided me with a jumping-off point by picking up two Harry Potter books in foreign languages (Spanish and Italian) during her travels!

Harry Potter e la Pietra Filosofale and Harry Potter y las Reliquias de la Muerte

I already have all the American covers and also one British book 7.

Finally, some quotes from a recent Keri Smith blog:

“i begin to write here and end up stopping for some reason. my mind does not think or reach outwardly these days.

she felt, not very “present”. just hearing her say that made me feel extremely relieved and understood as I had been feeling the EXACT same thing, but had not spoken of it to anyone. i felt my eyes get wide and my insides taking a deep breath.

right now I feel pulled in many directions but unable to connect.

this person looked at me and said, “it’s perfectly normal. you are in a new and very intense phase of your life. there’s no need to resist it.

damn, i really needed to hear that.”

Once I left for school in San Antonio, I no longer had a room at either parents’ house (due to my mother moving, and my sister occupying the former shared room), so summers and holidays were tricky. Plus I lived in a dorm, so I moved my possessions around every semester, in addition to those aforementioned breaks to Dallas.

So yeah, I have a weird relationship with the concept of “home”.

Even my first apartment(s) weren’t ones I chose for myself; I relied on my mother to help me scope out places and my final choices were based on her approval of the area’s safety and amenities.

So this new apartment of ours is great leap forward into constructing my life to my own vision. It’s come with a hefty price, though. To start, our utilities weren’t turned on in time, so we moved in all weekend in what was easily 100 degree (or 38 for my Celsius-based friends) heat.

Though now that I think about it, the price extraction started quite early on, with the sorting and purging of my apartment’s contents, which included three years’ worth of accumulated detritus as well as plenty of miscellaneous stuff I’d brought with me from four years of school.

Every time I look at a stack of papers from an old university class, I think of two things, Niecy Nash from Clean House (“mayhem and foolishness!”) and this passage from “The Artist’s Way”:

You probably won’t have time to complete all of the other tasks in any given week. Try to do about half. Know that the rest are there for use when you are able to get back to them. In choosing which half of the tasks to do, use two guidelines. Pick those that appeal to you and those you strongly resist. Leave the more neutral ones for later. Just remember, in choosing, that we often resist what we most need.

Truer words were never spoken, Julia Cameron! Shedding my accumulated ‘Stuff’ has been like a snake sloughing off its skin. It’s hard and emotional and makes me grumpy as hell, but it’s freeing in the best way imaginable.

Plus, definitely the best argument for asceticism is having to schlep your stuff down three flights of stairs and up two more in the Texas summer.

But any time I start to feel overwhelmed, I find that something is waiting around the corner to remind me of my blessings and to give me perspective.

This morning, Guy P linked me to the Longplayer, “a one thousand year long musical composition”:

Longplayer is composed for singing bowls – an ancient type of standing bell – which can be played by both humans and machines, and whose resonances can be very accurately reproduced in recorded form. It is designed to be adaptable to unforeseeable changes in its technological and social environments, and to endure in the long-term as a self-sustaining institution.

Longplayer grew out of a conceptual concern with problems of representing and understanding the fluidity and expansiveness of time. While it found form as a musical composition, it can also be understood as a living, 1000 year long process – an artificial life form programmed to seek its own survival strategies. More than a piece of music, Longplayer is a social organism, depending on people – and the communication between people – for its continuation, and existing as a community of listeners across centuries.

This canny and gorgeous project of course brings to mind Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, with its cloistered monastic communities deliberately living outside the too-rapid ebbs and flows of culture and society.

Anathem was, in turn, inspired by the Clock of the Long Now, “a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium.”

Obviously, no clock can have a guaranteed lifetime of 10,000 years, but some clocks are designed with guaranteed limits. (For example, a clock that shows a four-digit year date will not display the correct year after the year 9999.) With continued care and maintenance the Clock of the Long Now could reasonably be expected to display the correct time for 10,000 years.

Whether a clock would actually receive continued care and maintenance for such a long time is debatable. Hillis chose the 10,000-year goal to be just within the limits of plausibility. There are technological artifacts, such as fragments of pots and baskets, from 10,000 years in the past, so there is some precedent for human artifacts surviving this long, although very few human artifacts have been continuously tended for more than a few centuries.

(There’s even a music project inspired by the musical compositions in the books, a very pleasant merging of the human body and the mathematical concepts Anathem explores. It’s appropriate that it draws upon monastic musical tradition, and the 1,000 year composition is played on Tibetan singing bowls.)

