Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Archives for May 2002

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Ambient room noise is just the computers hissing at us with quiet piano from my headphones down the line. We are clackers, typing, sleepy, sniffling, dutifully moving from one record to the next. It’s hard to care about anything that’s in front of you at a quarter to three on Friday, even harder when you’re busy caring about anything else. There is only one voice inside here (tangled in the ivory piano threads), though in the hallway the construction crew are chatterattertattering about vans and pounds and heavy things.

I seem to have lost my voice – not in the traditional sense. I can speak. However, i cannot seem to sing. Every time i move past my safest three notes tucked into the lower middle of the treble staff it’s as if my throat is collapsing upon itself so as to resist anything that could be construed as a beautiful noise coming out. I am shackled to my tinny falsetto… sounds like all of our bad dance classics records singing out from the tiny headphones connected to their turntables, but i could only wish for that tactile needle-noise in the back of my throat. Instead i get a dull and angry throb that i have learned to almost taste.

The quiet piano has given way entirely to a wondering vocal: love you, love you not? I was up and out at eight in the morning today, and my eyes shot the world through a different speed of film than i’m used to. How can they let in so much light?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/05/85078123/

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Sometimes it seems as though everyone i know reads Henry’s Diary on a semi-regular basis, and today Aim beat me to the punch and had to break the news to me. Far be it from me to insert myself into other people’s personal lives that i know nothing about via the internet, but i would trade in a whole heap of my personal good karma if it could help the situation between Mike & Tracey. I was just a little younger than Henry when my parents separated, and my only memory of my father living with me is him standing on our steps screaming something. I think it might have been the day he left. I’ve already made my feelings pretty clear on how amazing i think Mike is for creating the Diary, and i just don’t want to believe that the idyllic little Californian world i had conjured in my head for Henry is now going to be irrevocably changed with only a website to act in the place of memories that will slowly trickle away from Henry as the years go on.


Right. So much for not inserting myself.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/05/85071720/

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The other night i inadvertently left Instant Messenger on while i slept, and i woke up in the morning to a blinking window from Ernie asking me if i really wanted to be part of the Peanut Gallery for BlindDateBlog.


Ernie’s webgames have come to feel like some sort of Fraternity to me, with each game representing a new pledge class, and i feel like we should all come back and serve to usher in our new brothers and sisters. Of course, i already did that once last summer. I told Ern that i was actually still interested, but the results of my getting involved could be mixed. On one hand i’d be serving alongside Choire, & Min Jung (among others). On the other, i’ve barely been able to tell anyone apart in my repeated attempts to peruse the game so far. PuppetMaster took up a lot of the slack time i had last year, but right now i don’t really have that, so i have no idea what the result will be.


Still, how can i resist being official colorful commentary on a game that will end up in two total strangers going on a first date chaperoned by Ernie. I mean, how can i?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/05/85071719/

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The two most interesting quotes i’ve read in the last 12 hours:

“Carrot Cake Soup is like the taste of watching girls make out.“

“For one thing, blogs will become ubiquitous to the point of transparency.“

The latter quote has relevance to yesterday’s first post because it implies exactly the opposite opinion of blogging while winding up with the same end result; blogs will be overabundant rather than just being over, and their proliferation will render having your own blog to be a non-event. The idea that personal pages once rife with badly justified text and awkwardly placed image files are soon to be transformed into a neverending stream of well-intentioned but poorly maintained weblogs is somewhat disappointing – even if my blog started out that way, i’ve always hoped the medium wouldn’t be relegated to such “ubiquitous” and “transparent” ends. If that happens, maintaining a domain name blog won’t be any different than having some shitty page on Geocities; not that it was any different in the first place.

As for the former quote… well, i really wanted to try the soup before they even said anything about what it tasted like.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/05/85067621/

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Have you ever wondered why you look so funny in pictures?

It is apparently a misconception that thirty frames per second is as fast a speed as the human eye can appreciate. Tests have proven that our eyes can discern the increase of quality between footage shown at 30fps and 60fps, and past double that at 129fps; an average would seem to be from twenty-five to fifty. Still, there is definitely an upward limit of how many individual subdivisions of a second our eyes can discern before something appears to be in a wholly fluid state of motion. Furthermore, our ability to enjoy movies (24fps), television shows (30fps), and computer games (90fps+) is aided and abetted by other functions of our human machinery … specifically our (somewhat selective) abilty to perceive motion blur.

A typical point & click camera has an approximate shutter speed of a sixtieth of a second if you’re using a flash, which i do on almost all occasions. Shutter speed denotes how quickly the shutter opens and closes when it does all of its camera magic to get an image onto your film. To crib from my last link a bit, this means that something moving 60 miles per hour would probably be a blur in my own flash photography; the object would be moving 17.6 inches in a sixtieth of a second – plenty fast enough to be blurred in a photograph.

My camera catches a glimpse of something which occurs in an amount of time as proportionally small compared to a second as a second is compared to an entire minute, which is something the human eye usually refrains from observing unless it’s paying very specific attention. Totally forgetting for a moment about angles and lighting and contrast and all of that, a camera is probably more likely to capture a likeness of you that you don’t recognize than it is to reaffirm what you saw in the mirror this morning. The click of a shutter can capture our brightest smiles just as easily as it can catch that strange inbetween moment before the smile has fully formed or that slow downturn of lips after a false photo-smile has been prematurely disposed. Add to that the lighting, and what angle the shot is from, and what color the wallpaper is … it’s almost a wonder that we recognize ourselves at all.

The photo newly appearing to the right of this block of text is how i really look; rubber-stamped and approved as an faithful likeness of myself. On the way to and from Boston i took seventy-five pictures; only a few of them actually caught the images i thought i was seeing at the time, and i don’t think Elise & I look especially like ourselves in any of them. Nonetheless, here are 42 of them, so that you can judge for yourself.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/05/85065726/