The general consensus ahead of Sunday's big HBO debut is positive: geeks and geek detractors are both excited for Silicon Valley. But Recode's Nellie Bowles attended the show's San Francisco premiere, and tech's favorite billionaire electric car baron has nothing nice to say. He also seems like sort of a prick!

Austin, TX — Strip away the pretension of the panels, and SXSW is pure leisure time. This rowdy crew swapped contraband wine bottles through the end of the night at one of this week's high budget parties, commanding the room, Google lanyards swinging. Now just think: soon every bar will look just like this.

When the team behind Connect—a generically named, beautifully designed social app—won a recent pitch competition, they were ecstatic. Nabbing $200,000 and the oozing love of venture capitalists is a reason to keep living. Now let's blast some fucking electro.

If you get an email offering free rides to a free party with free booze, it's usually too good to be true.

What do you do when your startup mixer has been an internet punchline for an entire week? Release a "video recap" of the night's event, of course. Game-changer. Innovate.

And by now, I mean again, because an economic disaster wasn't enough to teach people that modesty is becoming when you're touting a business with no demonstrable worth. But, Pharrell!

Or at the very least, much larger, more expensive, and includes a petting zoo. Is that a guy in chain mail making giant bubbles? It's all happening right now, in a Californian parking lot, far, far away.

The gilded dust has settled across Cannes after last week's advertising Hajj, and by all indications, Tumblr's party was a hit! Drinks, palm trees, etc. But we weren't invited, and neither were you, so here's what it would've been like to attend Karp's fabulous French bar tab.

Mostly because you weren't invited, but also because there's a muzzled guard dog standing outside of it like a checkpoint on the Berlin Wall.

There's not much to say about Tech Cocktail, and the firm says that little bit itself: it's "a media company and events organization for startups, entrepreneurs, and technology enthusiasts." Networking stuff. Simple stuff—and something apparently worth a giant investment from the head of Zappos.

With fears of a tech bubble looming, what better tie-in for your company fête than... the period right before America's greatest financial disaster? Someone at AirBnb sure thinks so: mark your calendars for a boozy night on West Egg. This might be the most oblivious party in startup history.

Last night's launch party for Gig-It, an online sim game that essentially swaps out FarmVille's crops for rappers, was music video lavish. It looked like its backers just listened to the radio for 30 minutes, said Hire them all!, and then smoked some blow out of a rolled up bitcoin. But what... is Gig-It?