I’m constantly astonished by how much things change in relatively tiny spans of time. Surgical sanitation (ie, the surgeon washing their own hands between patients) really only emerged in the 1840s, about 160 years ago. Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” hit right at the turn of the century, a mere 100 years past.

We look back on our Victorian and Edwardian ancestors and think of them as awfully quaint. But it’s going to be remarkably similar a hundred years from today. Even yesterday, someone on the radio mentioned that during an artifact recovery in 1997 (for a potential landing spot of Amelia Earhart’s missing plane), they handled items without gloves because even at that point it wasn’t possible to extract DNA from touched items, while it is now. I think the next really big advance will be how we view the human brain and its functions; we can see the mechanics of the body down to tiny levels of detail, but there’s still a lot of mystery about its chemistry.

What a fascinating mystery, though. NPR recently did a story on prayer and meditation and how it affects the brain. In short, meditation is a bodyhack that darkens the area of the brain which perceives one’s sense of self and the passing of time; hence, “oneness” with the universe.

Sitting back in this manner and considering time on a geographical scale instead of a human one really helps me feel less agonized by the day-to-day drudgery I’m dealing with now, as we purge, pack up and prepare to move to our new apartment. There’s enough there for me to discuss to want to craft a separate blog post about the gentle, constant pressure required for personal growth. But for now, I’ll resume the trudge forward to new spaces, physical and mental, with the final result firmly in mind.

Decorative tile on the new fireplace.

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.”
- Henry David Thoreau.

Another habit I enjoy is following a director’s or actor’s ouvre. At home we’ve started on some Akira Kurosawa films, intending to watch them in (more or less) order. (Though as in this Slate article on keeping discs for forever, we’ve had Seven Samurai languishing at home for months. I even carried it to England and back.)

But slightly easier to digest than the the above “existential cinematic vegetables” are the works of Japanese animation Studio Ghibli.

We’re following this list of “Films and specials (Excluding short films or Ghibli Museum releases)”. So that is, in order, with ones we’ve watched so far in italics:

Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Laputa: Castle in the Sky
Grave of the Fireflies
My Neighbor Totoro
Kiki’s Delivery Service
Only Yesterday
Porco Rosso
I Can Hear the Sea/Ocean Waves
Pom Poko
Whisper of the Heart
Princess Mononoke
My Neighbors The Yamadas
Spirited Away
Howl’s Moving Castle
Tales From Earthsea
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

So far I have been completely blown away by the films we’ve watched, and am lucky to re-watch several with new eyes.

Each Ghibli story is radically different, but they’re joined together by the same loving, creative spirit. The art is amazingly detailed, and the worlds they portray are unique but familiar, interweaving modern settings and mythology. And I love that many of Ghibli’s films deal with relationships between humans and the planet (the ones touching on harmonious, respectful co-existence often turning out to be the most profound and beautiful).

My favorites so far are Nausicaä and Totoro.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind takes place a thousand years after a war that destroyed the ecosystem of the planet, which is only just starting to heal itself. Every generation contributes its various pollutants to the atmosphere (just think of the Victorians and their coal burning! sheesh) and frets about its impact on the planet, so the film feels timely even though it was created in 1984 — the year I was born, and during the Cold War. In the film, a new war is about to break out, so there’s quite a bit of combat and fiery exploding stuff, but there’s also a truly epic plotline about the insects and toxic forest that are slowly covering the surface of the planet.

My Neighbor Totoro was a welcome balm after viewing Grave of the Fireflies, which is a beautiful but deeply haunting film about two children starving to death during war and famine in Kobe, Japan. Totoro is about two siblings who meet a giant, furry troll (it looks like a cross between a cat and a bear) who lives in the nearby forest. Early on in the film the children and their father enter the forest to visit an ancient camphor tree, to thank it and ask it to continue watching over them. Throughout the film — without getting too specific or spolier-y — they rely on the tree, forest and its inhabitants for help and guidance as they grow from children to young adults, physically and spiritually.

Like plenty of classic literature, lots of the Ghibli films feature children as a way to channel the magic of the world, a sense which fades as one grows older. (In Totoro, Granny explains to the children that she used to be able to see the house’s resident soot sprites, when she was their age.) Also given that there are strong mythological and earth-spirit elements, it makes sense that they’d use young people as vehicles:

“Animism in the widest sense, i.e. thinking of inanimate objects as animate, and treating them as if they were animate, is near-universal. Jean Piaget applied the term in child psychology in reference to an implicit understanding of the world in a child’s mind which assumes all events are the product of intention or consciousness. Piaget explains this with a cognitive inability to distinguish the external world from one’s own psyche. Developmental psychology has since established that the distinction of animate vs. inanimate things is an abstraction acquired by learning.” (via)

Totoro is also one of the most joyful films I’ve ever seen. According to Wikipedia, Totoro is as familiar to Japanese children as Winnie the Pooh is to British kids. I believe it, and I will also show it to my nearly-three-year-old nephew.

