Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

OCD Godzilla

after a weekend

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I needed this weekend to recharge for September, always an active month in my world. And, that’s without the currently thrumming circuit of band, wedding, car, house that keeps me anxious at all hours of the day.

Aside from much learning of covers, virtual house-hunting, and watching Kristen Bell deliciously chew scenery on Heroes, this weekend also allowed me to decisively finish off the remaining glut of neglected posts in my Google Reader, the best of which I’ll now share with those of you who eschew Labor Day BBQs to get your September off to a properly lazy start.

#1 Link: Mark Larson points out that you can stream the documentary All Hands on the Hard Body via Google video.

The docu, about contest where the way to win a brand new truck is to keep your hand on it for the longest amount of time, has been on my Netflix queue since the day I joined. Totally what I am watching tonight. (originally via and add’l background from Kottke.)

#2 Link: Know Your Stuff is downloadable software that allows you to catalog all of the stuff you own. Great for prepping insurance applications, or if you are an OCD nut like me. Via Unclutterer and Lifehacker.

Similarly, via trusty Kottke, Daytum is a “home for collecting and communicating your daily data.” Personal annual reports? OCD Godzilla approves mightily.

A close runner up in awesomeness, I spent way too much time on Saturday futzing with Election Projection’s Interactive Probability Calculator. Allows you to set the probability for each state and then runs an endless series of matchups based on your probabilities to determine the overall probability of the election result. For someone like me, who believes that most surveys are crap – political surveys doubly so, this is a nice equalizer.

Also:

Philebrity just ran an equally edifying and hilarious Philadelphia Internet History Week, tracking the ignoble fates of a handful of prominent Philly web startups. I should collaborate with Lindsay on a tell-all Record Kingdom post ;)

Drinking Liberally engineers happy hour meetups with other liberals in your community. Seems as though Philly is in need of a new event (hint, hint, anyone?).

Mad science alert: The five experiments most likely to end the world. A link unique in that it combines Gina’s professional interests and prominent musical themes. Also: one step closer to a real invisibility cloak.

Remaindered from many months ago, photos from the perspective of your tongue. Also, I continue to love this photo of WWII women working on a B-17 bomber.

Great visual: Texas house sucked into wormhole, via Electicism.

Worksheets for those both organizational and visual. Via Akkam’s.

A photo-essay slash interview on Japanese bathhouses. Not safe for work, I suppose, but I think the nudes are far from sensational – they actual portray the relaxing atmosphere of the sento. Also: Japanese float parade.

Another oldie that found sudden relevance this week: Become an expert interviewer. I’ve got a bit of natural flair at interviewing (oh, and that journalism degree), but this is a succinct reminder of what to do.

From MLarson: The Superest is an illustrated log of off-beat superpowers, each one meant to best its predecessor.

Last, but not least: longtime fav Gingerbead Latte took a moment to recap her month, including an ingenious game of the top 100 words in the English language. I got only slightly over a third, but all of the top two rows. Similar results on the 50 largest countries, where spelling was a big challenge.

That’s all I’ve got. If you have any thoughts for an overarching September theme for CK, please feel free to share. Last year, as you may recall, I remastered and reposted my favorite trio tracks from the past seven years.

Spinning Off (or, Welcome to NaBloPoMo)

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As I first draft this post I am on my lunch break, alternating my typing with wolfing down a salad and chugging a glass of Airborne, because I didn’t have any time to write a post last night after my band’s rehearsal, and after this it’s back to copy editing and drafting project schedules, and then directly off to have dinner with one of my co-best-ladies and her wife, and from there another brief rehearsal before meeting up with my fiancée at our favorite open mic, and then some brief iteration of sleep before more work, followed by an upscale bar crawl I’ve organized for my friends, and then bon voyage to fiancée as she heads to a conference in Florida.

That sentence says almost everything you need to know about my life, in a nutshell. If it sounds too yuppy or droll for you then you have arrived at the wrong droll, yuppy blog, because those are the sorts of crises that are crushing me lately.

Thus the title of this, the longest-running blog in Philadelphia.

 
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Last year my adventures in National Blog Posting Month were bookended by a comic book analogy, which provided a frame for a complete reboot of Crushing Krisis.

First, I rebooted on a technical level, as I moved over six years of posts from Blogger to WordPress. More significantly, I rebooted from a content perspective, by reintroducing each character and plot strand from my life with no assumptions and no back-story required.

Also, since I am cultivating a second career as a singer-songwriter, I performed and uploaded nine Trio podcasts of original music ranging in topic from my identity to things left unsaid to my modern pop influences.

 
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My wonderfully telling introductory run-on sentence shows off an interesting facet of the intervening year – many aspects of my tongue-in-cheek reboot analogy were more apt than I intended, because the majority of my 30-day accelerated reinvention actually stuck.

And, not just the minutia, like my attention to detail being recast as a inner OCD Godzilla spewing indigestion-causing hellfire whenever I don’t perform a task in the most anal way possible. We’re talking about major life changes… I even blogged every day for another entire month this past September – that certainly never happened before!

As a result, rather than subject you to yet another reinvention for 2007 (I’m not Madonna, I just cover her songs), for the rest of this month I’ll be blogging about the changes in my life, especially the songs and stories connected to the two best, biggest, and most exciting parts of my new identity – that I am now an actively rehearsing and gigging musician, and that I’ve recently become engaged to my amazing partner of the majority of the seven-year run of this page, Elise.

