"Whenever I'm alone with you,
you make me feel like I am free again.
Whenever I'm alone with you,
you make me feel like I am clean again."
-- The Cure, "Lovesong"

I apologize for the lack of posts recently. Lots of life going on, which seems weird to me.

As a side effect of all this life and trying to hit clubs and events, my sleep cycle's all kinds of fucked up. One night I'll be up until 2 a.m. and up at 7 a.m. and the next night I'm in bed by 8 p.m. and asleep until 9 a.m. and.... blargh. The effect of all this is that I feel more than a little exhausted all the time.

Add in to that financial stuff. I've lived a little too large of late, trying to hit more events and shows than I probably should, expending immense amounts of gas and paying lots of bridge toll. I'm working on figuring out some ways to free up a little more cash each month, and now I just have to enact some of those plans - but money is a stressor for me (as I'm sure it is for many folks), and I'm delaying for fear of having missed factoring something, somewhere.

This last bit makes me feel really bad - like I'm not supporting the scene enough if I hold back due to cash-flow reasons. And, for the sake of the site, it is fairly important that I do go to lots of events because that's where one actually finds out about more events in the scene.

For example: I'd have never been to Club Nocturne if I'd never heard of Solace first. And I would have never heard of Solace had I not gone to Dark Shadows. But I would have never heard of Dark Shadows had I not gone to Death Guild in the months before Dark Shadows started.

This sort of thing, of course, is the reason that SFGothic.net exists - to help my fellow darklings hear about things they never otherwise would have. Especially folk like me who live outside civilization-proper (by which I mean: I live in, basically, ultra-East-Bay suburbs) and so don't get to hear about the latest and greatest events and clubs and concerts and what-have-you that are springing up.

So all that said - what with the holidays about to kick into full gear and my cash-situation being a little strapped already - I'll probably not be getting out to a whole lot over the coming month or two, while I get finances sorted out.

Instead, I'm hoping to start writing a few more reviews of albums I've had the pleasure of picking up over the last six months or music I find on the web and also a bit more discussion on fashion. And maybe even more of my thoughts on stuff in general. We'll see.

Ultimately, what I'm saying is: you may be seeing a bit less of me out-and-about than before in SF-proper for a month or two, but I'm hoping that you'll be hearing/reading more from me as a result.

To kick some of that off, let's do some scene news:

There's rumblings that the Cat Club is radically shaking up its weekly/monthly calendar for 2012 -

• Word is that DieMaschinen will be ending in December due to low turn-out (I'll be honest, I only got to make it out there once and wasn't super impressed with whomever was DJing in the back that night - and I've heard some horror stories from other attendees that only reinforce that bad impression).
• I've also been told that Diverge will be ending next month as well. Diverge has never struck me as quite my thing, but I know some awesome people that really enjoy it, so it's a loss that will be felt within my circle.
  
• There's also tales that the wildly successful and excellent Dark Shadows may start happening two nights a month... and potentially on Saturdays instead of Fridays. So there's some serious "yay" in that. EDIT Update: Nope, sounds like 2nd and 4th Fridays. That's okay. I like hitting the Cat on Fridays.
  

I'm still hoping to hit Club Nocturne later this month, and maybe the Cell the week after. I might even try to hit Disorder finally on the following Saturday, since it's on my side of the Bay Bridge.

-- Mr. M.

"Hey you hey you,
Let's hear you scream.
I'll spoon-feed you my imagery.
I need you, I need you,
to spit it out.
I'll be what everyone talks about."
-- Aesthetic Perfection, Spit It Out

So I want to thank all of you for helping promote SFGothic.net on Facebook! Now that we have enough "likes", we now have a Facebook page with it's own address: www.facebook.com/SFGothic.net. Hooray!

But it seems that I've gotten a taste of this fame thing and now I want more. And I've recently been playing with Google+ (which is fairly awesome by the way - if you have a Google account, I'd recommend giving it a try). So we've now added an awesome "+1" button to the page as well!

