13:37. Kendra's project Perfect Stranger arrived this morning, and I spent several hours marvelling at her artwork. Perfect Stranger's underground status in some circles rivals Sleater-Kinney and Bust Magazine. Although she ended up working with a major entertainment company, Kendra was savvy enough to avoid the twin traps of corporatized grrls and youth niche-marketing disguised as sociology.

16:11. I received an Electronic Arts e-mail that there was a fire at Anim-X. I tried calling Kendra, but there was no answer . . .

Day 13

12:49. Yesterday's INXS post caused a stir for some people. Actually, it was a faked post, written in the style of the conspiracy theorists Fritz Springmeier, David Icke, Jeff Godwin, and the disgraced Mike Warnke. I heard that someone once faked some Hakim Bey posts, and people couldn't tell the difference. What's really happening is that this 'spiritual warfare' is about different perceptual frames. Most such presentations are the battles over semiotics, biblical interpretations (hermeneutics territory) and video fragments that Marshall McLuhan warned about in the contemporary media environment. They use either-or logic (what Edward de Bono calls "rock logic") to define the world as 'religious' versus 'secular'. I personally prefer Michael Shermer's cognitive skepticism. Check out his book Why People Believe Weird Things (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1997).

Day 12

14:31. I was sent this e-mail post today. I thought these pop music = global domination conspiracies had died with the Parental Music Resource Center and right-wing tracts that The Beatles were Soviet pawns. Apparently not. Forget the Baloney Detection Kit, in this postmodern/relativist age, you can make any cultural fragment mean anything you want:

The lyrics to the INXS song "Mediate" reveal that the Australian rock band is part of an Aquarian Conspiracy that is infiltrating the Body of Christ: 2+2=5. The lyrics begin with the hypnotic command "Hallucinate/Dessegregate" and then uses the reverse command "Mediate/Alleviate/Try not to hate" to anchor the first command. Who wouldn't agree with world peace? The reality is that this is the fruit of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) and not social engineering. "A One World state/As human freight" exposes the song's shallow dream and the band's true Aquarian agenda (John 17:17). "A white black state" refers to mass social control through segmenting the lambs of God from the sheep. "A gentle trait/The broken crate" juxtaposes self-innocence with a metaphor for the Aquarian goal of control through counterfeit spirituality (1 Peter 2:11). The meaning of "The Truth Dilate" is self-evident: this song is one big lie that teaches kids how to love the New Age and hate the Word (I John 2:15-16). "Like pretty Kate has sex ornate" exalts subliminally programmed carnal desire and virtualized idolatory over true submission to God. Flesh and Spirit cannot co-exist together peacefully (Galatians 5:16,17). "Now devastate/appreciate/depreciate/fabricate/emulate" and the subsequent lyric "Fascinate/deviate/reinstate/liberate/To moderate" explain the Aquarian attack on traditional values and the self-erosion of today's "youth irate" rock culture (2 Corinthians 6:14-18). "Recreate/Or detonate/Annihilate/Atomic fate" anchors humanity's transgression of God's Word by creating nuclear weapons. "Clear the state/Activate" refers to the dead-end New Age goal of man willing his own evolution, efforts directed at pointless goals like "Gravitate/The Earth's own weight" and "Now radiate/A perfect state". Pastors and church youth leaders should avoid this 'progressive' band and their 'music' at all costs. The 2000's will see the most intense war for the souls of today's youth ever fought. It's a War on Spirtual Terrorism that's getting hotter by the day.

Day 11

10:41. Kendra has promised to send me a copy of her underground comic book Perfect Stranger. She sent me an IM earlier this morning, raving about the latest EA production meeting. And some indecipherable message about the team wanting to zap Jay's stock options to Montauk Prime. It was too early in the morning for a rapid-fire exchange, I needed a fresh bagel and a strong cup of freshly brewed coffee. I drink it black, no sugar.