Last night’s Kiki’s Delivery Service was excellent as well. It features a young witch-in-training who leaves home at the age of 13 for a year of training in the real world. It’s about finding what you’re talented at, and then discovering what inspires that talent, and keeps you going. Inspired by Kiki, I have left this post as a long, rambling screed instead of trying to edit it down (or just cutting out parts completely), since I’m mostly just relieved I seem to have so much to say about it all.

Anyway, Ponyo is due out in American theatres on August 14, so now we have a dilemma — try to watch the remaining 10 films in 18 days and risk losing details in the rush, and not appreciating each film as a separate entity…or see Ponyo on its release, supporting the box office efforts and helping ensure the future of such films, but also ruining the order of our viewing schedule and the experience of seeing the films chronologically to witness the evolution of the studio.

(Though to be completely honest, we’ll probably see it on opening weekend AND watch when we’ve finished the others. Best of both!)

Last Sunday, Jey and I popped into the pet store down the street to grab some food and litter for Evey.

We emerged with a foster cat.

We’ve talked about adopting a second kitty but had agreed to do it in a month or two, once we’d scoped out some new apartments, had a bit more time to dedicate to the process, once we’d budgeted for the adoption fees…we had lots of reasons to wait. But when we saw Cleo, a tiny gray tabby curled up in her cage, shivering from the loud noises in the pet store, we looked at each other and decided to just go for it. Ten minutes later, the kind women of Texas Pawprints clipped her nails, put on her red collar, and handed us a carrier box.

We already have one cat, Evey, who is also a rescue animal. Because of her background (taken off the streets where she was starving, as she didn’t have the courage to fight for food) she’s always needed some special attention. Basically, she is the very definition of a “scaredy-cat” — she requires coaxing to do just about anything new. But with patience and time she becomes desensitized to new environments (walking around outside the front door, for example) and eventually becomes eager and confident.

Evey chillaxin’

I’ve never seen her around another cat before, and from her kittenhood she’s always been isolated, so we read a lot about how to introduce two felines to each other.

Mostly, the sources say, you have to let them get used to each other. Start with the two cats in separate rooms. NewCat, as a foster animal, is often comfortable with a bathroom or utility closet, as they are used to being in cages and even that small room is a lot of space to them. ResidentCat should be allowed to sniff the carrier, towels that smell like NewCat, or even poke her nose under the door.

As it turns out, Evey was not too keen on having another cat invade her territory. She hissed…a lot. At the cage, at the smell on our hands, at the bathroom door (when she could stand to be around it).

When Evey hisses her face gets wrinkly and distorted. Kinda like the vampires in Buffy.

But we just stroked her and kept talking to her. We also took turns behind the door, helping Cleo adjust, and explore, and not knock anything down.

Cleo is between 8 months and a year old, and she’s already had a batch of kittens (four of the five have been adopted out by Texas Pawprints already), despite still being a kitten herself. She ‘made biscuits’ on just about everything when she first arrived (as is evident in this video).

The first night, Cleo meowed all night long. We didn’t get much sleep.

The second night, Cleo meowed all night long. Our nerves were getting a bit frayed, but we put on some music and tried our best to get a bit of rest.

The meowing…the meowing…

The third night, Evey camped out in front of the bathroom door. Whenever Cleo began yowling, Evey would hiss. Cleo, reassured that she wasn’t alone, would stop meowing. Thanks Evey!

By Wednesday, we let the cats look at each other through a net divider. Evey would creep over, hiss, and retreat to stare menacingly (known in the cat world as ‘posturing’). But the hissing was less angry, more ‘I’m asserting my place in the household heirarchy!’ — progress!

After a couple of days of gentle meetings like this, Evey was constantly trying to get into whatever room Cleo was in (to groom her or swipe at her, we weren’t quite sure). Cleo also had a tendency to shoot out between one’s legs as soon as one opened the door. (This happened with me a lot more often than with Jey…)

Whenever Evey saw Cleo, she’d freeze — but after several attempts at freedom, Evey seemed a lot more chill — so we decided to let them occupy the same room (more or less, as we have a pretty open floorplan). Miraculously, hissing encounters were minimal.

Fast forward a few days, and the pair were actually kindasorta playing with each other!

