The very idea that a baby body requires different fluids than a full-grown corpse somehow arouses my fancy. The concepts of death and infancy are heavy on my mind these days, as my generation comes into power, as my father shakes his massive head and warns that gas and food prices will never go down again, that this is what he was warning us about since the fifties.

I think he prays that this isn’t the End of History. At some point, he says (or I remember him saying, admittedly different things), innovation and notable incidents will cease to occur or we will become inured to them, and history will stop. There will no longer be anything worth recording. Humanity will subside into limbo.

I just received a voicemail from Qais, who was appointed this week’s Toontwink via lottery, pleading, and feats of strength. The message was mostly garbled screaming, which I take to mean he’s still busy with his Flynn DeMarco sleepover or whatever.

Seeing as I am currently at my day job, dreaming about my real job, propped by a tripod fashioned of human femurs over a sweltering keyboard, this is really all we can afford: a casually perverse Japanese TV drama about a scorned woman who finds a beautiful young man half-dead in a cardboard box, and then, wait for it, drags him into her apartment.

Originally intended as a Japanese remake of the Seattle documentary film about my quest for Ectomo’s new writers (”Bughunter Q: Eliza Gauger and the Search for the New Scum)”, something is lost in the translation, here. But the essence, the geist of the tale is the same.

Please enjoy, with our compliments, the first episode of Kimi Wa Petto.

My dears, my sweet darlings, my everythings, my sins and souls, my readers. I feel as if sticky veils of honey-snot are being dragged off my starved gills. Like a stone toad, I am reborn from muck. And how I long to shake and shiver and splatter it all over your eager cheeks.

Well. Seeing as our posting schedule is more relaxed than it once was (no longer is Ectomo in the first wild urgencies of youth), I have turned our Twitter feed back on. Meaning: Twitter user Ectomo will now report when a new post is posted, as it will with this very post. POST.

I am pleased to announce that in addition to my slow recovery from the worst case of burnout in recorded human (or wookiee) history, I am also in the thrall of preparation panic for the sake of two overlapping art shows, in Seattle, in September. One a group show, with a cadre of my prestigious peers, the other a lonely solo redux of my bizarrely successful Lighthouse Roasters show. More on that when I have flyers at hand, I suppose.

Until next time, droogs.

milkman [Flickr]

Infusionist’s Log, Byrd Research Station, Day #308

I’ve spent the last four hours checking my watch, the station clocks, the Russian broadcast television that dribbles in from Russkaya station during the storms. Mostly, it’s 4pm. Mostly. We brought almost enough tea, but I use the bags twice, mostly out of fear. I can see too many grim futures, see us trapped in some snow-in for weeks, buoyed only by strong cups and thick cream.

I miss rain, frankly. And noise. I miss black, glistening nights in breathy cities; I miss the undulations of power lines beyond an accelerating car. I miss tea that stays warm for more than a few gulps. I miss tea that doesn’t crystallize.

Sure, I signed up for it. We all did. Brownlee brought in the contract one day and sat down with us, earnestly propping his elbows on his knees and underlining words like “compensation”, and “retirement”, and “phonesex”. We were seduced, enthused! We started biting and hitting and climbing over one another, just to get to our empty suitcases!

That night, our last night in civilization, we celebrated. We fools, we babes in the wood, we celebrated. Qais turned to me, well into his second cream cheese log, and threw one of his junky-limbs over my scapula. “Isn’t this what we always wanted, E?” he slurred, spraying almond slivers. “This is why we did it. The blog, the jointly-published papers, the letters to the Lancet, the black-tie nude revues. We finally got our funding. We’ll be able to prove everything.” I tugged his hair and laughed, then.

Well, bitterness is my cream cheese now. There was no “research facility”. There was no “heated dorm”, nor “Swedish masseuse”. There was a hot tub, yes, but a dank waft blew from under its protective tarp, and we could summon no will to lift it. Sometimes we find Ross standing on the tiles, barefoot and swaying. He says he has always been an accomplished sonambulist, a claim for which some of his prescription bottles make a case, but during these spells he does not have the slack absence of a true sleepwalker. No, he watches. He looks for something. Something I think I can smell, on evenings like this.

