off-topics

Review: The Private Eye by Vaughan, Martin, & Vicente

June 23, 2016 by krisis

Lately, I trust journalists less than ever before. Or, maybe I trust them, but I don’t trust the stories they’re telling.

Last week during the gun control filibuster on the Senate floor I compiled the names and demographic information from all the participating Senators, and my friend Lauren created an interactive infographic with the information. I did not read a single media story that named all of the participants after the fact.

I know this is a theme in conservative American politics right now – the bias of the mass media. I’m not talking about bias. I’m talking about facts.

The past few weeks have been full of big new stories nationally (Orlando and gun control) and locally (sugary drink tax and the DNC), and the biggest of those stories have been missing so many facts. They’re all headlines and quick hits. Hot takes with no depth. No quoting from primary sources. Lots of people coming away with incomplete ideas and parroting them as reality.

Those same weeks have also been full of truth. I become deeply invested in last week’s filibuster from the floor of the Senate and did not consume a single pundit’s take on it. I watched it live and was my own pundit. Yesterday’s sit-in in the House circumvented pundits even further – it couldn’t even be broadcast by networks because the House was out of session and cameras were off, so representatives broadcast it directly to the public via Periscope, cutting all all possible middlemen.

Of course, the next day journalism swept in – but, as a first-hand witness to the events in question, I found the subsequent coverage lacking. Where were the names of the participants, the lengths of time they spoke, the information they shared? I put more information together about the filibuster with data visualization from my friend Lauren than I saw from any news site!

I don’t trust journalists or I don’t trust the stories they tell, but I can hardly blame them. After all, I have a journalism degree and I never set foot into that field. I went CorpComm because I wanted job security and a standard of living, and that was before online outlets were effectively subsidizing their print editions and running on pay-per-click ad units. But I still believe journalism should represent unfiltered truth with a neutral point of view, unless it professes itself as opinion. I had a lot to say about the filibuster, but none of it made its way into the data.

What if journalists didn’t have to worry about the funding and the hits, and could focus on terrific journalism? There are some outlets today that fit the bill, and I don’t think it’s coincidence they produce some of the most thorough reporting. I know it’s hard to picture state-run journalism, because so often it’s journalists who expose the flaws in the state, but that’s one version of what I’m talking about. Instead of asking journalists to make personal sacrifices to do what they love and write for maximum eyeballs, imagine a minimum number of reporters guaranteed on each beat, with job security, fair pay, and a retirement plan.

Do you think the journalism would get better or worse? Does it take sacrifice to want to dig as deep as journalists dig? Or, would the skill and commitment increase?

The Private Eye

The Private Eye collects the 10 chapters of a complete web comic story by Brian K. Vaughan, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente.

Tweet-sized Review: The Private Eye finds Vaughan & Martin a bit too clever for their own good; I liked the world better than the story

CK Says: Consider it.

The Private Eye is a much more interesting world than it is an interesting story – and, it’s a pretty decent story.

Private Eye is an Eisner and Harvey Award Winning comic story conceptualized by Brian K. Vaughan and created in collaboration with Marcos Martin and his wife, colorist Muntsa Vicente. It was initially released beginning in March 2013 as a web-only comic via Panel Syndicate, with its 10 chapters released across 24 months. Each chapter was available as a DRM-free as a pay-what-you-will download.

You can still purchase it that way, or you can opt for a gorgeous $50 hardcover version released in December that includes the complete Vaughan/Martin email chain conceptualizing the story and their method of release (complete with fretting over what to call the website and how to make a profit from it).

The story of Private Eye depicts an America where the press has taken over peacekeeping for the police thanks to a landmark omni-leak of every possible piece of data. The event, called “The Cloudburst,” exposed everyone’s online information to everyone else. It wasn’t the leaked account balances or private nudes that did everyone in, but the search histories. It turns out that was as close as you could come to knowing what was going on inside someone else’s head – their deepest fears and desires. A lot of those heads were pretty dark places. [Read more…] about Review: The Private Eye by Vaughan, Martin, & Vicente

Do guns kill people? Actually, yes they do.

June 16, 2016 by krisis

I’ve never held a gun.

I used to want to shoot one. This was in the 90s, when The X-Files made it seem like a really good idea to be an FBI agent. That came with shooting guns, so I figured I had to get used to the idea. Since that never came to pass, neither did shooting a gun.

I’ve mentioned in passing that my father owns a gun store. He didn’t when I was a child, and despite it being about 15 years since I learned this fact I’ve seen him a finite amount of times in that period and fun gun facts have only come up in a few of them.

