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Crushing On: Cheap Graphic Novels

December 1, 2012 by krisis

Reading comics via graphic novels can be an expensive habit to maintain. They’re are rarely any cheaper than a $15 cover price, and sometimes run more like $20 or $40 – and hardcovers can be as much as $100! When you’re trying to gather a run of dozens or hundreds of individual issues, that adds up really fast.

When I first started buying, I thought I simply had to pay cover price at book stores or comic shops. That was really expensive, but it was immediately gratifying and I could make sure the quality of a book was high – both in its contents and its physical condition.

50% off of new graphic novel releases every week? Yes, please!

Then, I realized I could order them on Amazon for at least 25% off, and as much as 33% off. That was a lot less expensive, and fast with Amazon Prime – but, the physical condition of a book after it had been packed and shipped could vary widely. At one point I was sending back a fifth of everything I received!

Then, I discovered Cheap Graphic Novels dot com (CGN). They have (or, can get) every graphic novel in print, and if it’s from Marvel or DC it’s 45% off. And, if you order it the week of release, it’s an even 50% off! Not only that, but they are comic book lovers who are friendly to chat with and take a good look at books before they pack them in indestructible double-boxes with paper on all sides.

This totally exploded my comic book buying – I was getting double the books for the money I’d spend in a bookstore, and always in perfect quality compared to Amazon. I have spent an obscene amount of money with CGN in the past two years, and they have never made a mistake, and the worst quality issue I’ve encountered is a tiny bend on the cover of a single book.

I see you doing the project management math. Low cost. High quality. Surely there’s a downside? Well, there is, but it’s a minor one: CGN ships via Media Mail from California, which means I might not see the books for two weeks. And, they require signature on delivery, which means if you aren’t home to receive your order you’ll be headed to the post office.

You know what? That’s okay. When it comes to my comic habit, I’d rather spend a little extra time and keep my money and high quality bookshelf intact. If you agree, you should make your next order from CGN. There are a handful of other sites with similar discounts, but none that I’ve found so reliable and friendly.

Note: I haven’t been compensated for this in any way, although I’d love for CGN to start a referral program so I could add them to my Definitive X-Men, Avengers, and Fantastic Four guides. If you order from them, tell them Krisis sent you!

Filed Under: comic books, Crushing On, shopping

all the blue jeans you ever wanted

January 1, 2012 by krisis

Do you know how many pairs of jeans you own?

About 80% of my total collection of jeans, blue or otherwise.

This is a decidedly first world sort of question to even need to ask. Personally, I would love to have some sort of smart phone app to track and rate my jeans, because I have completely lost the plot when it comes to knowing how many I have or which ones make my ass look just right for bass playing.

I remember my first pair of jeans – in fact, I still have them and wear them as cutoffs. They were UnionBay jeans, and I bought them in eighth grade.

I am not telling you that to make you feel fat, although that is frequently the reason I still wear that pair of jeans.

My point is that nice jeans – attractive, durable jeans – are not cheap. For much of my life, acquiring a new pair was a momentous occasion. In college I owned a finite number of them. Four, typically – two identical newer pairs that were more for dressing up, and two older pairs for bumming around.

Now there is the distinct chance that I may come home with four pairs of jeans from a single, manic shopping excursion.

This morning as I worked to stow an overflowing basket of laundry I tried to explain my jeans-shelving methodology to E, but it is the sort of process that warrants a flow chart for proper understanding and I did not have a PC with PowerPoint or Visio handy. My jeans are no longer a strictly finite affair. I have about as many jeans as a Gap display shelf with a svelte mannequin standing in front of it. I need a set of those clear sticky tags to label one pant leg of each with the relevant size and style information.

I am not telling you this to make you feel inadequate about your own personal jeans collection. No. My seemingly infinite jeans are an allegory for my 2011.

2011 was awesome. I loved it. It featured so much stuff that I barely remember it all. Stuff to do. Stuff to buy. Stuff to remember. Stuff to play music on or through. Lots of stuff.

Honestly, it was a bit overstimulating. Now that I have my own house to house my seemingly-infinite jeans, approaching-infinite music collection, my actually-as-infinite-as-possible X-Men comic books, and many other precious things I love to acquire, the mere act of directing my attention at a single group of them can sideline me not just for hours, but for days – and that doesn’t take into account the possibly-actually-infinite other things I could be doing with my life, like writing songs or spending time with friends I love.

That observation doesn’t equate to a neat resolution for 2012. Do I want less stuff? No. I love my stuff. Do I want to be less stimulated? Good god, who would ever aspire to that? I am incredibly proud of my overstuffed, overstimulated 2011. I played a show every month. I paid off a student loan. I got promoted. It was awesome.

I suppose with a new year stretched out invitingly before me I simply want to offer both myself and you, my dear reader, the simple moral of my 2011 fairytale – that getting everything you ever wanted or needed just means you’ll want something new afterwards.

Don’t make your whole life about wanting.

Do. Create. Give. Love.

Live.

And, if your ass looks great in the pair of jeans you wear while living, more power to you.

Filed Under: shopping, thoughts, vanity

Lies Adults Tell Because They’re True (or: I’ll sleep on the floor and like it)

October 24, 2011 by krisis

As I grow older I am starting to realize that all of the annoying things that adults told me when I was younger were not the baldfaced lies and emotional blackmail that I assumed them to be at the time, but simply the rules of the world viewed through the lens of someone whose body incrementally decays with every passing moment, drawing them nearer and nearer to death.

My answer will NEVER be "no." Never.

While my recent birthday might put me firmly on the side of the slowly dying, I’m hoping using my blog as a reference point can keep my attitude eternally young so I don’t turn into a curmudgeonly old person. For example, now eating too much ice cream or candy makes my stomach upset, but that was never true for the first 27 or 28 years of my life. It was a lie old people told me. I know not to try to impress this fact of my old-person life onto a ten year old enjoying the chocolate carnage of Halloween or the unbidden joy of an all-you-can-eat sundae bar.

I bring this up not because of the impending holiday of chocolate sacrifice, but because of sleep. I never used to need very much of it. Three hours served me just as well as twelve. Presently, I require seven hours and fifteen minutes a night or I will be the grumpmaster the next day. Note that this excludes eight hours, or even nine hours. We’re talking about an exact science. Oversleeping is just as bad as a restless night.

In an attempt to abet my adult habit of fruitful sleep, I have recently campaigned for us to buy a new mattress. The one we’ve been sleeping on just passed its ninth birthday, and over the course of our five homes in those nine years its coils have given up the will the live. When I sit on it, the area around me dips to half its height. Sleeping on it – or, rather, in it – requires several pillows inserted around my body as wedges and cantilevers, and is generally a miserable experience.

Ikea Futon, side view

Thus, times when I absolutely require quality sleep, I wil abscond from the bedroom to our trusty Ikea futon, which has all the give of a cinderblock and imbues me with the energy of my much younger self when I arise the next morning.

This is what lead us to the Great Mattress Shopping Adventure Slash Possibly Catastrophic Money-Pit of 2011 two weekends ago.

I was convinced I wanted a firm mattress, but refused to simply buy an Ikea futon pad as our permanent mattress. That would be declassé. I am through with Ikea. I want expensive, non-modular, fugly, adult furniture that is three times as much money and comes blessedly pre-assembled.

Deep in the bowels of a King of Prussia department store (which, FYI, in my life is utterly synonymous as a scene setting to “fourth or fifth circle of hell”) we discovered their mattress area.

This was mistake number one – why were we in a department store instead of… gee, I don’t know… A MATTRESS STORE?

Then, I committed a second error, uttering the following sentence: “I’d love the firmest possible mattress. Given the choice, I sleep on the floor.”

I quickly discovered that, as with any boutique industry, the more specialized your kink, the more it costs to get you off. I wanted floor, and he would give me glorious floor – glorious, expensive, mattress-shaped floor that had all the features and benefits of sleeping on the floor except for the possibility of getting your clothes snagged on a stray carpet staple.

I stole this from a travel blog. I have to admit, it looks sort of awesome - but that's not the kind of thing you should ever admit to a mattress salesmen, or they will get you on a "ditch filled with sharp pebbles" model.

Why mattress companies are making high end beds that emulate the floor I could never tell you. Anyone who can afford these mattresses can afford and probably possesses a mattress-shaped area of floor that they could sleep on, unless they are so fancy that their mattress is suspended in mid-air, possibly by some sort of anti-gravity ray.

That would be a very valid reason to buy a floor-like mattress. Sometimes you yearn for simpler things.

E and I do not have that problem. We have lots of gravity, and lots of floors that our gravity makes it very easy to appreciate. Yet, we bought the second very firm bed we sat on. To my credit, after we selected it I insisted that we walk around the mall (or, “fiery inferno”) and sit and/or lay on several other surfaces before coming back to the department store to initiate a transaction. I did not want to be the one to later complain about our major purchase which MAJOR PERSONAL DISCLOSURE I always am, unless I had the chance to research it for several months on the internet and it has never received a seemingly valid 1-star review on Amazon.

Nay, not this time.

Said mattress arrived at our house on Saturday, ahead of schedule. When first I sat on it and its firmness bruised my supple cheeks, I proclaimed it good.

Then I tried to sleep on it that night.

You know the downsides of sleeping on the floor? Like, if you turn on your side your hip grinds to dust against the ground as an entire half of your body falls asleep? This mattress has all of those features, too. Like I said, everything but the carpet staples.

An example of E enjoying a firm sleeping surface. I can neither confirm or deny if she is passed out drunk.

Basically, the mattress is for two kinds people at opposite ends of the sleep spectrum: those who fall asleep intent and motionless, flat on their backs, and those who collapse limp and facedown, like a drunk college student. I’ve never been a back sleeper, yet while I may no longer be in college or especially drunk at any given time, I still sleep the sleep of the dead drunk at least half of the time. In that half of the time our new floor-board style of mattress is highly satisfactory.

The rest of the time, not so much. Also, it never occurred to me that the department store version of the mattress had been prodded by people and jumped on by children for months. It did not represent a Day 0 version of the mattress. I would have to work it like a mound of clay or a block of unyielding marble in order to get it to the state of older, carpeted floor boards that have a little give and some weak spots. Fresh out of the plastic bag its consistency was more like “kitchen tile,” or perhaps “cement floor of a prison cell.”

If this was disconcerting to me at least half of the time, E’s percentage was much higher. She’s not of the collapsing drunkenly to sleep persuasion unless she is, you know, actually collapsing drunkenly to sleep. Otherwise, she has a very specific evening ritual to wind her body down towards the gentle embrace of slumber.

Our new mattress, front view

Nowhere in the product catalog for this mattress do the words “gentle embrace” appear.

Two nights later, let’s say I am not married to the happiest woman on Earth.

Yet, I remain dedicated. I am certain I can wear the mattress down to an acceptably firm sleeping surface. We have sixty days to break it in before the manufacturer will accept that we don’t like it and take it back, but I refuse to admit defeat.

Why not? Because I am stubborn? Sure. Because I do yearn for a floor-like sleeping surface? That too.

Yet, one of those reasons is surely that when I was a kid I loved falling asleep on the floor, and adults would needle me: “Don’t you want to go to bed? It’s much more comfortable.” And, even if my slowly dying body now needs much more sleep every night, I refuse to admit that I am so old and decrepit that I require a pillow-top mattress for quality rest. My bones are not yet quite so brittle.

I will take a pass on that Halloween candy, though.

Filed Under: elise, shopping, stories, thoughts, Year 12

New Boots and “Fall from the Sky”

November 8, 2010 by krisis

Hi. This is my first NaBloPoMo default – I’m not missing a post, but I am way off the grid of my editorial calendar.

I spent all of my writing time today plugging away on my NaNoWriMo novel, which means no elucidating new post. But, hey, my book is now over 20,000 words long!

However, never let it be said that my filler posts are not awesome. So, here’s your default post.

First, these are my new Kenneth Cole boots. They are a little urban cowboy for me, but I’m excited. Part of my non-blogging time was spent leather conditioning them.

When did I turn into a guy who spends my non-blogging time leather conditioning boots?

In other news, here’s the further development of one of my favorite Filmstar tunes, “Fall from the Sky.” We have a few bobbles on it, but this is pretty damn close to what it’s supposed to sound like.


(watch the video in HD on YouTube)

We’re playing The M Room this Friday night. I may post a few more of my recent favorites.

Filed Under: bloggish, Filmstar, shopping

do start believin’

June 25, 2010 by krisis

A week ago I had just finished commuting home for the first time to my new house. Presently I am the merch guy for Filmstar as they split a bill with The Shondes at Tritone.

That’s the life, at the moment.

That, a seemingly unlimited amount of cardboard boxes in various states of unpack, and a steely, unflinching resolve to spend money on things like towel hooks and toilet seats. Whatever it takes.

We moved with no issue whatsoever, aside from only sleeping two hours in a 36 hour span. After all of the wacky settlement hijinks it was a bit of a letdown, where “letdown” means “totally awesome gift from serendipity.”

Things have generally been serendipitous lately, in a broad Alanis-Ironic reading of the term. I like to think it’s universe-funded payback for all the not-being-nasty I’ve done in the last year.

It’s hard. I’m nasty by nature. Or, at least, by nurture.

My high school graduation was 1/10 this big.

On Tuesday we walked into Trenton Arena, late for E’s brother’s graduation, to discover his face displayed on a jumbotron singing “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Apparently he was the only tenor confident enough to bring an appropriate amount of NJ rock to that Journey classic (by way of Glee), and so wound up singing Steve Perry lead at his own high school graduation to a half-full arena’s worth of crowd.

And now I am in an increasingly packed rock club, selling merchandise and recording video for my wife’s band while she rocks out in a rather short skirt which I heartily endorse. Later we will go back to our house, and sleep on a mattress on the floor. Tomorrow I will finish setting up my new recording studio and start playing music again.

This is the life.

Filed Under: day in the life, elise, family, Filmstar, house, philly music, shopping, thoughts, Year 10

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