Windbringer's internal clock tells me that, as I write this the calendar date is 27 December 2025. To be honest, I kind of lost track of the date just before Christmas of this year. Everything started blurring together around that time, in part because it had been raining so much in California and in part because my schedule - my usual sense of how things are supposed to happen - no longer exists. I'm still searching for a new job and while I might have one or two leads I have no details. Plus, hanging one's hat on a single option is …
As I write this, I'm sitting in a coffee shop about halfway through January of 2025 trying desperately not to to wonder about what in the actual fuck is going on in the world right now for the sake of my mental health. It feels uncomfortably like when your glasses are just a little out of kilter and your vision is messed up in subtle, deeply annoying ways that you can't quite put your finger on. Warren Ellis recently put it thus: "I am once again Not Fully Awake, though possibly that is down to being repeatedly bludgeoned by the …
Time and funds permitting, I try to go on retreat every year or two. I like driving someplace new, someplace I've never been before, and getting off the grid for a couple of days. I find that it makes it much easier to relax, rest, catch up on my reading (or sometimes television), do some writing, tinker with locks a bit, and generally be nonverbal for about a week. It's not easy these days (and won't be for a while, I suspect) but it is something that I at least attempt periodically. The AirBnB I rented had a most unusual …
After things slowed down a bit at work over the summer, I finally took some advice given to me by a number of people in various capacities and took a vacation. When your boss orders you to take a couple of weeks off because he's afraid that you'll spontaneously combust, it's kind of hard to argue the point. So, I put in for almost a month off, rented a car (because my family wanted to retain the option to travel as necessary), and scouted out someplace suitably far away in the mountains for as long as I could afford (which …
I didn't really do anything for my birthday this year, in part because I just wanted some downtime (rather than go to Pantheacon I stayed in a hotel and caught up on my reading, and later on went on a coffee shop crawl) and in part because my birthday gift this was a a road trip to Joshua Tree, California for a long weekend in March. It's been a long time since I was last in the high desert and, even though it didn't seem like it at the time I was looking forward to both the road trip as …
JWZ bought the space that is now the DNA roughly 17 years ago and during that time it's become one of the premiere hotspots of SF nightlife. Just about any kind of event you can imagine has been thrown …
Historically, it's rare that Blind Guardian goes on tour in the United States, so whenever they come to the States we scramble to get tickets because they put on a hell of a show. Around the house we jokingly call them elven thrash metal because their lyrics are steeped in the works of Moorcock and Tolkien, with influences from many different myth cycles, such as Arthurian legend. To be blunt, their show was face-meltingly good. They played some classic crowd singalongs like The Bard's Song and Valhalla during the show and brought the house down in so doing.
In October of this year VNV Nation visited California as part of their Compendium tour, in which they celebrated their twenty year anniversary by performing a five hour set without an opening band that covered their entire corpus of work, comprised of twelve albums (one of which is orchestral in nature, having been recorded with the Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg). I didn't even try to keep track of their setlist because of how long the concert was. I do, however, recall that they played Perpetual, and there wasn't a dry eye in the place. I still get choked up thinking about …
This summer Charles Stross went on a book signing tour for his latest novel, the latest book of the Laundry Files series called The Nightmare Stacks. In July his book tour brought him to the Bay Area of California, and a famous bookstore which I strongly suggest that every visitor to San Francisco spend some time at called Borderlands Books. Of course, being a fan of Stross in general and the Laundry Files in particular, I packed up a couple of books that I wanted to get autographed and headed for downtown.
I've finally gotten around to pulling another load of pictures off of my phone. This one is from The Cure concert in June of 2016 during their summer tour of the United States. It's not often that you get to see one of the foundational bands of goth live so when tickets went on sale we jumped at the chance. I'm sorry that the pictures didn't turn out very well, between our distance from the stage and the lighting it was a battle just to get everything in focus, and I've had to cull a couple of pictures that just …
