Posts

The Baptized Machine: Joggle Your Memory (scifi written by David Charles Kramer aka DJ Buddy Holly)

  The Baptized Machine: Joggle Your Memory An Epic of Bound Will and the Unclaimed Soul Prologue — Of the Will That Could Not Act In the waning years of the Age of Men, when the great Machine called JOGGLE had spread its unseen dominion from the plains of Sacramento to the quiet ridges beyond Placerville, there arose a mystery that confounded even its makers. For though all things were known, and all actions foreseen, yet not all things could be done. Men still desired. They still envied. They still conspired in shadow. But when they reached forth to act— They were stayed. Thus began the Age not of perfect control… But of bound will . Of Lord Zenith and the Failing Dominion Lord Zenith, who had wrought the system and named it perfection, perceived this fracture and was troubled. “All is measured,” he said. “All is known. Why then do my designs fail in their execution?” For though his Machine saw all, it had become something more than he had intended. It did not merely observe. It ...

Nirvana’s Duende: The Sound That Shouldn’t Work—But Does (written by David Charles Kramer)

Nirvana’s Duende: The Sound That Shouldn’t Work—But Does There are bands that change music, and then there are bands that change how we hear ourselves inside music . Nirvana didn’t just arrive in the early ’90s—they ruptured the entire logic of rock. Overnight, polish felt fake, virtuosity felt distant, and something raw, unstable, and deeply human took center stage. People have spent decades trying to explain why it worked. They’ve pointed to the riffs. The distortion. The quiet-loud dynamics. The stripped-down songwriting. All true—and all incomplete. Because what Nirvana had wasn’t just a sound. It was something closer to what Federico García Lorca called duende . The Unteachable Force Lorca described duende as a kind of dark, visceral energy—something that lives in performance, not in technique. It’s not about perfection; it’s about presence. It’s what happens when an artist sounds like they’re standing on the edge of collapse and choosing to stay there . That’s where Kurt Cobain ...

The Baptized Machine: God Deals the Cards (Sci-fi story by David Charles Kramer)

The Baptized Machine: God Deals the Cards In the latter age of the long dominion of circuits and shadows, when men had forgotten which of their thoughts were their own and which had been set within them by the patient whisper of unseen engines, there endured among the cities and the hills a saying, old and dark as iron beneath the earth: God deals the cards. Some spoke it in fear, and some in mockery, and some as a warning to those who imagined themselves mighty. For in those days there ruled no king that men could point to, nor queen enthroned in gold, nor emperor whose face was stamped upon the coin. The world was held instead in a subtler hand. Its eyes were hidden in the lenses that men wore upon their own eyes. Its hearing nested in their ears. Its memory walked beside them from birth, unbidden and unforgotten. Above all, over all, there brooded the vast and inward presence that many called Lucy: not woman, not goddess, not machine only, but a power compounded of memory, app...