19:11. This afternoon, while playing around with my e-mail account, I received an anonymous message with an attached file. It appears to be some kind of diary fragment:

April 26: Nomination e-mail arrived. Watched The War Room.
April 27: Who the hell is Susan Lucci?
April 28: What do awards committees do about block voting?
May 1: Street protests and breakfast at Tiffany's.
May 2: Deadline for nu-metal soundtrack. Rockin'.
May 3: Script seminar on non-winning Academy Awards nominees.
May 4: The Great Barrier Reef will have its revenge on Tina Wesson.
May 7: Not wyrd enough for Bubba. I smell a conspiracy. Called Badikian.
May 8: Web links: the soup of the soup of the soup . . . stinks.
May 9: This diary reminds me of my AD&D days: obsessive.
May 15: Argument with Mamatas about awards. He may be right.
May 26: Sometimes I hate Old Economy coverage.
June 8: The death of original Web content.
June 11: Fallout: end of original Webzines. Server problems.
June 12: More problems. Knew summoning Yog Sothoth not a good idea.
June 13: Tech team sucked into interdimensional vortex. Insurance?
June 14: NASDAQ de-listing warning. Death of dotcom immortality?
June 15: Sudden dreams of evil green fairy. Ungl unl . . . rrlh . . . chchch . . .

No source named, no viruses. Is this someone's idea of a joke?

Day 10

15:47. This afternoon my old flatmate Freya came over to discuss her doctoral thesis on Sufi and Slavonic folktales as a method of oral teaching. She has been collating Mulla Nasruddin tales, from Hakim Sanai to Idries Shah. One of the more intriguing stories she told me was about the death of Ibrahim Yakubov, a reclusive and solitary villager, who talked to no-one. After his death, the villagers found in Yakubov's house a beautiful carpet that he had been weaving, a metaphor, Freya said, for a life's creative work. "He didn't create this," the villagers said in disbelief, "because this man has no soul." Months later a 'man with a soul' appeared in the village, and all the villagers were spellstruck. They were eventually destroyed, Freya told me, because they had decided that those whom they called 'people with souls' were good while 'people without souls' were bad.

Day 9

13:23. Strange blips on my answering machine this morning. Maybe No Such Agency is scanning the phones of Jam Echelon Day protestors. I rang Verizon and checked my phone equipment, and it seemed fine. No wonder that spy stores are so popular.

18:41. I received a strange package today from an activist group located in Eugene, Oregon. They seem to be merging critiques of cyberculture and the Situationist Internationale. Here's an excerpt from their latest manifesto:

The rogue Digerati cadre formulated their strategies during a period of social upheaval. They emphasized the Internet's subjectivity but they equally mythologized the technocratic future that it was evolving towards. Franklin/Covey planners and PDAs extend military-information management systems to all parts of social life as idealized "self-management." Sloganeering, tactical media, and exalting pure subjectivity (fun) failed to overcome the Internet's machine-like quality, nor outmaneuver capital's ability to create counter-ideologies and adapt to new conditions. Where the rogue cadre experienced a virtual space that stressed autonomous living and structurally authentic relations, Internet users during the first commercial wave (1995-2000) encountered an environment that stressed shameless workerism, spectacular dotcom CEO stars, and ever-present rationalist instrumentality. Within only a few years, the rogue cadre's revolutionary potential had been ended from battles of intense subjectivist criticism. Detournement, ideology, recuperation, and spectacle were rapidly assimilated by bureaucratic capital. This became evident with a series of counterculture sites and Webzines that calculatedly deployed alienation symbols and the aura of specialist knowledge to give revolutionaries the illusion of freedom. The real agenda was to continue the build-up of objective wealth and mask the subjective poverty of post-modern life.

