Here they come, the Young Thousands.

The SXSW Interactive festival, which now gets annoyingly abbreviated as SXSWi in at least one place, is over, and thus so ends my commitment to volunteer for them. I guess I never really got around to mentioning that I was going to be volunteering for SXSW and that's why I was heading down to Austin, but I figure anyone who reads this blog already knew about that because you are my friend and I told you. If anything interesting had happened on a non-personal level, i.e. something that wouldn't involve me being catty about a fellow crew member or a panelist, I would have blogged about it, but mostly it was just a bunch of panels about technical stuff I couldn't possibly care about (although I have to say that CSS seems like an impressive little whatever-the-fuck-it-is) and about trying to create web apps to do things that are already perfectly good the way they are, like for example the telephone.

Bruce Sterling's "State of the World" speech, the last major event of the conference (other than the closing night party, with which I did not bother) was better-attended than the day's keynote speech by Burnie Burns of the painfully-unfunny Red vs. Blue. The idea that machinima filmmakers might want to be taken seriously as artists is so fucking abhorrent to me that I can't even conjure up the words, so a panel on it, let alone a keynote, is of exactly no interest to me, and I guess a lot of people agreed.

Sterling is always a good speaker to watch, even when he rambles and irritates me by referring to Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman as "cartoonists," and at the very least is good for a fun soundbite or two (the one I posted earlier was my favorite, but the runner up has to be "When I get up in the morning, I won't hunt for my shoes, I'll just Google them." His delivery reminds me of a cross between Jello Biafra and Bill Hicks, and it's peppered with enough jokes to render even the more impenatrable (to someone like me) technological talk bearable. Sadly, he opened the speech by announcing that the conference had become far too big for him to throw his usual closing night party, but then he hasn't owned the beautiful house those parties were thrown in since his previous marriage dissolved and he moved to Belgrade, so there you go.

Now the music starts and I will surely be dead by the end of it. Only thing I will be at for sure Wednesday night is The Rebel, aka Country Teasers frontman Ben Wallers, midnight at Jackalope. Say hi.