My father is a reasonable guy who is willing to have a conversation about just about anything. As someone in a super-liberal, gun-free bubble, his perspective can be enlightening. Our last chat was after the Sandy Hook shooting. Though he largely deals in antiques, he mentioned that gun sales and, especially, ammunition sales tend to spike after a shooting. He also talked about the realities of owning a gun shop, what background checks really meant for him, and how he sometimes decides not to sell a gun or ammo to a person.

Today I posted a now widely-shared Philly.com article titled “I bought an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in Philly in 7 minutes” on Facebook – not to stir any debate, but because I found it to be compelling journalism. In reaction, a conversation with a college friend who is a farmer sprung up. It took him “about an hour” to buy a Ruger 10/22 in a different state. That gun is is semi-automatic – a feature he appreciates because he’s trying to keep foxes away from his quail and he’s not such a good shot at a distance.

(I love my friends.)

My point is that it’s easy to say “BAN ALL GUNS” when you’re someone who has never held one, needed one, or sold one. Screaming from within a bubble using data that agrees with you doesn’t change hearts and minds.

Screaming from within a different bubble where you say “GUNS ARE GREAT” without those same perspectives is just as ineffective.

Since there has been a lot of bubble-screaming this week, I decided the only real answer was data and I would only accept that data if it was from non-partisan or fact-checked sources had references to the primary sources of said data.

Because I’m still struggling over the definition of semi-automatic and I no longer have an amazing team of analysts to help me interpret statistics, I decided to go broader and simply try to understand our rate of gun deaths. [Read more…] about Do guns kill people? Actually, yes they do.

actual facts about becoming the presumptive nominee of the Democratic party

June 7, 2016 by krisis

US_states_by_the_delegates_Democratic_Party_2016

States by Democratic primary delegate count. Note that some territories with binding delegates have been omitted.

We need to talk about the Democratic nomination process.

Last night, the Associated Press and many other outlets made the call to announce that Hillary Clinton is the “presumptive nominee” for president by the Democrats.

This was bad, unethical journalism even though Clinton is in all likelihood going to become the presumptive nominee by next week. However, “going to become” and “is” are two different things. (More on that from Paste.)

At the same time, yesterday social media influencers (primarily Sanders supporters) released an image of “Real Math” that seems to disprove that anyone can become the presumptive nominee before the Democratic National Convention on July 25th. This image doesn’t include the context of factors affecting said math. It is intentionally misleading in an effort to rile up Sanders supporters and Clinton foes.

From my perspective, it seems that three things are presently objectively true, with a fourth that is subjectively true for me. I am summarizing them below not to change your mind, but to try to engage transparently and reasonably with the information that’s available to me right now. I urge you to look at whole picture, and not solely what any single biased source (me included) may or may not be reporting.

Here we go! [Read more…] about actual facts about becoming the presumptive nominee of the Democratic party

zoological perspectives

June 3, 2016 by krisis

On the topic of wild animals acting on basic instincts, those of you who have been reading for a long while know that the combination of my mother and I quickly gets riotous. This can be good or bad depending on which way the riot breaks and if either of us can exit the situation of our own free will.

Traveling with a pair of wild and wildly-compulsive hand-washers leads to a lot of consternation about if you are petting the goats too close to their butts even if it’s already a known constant that you will be washing your hands as soon as you are done petting the goats no matter how much butt-touching you elect to engage in.

Thus, a fitting backdrop to play out this drama would be an actual zoo. And, adding to our inability to escape each other, not only were we both there to enjoy the company of a certain toddler, but my mother has been recently only semi-mobile as she recovers from an operation and so spent the majority of our time confined to a small, motorized scooter.

(I don’t mean to imply that motorized scooters are themselves hilarious – they exist for a very good reason, and many people don’t have an option as to whether they can use them or not! Actually, I really appreciate that the zoo not only has them for rent but has found a way to make just about every exhibit physically accessible – both outdoor and indoor. The ableist privilege I enjoy in life that means I’ve never really noticed that before, but there was no other way I could have made this memory with both my toddler and my mother. It’s something I’ll now always see in a different way having experienced it.)

The Mother of Krisis is not the sort of person you want behind the handlebars of a small motorized conveyance that has a little knob to set its speed, no seatbelt, and beeps when you back it up. Drivers and bikers are so used to mitigating speed with their gas and brake that it’s a real shocker to have to use your hands to adjust. We almost experienced a rollover on an incline she took at too slow a speed! She looked to be constantly on the verge of tumbling out of it, and by the end of the day I think she was maliciously beeping it at children purely because the high frequency of it seemed to itch their ears more than any adults.

