Ah. It's like crawling into your own bed after you've been sleeping in cheap hotels for a few months. Or something like that. It's great to be back, really back, on the Metaball, and I thank Jason for holding down the fort while I was unavailable for so long. Next time there's an election, if I win nomination again, I won't be giving up my post at the Metaball; one thing I've discovered is just how much this virtual rag, its writers and its audience, means to me.

I welcome a new writer to the magazine, Dan Pelton, and a new artist to the Visual Art section, Mark Smith, and I welcome back Robert McGhee and Kali, as well as our regular staff writers. This issue is another good one, and I hope you all enjoy it.

As usual, we are always looking for submissions for our next issue, which will be out sometime in the first half of April. Like Jason mentioned last issue, we have switched to a quarterly format so that we could focus more on well-thought out essays and less and scrambling to get content, which was wearing on some of our writers and myself insofar as design and programming goes.

And speaking of programming, we are in the midst of updating the code for the Metaball, which is [mostly] an invisible thing going on behind the scenes, but may result in the odd link in back issues not working properly. Please be patient as we finish this process over the next few weeks.

Have a great rest of the winter, and we all look forward to your feedback!

R.K. Finch
Editor (in chief)