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I’ve been meaning to talk about this . . . but it’s such an incredibly divisive issue, I’ve really kept my thoughts private.
I have seen this on TV just about every day for weeks, and it’s really heated up since Sunday . . . and I can’t just sit here silently any longer.
I have to live with myself, and living with the knowledge that I was silent about this is much worse than enduring some short-term controversy.

I just got my schedule from Creation for the convention this weekend.
Now, I’ll be honest: I’m mostly posting this here because I’m too lazy to call my friends and family and tell them what’s up. (Crap. I just realized that writing it all out takes longer than making six phone calls. Shit.)
Well, here it is, anyway:

Schedule for Saturday, March 27.

• 2:10 PM Performance of material from JAG and Barefoot
• 5:30 PM Photo Op
• 9:00 PM Dessert Party

At all other times, I’ll be in some autograph area hawkin’ my shit signing things, unless there’s someone really cool on stage, in which case I will be in the auditorium going fanboy.

Last year, they gave me 50 minutes to perform. I was able to read Hooters and The Trade from Just A Geek, and an excerpt from Sponge Bob Vega$ Pants (the “Star Trek: The Experience” section, for those of you following along at home. Be sure to turn the page when you hear R2-D2 whistle.) from Dancing Barefoot.
This year, I hope to get closer to one hour, and I’ll perform Hooters (It’s a good intro), the WFS story from Barefoot, and something else TBA from JAG.
Guess what I get to do now? If you said “Go see Dawn of the Dead with Darin, give yourself a prize, and GET OUT OF MY HEAD!
UPDATE: Just got back.
Huge plot holes, and a little “over shot,” but still a really good time, and a great break from the eye-twitch-inducing stress of the JAG deadline. I certainly enjoyed it more than The Shining Part II The Dark Half Strikes Back Secret Window.
I didn’t think of it as a remake, or even a retelling of the original. It just seemed to take the “there’s lots of zombies who can only be killed by head wounds, so let’s go to the mall” idea, and ran with it.
But, uhm . . . when the hell did zombies suddenly get to run fast? Did I miss a memo?

You know those little buttons that are all over people’s websites? The ones that look just like the TON of buttons you see below?
I guess they’re called “stickers,” and today I found a totally badass UI to make them. I’ve always thought these little things were spiffy, kind of a different way to say “I like this stuff,” and be a little creative while you’re at it. I just wasted spent an hour or so making stickers, to give my brain a rest after writing all day.
Here are some stuff about me, or stuff I like ones:



And some that could be nifty for links:


How about some love for XM?

And of course, we’ve got to have some Star Trek stickers:

Okay, so consider yourself inspired! Get outta here and make some that are cooler than these . . . you know you want to.

About a month ago, I announced that I’d be attending Creation’s Grand Slam convention in Pasadena this weekend.
I just wanted to remind WWdN readers about the event, and give you some fun details:

• I will have copies of Dancing Barefoot available to sign!
• I will be there Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
• On Saturday, I’ll be doing a short (1 hour) performance of material from Dancing Barefoot and Just A Geek. If you’re planning on attending, and there’s a story you’d like to hear me read, leave it in the comments, and I’ll see what I can do.
• There’s some sort of party thing on Saturday night. I’ll be attending that, too.
• I really do have other CDs that aren’t The Pixies. That’s got nothing to do with the convention, but I thought you may want to know.
• My friend Kathleen and I met up in Old Town last night and totally made a punk rock, DIY-style ‘zine out of our work at The Cult of the One Eyed Cat. We’ll have them at the convention, too. We didn’t make that many, though, so you should start lining up now, and then fight over them. That would be totally punk rock. \m/.
• I have a few EarnestBorg9 T-shirts, and some OBEY WWDN shirts. I’ll bring them, too.

It should be a good time. We’re expecting rain this weekend, and there’s nothing quite like the smell of wet Klingon costumes. I’m really looking forward to that, yo.

I’m almost finished with my first *real* rewrite of Just A Geek. I’m right up to just about the end, when I found out that I got cut from Nemesis, and how I dealt with it. After that, there’s really just two brief chapters to clean up (mostly cutting a LOT of stuff out, plus some minor rewriting) before I write a whole new chapter that talks about Dancing Barefoot, and some of the stuff that’s happened since I finished the first draft of Just A Geek over a year ago.
It looks like I’m going to make my April 2 deadline! w00t!
So. I am a little fuzzy on some stuff, and I’ve been reading lots of old comment threads, to help jog my memory. I noticed a TON of comment spam in some of the old stuff, so I was manually deleting some things . . . and I just now came across an entry that I started, marked as a “draft” and never finished.
I have no idea what story I was going to tell here, but I thought it was kind of cool. An “unfinished symphony,” if I may be so bold.
It looks like I wrote this on June 21, 2002, at 11PM. It’s untitled.

Growing up, we never had very much.
We were poor white trash from The Valley, but my parents never let us know that. They never once made us aware of precisely how little we had, or how many sacrifices they must have made just to give my brother, sister and me birthday and Christmas presents.
I lived in a small and very unassuming house in the northeastern San Fernando valley community called Sunland/Tujunga. Back in the late 70s and early to mid 80s, our claim to fame was being a regular location for the hit TV series CHiPs.
Around 1982, one of the numerous times CHiPs was filming in our neighborhood, the kid next door (Steven, who was always putting his hand in his pants) rode his Huffy over The Big Hill, went over to the set, and returned with autographed photos of Larry “John Baker” Wilcox and Erik “Ponch” Estrada. Steven’s sister Tina was a few years older than we were and she was quite taken with Ponch. So I sold my autographed picture of Ponch to her for 5 bucks.
I guess 5 bucks had become synonymous with real wealth in my young mind, since it was the value of my precious Death Star, and I felt great pride shaking down Tina, extorting 5 glorious dollars from her in exchange for the picture that I didn’t care about having, anyway.
That 5 bucks went into a fund, which eventually was used to purchase an Atari 2600 at KMART. It came with Combat and 2 joystick controllers, and Invisible Tank Pong with the most walls remains one of my favorite games to this day.
I tell you this because I’ve just been hit with a painfully lucid memory of being 10 years old, sitting on the shag carpeting of our family’s den in Sunland, playing that Atari 2600.
That memory was brought on when I was sitting here, just an hour ago, playing Circus Atari on an Atari 2600 emulator.
I loved Circus Atari, but we didn’t have it, because playing it required the purchase of paddle controllers, which my parents just couldn’t afford.
But Kent Purser, one of The Cool Kids, had Circus Atari, and I always hoped for the casual invitation to come to his house on the weekend, and play it with him…

Maybe I was going to talk about Atari? Or how I never fit in with the cool kids? I can’t recall if I was invited to Kent’s house or not. I *do* remember an invite to this kid Steven’s house to watch Jaws on Beta, where the Cool Kids all ended up playing Atari and never gave me a turn (and we never watched the movie) . . . Maybe it was going to be something about how we were super poor White Trash when I was a kid, but my parents never let us “feel” poor? I have no idea. But I thought, “Hey, this is kind of cool,” when I saw it.
So there.
Goddammit. I’m supposed to be working, and all I want to do is go play Yars Revenge.