Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Happy Birthday To This

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On my 30th Birthday

Day before 30th Birthday

I.

There are few things in our lives that are truly finite.

Of course, that’s patently untrue. For example, there are a specific, quantifiable number of people on Earth.

Go ahead, count them.

Arcati Crisis at the Tin Angel, September 2011

Full band debut at the Tin Angel

If that’s too tall a task, we can limit the scope. What about the number of cars in America? Still too large? Let’s think local – how many stores and carts in Philadelphia sell soft pretzels?

From the perspective of a single person’s experience, those finite numbers are unknowable. We can rely on estimations, aggregate data, and computer projections, but in our lives we’ll likely never know the answers. We’ll never know all of the facts or have all of the money.

The finite will remain infinite.

E and I at Chris’s birthday

II.

Two important things happened yesterday.

Around noon, E and I collected her two siblings and one nearly sibling-in-law into our car and drove to New Jersey to attend her step-sister’s wedding. There we met up with my extended clan of in-laws, which includes a pair each of step-aunts and -uncles, all beaming at a storybook beautiful bride.

On stage with Filmstar

(We also tailgated with them in the parking lot of a church, but that’s another story entirely.)

About halfway through the reception I was idly texting best-and-worst wedding stories of all time with Nan between speeches when a peek at Twitter revealed that Neil Armstrong had passed away.

I didn’t mention it to our table – I didn’t want to be that guy, reading the news off his phone at the wedding (even if I already was) (sorry, Tal). Later, outside in the parking lot in the fading daylight, I glanced upward to see a slivered moon hanging low across the sky, ready for the sun to cede its place in their nightly ritual.

I wish I could make the moment seem more poetic by saying I thought of Neil, but I didn’t. I was mostly thinking about how days pass so quickly while you’re living them, just like months and years. You live your life and then suddenly the moon is glowing above you and you are almost done being thirty, and you aren’t sure how you got there.

Okay, not you. Me. How I got there. Here.

Sometimes I’m not so certain, but that’s what Crushing Krisis is all about – all twelve years of it, as of today.

My retro-punk haircut

III.

Year twelve of CK has been a huge year of my life.

Ridiculous at the Shubin Theatre Holiday Revue

I turned 30. I was featured in Jump Philly magazine. I fronted a full, four-piece rock band for the first time. I was promoted to being the most senior individual contributor in my department. E and I were interviewed for CBS Philly. I visited Las Vegas. I began editing my first novel as a member of an Author’s Club. I became a regular contributor to another blog.

I went on my first road trip to celebrate Gina’s birthday. I managed the communications for one of the biggest events in Philly for its biggest year of all time. I found myself the leader of a wedding band. I completed my collection of every X-Men comic, ever.

I crashed our car into the house. I ran my first 5k. We recorded the rhythm tracks for our first Arcati Crisis studio album. I was named Geekadelphia’s Geek of the Week.

E in Las Vegas

Not every notable moment was a big one. We survived Hurricane Irene, mostly unscratched. I interviewed Philly art star Britt Miller. I delivered a dramatic reading about the morning after.

I reviewed a slew of DC’s New 52 debut comics, part of a rare “post every day” month at CK. I recorded songs from the first third of my lifetime, including a cover of Vogue with an emotional essay attached. E and I took home a band for the night. I attended a funeraland then visited bro in his first apartment.

I explained how bigots should not be allowed to like X-Men. We bought a firm new bed. I wrestled with the monsters in my life. I recorded a video confession about my obsession with coasters. E got drunk at The Muppets and could not help me identify a lost song. I shared my OCD issues with dirty feet. I mused on how Taylor Swift is like (and unlike) The Beatles. I reviewed the best of X-Men from 2011.

Yoga at work (long story)

E dreamt about zombies. I speculated about dead aliens being removed from our plane from Vegas to Philly. I re-watched the X-Files. I reviewed Madonna’s new LP, track-by-track. Gina taught me an Iron Maiden song. I broke the first comprehensive news about Marvel’s non-reboot. We spent time with our new old friends Chris and Courtney. I saw Fiona Apple, as I have once after each of her albums. I was on vocal rest for two weeks.

Lounging with my fellow Authors

IV.

There are well over a million words on CK. To you they might seem infinite – more than you’ll ever read. They’re infinite to me too, but in a different way – I’m never certain how many more of them I have in me.

As always, I struggled with wanting to post more – constrained both by privacy and time. Week after week I planned seven days of posts, but I rarely wrote past a Wednesday.

