In the '90s, the Web cognoscenti joked about doing crack. But New York Times columnist David Carr actually did crack! Which might explain his befuddlement in this clip from the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin.

What recession? More than 10,000 revelers are expected for this year's SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas this week. With no real work at hand, they're hitting the parties hard — especially the unofficial ones.

What turned culture-jamming tech blog Boing Boing into the kind of censorious monster it normally ridicules? Beyond its initial statement that the reasons are "personal," Boing Boing hasn't elaborated, but all signs point to the foundering of a once-romantic friendship between Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue, the sex blogger whose many links from Boing Boing were erased last year. (Full disclosure: Jardin is Valleywag's favorite gendertastic sex-robot space princess from the future, while Violet Blue has contributed to Fleshbot, a porn blog published by Valleywag owner Gawker Media. Blue once approached Valleywag contributor Melissa Gira Grant for sex, but was rebuffed.) In an email to Valleywag, pasted below, Blue continues to profess ignorance of what she did wrong; she also dismisses her entanglement with Jardin as a friendship laced with casual sex. Blue's own photo of the two at Kink.com party, shown here, suggests, in its entangled limbs, that the relationship was more serious than that.

Sex and tech writer Melissa Gira and new Gawker writer Nick Douglas are two of the confirmed famous-for-the-Internet people who'll be at Valleywag Friday today, starting at 4 p.m. and continuing through maybe 8 or 9 at Moose's in Washington Square. Some of Gridskipper co-conspirators may be there, too. Valet parking available.