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Hi, I’m Christian Carvajal. You may know me from such blogs as this one, last updated several months ago. I’ve been busy. For example… As most of you know, I got married on 28 May. The bride was beautiful, I was presentable, and the weather was unexpectedly gorgeous. In fact, and I say this as…

Thursday, February 17, was huge for The Weekly Volcano, as it celebrated the debut of our Best of Olympia edition. Far more important to me, however, was the impending arrival of a certain long-awaited piece of bling. My girlfriend Amanda and I planned to celebrate a postponed Valentine’s Day the following night, Friday, with a…

I was killing time in the library yesterday when I passed a copy of Wizard magazine and leafed through it. If you’re not familiar with Wizard, it started as a glorified comics guide twenty years ago, then expanded to cover all of Western pop culture. Sadly, both Wizard and its sister publication, ToyFare, ended publication…

If there’s an expression that crawls under my skin faster than “Too Much Information!” I find myself at a loss to recall it. I’d rather be called a racial slur any day of the week than have “TMI!” thrown in my face. Just when the conversation gets interesting, some insensitive dimwit has to pipe up…

My research for Novel 2.0 has taken me down some colorful paths, but none more bizarre than a 2006 book by David Levy called Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. In some ways, this topic is an extension of previous reading, especially The Singularity Is Near (2005) by Ray Kurzweil, an…

I was planning on blogging about something completely different today. Then I read your story on CNN. I hope my friends are familiar with the story, but if not, they should read it right now. We can wait here till they get back. The truth is, Katie, I’m not known far and wide as a…

I grew up carefully not observing Thanksgiving. Jehovah’s Witnesses are funny about holidays. In each state I’ve ever visited, any time I meet an ex-Witness, we laugh about this. Somehow Witnesses always squeeze in a turkey dinner, oh, somewhere around the last Friday of each November. “It’s when turkeys go on sale,” they insist. Now…

First, let me say a quick thank you to my friend Sam B. for a comment on my Facebook page, on which he responded to my blog entry “Losing My Religion.” He said in part, “[T]heatre is as much for the audience as it is for me. I just tell myself that when it doesn’t…

Barack Obama is the worst president in American history. Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win. Barack Obama is a socialist. Those first two statements, and to some degree the third, are matters of opinion. We can have a debate about them, but neither of us can really say with a hundred percent certainty that…

I’ve completed my move to Olympia from Bremerton, seventy minutes away. Okay, so actually I’m in Tumwater, but that’s just a less bohemian neighborhood of Oly so close it shares the same zip code. I’m five minutes from downtown, less than ten from my girlfriend. Huzzah! And it’s weird. I’m not used to being minutes…