Dime Store Riot

The New McCarthyism  smoke screen continues. The unDemocratic Party wants you to forget all the facts of their own malfeasance and instead focus on some unproven narrative that Russia hacked the DNC , then provided the info to WikiLeaks to swing the election in favor of Trump even in the face of a WikiLeaks operative insisting someone inside the DNC provided them the documents out of disgust.   Honestly, it's not that I'm surprised the DNC would pull this nonsense, I'm mostly surprised how many people have bought it into it and embrace it with both arms. I mean, I know I shouldn't be. You know, confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance and all that stuff that gets thrown around in online arguments. And this whole thing does allows a continuation of the infantile good/evil narrative that the duopoly always has in play during elections, but it's the hypocrisy that is so shocking to me. It's like: You're not mad that the Democrats rigged the results

Coming Soon:

Never seen a better explaination:

The last couple of days, I've been thinking a lot about Sujata, the girl who gave the Buddha food. I don't know if you know the story but the last thing Siddhartha tried before just going and sitting under the Bodhi tree where he found enlightenment was to live as an ascetic. Now, the stories talk about how Siddhartha threw himself into everything he tried, so of course he was the most rigorous in his discipline and the most severe in his denial of the body, the mortification of his flesh—think existing on a single sip of water and a single grain of rice while engaged in meditation or chanting or whatever difficult practice. Eventually, Siddhartha realized asceticism wasn’t helpful and wasn’t getting him anywhere. Unfortunately, by then, he’s near death. Weak and in pain. Exhausted. Can barely move. And a girl—Sujata—she sees him and she gives him her payasam—which is like this sugary, milk, rice pudding dish—and that’s what keeps him from dying and what gives him the

I used to write a lot of fiction that appeared on the free online zines. Most of those have run their course. And, honestly, the few who are still around aren't doing me any good because no one is going to dig through those for a flash fiction story that appeared two or more years ago. So, I'm moving a lot of those over to Wattpad. Not only does it give me a chance to teach myself photoshop, but, hopefully, I'll eventually get the attention of new readers. First up is:

Jacob's Ladder had a huge effect on me. Huge effect. But in spite of all the disturbing images, the part that has stuck with me over all these years is the bit Louie tells Jacob near the end: "Eckhart saw hell too. He said: The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you, he said. They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and... and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth. It's just a matter of how you look at it, that's all. So don't worry, okay?"

The Biden-Obama memes win the internet. Such funny stuff. I really want someone to greenlight a TV show of their "fictional adventures." Maybe it starts right after the election--more free time and Joe begins to set his Home Alone traps--then first season ends with the change-over in power and that fist fight Joe challenged Trump to a while back: CUT-TO: EXTERIOR. WASHINGTON DC GYM. REAR PARKING LOT. A fleet of BLACK LIMOS and SUVs surround the parking lot. The brilliant glow of their headlights reveal a rowdy crowd of men in nice suits and women in expensive dresses. STEADY-CAM through CROWD while the hottest RAP TRACK blasts. FISTS full of money pump the air. DRINKS Slosh. WOMEN Cheer. All interspersed with SECRET SERVICE AGENTS looking on anxiously. PULL-IN TIGHT ON: JOE BIDEN wearing boxing trunks and bouncing from foot to foot, BARACK OBAMA with his sleeves rolled up, a towel tossed casually over his shoulder, and a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.  O

Mondays at the day job always remind me that I need to write faster, finish more, and submit more.

Some things to consider post-election: * Feel how you feel. There’s nothing wrong with feeling how you feel—being human means you should naturally experience a wide array of emotions, good and bad. But then allow it all to pass. When emotions, either good or bad, don’t pass or you won’t allow them to pass, that’s when they create trouble for you. * We need to deal with what is. For better or for worse, Trump is our president. Short of a complete overthrow of the government, he’s not going anywhere for at least four years. *Young people, I know this is disheartening for you. I’m 40 years old and have voted in every election since I was 18. Sometimes this shit is fucked up and sad and disappointing. But you’ll get through it. * Have bad things happened because Trump won? Sure. But bad things happened before he won and bad things will continue to happen after he is long out of office. Dickheads will always find an excuse to be dickheads. Stop making this the source of all &quo

Have I mentioned how ridiculously excited I am to see Doctor Strange on the big screen?

Here's to a bit of the old tender or crispy...

What am I up to? You know, the usual. Just kicking back.

