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.

Marvel United: Multiverse adds a Secret Invasion expansion (plus, 20 events that could be expansion boxes!)

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Earlier today, CMON’s Marvel United: Multiverse Kickstarter campaign announced its fourth new expansion box: Marvel United Multiverse – Secret Invasion!

Marvel United Multiverse Secret Invasion Box Kickstarter

This box, its theme, and its characters were not on my list of predictions in this weekend’s post about the Marvel United Multiverse – Civil War expansion! It includes the O.G. Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Quake, Clint Barton as Ronin, and several Skrull opponents.

I’ll admit, I’m slightly negative on the contents of this expansion box.

While I love the idea of having a set of Skrull villain sculpts, it didn’t add a group of hotly-anticipated heroes. Having Nick Fury Sr. is fun, and Quake has a following from the Agents of SHIELD TV series, but Maria Hill is relatively anonymous as a standalone hero and an alternate Hawkeye wasn’t exactly at the top of every list.

Who else can you include in a Secret Invasion set?! Most of the story was about not knowing who to trust, so it’s shorter on iconic heroes than some other Marvel Events. Yet, there were options available. Hank Pym as Yellowjacket is core to the event, but they just included him in the Civil War box. It’s a pivotal event for Janet van Dyne, and the Wasp in the core Marvel United box is technically Hope van Dyne! Why not give us a Janet figure?!?! And, Norman Osborn plays a massive role in the event, but we just got his Iron Patriot as a stretch goal.

I think including Hank and Janet in this set was the way to go, which could’ve freed up a spot in Civil War for a different hero. CMON really missed their chance here. As a completionist I’ll eventually add this box to my final pledge, but I’m not excited about it.

(Want to play Marvel United right now? Grab either the Marvel United or Marvel United X-Men core boxes right now. They are fun cooperative games that are fun to play with adults and kids alike.)

I’m much more interested in what this set means for the remaining expansion boxes in this campaign – and it’s looking like we can expect 2-3 more. To this point I’ve been predicting teams of characters, because that’s how the past two campaigns worked. However, this campaign is all stories and events – The Coming of Galactus, Age of Apocalypse, Civil War, and Secret Invasion.

With that in mind, it’s time to pivot to an all-new, not-entirely-different list of 20 predictions that repackage major characters into events-based boxes. For a list of all of Marvel’s many line-wide events over the decades, check out my Guide to Marvel Universe Events. [Read more…] about Marvel United: Multiverse adds a Secret Invasion expansion (plus, 20 events that could be expansion boxes!)

New for Patrons: Guide to Wasp, Janet van Dyne

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My newest guide for Patreon supporters of Crushing Krisis is for one of the longest-running women of Marvel. In fact, while researching this guide I realized she may be the first Silver Age female Marvel hero to merit her own series of solo anthology stories! She’s also the first woman with a lengthy stint as a team leader at Marvel. All of that makes it absolutely wild that she has never had her own solo series until this month!!! Find all of those Marvel milestone moments in my brand new Guide to Wasp, Janet van Dyne!

Guide to Wasp, Janet van Dyne
This guide is now available to the public thanks to the astonishing support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis!

I won’t lie – getting this Guide to Wasp done was a battle, even though I got a very early start on it!

That’s because Janet van Dyne has appeared in a staggering 1,296 Marvel comics as of this month, which includes 1,295 comics that were not her own comic.

Building a guide for a character who has mostly appeared in their own series is always more straight-forward than building one for a perennial team member and guest star – even if that character has many series like Wolverine. That’s because their series established their prevailing narrative. Even if Wolverine made three times as many guest appearances in a period compared to his number of solo issues, it will be the solo issues that establish his character arc at that time.

Janet van Dyne has never had that privilege. For a character who is about to celebrate her 60th anniversary, her major character moments are relatively few and far between. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Wasp, Janet van Dyne

my weighted blanket is hungry

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E gave me a weighted blanket as a holiday gift.

I am the kind of person who likes to burrow under a mountain of blankets to go to sleep. Maybe with some other stuff piled on top – like my laptop on my chest and the contents of several laundry baskets scattered on top of the blankets. That’s a difficult sleep tableau to maintain – it’s given to tangles and things falling off the bed.

(It also means I like to sleep where it is COLD, because I’m going to pull something across my body regardless of the temperature.)

Enter the relatively-recent trend of weighted blankets. They went from a niche product for people with anxiety or serious sleeping problems to something you can find in every home goods store. Sometimes you can even choose between multiple brands and weights!

I’m not sure how exactly they went from nice treatment to retail seller, but every time I’d see or hear about them I’d think, “Huh, maybe I’m piling all of that stuff on top of me not for warmth but for the weight of it.”

Thus, my holiday gift. It is 10 kilograms – 22 pounds! That’s much more than the recommended amount for my size and weight, but I believe my request was, “I want to feel crushed as flat as a pancake and E really delivered. And, let me tell you, 10kg isn’t necessarily a heavy weight to lift as a barbell or even a wriggling baby, but 10kg spread out across a queen-sized blanket? That is hard to wrangle. Think of all the ways you casually toss or fold a blanket over the course of making your bed or slipping beneath it to go to sleep.

Not with this fat mama. It ain’t going anywhere it doesn’t want to go.

When I emerged from my first night of sound sleep with it, I declared that I felt well-rested and “completely flattened.”

All seemed to be well and good for the first few weeks of our relationship. Then, I noticed that I wasn’t getting up as early in the morning, despite it being the height of summer here in New Zealand. I’m used to popping up before my alarm goes off, especially if I leave my curtains cracked. Now, I was sleeping right up to my alarm – and, if I somehow managed to turn it off or it came unplugged I could sleep the whole morning away. I lost that ability when I became a parent nearly a decade ago!

