Greetings from Austin and the amazing SXSW festival. I’ll be giving daily updates for the next few days about the Interactive portion of the festival and will try to get into a couple of films to review them too.
I was amazed at the tone of the interactive portion of the festival today. Everyone was buzzing about Japan, sharing websites and ways to help the victims. This fulfills the promise of the best of the internet: bringing people together in good will to help complete strangers.
Today we started off easy, though. Started off the day with a couple of panels: How To Not Be A Douchebag at SXSW and Rebooting Iceland: Crowdsourcing Innovation in Uncertain Times . Key points of anti-douchery? Don’t be a shameless self-promoter, and just generally relax. So after I got the gist of that, checked out the last bit of the Iceland panel. Good stuff- Iceland has more to offer than just Bjork and geothermal energy, you know? It was great to hear how young people were getting organized and helping to bring Iceland back from the brink of their financial collapse. Makes you hope something similar happend here, eh?
The next panel was Can You Trust Me?, which was supposed to be about loss of brand trust due to social irresponsibility… and the presenter didn’t show up. So, the answer is “no,” I can’t trust you.
I spent the next hour finding the press lounge (very nice), and then wandered into the Tron Interactive Lounge. Good choice. Inside they had Tron:Legacy playing on several screens, and I was immediately offered some 3D glasses to watch the Arena Battle in 3D. It was beautiful.
I must admit, I’m skeptical of 3D. I think it’s gimmicky, I think it’s a fad. And so to know that Disney was packaging it in with the BluRay made me a little concerned. I’m actually a big fan of what Disney/Pixar are doing to package BluRay/DVD/Digital copy together- since they take their classics in and out of “the vault” you have to make sure you future-proof your collection. This is why my wife and I started buying Disney DVDs before we had a DVD player (and before we had kids).
But the likelihood of me ever owning a 3D tv? Probably pretty slim. So I thought it was dumb to offer the bundled 3D disc.
Boy was I wrong. This looked fantastic. And made me want to at least think about a 3D tv. So, in terms of futureproofing my own movie collection, I will be glad to get the 3D Tron Legacy disc, if for nothing else than as an insurance policy.
The last panel I attended was Offline America, Why We Have A Digital Divide . Folks, I am glad I live in the Austin area with decent broadband penetration. We have some serious problems preventing folks in rural areas (and poor areas around major cities) from getting broadband penetration. The good news is, policies at both the local and national level can change this. The bad news is it’s going to cost money- the same way rural electrification did.
Other bad news? I didn’t get in to see Source Code tonight. But, I had a couple of friends who did and they said it was “great” and that Jake Gyllenhaal is “dreamy.”
Tomorrow: Mythbusters with Adam Savage or Star Wars Documentary? I still need help deciding- leave a comment if you have a preference. Also, going to check out the Screenburn Arcade, go play some Marvel v Capcom 3. Word is, they’re trying to get Mike Tyson to come by and play. That I have to see. Also going to try to get into a couple films: Super, and Attack the Block. If I get into both, or either, my review will be coming very late tomorrow night.