• Emily Pohl Weary surpasses herself in the ever-eloquent editorial. Excerpt: "Perhaps the only remaining refuge from high speed is birth and the awkwardness of life during our first few years. Before we gain fine motor control and an awareness of how to use things like keyboards, we're stuck in an altogether human reality."
  
  
• Jesse Hirsh spins a reality-based cyborg tale, culminating with an unsettling metaphor of the internet as the body for an unfortunately homogeneous new mind. Excerpt: "The evolution or transcendence of the human mind toward divinity is not a new or isolated concept. However, the field of artificial intelligence is perhaps the most meticulous, ambitious and widespread attempt at this goal that we have seen for some time. It is rivalled only by the religiosity of NASA and the space program."
  
  
• Tyler Clark Burke writes a ripping good mortality rant. Excerpt: "All the strangers are alive on the planet right now (which is cool, I mean rad, without being radical); everyone who is alive will be dead at the same time at one time, and then almost mid-sentence like right now I reminisce about all the best run-on sentences I've ever written, like someone is reading it and it is alive and so are they and, punctuation long-forgotten, I remember that we are social beings and we do share things like fantasies about the Unabomber and Henry Darger-dirges ..."
  
  
• I'm very grateful for the lucky accident that plopped me into the world during this particular junction of space/time because once in a while I get to read Paul Hong's writing. I have tried several times both in the past and this very evening to find a representative passage of Paul's work, but the writing is so tight and resonant that to pull one bit out is to do the whole a serious disservice. Just find the zine and read it.

you're too nice, sally! but seriously, it feels good to get some encouragement after months of sitting in front of my computer working on km and other stuff all alone... and yeah--you should *all* buy the new kiss machine. it's worth the cover price of $4 alone to get the chance to examine mark connery's babies and robots-themed cover art.
- kiss machine 3-27-2004 6:39 am

KM in the Star

"With agriculture, when you get down to only a few species, people get sick," [Emily Pohl Weary] says. "It's the same thing with cultural creations. You don't want any one or five big magazines to rule the world."

- sally mckay 4-14-2004 8:22 am