Name dropping

A couple people suggested that I should go to Bruce Sterling’s for the post SXSWi party he was throwing. Although I prefer to get invitations from the host, I decided to show up anyhow. After all, he lives just a few blocks away…

Being there was sort of like being at a wrap-party for a Hollywood blockbuster, only all the celebrities are geek celebrities, not beautiful-people celebrities. Ben Trott and his lovely wife Mena. Anil Dash, who I spoke with for a bit. Cory Doctorow. Dan Gillmor. Probably lots of other people I should have recognized but didn’t (at one point, Anil buttonholed some former Pyra employee to corroborate a point about features for Blogger Pro that existed in the beta but were dropped from the final). A little while after I got there, Gwen joined me.

Gwen and I chatted with Rebecca Blood at some length, and told her details of the construction of the house we were in–I had never been there before, but had seen it under construction. We talked about 37th Street, right around the corner, where I used to live.

In one of Bruce Sterling’s earlier novels, The Artificial Kid, the story opens with his protagonist surrounded by a swarm of his own tiny, flying cameras; he edits the footage of his life down later and makes it generally available (as do, apparently, many of his peers). Although this bears a vague resemblance to a certain popular activity today (cough-blogging-cough), what recalled this to my mind last night was seeing a trashy-pretty woman approaching the Sterling residence with a tiny digital camera in hand. She was holding it high and shooting pictures of herself as she walked up.

3 thoughts on “Name dropping”

  1. The bit about the woman taking pictures of herself made me laugh myself out of my chair. That seems so un-Austin. Or maybe scratch that … it is very Austin because she’s doing it herself. Whereas a Hollywood-ite would have a complete film crew doing the work.

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