Author: merritt k

  • Raymond’s Women

    Raymond’s Women

    Raymond was dead. There was no mistaking it — his frail form laid motionless atop his bed in the dark, a hardcover book spine up across his chest. As she waited motionless on the couch in the dim lamplight, Lisa wondered if she’d ever be able to get the image out of her head. She’d…

  • The Dragon

    The Dragon

    I remember how excited I was for the launch of Reverie Moon Online. My friends and I had read about it in magazines for months, talked about it after school while trading Pokemon cards. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before — a 3D roleplaying game that let players cooperate with strangers around the…

  • Yet More Press for LAN Party

    Yet More Press for LAN Party

    032c covered LAN Party last year and I forgot to mention it until now. Same with this interview I did with the eidolon journal. My bad! More recently, I spoke to Steffi Cao for CNN Style about the book and the culture and aesthetics of the Y2K era. Don’t have a copy of LAN Party…

  • Larry

    Larry

    It takes a certain kind of temperament to be a bus driver. My uncle told me that. He drove city buses for forty years and during that time he saw some crazy shit. Women going into labor, couples getting into explosive arguments, people pulling knives on each other, the full spectrum of human experience crammed…

  • Connection

    Connection

    When Facebook and the mass internet started to really take off one of the most interesting things was realizing how widespread and shared personal quirks and behaviors really were. A lot of these came from childhood. Remember that Facebook fan page for “turning the pillow over to the cool side?” Things like that. It was…

  • More Press for LAN Party

    More Press for LAN Party

    LAN Party is available at retail later this month, and it’s been getting some new coverage. I spoke to Dazed — who also covered the book back during the pre-sale campaign — about the appeal of LAN parties to younger people who’ve grown up with ubiquitous online gaming and internet access. Additionally, there are some…

  • Survival Instinct

    Survival Instinct

    The world was anathema to life. Well, Belan considered, that wasn’t entirely true. It hosted a thriving ecosystem of flora and fauna that were uniformly hostile in the extreme. Its atmosphere, thoroughly poisonous to him, had apparently created the perfect conditions for organisms deadlier than any he’d ever known to thrive. It was as if…

  • Little Gods

    Little Gods

    Anyone who’s been online long enough knows the format of these things, right? You know how it all goes: someone remembers a TV show from their childhood, or they download a cursed ROM, or they find a video tape at a garage sale, and then something terrible happens. Do people even have garage sales anymore?…

  • 101 Street Fighting Secrets

    101 Street Fighting Secrets
  • The Collector

    The Collector

    This piece originally appeared in Tower Magazine Issue 1. At some point, everyone in the retro video game collector community has “The Dream”. It goes like this: you find yourself in a store. You’re not sure how you got there or why you’ve never been in before. You start looking around, and you notice that…