Before Filmstar at Dobbs

As a result, I missed recording many details of my life. I did not write about every Arcati Crisis rehearsal and show. I did not share every new thing I am crushing on. I did not describe the excitement of talking to E about her new career as a Software Engineer at a local start-up. I never finished a post about my first photo shoot as a member of Filmstar.

I never made the post about how I wore a hood for weeks after Trayvon Martin’s murder. I did not blog about a brief depression this spring. I forgot to detail E’s riotous birthday party, and the amazing new friends we have in our lives. I didn’t discuss joining the board of Social Media Club Philly.

I have yet to write the first post of my epic re-read of every X-Men comic in the order they were written. I didn’t talk about the zeal of seeing my favorite band, Garbage, back on stage. I totally skipped out on recording my exploits with Nan at the 140 Conference in New York.

Hooded for Trayvon Martin

Why didn’t I record all of those moments and feelings? Because, if there is one thing in our lives that is finite, it’s time. We might waste it – pass it with idle distractions – but it’s the one thing that lies plainly charted and steadily consumed. There is no more of it to discover, and none of it truly lost. There are only moments forgotten, unrecorded and unremembered.

Refereeing FourSquare Day

V.

Back to the wedding, and the moon.

The distance from where you sit reading this right now to the surface of the moon is finite – and not finite like the people in the world or the soft pretzels in Philadelphia. It’s knowable. Measurable down to the very centimeter.

April show at Tin Angel

Except, it seems pretty infinite to you, doesn’t it? I know it does to me. It’s not a distance I can use anything in my life to define or describe. It’s not a place I’ll likely ever go. Yet, some people on this planet understand the distance perfectly, because they have not only measured it, but traversed it to stand on the surface of that sphere that looms above our heads every night.

One less person now.

Then there is the wedding. Not exactly a harbinger of the infinite. I’ve been to a lot of weddings – I had even at the point I started writing this blog twelve years ago.

As a wedding band

What I didn’t have back then was siblings. I was still a year away from from moving in with Erika and Lindsay, and further from meeting E’s sister and brother. I had Gina, but we had yet to truly explore the depth of our connection to each other through life and music.

I was alone, and that solitude seemed infinite. The idea of marriage, and later of knowing a fraternal and sororal love so deep that I would beam back at them on their wedding day, was a concept so remote at to seem infinitesimal – just like the surface of the moon seems to me today.

Nan at #140Conf

VI.

There is so much in life we’ll never never know or do that it’s easy to define ourselves with that negative space. I will never know everything. I will never have all of the money. I will never play my songs for every person living in Philadelphia

Stained at the Color Run

That list of nevers stretched even further twelve years ago, and if I didn’t have a blog it would not be so easy to understand how I have expanded to know and do so much more than I ever thought possible.

No one should aspire to simply be an outline of the space that contains them. Better to wish to expand your life in every direction to find new knowledge, experiences, and family. New objects in space. Because the one thing we know we will run out of – the only thing that truly contains us – is time.

At the Geek Awards

Thank you for being a part of my journey through time and space, and for reading about it again and again. You are part of the infinity I once thought untouchable that is now tangible. Every word that you read expands the boundaries of my life a little further.

Thank you, and happy birthday to this.

Crushing On: Smart Girls at the Party

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E and I joke that in our relationship she contributes most of the food discovery, while I chip in most of the media. She finds fresh foods, new snacks, and recipes, while I unearth new bands, programs, and news.

Lately we have slightly flipped the script, with me signing up for a CSA and E getting more connected with the women in tech movement. Which is how I walked downstairs the other day to find her watching this:


(If you can’t see the embed, you can watch the episode elsewhere.)

I sat down. I laughed and cried. I was delighted.

That’s an episode of Smart Girls at the Party, an unusual and awesome internet talk-show hosted by Amy Poehler of SNL and Parks and Rec. The show’s mission statement is “Extraordinary individuals changing the world by being themselves.”

What that boils down to is Amy Poehler interviewing young women who are trying and succeeding at anything and everything they want to do.

“We wanted to represent real female friends and celebrate that stage of life where you write down what you want to be when you get older, before too many people tell you no,” Poehler said. “And we poke fun at the talk-show format a little bit, taking very silly things very seriously. This is like ‘Charlie Rose’ for a younger audience.”

…”We wanted something to feel bite-sized and positive and I do think that there’s some lack of celebration of the unique, original girl,” Poehler told the Daily News. “So in some ways, it was a response to that. But, honestly, we really wanted to do a talk show that had a dance party at the end.”

I am not a fanatic about Poehler, but here her typical deadpan delivery makes for hilariously honest interactions with the wide age-group of her guests. She never condescends or jokes at their expense. Actually, she builds them up as characters and experts by interviewing them from a place of delighted naivete.