Now, they both tolerate each other. They hang in the same room, usually within four feet of one another. Evey only hisses if Cleo tries to smack her tail. They aren’t sleeping on the same surfaces yet, but I think it’s only a matter of time.

A gallery of Cleo:

P.S. The kitty’s original name (given to her by Texas Pawprints) was Rizzo, after the character from Grease played by Stockard Channing. We were planning to name our new kitty “Mew”, but found that we talk to them too much (“Hey Mewmew! Come here!”) for that to work as a name. I think kitty has a very Egyptian profile, so her name is now Cleo — short for Cleocatra.

We move in August 8.

The new place is warm and bright and we could feel its good vibes immediately. We’ll be doing some major purging as we sort through our collective belongings to pack, ridding ourselves of literal and figurative baggage. I’ve been feeling discombobulated for a long time, having trouble focusing and not feeling like I had the time or mental energy to bring to life the creative things that have been banging around in my head. The thought of starting in a physical, mental, emotional space that’s a fresh and clean slate is so freeing, and this is such a huge step toward making the lives we actually want to live, that when I think about it I get a really strong physical reaction – a nervous energy roiling in my stomach, making me nauseated and giddy at the same time.

It’s perfect for holding up to things and pretending those things are wearing mustaches. Kind of like that Kids in the Hall sketch with the head-crusher.

Then, last weekend – a perfect opportunity…!

“tesla + laura = teslaurrrra!

(shot live on location at koriente, austin)”

1. Funky Finds Welcomes You!
2. KraftyMunchkin Designs
3. Fiber Therapy

4. Heather Chang of Heatherly Designs
5. Strange Little Bird
6. Miss Amy’s Stitch & Kitsch

7. Little Cookie/soapopotamus
8. Cut Out and Collect
9. DanceWithSilver/Paper.Scissors.Rock!!!

After the farmers’ market at Mockingbird Station, we went to the library and ate dinner at the Spiral Diner, a vegan cafe. It was so great to have so many menu options, and also to not have to worry about what’s being used to prepare food. I also did a series of posts over on DIY Gems on how to make your life a little greener, along with crafts, tips and tutorials.

All in all, a great day!

Kaede writes a monthly column in the Japanese creative magazine “Brain” and this month’s column is all about ARGs! I and a few other players (@jasper_su, @cubicgarden, Roberta Romero and @redbanshee) were contacted about using our photos, and they sent me a copy in return. My photos appear on the second page of the article (the third photo linked above.)

It’s really exciting to see my stuff in print! I love it when people contact me through Flickr to use my photos for projects like this. I’ve got another photo that will be in an upcoming insert in the Guardian, about summer sports, and that was all arranged through Flickr as well.

Now, charity:water has posted videos of the first well being drilled in Ethopia, from April 11-14!

It’s really great to see actual progress that benefits real people, as a direct result of our efforts and hard work.

Kansas-based sculptor Sean Corner at work (L), and a festival attendee with her dog (R)

Last weekend, Jey and I took the DART Rail downtown to check out the Deep Ellum Arts Festival, an annual community festival that celebrates the Dallas Entertainment District, with live music, a pet parade, and hundreds of artists and crafters.

Check out more photos below the cut:

Face-painting and henna (L), and a band whose name I am still trying to track down…but I will edit this post when I do!

Pets all over the place! (L and R)

NREAZON’s very cool custom vinyl and softies (L), and some friendly kids playing (R)

A tooth-whitening setup and a totally “Dallas” customer with her pet dog (L), and Jimmy Randel’s (Oklahoma City) wood Rose Creations (R)

More photos are available in my flickr set here. The Dallas Morning News also has some great shots, available here.

We had a lot of fun and are really looking forward to more local art events!

AUSTIN, Texas — Guy Kawasaki twittering, a food blogger chowing down and someone using a Zune: These are some of the South by Southwest scenes that helped a festival attendee win SXSW Bingo.

The game, cooked up by web software company Iridesco, tasked SXSWers with snapping and uploading shots of web celebs, tacos and other staples of the annual Austin conference. Laura E. Hall, a 24-year-old social media consultant from Dallas, won a Kindle e-book reader for filling all the spots on her card (above).

SXSW_2009 Danny Wen, co-founder of Iridesco and one of the guys behind the clever SXSW Bingo marketing ploy, said only about 15 people actively played during the festival, but he was still pleased with the outcome.

“We’re pretty happy about how it turned out — people knew about the cards, tweeted about them and always laughed when they took the time to look over what was on it,” he said in an e-mail interview. “Not to mention it was a great conversation piece for us as we met people throughout the conference.