I don’t expect you to be familiar with the highly obscure, highly complex history-of-me to follow along with my NaBloPoMo content; after all I’m just one of over 3,000 blogs for you to traipse through over the next 30 days, which is no easy feat. I know … last year I read every single blog, linking to a full 10th of them.

So, to spare you any extra research on my behalf, and in keeping with the original intent of last year’s reboot, all of my NaBloPoMo content will be presented free of backlinks to anything other than previous NaBloPoMo content from this year and last.

Tune in tomorrow for the first chapter of my engagement story. And, welcome to National Blog Posting Month at Crushing Krisis.

(a)Live, (and back) From Australia: Part 1

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You may have detected with your keen bloggy-senses that I took a weekend holiday from CK to commemorate Elise’s return to American soil.

Well, half of it was in commemoration. The other half was spent in a ridiculous house-cleaning freakout fueled by the inexorable OCD Godzilla demon that resides in the hereditary depths of my soul.

(And, actually, about a fifth of that half was spent on the couch watching season five of Buffy and eating peanut butter out of a jar. But, I digress.)

I am still absorbing the national wealth and wonder of Australia via Elise’s stories (the best of which is about how she kidnapped a small boy to tow her kayak) (no, really), but right now I have to share the two that paint the pair of us in the most ridiculously naive light.

I’ll go first.

I’ve always assumed that kangaroos are are… you know… special. I’ve only ever seen one or two of them in my life time and, after all, they are a national emblem. So, while they might not be bald eagle special, I’ve spent my entire life assuming that they are least as special as a grizzly bear, or maybe a dolphin – something you don’t often see in your daily travels unless you live adjacent to a very specific terrain.

Plus: marsupials!

Also: adorable, in a strangely rodent sort of way.

Well, if you thought something similar in your decidedly nationalistic naivety I hate to shatter your illusions, but apparently we were dead wrong.

Not about the latter two things, mind you; no one can take those away. We’re just wrong about the relative scarcity.

Because, you see, kangaroo are common. Quite common. As common as deer are in Pennsylvania, especially in that you are most likely to encounter them grazing in your yard or narrowly averting them in the middle of a road, and they are fair (and even welcome) game for hunting and eating.

This seems like the sort of imperatively important thing I should have learned in second grade, or whenever the teacher reveals to a shocked and awed classroom that there are other countries where people don’t spend American dollars.

(Actually, I knew that all along, and as early as kindergarten and as late as fifth grade I was endlessly amused by the morons my peers who didn’t understand that Philadelphia was a city and Pennsylvania was a state, let alone the nuances of zip codes. But, here I have to digress yet again. Back to kangaroos.)

I mean… deer are just Bambi, you know? They don’t do anything special like, say, fucking hop at speeds up to 44 miles per hour, or carry their young in a built-in fanny pack. They just walk around and… well, that’s really all they do.

My point being, deer aren’t magical, imaginary, cartoon creatures that just happen to be real.

Illusions shattered. Seriously, I can never go back.

Tune in tomorrow for Elise’s way, way more flagrant display of nativity, which – unlike mine – can’t even be blamed on being an ignorant American.

Many Splintered Realities (or, The Conclusion of NaBloPoMo)

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I began this month by comparing my entry into National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) to a DC comics-style Crisis – a reboot of me and my entire multi-verse of blogging, all for the benefit of any new readers that might stop by. Everything familiar would be eliminated, or re-imagined from scratch.

 

 

I was never a DC comics fan, so fittingly this month wound up more of a Marvel Comics event, even if i didn’t intend it. Marvel doesn’t have a hand catchword like “crisis” for their crossovers, and they usually don’t destroy the entire universe to make their point.

Age of Apocalypse is a particular favorite of mine, because it involved the X-Men, which was my concentration in Geekdom. In it, Professor Xavier is assassinated in the past, causing decades of history to shift radically.

For four months all of the many X-Men books were canceled and replaced with their alternate reality counterparts, similar at the core but alien on the outside. Wolverine and Jean were mercenary lovers. Magneto formed the X-Men, and Scarlet Witch was the first to fall in battle. Beast was an evil scientist, and Shadowcat a heartless bitch.

Unlike DC Comics, Marvel never really eliminates the past. At the end of four months the history we knew and loved returned. Not unscathed, though … it came along with new insight onto characters, and relationships, and some new characters mysteriously brought over from the alternate time line.

 

 

My little Krisis of the Infinite Crises (AKA NaBloPoMo) wound up a lot like that.

Clearly I am still me, and everything I’ve written over the past six years of Crushing Krisis remains part of my personal canon. Yet, during NaBloPoMo I recast some of my major characters, topics, stories, and songs. Certain themes, previously prominent, didn’t merit a mention. Others were played up anew for dramatic and comic effect.

Some changes were temporary for the sake of simplicity, like the comedification of my mother, and the suspension of archives and backlinking to old posts.

One universe-shattering change is here to stay: the port of my blog to WordPress.

Other, smaller changes may or may not stick: The return of Trio, the web’s longest running single-artist web session (AKA podcast). Reinstatement of comments. Retirement of certain prominent persons and topics. New favorite reads. OCD Godzilla.

 

 

As I re-imagined my personal narrative for NaBloPoMo I was reminded about the best aspects of myself and my life, and how they could be reflected in the best aspects of my blogging. I realized how blessed I am to have a six-year-old website that I still enjoy updating, and how unique I am to be able to express some of my sentiments in song.

I realized how truly, truly lucky I am to have such fascinating people interested in reading about it and hearing it.

I thank each of you for your attention, patience, and support. I sincerely hope that you decide to stick around to see what the future holds in store.

 

 

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.