The Damned Lies Project

Wherein we try the dance club thing again, a cute girl falls through my grasp, and a night ends poorly.

Ohms was a bigger club than Proteus.  Of course, club size was relative in the Sixth Street area; space was a premium, so no club was really huge.  But Ohms had a big dance floor, a few times the size of Proteus’s.  The club on a whole was darker, leaving more illusion to the actual size of the club and the actual attractiveness of the other club goers.  Add into that the requisite dance club dynamic lighting and copious amounts of alcohol, I was surprised people actually knew if they were going home with someone of the same species.

Our stomachs full of greasy but still unappetizing pizza (“Dude, chill.  Let the pizza go,” said Trent), we resumed our drinking in debauch in this new club.  There were three bars in Ohms.  A long one that stretched the length of the dance floor, an outdoor bar for their tables out back, and a shorter one near the random arrangements of old couches where we found ourselves.  I remember looking at the couches, trying to peer through the darkness, colored dance lighting, and smoke, wondering if I’d ever sit in these couches if I saw them in the light of day.  Trent suggested the same might be said of some of the girls at these clubs. Read the rest of this entry »

Someone has stolen Croggon’s airship.  He has an idea of who, but he doesn’t know why.  As he pursues the ship east across the United States, he finds that his beloved Free Crow has been renamed the Clementine.  He has no clue what cargo they stole his ship to transport, but he knows that they keep moving east towards the Civil War still waging between North and South.  He would be unwelcome with either side, but the South has a death warrant since he escaped his slavery in a bloody way all those years ago.

As if the pursuit of his ship were not enough, he is also being pursued by the newest member of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.  Maria Isabella Boyd is an actress and former spy that has been marginalized and pushed out of employment by her beloved Confederacy.  She is given orders to make sure that the Clementine’s cargo arrive at its destination no matter the cost. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein a pontificate about pizza with unrepentant snobbery.

I admit that I’m a pizza snob.

No defenses, no conditions or suppositions, no backpeddling to make you think I’m even handed.  Nope.  I grew up in New York eating pizza nearly once a week for eighteen years.  There’s just a way pizza needs to be done.  It needs to be handed to you on a paper plate that has ruffled fringes on the ends for no more than a buck or two, often paired with a soft drink special.  You carry a single slice (because that’s enough for lunch) back to booth-style seating where they have a salt shaker full of powdered garlic, another shaker filled with red pepper flakes, and a metal napkin dispenser at the table.

Don’t get me started about Chicago style deep dish pizza.  I acknowledge that it is also called pizza, but I think of it as some other type of pizzeria culinary cuisine, like it’s some sort of tomato-covered calzone.  I sleep better at night that way.

Moving down to Austin was a rude awakening for my inner pizza critic.  My first observation was that the pizza shrunk in the wash.  It wasn’t just thinner or smaller on a single dimension, the entire pie was shrunken and pieces carved off of that.  Where in New York the expectation is that a slice or two would satisfy you (unless you were binging), in Austin a single person was expected to consume three to four of these mini slices for something resembling satisfaction.  I guess you could consider Texas pizza the sliders of the pizza genre.  I just considered it bad. Read the rest of this entry »

You know the old story.  Boy meets girl.  Boy hooks up with girl.  Girl vanishes into thin air the next morning.  Boy finds out girl died weeks earlier.  Girl is trapped in a purgatory like Limbo where she can only visit the land of the living twice a year.  Yet the love story persists. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein I go downtown with friends and witness a chilling event.

Those with some passing familiarity with Austin have heard of Sixth Street.  Not the street itself, but all it encompasses.  Even if you had not heard of it, when you move to Austin as a college student, you hear about it pretty quickly.

“So there’s an area downtown where there are like a hundred bars and clubs in a few block area.  Literally bars next door to other bars.  And most of them are playing live music or have dance music.  So you can just walk from one bar to the next as you like.  And there are girls all over, hopping from bar to bar, typically dressed for clubbing.”

“Where is this mystical paradise that you speak of?  How soon can I go there and how much of my soul will it cost me?” Read the rest of this entry »

A series of bizarre murders have struck Victorian London, prompting panic and sensational newspaper headlines.  The police call on stage-magician and sometimes-detective Edward Moon: past his prime, near-disgraced and terminally bored.  Together with his ever-present companion The Somnambulist, a giant who only drinks milk and is unharmed by stab wounds, they return to the life of detective work.  What follows is the unmarking of a strange plot, intersected by carnival performers, freakshow prostitutes, London’s secret service, a man who lives backwards in time, and the work of the Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein we discuss Evil Twin theory and my personal experiences.

It was during my time at college that my evil twin died.

Not everyone knows this, but everybody has an evil twin.  There may be some naysayers, but it is true.  Somewhere on this planet, there’s an evil twin for every person on the planet.  They may be on the other side of the globe, a thousand miles away, or just across town going to that bar you never go to.  Everyone has an evil twin somewhere.  Except me, because my evil twin died. Read the rest of this entry »