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.

May 7, 2002 by krisis

The two most interesting quotes i’ve read in the last 12 hours:

“Carrot Cake Soup is like the taste of watching girls make out.“

“For one thing, blogs will become ubiquitous to the point of transparency.“

The latter quote has relevance to yesterday’s first post because it implies exactly the opposite opinion of blogging while winding up with the same end result; blogs will be overabundant rather than just being over, and their proliferation will render having your own blog to be a non-event. The idea that personal pages once rife with badly justified text and awkwardly placed image files are soon to be transformed into a neverending stream of well-intentioned but poorly maintained weblogs is somewhat disappointing – even if my blog started out that way, i’ve always hoped the medium wouldn’t be relegated to such “ubiquitous” and “transparent” ends. If that happens, maintaining a domain name blog won’t be any different than having some shitty page on Geocities; not that it was any different in the first place.

As for the former quote… well, i really wanted to try the soup before they even said anything about what it tasted like.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/05/85067621/

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://crushingkrisis.com/2002/05/85065726/

May 6, 2002 by krisis

First it was purple … TVaB purple, i declared. Then there was a big to-do about whether or not you could see the side of my face at all or if it was just a puddle of three different colors of gray pixels. Then i decided to go blue, as the logo picture also decided shortly thereafter. And, of course, there is the issue of the menu, which currently doesn’t exist.

The apathy involved in this redesign amazed me. It basically got to a point where i knew there was a redesign coming, and i didn’t really want to blog until it happened, but i didn’t really want to work on it. Which, equated to not wanting to blog at all.

On April 26th at noon i was standing outside of the Electric Factory by myself; i was first in line to see Garbage. Seven hours later the line stretched out past the gate onto seventh street, and i found myself up front with a gaggle of cool people. Conversation ranged back and forth for a while, but at some point Blogging came up, as i was wearing my Blogger T-Shirt. The opinions were strong, to say the least. “Blogger… is that still around?” “Personal publishing is so last year.” “God, i think everyone i know just gave up and switched to LiveJournal.”

Suffice to say, i was definitely stymied by their quick opinions on the matter, and driving to Boston that night with three other Bloggers didn’t exactly help me to forget about our conversation. Rabi expressed shock at the proclamation that Live Journal has supplanted the Big B in functionality or usability, and my fears that my webpage had become suddenly irrelevant were assuaged by the fact that i generally drew blank stares from the gaggle when i started talking about switching to Moveable Type and how PHP & MySQL make GreyMatter somewhat obsolete. They just weren’t hard-core bloggers.

By the same token, I’d expect that they wouldn’t refer to me as a hard-core Garbage fan; i missed meeting Shirley Manson because i was on the phone with Amy trying to bribe her into coming to the show, i didn’t buy the reissued record of Shirley’s old band, and i don’t own a single MP3 of Garbage – not even their apparently hot new cover of the Rolling Stones classic “Wild Horses.” Of course, i have met (and spoken with) the entire band before, i do own a Guild Guitar signed by them, and i did collect a complete set of their B-Sides on over twenty import singles.

They are, as i like to mention, my favourite band.

My point would seem to be that everyone is a fan in a different way – i don’t read fan boards or subscribe to ‘zines, but i do know all of the chords and own (yes, own, not download) all of the songs. It’s really just like how everyone weblogs just a little bit differently; weblogging might be so-last-year for those who jumped onto the bandwagon, but for those of us who found it as a natural extension of our old decaying pages on dreadfully unreliable free servers it never “got hot” and it will never “be over.” And, after all, it’s not how big of a fan you claim to be, but what kind of things you do to prove it.

And to keep it to yourself.