“The amount of noise that was at the conference this year is overwhelming,” he said, “so if we can leave people with something fun and unique, and which contributes to their overall experience in a positive way, I mark that down as a success.”

Wired.com talked with SXSW Bingo winner Hall about her tactics, the hardest “gets” and the joys of interactive games.

Wired.com: Why did you decide to play SXSW Bingo?

Laura E. Hall: I’m really interested in interactive, immersive and location-based games, so I paid a lot of attention to the games being run at SXSW Interactive. There were a lot going on — The Go Game, The Hat Game, SXSW Bingo, Foursquare, Werewolf359. They’re all very fun in their own ways and make great use of the masses of people attending the conference.

Specifically, I thought that a scavenger-hunt-style bingo game would be a fun way to get me to look up from my phone a few times during the conference and actually pay attention to the details of my surroundings. I played all of the games I could, but there were others who were way ahead of me in the Go Game and Hat Game. When I realized that the Kindle was actually within my reach, I became determined to track everything down and win.

Wired.com: What was the toughest image to snag?

Hall: The hardest pictures were of the celebrities, because they were definitely all busy and sure to be surrounded by people, plus there was no way to know exactly where they’d be, unless they were speaking and listed on the schedule. I waited at the front of the ballroom before Gary Vaynerchuk’s panel to snag his photo, and my friend found a party Guy Kawasaki was hosting offsite.

Felicia Day was around the conference from the very start — we saw her in the street and on the escalators and everything! So I caught her on the ground floor of the center. But Robert Scoble was 100 percent luck — I was racing through the conference center toward a rumored Kindle, and saw him outside crossing the street. He was very cool and didn’t seem freaked out at all by the mad girl rushing toward him with a camera.

The other hardest image was finding someone using a Zune — 11,000 attendees and not a single one present. We had to drive to Best Buy to take that photo.

My final photo was of the Harvest T-shirt. [Harvest is a time-tracking and invoicing application by Iridesco, the creators of SXSW Bingo.] The guys said that if I got every other photo, they’d hook me up with that one, and so they did! It was cool to be able to announce my winning “Bingo!” with everyone present.

Wired.com: What led to the coolest experience?

Hall: The most fun was probably the free cupcakes, as we went to the “Pasties and Pastries” burlesque show at Emo’s. The “Something built with an Arduino” square meant I absolutely had to attend DorkBot (though I would have anyway, as it was awesome last year!). There were a few easy pics that were kind of throwaways — pair programming and the hashtag symbol, for example.

Wired.com: Did you get any help?

Hall: It was a big collaborative effort. My friends tolerated me stopping strangers in the streets or hallways, who were in turn always really helpful and nice when I explained what I was doing. Everyone I spoke to checked the card to see if they could help me get more squares. And many of my friends were keeping their eyes peeled for items on the squares, and texted me to let me know when to come find them.

Wired.com: How did you find out about the game?

Hall: I’d never heard of Harvest or any of the people who made [SXSW Bingo] before the conference, but I followed all them in anticipation of traveling to Austin because they said they’d announce news and give out printed bingo cards at SXSW. I found out about Bingo by following a few of the SXSW-themed Twitters (@SXSWThrive, @SXSWbaby, @sxswtwits, @sxswi).

Wired.com: Did you enjoy the game?

Hall: It was actually a great experience, because I got to explore the conference and center a lot more than I would have otherwise, and I had a good excuse to speak to strangers all over the place, which turned out to be informative and a lot of fun. After the fact, I even got interviewed for a Kindle podcast after spotting @LenEdgerley in the hallway and asking him where he’d bought his Kindle jacket. It’s a good habit to have developed.

If you’ll permit me, I’d like to thank @jeyb, @guyp, @repeatnone, @rylon, @catburton, @Emma_Smith, @acton, @GoGameMei, @AndruEdwards, @diviniaknowles, @Silona, @micahsaul, @garyvee, @guykawasaki, @Scobleizer, @tobymoore and @feliciaday for appearing in the photos or otherwise helping spot targets (along with those whose Twitter handles I didn’t get), my friends for tolerating my pursuit of the blackout bingo, and the guys at @harvest, @bjhess, @dannyw and @EvilPRGuy for being genuinely nice and helpful throughout the entire conference, and for coming up with this thing in the first place. Thank you all so much!

I’ll be posting a lot over the next few days so that all our adventures are preserved in blog form, and I promise no humiliation will be spared. But until the posts are complete, please join me in gazing wide-eyed at my favorite takeaway from SXSW 2009 – a Kindle 2: