Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

krisis

Krisis has been creating Crushing Krisis since 2000, writing songs since 1996, and reading comics since 1991. He is a Customer Success and Digital Brand Strategy executive, serial organizer, parent, and feminist, among other things. Based in Philly through 2017, he now resides in Wellington, NZ.

Support Net Neutrality (Bob Brady, I am talking to YOU)

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Yesterday Philebrity posted an article about 74 Democrat Congressmen who have come out against Net Neutrality.

I struggled with how to define Net Neutrality for you, but then I discovered that I had blogged about it before. I love being my own source! That post (re)directed me to Save the Internet, who over the past four years has further condensed the definition to the following:

Net Neutrality means that Internet service providers may not discriminate between different kinds of content and applications online. It guarantees a level playing field for all Web sites and Internet technologies.

… With Net Neutrality, the network’s only job is to move data — not to choose which data to privilege with higher quality service.

Life without net neutrality?

What does that mean for you?

Imagine if your internet provider could meter and limit your internet usage for different things, just like a cell phone plan or your cable TV subscription. Any of these statements could become true..

“Like to shop online? Shopping sites are just $5 extra a month!”

“Get your news from Fox – Fox sites load 10x faster than CNN on our network!”

“Are you an online gamer? Game for free overnight, 1am-8am. Standard hourly rates apply to peak time gaming.”

“Do you need to upload music for your band? Sorry, you’ll need our Business Plan to upload MP3s.”

Basically, ISPs would gain the right to selectively charge, tax, or even restrict your internet usage based on their own internal policies for or against certain sites, activities, or services. Wikipedia can tell you more about the reality of this threat to our internet freedoms.

I appreciate that the internet has been created as a level playing field for information, whether you’re a newshound or a gamer, a liberal or a conservative. It is terrifying to me to think that my blogging or music could be stymied because I can’t find an affordable carrier for it.

Which brings us back to the 74 Democrats, including my representative, Bob Brady.

Understandably, they are looking at the internet from a business and regulation perspective. In Brady’s case, Comcast is one of his biggest constituents. The reps hear companies and lobbyists saying, “We’re providing a utility, so let us regulate it!”

The internet should not become that kind of utility. As soon as you make the internet equivalent to cable TV or electricity, you start pricing people out of the amazing era of democratized production we’re currently a part of.

Yes, maybe businesses need to meter bandwidth, but should they really have power over the sites we access and the services we use? Once that door is opened it can never again be closed.

That is why I called my representative, Bob Brady, to tell him I do support Net Neutrality, and I do not support his signing Rep. Gene Green’s (D – TX) letter to the FCC arguing against neutrality. I told him I would campaign actively against him if he continued his stance.

Mr. Brady, consider this a shot fired across your bow.

You can read the full Rep. Green letter at Balloon Juice. It’s a small step, but if left unchallenged it leaves the door open for further action or legislation against Net Neutrality.

Below I have reproduced the letter and its list of signatories. If you see your representative on the list, please give their office a ring and comment – Philly residents, you need to call either Bob Brady (215) 389-4627 or Chaka Fattah (215) 387-6404. If you’re not sure what to say, I’ve included a sample script from Save the Internet.

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personal anti-wireless forcefield update

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Now heading into day seven of no internet in our house I decided to do a cursory inspection of the grounds to search for some external culprit, and it seems that a panel of our back fence has collapsed on top of the phone/internet switchbox.

Now, I’m not saying that I don’t have a personal anti-wireless forcefield generated by the intense electro-magnetic powers of my hair. I’m just saying that maybe the my hair is not to blame for this particular portion of my life-wide wireless signal outage.

Unless, of course, my hair caused the fence to collapse.

my personal anti-wireless forcefield

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When you are an internet addict trying to buy a house and maybe launch a new feature on your website, it can be a little frustrating when your connection is spotty.

It can be downright maddening when every device in your life stops communicating with the outside world at once.

Evidence of potentially villainous hair. Note its awesomeness.

To whit: The wireless in our house died, followed by the entirety of the internet connection. The GPS on my phone has stopped working. My broadband card keeps sputtering and dying.

I’m not sure if the static electricity contained in my awesome curls has mutated me into some sort of electromagnetic pulse deploying super villian that surrounds myself with an electronic deadzone, but pretty much every wireless device in the vicinity of my body has stopped working. It’s only a matter of time before the effects extend to radios and digital watches.

This is a steep price to pay for having one of the best heads of hair in Philadelphia, but we all have our burdens to bear.

Blog Spotlight: Unsolicited Analysis

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I have a svelte 400ish blog subscriptions on my feed reader, so it stands to reason I could tell you about one every day for the next year.

That would probably get a little tiresome, so I thought I’d start with one a week. Here’s the first.

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I love Unsolicited Analysis. It’s probably my favorite blog of this year to date.

