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.

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Of all the beloved sites i’ve ever seen shut down, it’s always been the decision of the site administrator(s). Regular readers can leave and staff members can be bitchy and unhappy, but ultimately the admin makes the decision to pull the plug on the main page leaving everyone scrambling to talk to each other on the message boards before those too fade away or become completely irrelevant.

What is it about being the admin of a site that makes it so easy to shut everything down rather than just make a change? Is it that you’re tied to what the site was and not what it will be? Or, is it that you just get tired of making little fixes to what seems to you a large overall problem. Pulling the plug on a site, whether it be a treasured monument to e/n or the best Ani DiFranco site on the internet, seems like a hopelessly selfish choice. However, i suppose if you take on all the weight of maintaining a page yourself then you’re entitled to be selfish about it’s dissolution.

Bearing that in mind, is the solution to distribute both the joys of being a successful administrator as well as the sorrows? Does having a solid support staff make the difference between giving up on a page or just taking a much needed breather? Of course, having support staff presents nearly the same problem, as their collective vision sometimes strays from yours, leaving you either useless or annoyed. So, what’s the best formula for keeping a site going long enough that it becomes a mainstay in a community and not just a blip?

It seems to me that the easy answer is staying involved in the flow of your site, which is why so many solo blog-projects have become so consistent and venerable. It’s also why so many of them burn out and fail. If you don’t stay involved emotionally or scientifically or anything with your own writing, eventually what you’re creating means nothing and your page is just like the impression your head leaves on a pillow rather than a pillow with a real head on it. The same holds true for a group site … if you let yourself stray slowly from being an active poster to being a distanced administrator, your idea of fun is only based on reading the page as opposed to the real fun of writing it. This is not to say every administrator should be the center of attention – primadonna in their own specially constructed showcase. Instead, the point is that you have to occupy all of the positions at once: admin, staff, writer, and most importantly, fan.

Remind me about this post if i ever start bitching about any of this, if you would be so kind..

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/05/3829478/

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So, this morning Shafted.org finally gave up the ghost. You can go to read the final message of apathy and disinterest if you’d like, but i’ll spare you the link.


Sometimes bands break up because their overall creative urge started to diverge, and sometimes the various members of those bands go on to do beautiful things. Rather than use the obvious example of the Beatles, take a look at Ben Folds Five: they recently broke up because as a band they weren’t functioning properly, but Ben Folds has a new solo album coming out in a matter of months picking up where his creativity left off. I hope Robert and Darren have similar projects up their sleeves…

Anyhow, my point is that despite the old administration of Shafted losing interest in the interactions therein, those of us doing the majority of the interacting remain engrossed. As a result, today i uploaded the very basics of Repulsed using Noah Grey‘s spectacular GreyMatter as the backend. Only time will tell if we still have anything interesting to say, but at least now we have somewhere to say it.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/05/3820815/

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I’m actually feeling somewhat violated by this whole McDonald’s debacle. Basically, their fries are vegetarian all over the world except in America, where they’ve been prepared with beef extract somewhere along the line. In India the cow is sacred, and so McDonalds respects that. In Britain vegetarians are a minority that actually holds some sway, and McDonald’s conceded. Yet, here in America where we’re just a bunch of ineffectual cow-munching idiots, McDonald’s has given no indication that they’ll change their preparation of fries. I was a vegetarian through all of the latter half of highschool and my first year at college, and i know for a fact that in that time i’ve had plenty of McDonald’s fries and i honestly feel like my decision to be a healthier person was violated by a multinational corporation with no respect for the people it serves. In light of this, maybe fast food restaurants need to indicate what’s really vegetarian on their menus, because sometimes vegetarians get hungry for some drive-thru too. As a result of all of this, i am hereby boycotting all McDonald’s products until the fries are vegetarian once again. This will be especially painful for me because i have a serious addiction to McDonald’s hashbrowns (which probably aren’t vegetarian either). Have a nice day. (stole from Re)

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/05/3816126/

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I have this mass creative urge and i don’t know where to focus it.

I used to have these days all the time when i was younger… i’d feel like i needed to output my thoughts somehow or else i would just endlessly spin in place for a whole day getting absolutely nothing done. My relief for this emotion in the olden days was either writing or playing with my G.I.Joes. Writing then was fiction rather than songs and blogs, so both forms of expression allowed me to create personas other than my own and then intermingle them all together in a storm of creativity that i could reflect upon later. If i was really stuck for resources i’d funnel all that creativity back into a pre-made creation like a novel, but that wasn’t ever wise because i could devour those books in a matter of hours and they would only leave me more hungry to create a piece of my own.


