rabi

August 23, 2003 by krisis

I must admit that my legs hurt a touch, but Rabi can just neglect to find that out until she reads this post. It is worth it, to blithely walk around New york, hopping sidewalks and diagonally jaywalking as if i actually know where to go. We’re now at the Prince Street Apple store, which looks more like some sort of overly lit nightclub whose status as a computer seller is only given away by all the computers sitting around. I am on the kind that looks like the Pixar lamp, but rabi cannot figure out how to make the digital camera that’s strapped to it work, so you’ll just have to take my word for it

Funny how i can find people to be so vastly different only five hours from where i grew up. Just goes to show, you don’t have to be from a tiny place to be a small town boy.

More, later.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/08/106168283586810413/

September 25, 2002 by krisis

I have this ongoing joke, mostly with Gina and Rabi, that i majored in Communications to avoid doing anything difficult in college. In their sciences, Chemistry and Astronomy respectively, they pretty much have to work until they either reach a finite provable conclusion or a quantifiable amount of knowledge. I just have to work until i feel finished … with the generally correct assumption that my professor will be happy with anything that i declare to be my best effort.

Well, the joke certainly was funny while it lasted.

While i’m not going to compare my trials and tribulations to the multiple hour chemistry lab Gina has on Saturday mornings, the thesis Rabi has undoubtedly mulled over within the last thirty minutes, or the courseload of a Journalism major at an Ivy League school, this semester is shaping up to be the most challenging i’ve ever undertaken in every aspect — in quantity, content, scheduling, and resources. I have six full credit classes in addition to a single credit of choir, whatever other extracurricular activities i get entangled in, working all of my free nine-to-five hours in Admissions, and all of my typical personal commitments like writing songs and having a girlfriend. I know other people do this all the time (again, i’ll invoke Rabi and anyone who does theatre and works part time at a tier one school), but for me it’s an entirely new challenge … presented, almost shockingly, for the first time during my 21st year. And, surprisingly, i am entirely up for it.

Whee!

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/09/85490346/

July 28, 2002 by krisis

Elise just read her Snapple lid, and it says if you keep a goldfish in a dark room it will eventually turn white. Meanwhile, imagine my surprise to load up Weblog Wannabe to find myself featured in Firda’s new haiku! Firda and i have traded links a few times in the past, but she’s apparently avoided listening to my vocal talents [sic] up until now. In other linky news, Rabi has deferred to Mollie, Alex, and i to provide content to her many readers for the weekend. Also, Haya got a chance to listen to me in the last few hours, during which she’s also discussed her impending attendance of a school that, like Drexel, features a co-operative learning program. Oh, and Undisturbed returned my link already. Right back at ya, babe. Again! And, last in my kiss-ass link-back program, the impeccably designed All Blogged Up and Nowhere to Go linked me even before the ‘thon got underway, even deigning to mention my nekkid ass.

I don’t know when nekkidness will come into play, but Jack is sitting in my lawn chair right now making up dirty limericks. I think my extended cast of roommates might be weirder than all of the other ‘thonners combined. Not even counting the ferrets…

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85288543/

July 16, 2002 by krisis

In other news: Alison compares bug spray to whiskey, as she discovers that one of her resident kitchen vermin has a higher tolerance than she does. I am mulling over which charity i’ll be singing for. Rabi saves a life and lives in a cave, but she seems to have forsaken permalinks (or not). We’re one step closer to living in an episode of X-Files. Just when i thought she was about to slip, she reaffirms my faith. I talked to another Philly blogger. Meg is either a Virgo or operates on the same set of brain waves as i do. Brendan won’t be back for over a year. And, um, i started writing a new song for the first time in a while.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85252784/

May 6, 2002 by krisis

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/