Honestly, I think they ought to have some kind of licensing exam before they hand over the keys. To her credit, she was great at parallel parking it next to strollers whenever she needed to stand up for a few minutes.

Talking about my mother hamming it up on her scooter buries the lede a bit, in that just a few days before a child not too much older than EV slipped into a gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo, which ended in injuries for the child and the extremely unfortunate death of the gorilla.

It’s incredibly easy to be judgmental when you read a story like that and say something like, “Where were those parents?” or “They should have shot the kid!” especially considering the gorilla had done nothing wrong and was of an endangered species. The thoughts crossed my mind. It’s not like my mother ever let me fall into an animal’s lair.

Still, I was more vigilant than ever about hand-holding with EV than I typically am (which is already pretty darn vigilant). Yet, I was also minding a doddering, scooter-bound, actual crisis of a Mother of Krisis. In the ensuing chaos, EV managed to slip away from me at an exhibit. It was the giraffes. I was juggling her at the railing while talking over my shoulder to my mother, who was trying to stand up to see better. I don’t recall exactly how it happened, but I think I set EV down to get a better grip on her and within the span of a second she slipped my grasp.

Quite suddenly was between the railing and the exhibit wall, which she was peering over for a better view. If she was a few inches taller she could have easily boosted herself up and then fallen over into the enclosure. It would have only taken another half second.

(And before you say, “Well, yeah, but they’re giraffes,” they have both a powerful kick and stomp that can shatter a skull in one blow. All wild animals can be dangerous.)

In a split second I had my arm around her chest to scoop her backwards and back to the other side of the railing, but in that moment I could have easily had a child being dragged around by a well-meaning gorilla. Instead, she giggled as I picked her up, and my mother stepped off the scooter to join us in watching the tallest of the giraffes amble across the enclosure to nuzzle his child.

I don’t actually like zoos. The animals are permanently captive. The people are temporarily captive. It’s likely either too hot or too cold for some percentage of the animals and some amount of the humans. Some of it probably smells bad to the humans, and the humans likely smell bad to the animals. It’s just not a place I associate with positive outcomes. That might not be a fair assessment, first because zoos are an important factor in conservation of all animals – not just the cute ones, and especially since the Philadelphia Zoo has a lot of positives that other zoos don’t have. But I cannot help but be depressed by a giraffe that cannot run at full speed or an ape with a jungle painted on its walls.

Yet, that opinion was formed by me as the protagonist of my own admittedly pessimistic story at the zoo. I had never experienced it through the eyes of a child, or a grandmother, or a disabled person. I keep going to the zoo to make memories with and for EV, but this week I got something totally else from the experience.

happy birthday to this

August 26, 2015 by krisis

Baseline Peter on the way to play a Smash Fantastic show in June.

I have wanted to have blue hair for at least half of my life.

Not bright, electric blue, but a dark, steely, navy blue that looked like Wonder Woman’s hair back when newsprint comics didn’t print a true black, but instead built it from other colors such that you could always detect blue in the highlights.

I couldn’t exactly pinpoint why. I like blue, but not navy blue. I’m actually a bit afraid of it, to tell the truth. I don’t like how it’s deceptively almost-black. Wearing pants that might be black or might be navy blue used to make me physically itch from confusion. Yet that’s how I’ve always described this dream hair.

I described it in high school, when Gina and I tried to Manic Panic it directly onto my long brown locks and failed to even tint it. I described it in college, when I inexplicably went copper-red instead because it wouldn’t raise eyebrows on interviews as it faded. I described it when I worked for Blue Cross, joking that it was the wrong Pantone blue for me to be their mascot. Yet, even as I did so many other things I had always wanted and dreamt of, I never had that blue hair.

All of that is to say I am proud and quite giddy to be writing this post to you from beneath dark blue locks today, on the fifteenth anniversary of this blog.

II.

If I had to speculate on the origins of my blue-hair obsession, I would trace it back to being psychic, which in turn is linked to summer camp. Not to say that my psychic powers came from summer camp. They’re just related.

Embarking on blondness a few weeks ago, here I am in the Spike From Buffy The Vampire Slayer phase of my bleaching.

Let’s step back for a moment. It was circa Junior year of high school and I had a major crush on a younger girl who, in retrospect, was part of a post-punk early manic-pixie-dream-girl movement of chicks who wore black with zippers and patches and dyed their hair awesome colors and who were very briefly my type. (My actually-punk female friends at the time were blonde and wore plaid.)

