It's time for the launch of our second album!

Hey. It's been a while since I posted here, huh.

In the context of the internet, that space between posts is effectively the end of that person.
We only really exist through the content we produce. It's the only thing that confirms our existence in the digital landscape.
When you stop communicating, or change your username, or take a break, that 'you' that you left behind, that vessel you stopped filling, remains.

Dead pages, dead users, entire swaths bathed in 404.
Sometimes I imagine the web as a vast graveyard. The tiny places of the net I grew up with are gone, replaced by hub pages with massive communities and centralized product, all in one convenient place. Pages controlled by uber-massive corporations that only care about turning the internet into TV. Pre-packaged, commercialized, content goo for us to lap up.


Anyway, onto the main topic.

This has been a pretty good year for our music side project, Red Honey. Today is the launch of our second album, Type Your Text Here, and I'd love to share it with you all.

You can check out the whole album here on our newly created Soundcloud:

Soundcloud

Or you can check it out, just like last album, on our Youtube channel:

Youtube

Finally, Nacchi has been working on something really cool for us. We're finally getting a proper Tumblr page. It won't necessarily replace our Blogspot here, but it could potentially draw in some new eyes to our ongoing meme project. You can check it out right here:

Tumblr

(At the time of writing this it's still a WIP. We'll have some of our best stories ported over there soon. Maybe even some singles from our Red Honey albums?)



Anyway, I think that'll do it. My New Year's resolution is to be around this site a little more. I've been itching to get back into storytelling, and this new album has me fired up to make more music, too.

Happy holidays, everyone!

-Aleximander

Housekept (Also the First Legend of BloodLines ONLine)

Okay, that should do it.

Did you know that adding something in the HTML to make a section of the page transparent can arbitrarily make Blogger stop accepting CSS inputs? Did you know that the preview renderings of the page don't display this error, so you have to work with the live page? Did you know that I want to die?

Anyway, it's fixed. Five hours later.

Does anyone use this platform anymore, and if so, why?

While I'm here, have a piece of writing that I did a while back but never posted. I wrote a couple of things centering around this character but I can't find any of the others, which... is probably no great loss. I don't currently have any plans to write more in this vein, but I don't really plan most of what I do.

I also don't remember writing about this first part, but I'm going to assume that the description I typed at the time was accurate (which would also explain why this doesn't read very smoothly. I'm not editing it) and I was mired deep in some strange nostalgia for something I only observed from a distance at the time: the emo subculture.

That's right, I'm just a fake. A posuer. I was never emo online in its ripeness.

And for this, I live a lifetime of atonement.

– ♥, Nacchi

All around me I see parasites. Parasites who dig down into the fertile earth and spread their concrete excreta, their drywall-and-steel mounds, pustules erupting in luminous shopping centers along the blackened veins of the land. A swirling torrent of noise and filth and heat, the voice of the human race.

I prefer the night, the dark, little quiet spaces. I live in the emptiness between stars, in the frigid not-being of the cosmos, infinitely vast, infinitely quiet, but struck through with burning light. Stay out of the light for as long as you can. Hug the walls, keep your head low, find where the shadows pool deep enough to choke out its tendrils. It’s the only way to live, to grow as the life springs from the black soil, to protect those inner seedlings yet uncovered by the concrete.

The night air reminds me that my shape is not mine. It is that of all the things I am not, the boundaries of flesh and warmth which might mingle and soften in the darkness but are so starkly drawn in light. The most egregious of language’s sins is to pretend to clearly demarcate as absolute what it instead softens, mixes and muddles, takes into shadow and allows only glimpses of. Language is darkness masquerading as light.

A poor ally, but I have so few these days.

Years spent balancing on the edge of a knife, whittling myself down to its thinness. Becoming sharper, keener, never thinking about what I left behind. Such is the nature of survival. Such are the teenage years of an American after the ages of subculture. At least intersecting blades might form an axis, something on which to build. Some way forward from the white emptiness, something to cast a shadow among all that light.