You see, my weighted blanket is hungry. Hungry to do its job. Hungry for companionship. Hungry to crush something beneath its velvety grey expanse.

It’s not even exclusively hungry for me. I noticed this a few weeks ago when my beloved Blogger.com t-shirt went missing. I was sure I had set it out just before a shower, but when I returned it was gone. I searched high and low for it for days to no avail… only to find it nearly a week later within one of the folds of my blanket!

I’m not saying the blanket is sentient. Not necessarily. I’m saying if you take a large floppy thing like a blanket and give it weight, it starts acting like a prehensile tail or the arm of an octopus. If the edge of it drags across the floor, it actually GRABS THINGS as it goes. And, if you give it a solid yank to fold it or flip it as you would with a normal blanket, it’ll curl around whatever it can grab a hold of and swallow it up in its folds.

T-Shirts. Headphones. Pencils. Your entire waking life. All devoured by a ravenous 10kg beast dangling innocently off of one side of your bed.

Maybe this is why the blankets come with weight recommendations. Maybe it’s not about the blanket being too heavy for my delicate frame. Maybe I’m just not enough to satiate it. Maybe if I had asked for a lighter blanket it wouldn’t wake up hungry in the morning and try to swallow anything I placed in hem’s reach.

Maybe so. But… I’m sleeping so well.

RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, Episode 5 – House of Fashion, Review & Power Ranking

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Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the fifth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15 – House of Fashion. It’s an unconventional material design challenge with a twist: the queens are split into three groups and have to present cohesive runway collections for the House of (Michelle) Visage, the House of (Carson) Kressley, and the House of (Ross) Matthews.

This episode lacked a certain spark, and it’s hard to decide if that was down to the 40-minute runtime or the peculiar version of this familiar challenge. Seasons 3, 4, & 5 each opened with and iconic unconventional materials episode with a full cast of queens.

Season 4’s “RuPocalypse Now!” is probably the best of the bunch – packed with Sharon’s zombie look, Jiggly’s baked potato couture, and LaShawn Beyond’s classic “Post-Apopaloctic” line. It’s a 63-minute edit, but 20 of those minutes are entrances and a length photo shoot challenge! That means the meat of the design challenge (including the whole “wrestling with zombies for clothes” bit) still fit into 40 minutes, and it included both a walkaround with Ru and the private judges deliberations.

Of everything that feels squeezed by these 40-minute edits, I think the element that is most-sorely missing are those private judges deliberations. Without them, we don’t have any sense of RuPaul as a character on her own show. It also complete defangs Michelle Visage if we can’t hear her cutting opinions in private. Finally, it renders the guest judges completely pointless, since we don’t get to hear their unbiased opinions as they go to bat for the queens.

It was especially cruel to miss out on those deliberations in this episode, where Michelle and Ross had queens representing their brands and the guest judge was Janelle Monae, who knows something about fashion!

House of Visage

House of Kressley

House of Matthews

Looking beyond the edit, there was also the unusual nature of this iteration of the unconventional material challenge. First, since the queens were in teams it meant there was no apparent fighting over materials – sharing was in their best interest. Aside from losing the prurient fun of the catty fighting over who gets what leopard-print pillow, what was really lacking was a feeling of scarcity.

Part of what makes unconventional material challenges truly challenging is the queens trying to figure out what they can construct out of things other than fabric. Yet, in this challenge there was enough for nearly every queen to make a cape!

If I had to award a team win, it’d go to the House of Matthews. Even if their collection trended a little bit casual, it was cohesive and there wasn’t a bad look in the bunch. The judges seemed to agree, giving half the group a high placement and calling the other two safe.

What did this unconventional version of the unconventional materials design challenge mean for my power rankings? While the very top remains the same as last week’s Snatch Game ranking, there are some major shake-ups in the middle of the pack as the queens without wins jostle for positive critiques and screen time.

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, Episode 5 – House of Fashion, Review & Power Ranking

Breaking News: D&D continues support of Open Gaming License (OGL 1.0), releases their core rules SRD under Creative Commons

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Huge news breaking in the past hour: In a totally shocking reversal, D&D and its parent companies Wizard of the Coast and Hasbro have abandoned plans for a restrictive update to the Open Gaming License (OGL) that would revoke the existing OGL v1.0. Even more shocking, they have released their “System Reference Document” for free under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License!

Image by ScalyDragon from Pixabay

I first wrote about these changes and the depressing effect they have on TTRPG creators and players alike a few weeks ago.

The OGL v1.0 is the license that allows 3rd-Party creators to publish products that use the rules and core concepts of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.

Now, D&D has gone beyond re-affirming their support for that license by offering free and irrevocable access to their entire 5th edition core ruleset – called the System Reference Document (SRD) under Creative Commons.

The now freely-available information not only includes rules of play, but standard spells, and classic D&D monster state blocks. You can access the massive 400+ page document here.

This is a massive shift, not only compared to the proposed restrictive OGL v1.2, but compared to what anyone imagined was possible a few months ago.

In the words of D&D executive producer Kyle Brink from his announcement post:

This Creative Commons license makes the content freely available for any use. We don’t control that license and cannot alter or revoke it. It’s open and irrevocable in a way that doesn’t require you to take our word for it. And its openness means there’s no need for a VTT policy. Placing the SRD under a Creative Commons license is a one-way door. There’s no going back.

Our goal here is to deliver on what you wanted.

Of course, many 3rd Party producers have already announced creating their own open gaming platforms, like Paizo and Kobold Press. However, D&D has undercut those plans by making the 5e rules available in Creative Commons in perpetuity. That changes the playing field for smaller creators, who can continue to create content that will sell to 5e fans with total security.

Gizmodo has more context on this breaking news story.