I was resolved not to repeat past romantic failures in this instance (oh, youthful hubris) and was gearing up to ask said young lady on a date rather than let the feelings linger unannounced. One night I dreamt that I was riding on a school bus with her sitting behind me, and I turned around to confess my feelings only to see that her hair – previously bleached blonde and dyed in streaks, was now blue.

This was a weird dream not because of the girl or the hair but because of the school bus. I had never ridden one of those yellow-colored, vinyl-seat school busses in any context other than summer camp, and just for one summer.

Summer camp was a miserable experience for me, because it involved spending unadulterated time with other boys my own age. I mostly didn’t like other boys my own age, but mostly because they didn’t like me. That started around the seventh grade, when I was suddenly teased for not being boy enough, which was a different sort of teasing than the teasing I’d experienced for having massive beaver teeth or Spock hair. Sure, all those times I was being teased for being different, but now I was teased for not being the same.

That summer was probably when I stopped really enjoying sports. I was actually a voracious watcher of football and wrestling around that time, and I had always loved gym class. Yet, at a sports-oriented camp, I discovered there were two kinds of boys – the boys who were good at sports and then the boys who got teased for being gay. And, of that subset, I was the one who actually seemed as though I might really be gay, which made me the teased-in-chief.

With that being the experience I associated with yellow school busses, you would think I would have recognized that my blue-haired school bus dream was not a good sign but instead a terrible portent of impending failure. Yet, the next day I waited in the hall in the stairwell outside one of my dream-girl’s classes. Out she emerged, and as I wound up for my actual-life confession of teenage crushdom, I noticed her hair was blue.

“Hi,” she said, smiling, not expecting to see me there.

“Hi,” I replied. Her hair was blue. I searched my memory, trying to recall if she mentioned she would be dying her hair blue. Nothing came up.

“Your hair is blue.” I remarked. It seemed like a good sign.

“Yeah, I did it last night.” Funny, that, since I had dreamt about the blue hair the night before as well.

I did ultimately comment on my feelings in that exchange, referring to them as “non-platonic.” She agreed. I was thrilled. Yet, a week later, she was surprised when I had Gina act as my valet to deliver her roses in homeroom on Valentine’s day, later commenting, “I didn’t know what platonic meant.”

Just as she had misinterpreted me, clearly I had misinterpreted the dream.

As it turns out, she was not amongst the most significant unrequited loves of my teenage life, as displayed by my songwriting habits of the time. However, the blue hair stuck with me. Maybe that part wasn’t such a bad idea.

After one wash, my hair hadn’t quite settled down to the silvery, ash-blonde we were shooting for as a base-coat for the blue.

III.

Last week I went to summer camp for the first time in half my life – since circa the beginnings of my blue-hair urge.

It was not a weeklong hipster summer camp for Brooklynites (not that there is anything wrong with that). Instead, about a quarter of RJMetrics packed up for a weekend of sports, swimming, sun, and sleeping in cabins for no reason at all, although ostensibly the reason was team-building and camaraderie.

A lot of it was the most fun I’ve had while not playing with a band or with a baby in… I don’t know how long. A long time. And, in having that fun, I found myself doing things I’ve never done before – or, at least, had never had fun while doing before. I competently played sports, actually scoring and at one point sliding into a base (I was out). And, a gaggle of much-younger, much-fitter guys taught me how to do flips into the pool – something I’ve always wanted to know how to do.

Due to said band- and baby-having, I don’t get to do a lot of these off-hours team-building and camaraderie things. I’m missing one right now, actually. As a result, I try to do my team-building and camaraderie during my time in the office as much as I can, which means I have to figure out how to do them while working.

That recently took the form of a workgroup around selling analytics to content-based sites. I paired up with a group of people I never get to work with and dissected our favorite money-making blogs to understand how they ticked, which inevitably lead to dissecting this blog to expose those gears and guts of visitor patterns and affiliate links and conversion tracking.

I didn’t give it a second thought. Having a blog is part of who I am just like the band and the baby. I don’t hide those things, so why hide the blog? All of them are a part of what makes me a success.

Driving home on Sunday morning from my idyllic day at camp, it struck me that all the fun had to do with trust. I trust those three-dozen other people every day with my success and the success of our company. They trusted I would do my best to catch a ball. I trusted they wouldn’t make fun of my twenty back-flops into the pool on the way to a full 360 degree rotation. They trusted I wouldn’t make fun of them as they sang to my guitar playing around the campfire and that I could lead them through enough sun salutations to warm ourselves from the cold, dewy dawn that surrounded us. I trusted I could use my blog as an example for my colleagues and they trusted that I was doing something that would help them sell and service clients better, even though it seemed a little unorthodox.

