When I first started thinking about what I wanted to say, I figured out that I really shouldn't be thinking in the first place; that just makes things complicated. I could start by simply complaining about the people who complain about SXSW or better yet I could start railing on the organizers of after parties and how they should really figure out what their legal obligations are before calling shenanigans on SXSW management. Maybe I could talk about how $140 is way too much to charge for access to 1500+ bands, but that would just be asinine and ridiculous. Maybe, just maybe, I could bring myself to try and help some people out on how to deal with SXSW. That my friends, (read as people who have too much time on their hands so they are actually reading this garbage) is what I will attempt to do....

Howdy istites. My name's Mike Dahmus, otherwise known all around various ratholes of the internet as M1EK, and I've been invited to write an honest-to-goodness post instead of a wimpy little comment. Normally, I crackplog ("crackplot blog") at my own place, M1EK's Bake-Sale of Bile, which is "Mostly Austin. Mostly Transportation. Mostly Bile.". I served on the city's Urban Transportation Commission from 2000 to 2005, before Daryl Slusher gave me the boot for being insufficiently slavish to Mike Krusee's plan to screw Austin's rail fans forever. I've been writing that crackplog since about 2003, starting in the run-up to the commuter rail disaster. ...