Songwriting was the perfect cure for the whole mess in two ways. The first was that even my longest song clocks in well under six minutes, so now i have a library of hundreds of facets of my own personality that i can trot out one after another, delve into deeply, and then end with a simple resolving chord (or lack thereof). The second was cover songs: the perfect way to focus my energy into someone else’s creative work but to still come out with my own product. Cover songs are much more productive in the long run than my old alternative of writing fanfics, which are inevitably not only totally invalid when held on their own but also totally the property of the originator of the universe the writing occurs in. Cover songs are not my own, but my interpretation of them is, and i’m always allowed to climb into the feelings a song portrays for a single performance, during which it’s as valid as any of my own songs.

However, my guitar occasionally fails me and i likewise have been known to fail it, whether it be due to a broken string or a lack of physical motivation to play. In some of these instances i’ve been left listessly strumming a G chord (or the remainders thereof) trying to get up enough rhythm and momentum to have a go at a song, but otherwise all of my energy would be wasted. That’s where this log came in last summer … a way to make sure that none of my creative energy would have to go to waste, and also a way to integrate my other creativity into one tangled web of personal thoughts and experience. However, as i become more and more comfortable with my guitar and my own voice (as a lyricist, as a blogger, and as a vocalist) i’m again branching out into other artistic and creative endeavors, which in turn can seem quite fruitless because i never created a mechanism to tie them back into this log. Shortly before this log came about i wrote half of a novella that ran over 100 pages, but it was hosted elsewhere on the internet and was based on years of other writing, so i left it to itself rather than ever mentioning it. During the run of the log i’ve continued to chip away at the novel i began six years ago in my endless churning loop of revision after revision to the same essential chapters, but it never manages to see the light of day. More recently i’ve been reviewing music somewhat consistently, and that i have managed to integrate into this domain at both jla and cor (though their participation with this page is usually limited).

It’s easy to see that i’m presented with several problems tied into this new creative urge of mine. The main issue is that i feel like any content that isn’t integrated into this log is essentially being forgotten before it’s ever found, and also that it’s liable to simply fade away from beneath my fingertips if i don’t sew it into my daily fabrication. I’ve been known to be hesistant about posting to the Ani Discussion Board, Shafted, or even the BlogVoices at Wockerjabby because i’m afraid that one precious paragraph of mine will fade into the ether of someone else’s site to never be retrieved again (a fate that blogger often forces onto posts of this epic length and breadth, which leaves me rather paranoid at the moment).


So, i have an obsession to track everything i do, and to tie it back into this very page. Is there any doubt about why i want a webcam? But, anyhow, i often lack in the motivation, organization, and programming skill it would take to seamlessly integrate all of my creativity into Crushing Krisis. However, where i fail in those latter two aspects i’ve been excelling in the first, and so things just like cor have been cropping up everywhere offering me and alternative for dispersing my creative output. Sadly and somewhat ironically all of these venus seem to be detracting from their intended nucleus: this very log.

And, so, i am left here with this mass creative urge but with nothing to blog and a currently irreplacable broken guitar string. And, i’m wondering what’s going to come out, and how i’m going to record it for posterity if it’s something worthwhile.

{some of the links in this entry have additional blog-length exposition that will show up in most browsers when you hover over them. enjoy.}

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/05/3808323/

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(logged via lyd:) Have you been to Cloudmakers.org? In my inestimably humble opinions, it is by far the best and most innovative use of the web ever, for anything… or, more accurately, is is the result of that innovation (and it only took me two whole hours of reading the same html document to come to this conclusion). Cloudmakers it the group that monitors the web-integrated real-time story that ties in to the new Spielberg flick (originally Kubric) movie AI, except this story takes place nearly a century after the movie and seems to include only one or two of the same characters. And, even more thrilling and chilling, the game has integrated into real-life with actual rallies that dispersed clues… so that if people didn’t attend the game would have stalled out. With a month left still until the movie is released, the mystery seems to be still far from its end. Meanwhile, the game features a full cast of characters, hundreds of dynamic pages of html, (long distance) phone numbers with actual messages to hear, email responders that continuously talk back, fax numbers to obtain information from, and nearly impossible puzzles that integrate information from all of the above sources and more. At a recent panel about the movie there were business cards for an special effects director who shares a name with the first character introduced into the game, and the back of the business cards contained a clue that wasn’t released in the web aspect for a few more day. The game itself occasionally refers to Cloudmakers as a multi-person problem solving scheme that equates to group AI, and occasionally links fan sites as in-game news. Also, if you’re the first person to solve a puzzle you can occasionally effect the game environment, as one person got to write a faked autopsy for one of the primary players in the puzzle.

The game itself is a bit too involved for me, but following it is nothing but a delight and joy. Second to journalism (or stardom), i’d love to be employed to design stuff like this, whether it be storyboarding or web designing. In the meantime, i can just hope that the movie is half as good as what has been conjured up to accompany it.