"Dark Miracle" in Coilhouse Issue 2!

I thought y’all would like to know that my Trinity piece, “Dark Miracle“, is actually seeing print, in Issue #2 of the fabulous magazine Coilhouse, available now! I haven’t gotten my contributor’s copy yet, but the little bits of proofing I’ve seen make it look awesome. So if you like the piece, order the magazine and check it out. (You should order it anyway. Coilhouse is amazing. Zo and Meredith and Nadya are doing an incredible job over there.) I’ve got another piece in this issue as well, a conversation with my old friend R.U. Sirius about cyberpunk and futurism and how he helped me get girls when I was a teenager.

So go to it.

[Full disclosure: I didn’t receive any payment for Coilhouse using the piece. As far as I’m concerned, y’all paid me for the piece a long time ago; I just wanted to see it in print somewhere, and I’m glad it’s in Coilhouse, which is shaping up to fill the void Mondo 2000 left a decade ago. It’s an awesome mag.)

Cyberpunk in 1996

and, via David Pescovitz over at BoingBoing, here’s a Bay Area TV show called “Net Cafe” episode featuring my friends St. Jude and R.U. Sirius. I was probably already hanging around at this point.

It’s nice to see Jude, who died a few years ago. I miss her.

And yes, this is all very quaint now. It wasn’t then, okay?

(This is also around the time I met Pescovitz, but I doubt he’d remember me; he worked on our Revolting.com project, but I only ever actually met him IRL one time, when the Revolting team met up in Oakland. I was 19, and probably an ass.)

Merry Dies Natalis Solis Invicti To All!

And I’m off to the parents’ house for sugar comas and Christmas movies — it has become a tradition in my family to round up all our friends who don’t have family in town and aren’t going home for the holidays to come over, eat a bunch of food and watch a couple of contemporary X-Mas flicks on Christmas Eve. Tonight, I think, it’s gonna be Die Hard and Bad Santa.

And let’s not forget the poor old Deus Sol Invictus on this day — after all, December 25th was his birthday first. (And almost certainly not that of Jesus of Nazareth. Remember the whole bit about “shepherds in their fields”. In December, in the Northern Hemisphere? Not likely, not even in Palestine.) It was the first day of the year when the lengthening of the daylight hours was noticeable to ancients, and it symbolized the triumph of day over night.

Which is what Christmas ought to always be about, whether you’re a Christian or not: the recognition that light still shines in the darkness. This has been a terrible year for me personally and for a lot of people in the world in general. But light still shines. We’ve got a man-sexy new President who may actually believe the stuff he’s selling; and hey, gas prices have gone down substantially, yeah?

The light still shines. And I hope it shines for you and yours this Christmas, and that you have the best Christmas possible.

Good night.

The Thought That Keeps Me Awake At Night…

…is that 100,000 years from now, when aliens discover the scattered remnants of what’s left of the human species, the dialogue’s going to go something like this.

“Hey, Zerplax!”

“Yes, Kiplorg?”

“Check out this video the humans left.”

“Okay, what am I…okay, there’s two girls, and…what are they eating?”

“Just keep watching.”

Divine Intervention

No, not for me. It’s a song of mine — one none of you have heard, since I’ve never recorded it and never played it live.

Aaron Archer came over and laid down some sick guitar parts for this track. It’s a Bloc Party-kinda thing — all staccato uptempo dance-punk dub sound. He put a ridiculous slide solo on it.

I’m going to dub new drums, bass and synth behind his parts and then figure out how I’m gonna do the vocals. But it’s awesome. Imagine that — Red State Soundsystem music that’s actually indie-pop friendly!

Introducing the new work blog!

If you’re curious, pop on over to my new work blog and check it out. Not much doing there so far — considering I just put it up today — but there should be good stuff coming up soon. I’ll be migrating all of my work-related content over there in the coming days/weeks/months. I think it’ll be a lot better for me to separate work and personal stuff.

Lemme know what you think.