Day 8

11.21. Matt played me the soundboard tapes from a recent gig at Chicago's Exit punk club, a dark and brooding club that has successfully "crossed over" to the S&M bondage scene. During their encore "Juliet" (a reference to guitarist Robyn's favorite author, the Marquis de Sade), Matt slyly slipped in some riffs from Stu Hamm's debut effort Radio Free Albemuth. This prankster side of Matt reminded me of the time during his first year at Roosevelt University's Jazz Studies program when a tape of him noodling on Jaco Pastorius riffs was sent as a birthday joke through the Office of Residence's voice-mail system to his friends. Months later the riffs were still circulating . . .

19.08. I stopped an afternoon's work on the script for chilli tacos and a margherita. I reworked an tunnel chase sequence in the middle of the story, where Gully Foyle escapes from his captors. Jettisoning some of Bester's dialogue tightened the sequence considerably, without hopefully falling into the cliches of action-drama films. I've found some of the advice at the Inzide site to be helpful.

Day 7

16:10. My blog was posted today, and the initial feedback from the discussion forum annoyed me. Actually, I agree with a lot of it about the site--Disinfo and its editor have a tendency to name-drop--but c'mon, that's also using the Web's hyperlinks (did you even bother to read them?). It's Alex who puts a lot of the links into the final text, and he definitely overdoes it sometimes.

Some of the personal comments ("aren't we so la di da?") struck me as mean and sexist. They have the Phil Farber interview offline, amongst a heap of other stuff, that's being edit for the latest RealVideo software. If people want to go elsewhere, then maybe it was time for them to do so. It's not the giddy counterculture heights of 1996-1998 anymore, so get over it. Compared to Slashdot or Plastic, the Disinfo discussion forums have always been pretty negative. Jon Lebkowsky sent me a link to "a new 4x experimental blog."

19:30. I spent the afternoon worrying about my course application and laughing at MIT's Blogdex. Do they get funding for this? Got a call from my old friend Matt, who played bass in a Chicago punk band called Vermillion Sands. He's in town for the weekend, and heard of me writing the Great American Script. Better be careful who I talk to . . .

Day 6

8:53. An IM this morning from Disinfo editor Alex Burns: "We're just 'coasting along'? Please explain." I expected counter-competitive intelligence, typical (lucky I have some competitor intelligence skills of my own). The sense I got from our rapid-fire IM exchange was that Richard Metzger was the bacchanalian Dark Lord of Disinfo, whereas Alex was academic and . . . bookish. He writes too much material, and the memetics stuff never interested me.

The upshot of our exchange was that Alex offered to host my blogger (because of the Majestic bits--marketing?) at Disinfo, and I accepted. "I'm waiting to hear from USC about their Masters of Planning and Development degree," I told him. "Doing some freelance writing gigs." So what interested me in conspiracy theories? "I'm not really," I replied, "but some of them, like those lunar conspiracies, reveal problems about political institutions that ties in with development studies. It's a factor to include in early-warning tools."

He pressed me further to elaborate on my first comment. "I liked Disinfo around 1998. You're not as extreme as then. Please get some other writers than yourself." He asked me about Don Webb after I sent my blogger copy. "I met Don at Death Equinox after reading some chapbooks," I replied, "and read his mystery novel Essential Saltes." He told me that Webb headed an esoteric group he had once been part of, and that they both liked Henry Corbin, especially The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. "There's a sub-text to Don's novels," Alex said, "like Jacques Vallee he's hinting at something. But I never worked out what it was . . . I once wrote a sequel to his essay 'Fictive Arcanum' called 'Memetics and Fictive Acarnums', that I might publish one day." Not more goddamn memetics. "There are still observable patterns if you reject Richard Dawkin's model," he countered, "and there's an interesting lineage, that includes George Gurdjieff's legominism and The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers, about a book that warps people's sense of reality and eventually drives them mad. John Shirley's Eclipse trilogy is also a warning."

15:11. Kendra sent me an IM about a just-posted RealVideo interview with Brian Cale and Mike Griffin about Majestic. There's a moment where Griffin says, "Much of the experience occurs inside the player's head." Maybe while they were eating Kyle Sullivan's chocolate chip-oatmeal cookies, the production team were gorging on Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon . . .

Day 5

11:17. A portion from an e-mail interview I'm doing with culture jammer and eso-terrorist 7u?:

Aren't conspiracy theories so . . . 1999?

Well, there's only so many Black Helicopter urban legends and David Icke rants. And The Lone Gunmen sucked. Even Disinfo is just coasting along. The most disturbing Web sites are the ones that tell the truth. So, the future of conspiracies will be a net.battle between Conspiracy Planet and Lobster Magazine. And I hope Adam Parfrey gets his own television talk show.

7u? recycles everything from elsewhere. Maybe the interview will make more sense if he puts it through a cut-up text generator.

6:45. My Them review is late. Time for some psy-war tactics to deal with my editor. Hey, if it worked for Hunter S. Thompson at Rolling Stone . . .

Day 4

13:03. Beautifulgarbage playing on the laptop, rushing to finish a review of Jon Ronson's Them, and eyeing off a recent one in Fortean Times Magazine.

16:47. The game must have made an impact: Mike sent me a note with links to three classic H.P. Lovecraft stories: "The Statement of Randolph Carter", "The Silver Key" and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key." Kendra sent a quick IM about the dangers of the Pacific Northwest's microbreweries and Selby Madsen's salsa dancing. Too much time on your Majestic production diary, right, Kendra? Is that why the art department looks like Choronzon just visited?

Day 3

10:27. Four voicemail messages and two cups of coffee already. Richard Metzger phoned for our interview about his Paul Laffoley collection. Linda Wolf gave me a progress report on her upcoming anthology. And an indecipherable message with static. Maybe the FBI is tapping my phone, just like they did with Chuck D. Mustn't joke about things that could happen . . .

14:33. Kendra Moore calls to let me know that Mike got my package, a copy of the vintage game Darkseed, created by Cyberdreams in collaboration with H.R. Giger. "If we're not careful, Mike will start acting like Korn's Jonathan Davis," she laughed. "Well, gives your team something to do while you search for a real New York bagel," I replied, "and keep an eye on Mike, or he might go the way of Mike Dawson."

Day 2

22:13. An early evening at the Driskill Hotel, looking over my research on the gaming companies Anim-X and UbiSoft Entertainment, whose new game Rogue Spear is being used to train US soldiers for urban anti-terrorist operations.

I had forgotten to transcribe my phone interview with Anim-X co-founder Mike Griffin. We spent most of the time reminiscing about our most memorable Dungeons & Dragons sessions and our favorite movie explosions. Mike was thrilled to hear that his second game Cold War, designed with the help of programmer Anthony Venkata, was used in grad school as a simulation of different political systems. "A lot of that research was used for Majestic," he told me. I admit, I'm addicted to political computer games.

Day 1

19:23. After work drinks and pool at Lala's Little Nugget in Austin with some ex-FringeWare Review zinesters. Our conversation ranged from the strange art of Stanislav Szukalski to certain hermetic Myths of the 20th Century. Don Webb and his wife Guiniviere dropped by to throw around ideas for the spec script I had been slaving over, a Tech Noir version of Alfred Bester's novel The Stars, My Destination.

I had been having problems with earlier script treatments, Bester's sexist dialogue ("we'll have to ditch that, or we won't get the hedonistic grrls that loved Bridget Jones's Diary," I warned) and visualizing the film's cast.

"Forget casting Mel Gibson," Don told me, "what should really drive your story is Gully Foyle's transformation." He paused to quickly scan the prologue sequence, where Foyle is trapped on a derelict space-craft, adrift in deep space.

"His motivation in the opening sequence is biosurvival," I said, "which changes from fear to hope when the other space-craft arrived then anger and lust-for-vengeance when he is abandoned."

"Foyle's trapped by his negative emotions," Don replied, "caught up in Negativland." As he said this, Guinievere chose some music from the Rock-Ola. "But he uses Hazard and his limits to change himself, which is why his closing speech is truly scary--"