Despite being a major feminist, I’m always unsure when it comes to girl-centric programming – whether that’s curricular or in media. On one hand, I know girls need to get away from the shadow and influence of boys in educational and social settings so they can grow up with equal footing. On the other, girls-only can be a ghetto, and it can serve not only to over-shelter girls but also exclude the inquisitive, equality-minded boys that form the other half of a equal-opportunity world.

It’s a tough line to tread, and I feel like Smart Girls at the Party really gets it right. It’s a show I would share with girls or boys, and I’m sure they would both find it equally delightful – it just happens to feature the empowered young women who will change the world tomorrow by being themselves today.

Best of all, it’s a reminder that smart girls at the party are often the coolest ones in the room.

How to turn off post revisions in WordPress 3.3

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Did you just update to WordPress 3.3 only to find that post revisions have returned even though you previously engineered some way to turn them off?

Don’t worry, I can help – but, first, some background and chatter.

Way back in 2008 WordPress added Revisions to its core features, and the feature persists today in the newly released version 3.3.

This is the amount of WP revisions I can create in a single week of editing if left unawares.

Revisions captures every published iteration of a post you are working on, so that if you republish with some minor changes you still have the prior version available to roll back to, if necessary.

This feature can be helpful if you make a lot of major changes to your work, or if you are on a multi-author blog and need to occasionally reverse someone’s edits.

It can also be detrimental, or plain old annoying.

The revisions feature nearly destroyed Crushing Krisis. Because, you see, my managing editor is an OCD Godzilla that lives inside my abdomen and due to his influence I have been known to spend my spare time making literally hundreds of tiny edits to spelling and spacing across the million-plus words of this site. Each edit I published spawned a new post number in a new post ID. My database ballooned by thousands of lines, I was using more RAM on my server, and legacy posts and pages linked by their post IDs were suddenly appearing at new permalinks!

There have been plugins to turn Revisions off, but when a new version of WP debuts sometimes those plugins don’t work right away. That’s why I am sharing the manual way to turn off Revisions.

This involves editing core WP files. You do so at your own risk. I am not a WP developer, and I cannot provide support to you if you hobble or destroy your blog. Unlike a plugin, this will not still work after a reinstall or upgrade of WP, so when you move to WP 3.3.1 you need to do it again.

Ready?

  1. In your root directory you have a file called “wp-config.php.” Save a copy of it elsewhere in case you mess things up terribly.
  2. Open wp-config.php and scroll down. At some point you should see a comment that reads “/* Stop editing */” – we will insert our new code just above that.
  3. Insert this code:
    /* Disable Revisions Feature */
    define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );    If you would rather just limit the revisions that get saved, change as follows:
    /* Limit Revisions Feature (by number of revisions) */
    define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',6);
  4. While you are here, you could also choose to add a line to define how frequently you would like WP to make single autosaves of your posts, which frequently saves my ass in the case of a browser crash. That code is:
    /* Set Auto-Save Timing (in seconds) */
    define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 300 );
  5. Voila! Though WP will still inform you of your revision number in your posts table, it is no longer saving revisions.

Keep in mind, you do still have a number of revisions in your MySQL database, sitting around doing nothing like some vestigial appendix-like organ in your body that may or may not cause a later explosion.

(If you are me, that number of revisions is 250 in the one hour since you installed WP3.3. Yes, I literally make that many edits to CK in an hour. OCD Godzilla is a terrifying beast.)

To do away with them you simply need to delete all of the rows in your post table identified as revisions. Any time you directly edit your MySQL is potentially bad mojo, so I am not going to specifically advocate doing that. However, if you have backed up your DB and know what you are doing, visit WP Recipes for the simple one-line SQL query that will wipe out your revisions.

I hope this helped you! Personally, I get completely frantic when WP updates and one of my old plugins stops working to provide (or, in this case, block) a feature I rely on.

A Moment of Krisis

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Watch as I talk about my “obsessive collectorism” and my Quixotic quest for the perfect set of coasters.

What an example of something you’re obsessed with collecting? What thing did you pass up the chance to buy that you wish you could go back in time to purchase?

A Moment of Krisis

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Watch as I answer one of my friend’s recent Facebook Poll queries: “Is pure altruism real? Do people ever do anything out of concern for others that is completely independent of their own self-interest?”

I know my examples of altruism aren’t exactly the work of Mother Theresa, but my point still stands – I think even when we do the best possible thing for someone else we get something for ourselves, even if it’s just a bit of satisfaction.

Do you agree? Can you think of something altruistic that you do totally free of any psychological reward for yourself?