That doesn’t have anything to do with the unsolicited analyzer being my increasingly tight friend and occasional drummer Chaz. It’s more about an obscenely diverse mix of topics, all delivered with decisiveness and snark.

The title “Unsolicited Analysis” is a thesis statement – the blog is dedicated to providing unasked dissections of life’s data. That often translates to providing hard-core (but still layperson-accessible) financial analysis – but also to world events, old and new music (and musicianship), politics, television and film, gender and race relations, reflections on content married life, and first-time home-ownership.

It’s all delivered with an unrelenting attention to rhetoric, but also dedicated to learning stuff about the world and finding moments to be an actual human being in the sometimes dehumanizing process of occupational and financial transactions that make up our life.

Do I always agree with Chaz? Oh god, no. Even when I don’t, he speaks from a place I can appreciate, as in this comment, after pulling a 17hr shift in the office yesterday:

There is no reason for me to have any faith in the future or illusions of inevitable reward for my labor – everything I’ve done will be torn up in front of my face by a mob of regulators and lost in the collapse of the Western democracies.

Nope, no careerism here; I’m just making sure Titanic gleams iridescent fang-white the whole voyage to hell.

Even if my eyes glaze during passages about credit default swaps, I appreciate every post because Unsolicited Analysis is the absolute definition of why someone should have a blog – because they are passionate about writing and they write passionately.

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PS: UA is a Tumblr blog, which makes for a lot of community discussion that you can’t take part in if you aren’t on Tumblr. But, you can subscribe to its RSS feed just like any other blog, so the only downside is not being able to mock Chaz when he finally admits he likes Lady Gaga.

PPS: If you are a Tumblr user you can follow a simul-cast of CK there, with occasional bonus re-blogs from other Tumblrs.

houses, wombats, sinuses, clouds, etc

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The house process continues to rage across my life like a wombat on methamphetamine. While I had that under control, I also came down with a bit of a complete sinus disaster on Thursday, which left me feeling like I had a blanket wrapped around my head for the past four days.

Have you tried fighting an allegorical rabid marsupial on uppers with a blanket wrapped around your head? Slightly more challenging than your typical allegorical wombat-fighting.

An angry wombat.

(PS: On wombats, Wikipedia says the following:

Wombats are Australian marsupials; they are short-legged, muscular quadrupeds, approximately 1 metre (39 in) in length with a very short tail. … [T]heir lack of fear means that they may display acts of aggression if provoked, or if they are simply in a bad mood. Its sheer weight makes a charging wild wombat capable of knocking an average-sized adult over, and their sharp teeth and powerful jaws can inflict severe wounds.

See that sidetrack I just took? That is my life for the past four days.)

Usually if I’m sick – even a little under the weather – I go on complete life lockdown. I’ll go to work or appointments, but I am low key and constantly snacking and hydrating.

Friday didn’t really allow for that. I went to a United Way business breakfast and awards, which meant I had to be up early and completely on-point w/r/t personal style. Somewhere in there i may have forgotten that I already took decongestant, so I took it again. At that point I think *i* began to resemble a wombat.

Then I had to condense a full workday into a less-than-full workday to deliver a huge project. Afterward, what was supposed to be a 10-minute appearance at a goodbye party turned into a four-hour odyssey, interrupted intermittently by calls to our Realtor until my phone died.

And, PS, for the first time in five years the internet in our house was completely down.

Yeah, so, not a lot of snacking and hydrating in there, which meant i woke up at 7am on Saturday in less than tip top shape – making it a perfect day to jump out of a plane with Gina and Wes.

Just ignore that Peter is carrying an entire roll of toilet paper with him as he straps into his ‘chute. “Why a roll of toilet paper,” you inquire? Because he is using boxes of tissues at the rate of 2boxes:3hrs.

Fast forward seven hours and half a roll of toilet paper and no skydive has occurred, due to cloud cover. Which, honestly, I know it’s a very complex process with a seemingly endless array of safety concerns, but when you’ve paid and you’re sitting there on the bench staring up at clouds with hunks of toilet tissue wedged up your nostrils you are thinking, what is the big fucking deal with the weather that it’s going to interfere with you THROWING ME OUT OF A PLANE!?

It’s probably all for the best because – as E pointed out – if your sinuses are completed jammed even after two boxes of tissues and half a roll of toilet paper you probably do not want to introduce massive, repeated pressure changes to ram that farther up into your brain.

I finally got my rest and hydration after that, but I had to make up for all the abuse of being out and about before I felt totally blanketless. And, while resting and hydrating and lacking internet, I didn’t get all that much done in the way of signing away my life in exchange for a charming 87-year-old Tudor.

And that was the last four days of my life.

I’ll come back and tell you the next actual chapter of the house project tomorrow. Ish. I have to make sure that wombat is corralled before I make a big show of talking about it.