All we had to do was trust each other.

After another two washes I had a spectacular, surprisingly realistic silvery blonde. Now, the waiting game began.

IV.

This past year has been a year of everything and nothing, a constantly churning status quo. I don’t quite know how to sum it up. Maybe it’s because the things around me are changing more than I am, and so I am suddenly measuring time by my sameness rather than my difference.

Last year I had a baby and now I have a toddler. Last year I had a scrappy acoustic trio sweating out covers and this year I’m leading a full band confidently unreeling unheard tunes. Last year I wasn’t writing music, but this year I’ve got a fistful of new songs. Last year Arcati Crisis was on indefinite pause, and this year we played one of our best shows ever. Last year I had hired a core of my team, and this year I nearly tripled it. Last year E was also the director at a successful start-up, and this year she is employee #4 at an even-newer start-up and a local tech figure of some note.

All those things changed, but it’s hard to tell if I have. If I did, it was in a much more incremental way. I’m the same shape and weight, the same voice and temperament. I didn’t change many opinions or buy many new clothes. Despite nearly slicing my thumb-tip off a few weeks ago, I don’t even have any new scars to report.

Maybe it would be easier to tell the difference if I was writing more, but maybe I’m not writing more because things seem so the same. I suppose the only way to know would be to write about it.

I should probably do that.

Back to the salon today to touch up my roots and then paint me blue!

Today I almost cried in a hair salon.

To be fair, I cry a lot of places for a lot of reasons – becoming a parent just exacerbated that. But when I hugged my long-time stylist goodbye today with tears in the corners of my eyes it was because she helped me perfectly realize a dream that had stuck with me for over 17 years. It was a complete shock to look in the mirror and see that blue I imagined sitting on my head, perfectly realized.

That blue-hair urge is only slightly older than this blog, seventeen to its fifteen, but where my three week process of changing my hair still feels sudden, Crushing Krisis is anything but. It’s like a fossil record of myself, full of dated thoughts and opinions in each era, crystalized in HTML to be excavated and revisited later. If it wasn’t for this record, maybe I wouldn’t understand how much I’ve changed except for those big, blue-haired milestones.

I’ve been wrestling with trusting other people even longer than with the blue or the blog, and tracing the story of the blue back to its proverbial roots made me realize just where that trust began to elude me. It was at that point where everyone stopped being just kids and started being boys and girls, jocks or geeks, straight or gay. That continued through playing my own songs, always ready to wince away a heckling comment.

It doesn’t make any sense that performance anxiety or avoiding sports or not wanting to hang out with other men could stem back to those formative moments just like it’s hard to believe my wanting blue hair somehow emerged from that marble stairwell, but those are my best two guesses and thanks to one psychic dream they’ve been inexorably connected all of this time in the back of my mind.

This week feels like a sort of kismet in that way, wherein I resolved the camp issues and then my long held hair wishes, and also stayed in a cabin full of a dozen other dudes without feeling out of place for a second, all right in time for the day of the year that I retrospect the most. It’s clear that I’ve changed a lot in the past year despite some semblance of status quo, and not just by the virtue of it ending with me scoring points or dying my hair blue.

I feel like I’ve just put a final piece of punctuation on a long-unfinished sentence – one that’s been playing out here for years. It’s a lot about trust but also about just doing what you know will make you happy when you are sure it can’t hurt anyone – only help.

So here I am, instructing my future self: when you look back at this sort of epiphany and want to know how it feels to get here, do not think of the way your whole body has ached for days or the dye burning your scalp. Instead, consider that second after my feet left the diving board dozens of times and how I shut my eyes and just spun, unmoored from gravity and rotating, spinning free, knowing I would hit the water in a moment but also knowing that was not the point at all. The point is the journey, the spinning, the trying to orient myself the right way, and all the rest is just what results. That’s why I kept diving, even after I stopped landing on my back and got the flip right. It wasn’t about getting the flip right. It was about what happened on the way.

Tomorrow when I wake up I might feel the same, but I will have this blue hair to show me I am different. Yet, blue or not, no day is ever the same and that’s why I keep waking up and doing it again. Sometimes I am the change and sometimes the change is all around me, and no matter what I spin through it again, trying to orient myself.

Thank you for being a part of that change and part of what stays the same. Thank you, and happy birthday to this.

A toddler, a dinosaur, and your author with his long-awaited blue hair.