A Memory Hacker Explains How to Plant False Memories in People’s Minds

Jack Parsons  is -- IRON MAN: THE SORCERCER SUPREME

Still seeing a lot of people talking about writing in Bernie as their choice for president. That's not how write-in candidates work. 34 states require the candidate to be registered as a write-in, 9 do not allow write in candidates at all, and the remaining 7 states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Oregon) count the votes of anyone you write in. However, Bernie is not a registered candidate in any of those 34 states. And even if he, by some miracle, managed to get enough votes to take all 7 of the open states, that would still not give him enough electoral votes to be president (see breakdown below). Pennsylvania 20 New Jersey 14 Vermont 3 Rhode Island 4 New Hampshire 4 Iowa 6 Oregon 7 Total: 68 electoral votes

I think I might need to rethink how I spend my time:

It's not too late! GoFundMe coming soon!

Personally, I tend to follow Eugene Debs' logic, "I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it, than vote for something I don't want and get it." But seriously, the thing that absolutely drives me crazy about all the people who are just so rabid about lesser of evils voting or a vote for anyone other than Hillary is a vote for Trump or a third party vote is just throwing your vote away apparently don't understand how our election process actually functions or the importance of where they live when it comes to their vote. Listen up: I know you've been told this is a democracy and every vote counts, but that doesn't mean what you think it means. Thanks to the electoral college it's not about who gets the most votes. It's about who takes what states and gets the right amount of electors . Hell, thanks to the electoral college, it's even possible to lose the popular vote and still win the damn presidency. So, let's take my home

The mental hoops I see people jump through to defend Sanders new job as Democratic lapdog are absolutely mind blowing. It's one step away from, "He has to work for the corporate-run establishment and the warhawk candidate that stole the election. He's been infected with a time release poison and the DNC won't give him the antidote until after the election." It's really helped hammer home one of things that I've noticed this election: people on all sides really just want "heroes" who will save them for some "evil" and whom they can follow blindly. Honestly, sometimes, I'm really amazed we ever got rid of kings.

The Miskatonic Dreams anthology is currently available from Alban Lake in both print and digital . I hope you’ll check it out, either now or when it becomes available through Amazon in about a week.  "Your Special Advocate" introduces Ezra Gaskell who chairs the Dunwich Committee on Student Safety. There are a couple of things I tried to do with this story. Other writers portray the weirdness of Miskatonic University as either overt or covert. I prefer covert and so tried to filter that through my own experiences at the day job working with student safety where parents tend to panic over everything. I also wanted my story to be thoroughly modern and not read like a Lovecraft pastiche—my main character’s best resource is his smart phone and he’s never met an antiquarian. And lastly, my worldview runs counter to Lovecraft’s in pretty much every way. I wanted to make sure my story reflected that (hence the Dunwich connection)— “Listen,” he said. “Right now, you fee

Details soon on the anthology appearance of my horror story called "Your Special Advocate." In the meantime, I'm working on some more Cyberpunk stories...

Senator Joseph McCarthy I think it’s very telling that following the DNC leak the mainstream media has worked overtime to reframe anything connected to Assange and WikiLeaks in terms of how it “benefits Russia.” Instead of addressing any of the information revealed in any meaningful way, they’ve simply fallen in lockstep with the Dem’s New McCarthyism where any critic/opponent becomes an agent of Russia. What makes the whole thing even more ironic to me (besides the fact that the DNC stole the primary for Hillary) is that Obama Administration has been the least transparent presidential administration in history and used the espionage act to prosecute whistleblowers and information leakers more than any other presidential administration ever. But hey, you know, according to their marketing the Democrats are the liberal party, so ignore that the same way you ignore all the drone strikes and move along…

Ever noticed how much "alternative clothing" amounts to just slapping a pentagram or a baphomet or the alchemical symbol for sulfur on something? Under capitalism even Satan gets commodified.

Years ago, " Six Bullets For John Carter " began as a very short story written for Beat To A Pulp . Now, the expanded, far more philosophical and far more violent, version is available for Amazon Kindle: In the future, thieves don’t steal your identity, they steal you. The man didn’t care who a client wanted or why, as long as they could pay. He buried his conscience under a mountain of wealth and there it stayed…until he agreed to grow the blonde from Alpha Centauri... Burned by a powerful client, the man fled Mars for the free cities, the anarchist encampments along the Kuiper Belt, and the black market strongholds secreted in the Oort Cloud. But now he’s tired of running. A slice-and-splice job has given him a new face and new body, but the rewrite will kill him in a matter of days. He’s got a powerful gun, but the weapon only came with six bullets. He’s sacrificing everything for revenge, but what will it get him?