When the light becomes searing electricity, when the shadows wane and falter, when space becomes a precious commodity, you compact into a single, hard edge. Things emerge from the static as points of either black or white, flash judgments made within all the time you can steal to react. You need to cut through the blinding light, to find your precious shadow, and ultimately to cut through that thickest shadow and tumble, scorched, into the purgatory of American young adulthood, which is neither dark nor light but gray and shot through with iridescent fractals. But not now. Not yet.

Now, you must become a master of yourself. To keep keen the edge you’ve fashioned of all those empty days, that blade you’ve oiled with your tears.

You must become an edgemaster.

You try to define the boundaries of selfhood, grasping at the things you could never have, to wrest power from those who would shape you—but selfhood is the overlapping of murky tendrils of shadow and you mangle them in your haste. The forgiving shadow, writhing like a cut gas-line in the throes of pneumatic agony. Fluid everywhere. You’ll try to kill it because killing is all you have, your only mode of interaction with this world, but to kill you must slash through with a line of hard, sharp light and you’ll burn yourself over and over again, scorching your fingertips dark on the blade.

Soon enough you’ll spend your Fridays getting drunk off two glasses of wine, listening to three Fleetwood Mac songs and crying. Or something like that, at least—these lives all interconnect, yours and ours. But not yet, dearheart. When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know. For now, you will be bathed in the psychic piss of teenhood, and you will not emerge unbent. For now you must be BlackheartSasuke.

And you should be, and it is good that you are. Never apologize, BlackHeartSasuke, for the life which radiates from you in crackling tongues, though they may singe. Do not limit you own power, so long and so readily limited by others. Go in peace, shadow of days gone by,  and let this be your offering:

 A tale of BlackHeartSasuke, the strongest vampire assassin in BloodLines ONLine, Server: Eden

I am the one who traverses carnadine skies on bat’s wings. I am the one who does not fear the light. The sun will fall, and when it does, the night will be there, as it always has been, the absence of light, of artifice, the truth of this world. And I am there, in the night, a hard form, bruising and undeniable, and I mix copper tones into the blacks and blues and silvery light.

Those who hunt us do not hunt me. I am the hunter, always. As fearsome and opaque as the blackest night, as sharp as the clearest moon. I am the master of vampires, and under my grace the blood flows freely, velvet-rich and twice as smooth. I am the reason humans hole up in their homes when the sun sets, and I am the futility of their thin walls and steel blades.

I am BlackHeartSasuke. I have girlfriends in six realms and boyfriends in four. And I am with you. When you feel the chill night air, will you spread your wings? Or will you die in fear, your back to the wall, bleeding out into the darkness?

Why should I care?

The day is cruel, host to all sorts of inhumanities—chief among them my human form. Denied my powers, chained to this broken society, I await the night when I might shed my skin and emerge wreathed in stars. The tides of dusk bring friends, purpose, control. All earned, and all stolen by me from the break of dawn.

Those who fight for the day must be given no quarter. They would slay every last one of us if they could, and those who use the night to such ends—those who find no solace in the solar daylight but mimic it in the graces of the night, my night—the hunters—they have buried themselves in sin, and not even the rain of blood may cleanse them of their guilt.

They were fools to come on this server. This is our domain, and we will not be hunted. We will strike back, strike deeper and deeper until we might bring the fight to the daylight, to those who would inflict their miserable order upon us when we are deprived of our wings.

I will not tell you who I am by daylight. I will not subject myself to the humiliation imposed upon me by everyone else in this miserable excuse for a town. Everything you need to know about me, you’ll hear in hushed whispers. That I carry a blade not seen since the first days of the founding. That my wings crackle with the power of my cold blood, that they darken the sunlight beneath them. That is who I am. That is all that you may know, for it is the only truth I can tell you. The only truth there is. Carved into fleeting shadow, yes, but such is the nature of truth.

They have a different conception of truth in this daylight world. A truth that binds, that effaces those who do not fall within its sharp edges, edges which crush down with the weight of all of civilization. An eternity of lies and murky half-somethings, and bodies thrown within, wingless, fangless, helpless. Rotting within the mire.

I will not rot. I am beautiful, terrible, incandescent darkness. And I will create a better world, one gorged on the blood of those who would stand above us. I am the eternal night, the black heart of the universe. And I will never die.

-BlackHeartSasuke, 2006