They’ll come back inside, soon.

5 x 7″ Claybord sketch, one of a set of three, for the Ectomite who ended up fixing my MBP screen.

Adam’s Commission [Flickr]

Same deal as last time, gentlemen: you find me in the heaving crowd, I’ll do you up an Octobee, on the house. (clue: my hair is mintyblonde, and I will be dressed as a biplane-hijacking escapee from Mad Max’s personal bellydancing troupe)

This is Bong-Ra’s first US tour, and he’s augmented by a lineup of excellence including Pneumatic Detach, and Enduser, craftsman of one of my and Qais’ all-time favorite albums, Bollywood Breaks.

Ectofriend DJ Intoner, who put the show together, will be spinning between sets.

In case you, my treasured readership, are not yet familiar with Bong-Ra, allow me to advance the notion that he is fucking insane:

As for the rest of the cast, just click your dainty pointers below to be bathed in the relevant phat beats.

Bong-Ra pre-show tickets available [DNA Lounge]

Gentlemen, I am outraged.

Your gross negligence in assuming I am ashamed of any of my musical predilections is noted, and will be revenged. There is absolutely no reason to assume, self-righteous pricks that you are, that the carmine creeping up my collar is anything other than stoic pride, a touch of the ol’ toxoplasma gondii, and perhaps a brief spike in my everyday, baseline feelings of discomfort.

Listen you, I was enjoying the Ruski pop nymphets way back, before any hoity-toity English remixes got loose, much less actual American album releases. This shit was edgy and inaccessible. Hell, it still is! I would get home from my live-action Vampire the Masquerade roleplaying session at the local college campus (back when I was a ginger-curled nymphet myself), maybe boot up a game of Fallout 2, invite my BFF Steve over, and we’d watch these videos, on repeat, in silent awe. Why, I thought to myself, did I not have a dark pixie of a partner, an eternal semi-succubus, someone to cling to during the long nights of crippling self-doubt, someone to share my pants and lipgloss, someone to hold my hair while I purged, someone with whom to ghost ride the whip? I mean, someone besides Steve?

Now, emerald-haired, naked in a wooden trunk, chugging Red Bull and typing on a keyboard for which I cannot see the screen, I ask myself: if I had found her, this dark unicorn, would things have turned out better?

But then I think: how could they?

Picking up pets offworld was generally frowned upon by the Company, as there were no quarantine facilities beyond the Oort.

Foreign mammalia carried strange strains of crippling flu, shed itchy fibers on cockpit upholstery, and left crumbly little fewmets in secret places, fewmets that became apparent, and airborne, as soon as a ship hit ohgee.

Loneliness was somewhat alleviated, yes, but at the cost of vacation time squandered on bad worlds, stocking up on exotic feed.

Twilight in the Roachfields (What I Did on My Summer Vacation) [Etsy]

My father and I have long maintained a correspondence of epic intellectual proportions. Usually these take the form of discussions on science and science fiction, Rick Gauger being an award-winning science fiction author, and all-around life of the party.

Recently I sent him a link to a collection of cartoons on the fashion wars of the early 1800s, which were as vicious as they were short-lived. Men and women abandoned the stiff, straight-laced wardrobes of the 1700s and briefly adopted a more modern, flowy, comfortable look. This was the famous Regency era, in which Jane Austen lived and wrote. Unfortunately for fashion, it was quickly destroyed by the severe repression of the Victorian age’s corsets, high heels, and silly hats. Dad, armchair fashion historian, elaborates [with my notes appended, thusly]:

Yes, I’ve always thought it odd that women went out of, and back into corsets in the early 19th Century. In our own time, the 60s got over in a hurry, as women went back to makeup and hairdos in the early 70s. In my century [Dad is 64], I think that the corporations panicked as they saw hair styles, makeup and tailored clothing apparently becoming obsolete, and they put on a major propaganda offensive. The majority of people (including women) never understood the 60s anyway, so they were ready to buy into it. We had a last hurrah of big cars, just at the moment when we should’ve been changing our ways.