I loved Star Trek when I was a kid. Just loved it. I remember I made my mom take me to see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in the theatre and I bawled all the way home after Spock died. To celebrate the 50th Anniversary, I'm going to rewatch all the films and post my thoughts and observations. When I make it all the way through, I'll sum everthing up.  Star Trek: The Motion Picture Almost as soon as the series was cancelled, Roddenberry began lobbying Paramount for a feature film. Paramount didn’t agree until 1975, after the series did extremely well in syndication. However, despite a multitude of scripts being turned in, the studio passed on all of them before finally cancelling the project in 1977 with a plan to reboot the franchise with a new TV show. That changed again when  Close Encounters of the Third Kind ended up a box office hit. Paramount decided a feature film was the way to go. So the pilot episode for Star Trek: Phase II (An Alan Dean Foster scr

This talk by Damien Echols of the West Memphis 3 is absolutely worth a read.

Tonight's viewing is season two of one of my favorite vampire tv shows. "He was brought across in 1228. He preyed on humans for their blood. Now he wants to be mortal again. To repay society for his sins, to emerge from his world of darkness, from his endless forever...night."

I’ve been working on a lot of other stories outside of the crime genre and submitting them to markets that pay. Happy to announce my horror story “Your Special Advocate” will be in a Lovecraft anthology called Miskatonic Dreams . More about all this soon.

Shane Stevens at Breadloaf 1970 Meant to post this here sooner...I'm back talking with Richard Godwin about Shane Stevens. Read the Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse HERE .

Now that the most recent season is on Netflix, we've been rewatching  American Dad .  Hearing Scott Grimes voice Steve Smith really makes me want to watch  Critters  and  Critters 2  again.

The most interesting thing about the TRENDING ticker along the side of your Facebook feed? Clicking a topic, pretty much any topic, and seeing how many people share and comment on an article while clearly never having read it. Pretty much sums up one of the biggest problems with how we process, share, and deal with information on the internet.

I came across this list by the extremely talented but woefully unprofilic T.E.D. Klein. I have not read a couple of these, so it looks like I have a lot of new stories to track down: THE 13 MOST TERRIFYING HORROR STORIES Casting the Runes by M.R. James   The Novel of the Black Seal by Arthur Machen The Willows by Algernon Blackwood The Dunwich Horror by HPL Bird of Prey by John Collier Who Goes There? by Don A. Stuart (John W. Campbell) Antarctic horror, the genesis of The Thing. They Bite by Anthony Boucher Stay off the Moon! by Raymond F. Jones Ottmar Balleau X 2 by George Bamber First Anniversary by Richard Matheson The Autopsy by Michael Shea The Trick by Ramsey Campbell To Build a Fire by Jack London

I was watching a show the other night and was just totally put off by one of the characters. Couldn't put my finger on it for the longest time. Then it hit me...the character reminds me of Karen from Californication who I absolutely positively hated. The problem with disliking Karen (and I’m not alone in this) is that you were supposed to like her. Her relationship with Hank was the big arc of the show. As much as you wanted it to resolve and Karen to just go away, she’d always come right back (which is why I often ended up hate-watching the show more often than not).  That's left me thinking a lot about characters in TV shows and books that you were supposed to love but don't. Wondering why that happens? What goes wrong? And why, more often than not, the writer doesn't adjuster their program or series accordingly.

Think it's about time to rewatch Life . Alongside Terriers , it's probably one of my favorite recent shows that never got a fair shake thanks to the networks and some terrible marketing.  "I want to be the unwobbling pivot at the centre of an ever-revolving universe. I want to be still." --Charlie Crews Honestly, too, it's a same that both shows didn't come along just a little bit later. I think one of the streaming services would have taken them over in a heartbeat.

Shinsuke Nakamura's acquisition by the WWE is probably the smartest move they've made in years. Let's hope they don't waste him or completely blow the opportunity.

Showtime finally remembered they used to air The Red Shoe Diaries and greenlit a show called Submission written and directed by the talented Jacky St. James . If you were intrigued by 50 Shades of Grey , Submission tackles similar material but is both far better written and far sexier. If you were, rightly, put off by 50 Shades of Grey , Submission does NOT portray BDSM as something messed up and dark or attempt to pass off an abusive relationship as an “alternative lifestyle.” Submission is also just fun and sexy smut.

I have a lot of thoughts about the Captain America Agent of Hydra controversy (especially re: “fan entitlement” as an insult to blow off critique) that’ll I’ll get to later but for right now, there are a couple of things that are in the forefront of my mind. First, I think some of the conniption fits like this would just die down if the media wouldn’t turn them into a big deal. But unfortunately, real journalism is dead so things like Captain American secretly being an agent of Hydra get reported widely. And a big part of the problem is we still haven’t worked out all the kinks in our relationship to the internet/social media so no one seems to understand: the internet/social media makes it easy for people to complain, the asshole and the jerk will always open their mouth, and not every complaint is valid or even worth acknowledging. However, I think part of the problem is that we have a screwed up relationship to “art.” I think, we need to view the entire thing more bro