Since I'm limited by Weebly's software, it might be a bit before I can get a button for individual blog posts - but you can always follow me (MisterMephisto in case you've forgotten me) on Google+, and I'll do my best to keep you updated via posts there.

So, thanks again to all you awesome people that have supported SFGothic.net! And please continue to do so!

Because it starts to look a little funny when all I'm doing is talking to myself.

-- Mr. M.

So when I initially envisioned SFGothic.net, a calendar of events was definitely part of "the plan" - someplace that my fellow darklings could go, click some buttons, take some glances, and see everything I could find to include over the next month or two.

But I quickly got caught up in maintenance and expansion and soon forgot about my dream of a gothic event calendar. For, y'know, a whole two months or so.

Well, the wait is over, kiddies. for the SFGothic.net calendar is now undead and kicking!

I'm sure it will be undergoing an occasional overhaul here and there as we move forward. But, for now, I've got all the current one-shot and re-occurring events/clubs on there.

Obviously, the club and event pages are still good for links and details and such - but now we can see, at a glance, all the weird and awesome stuff happening in the greater Bay Area... At least, all the weird and awesome stuff that I'm aware of.

As usual, let me know if your favorite event isn't on the list.

Thanks be to Saint Google, for her divine indulgence and righteous illumination. Amen.

-- Mr. M.

So, back on 7/8/11, SFGothic.net had over 130 different visitors in a single day. And the next day we had over 70. These are the two highest unique visitor counts we've had so far and it's amazing!

I'm attributing this more than a little to the lovely Madame Deidre Anaid of the Cell linking us on her Dark Fusion Facebook page and connecting her awesome fans to us. So many thanks go out to that classy lady!

Some of you with more web-experience are probably scratching your heads going: "Wow... really? That's all and you're getting excited?"

But the fact of the matter is this: SFGothic.net is a niche website. We're catering primarily to goths and industrialists and other alterna-folk specifically in the San Francisco Bay Area who are active enough on the Internet to actually find or hear about us, which makes us a niche-within-a-niche-within-a-niche. And while some of the information herein reaches out as far as San Jose to the south and Sacramento to the east, the info from those areas is spotty at best - so our core demographic is fairly centralized.

All of our advertising is word-of-mouth, the business cards I manage to drop off at events I'm personally attending, and a Facebook page that doesn't even have enough "likes" to become its own named address yet (that's my next goal, so I can put it on the next batch of business cards).

So, yeah. 130 different IPs hitting us in the same day is pretty awesome. Having it followed by another day of 70 is even cooler.

On the other hand... I know that there's more than just a few hundred people out there that could use the information provided on this site. So now I want to hit that 100+ mark every day. I want my next: "Awesome!!" to be about hitting the 200 visitor mark. Or, even better, the 300 visitor mark.

So if you're a fan of SFGothic.net, I want to ask you for a couple of small favors:

1. Go to our home page or to our Facebook page and "like" us on Facebook.
   
2. Tell friends and family and acquaintances about us, especially if they're of a darksider persuasion. Shoot them an email or mention/link us on your Facebook page a couple of times or "like" our links. Help us broadcast our existence! Let the world know that we exist!
   
3. Comment on the blog! Tell me if you find a post interesting or inaccurate or just plain ridiculous.
   
4. Send me (via the contact page or even just in blog comments) information about the events, shows, concerts, clubs, whatever in your neck of the woods (whether you're one of the promoters or just a fan) and let us advertise it here! It's free advertising which can only help make those events more successful.
5. Also via the contact page, send me suggestions of things you'd like to see on the site or hear about or maybe just things to chat it up about.

And you don't even have to do all of these things to help us out. Just one or two of the above could really boost our site traffic and get us linked on other people's pages and further disseminated throughout the region and the scene. And that slowly pushes us further up the rankings on Google searches, bringing even more people to the site.

And if you do any of these things, tell me. Shoot me an email or leave me a comment (on the blog or on Facebook). Let me know so that I can thank you for helping SFGothic.net be the resource it is intended to be.

-- Mr. M.