Another reason for the quick loss of those styles was that a woman really has to be very good-looking [such as my mother, 54, who to this day refuses to learn how to use an eyelash curler, probably because she’s too busy beating men away from her door with a stout stick] to be able to go without makeup and tailoring. There were a couple of girls among the grad students of 1965 that made me froth at the mouth; most others, however smart and sweet they might be, just didn’t have what it took. One of them was the girl who welcomed me back from my first tour in Vietnam. She came out in a nightie that made her look like a joke. I would have rather died than hurt her feelings at that moment.

Continue Reading…

Four Red Bulls, twenty hours, and a bag of squid chips later, it is done. The very first Ectoplamosis print broadside is ready for distribution.

But soft, ye say, what in blazes am I talking about? I’ll let Warren Ellis, Big Daddy to Ectomo’s Little Sister, explain:

The broadside has a centuries-long history as a device for disseminating news and ideas. I mean, flyers go up on the web to be printed off, sure. But it’s not quite the same thing. Getting an idea, or a piece of writing, on a single sheet and saying, yes, print this off, copy it and distribute it wherever you like — that’d be interesting.

In short, a single-page guerilla publication, distributed by xerox and zealous reader in coffee shops, cubicle farms, club bathrooms, 24-hour greasy spoon diners, on telephone poles, shoved under windshield wipers, wiped under windshield shovers, safety-pinned on unsuspecting hobos, and fluttering in a comet tail behind us, wherever we may roam.

The first episode of ECTOPLASMOSIS! is offered in three editions:

• US Letter 8.5 x 11″ one-side printed sheet: broadside1_standard_final.pdf
• 8.5 x 11″ borderless, all the way to the EDGE, man! For people with printers who can handle “borderless” printing: broadside1_borderless_final.pdf
• Eurotrash A4 8.3 x 11.7″, for our international clientele: broadside1_a4_final.pdf

This broadside is formatted specifically for easy printing and xeroxing, and features original artwork, an updated version of my famous Toxoplasmosis article, vintage illustrations, and an octobee coloring contest! Those of you who wish to curry our excellent favor, print and distribute with zest and enthusiasm! You will be rewarded in this life, and the next.

Stay tuned for more information about the coloring contest, a distribution contest, and other blunt mutterings from Brownlee.

Eliza has a problem. Due to an inner ear infection, a belly full of Red Bull, a pair of 14 inch platform boots with drunken goldfish in the heels and a Cosmo-Kramer-esque sense of internal equilibrium, the illustrious Ms. Gauger managed to trip and drop her cherished MacBook Pro upon the cold concrete ground. Kersmash.

Now the screen doesn’t work. Eliza took it to Apple and they are quoting a repair price of an astonishing eight hundred dollars. Now, Eliza may be an asexual shrew with genitalia as shriveled and desiccated as the corpse of a sea snail transplanted to the Sahara, but she knows when she’s being boned.

She’s looking for other options, preferably (but not necessarily) in the Oakland, California area. Do we have any maverick repair gurus in the audience? Eliza can pay, but it needs to be far more reasonable than what Apple is charging. We’d all like to see her get through this, especially since she is working on some sickeningly cool stuff for Ectomo to roll out in the New Year. In addition to paying cash money, we can also distribute plush Cthulhus to anyone who can help get this sorted.

If you can help, or have a suggestion, either drop us a line in the comments or email Eliza at eliza.gauger KRUNK! gmail.com, where KRUNK! is an at symbol.

Official Going Like This at TGS, originally uploaded by Ectomo.

Brownlee and I are in the offical Tokyo Games Show Press Room, enjoying delicious cold tea and even colder stares of disgust and condemnation from our game-journalisming peers.