consume

Music Monday: “Can’t Get Enough of Myself” – Santigold, featuring B.C

September 5, 2016 by krisis

I love Santigold’s album 99¢, out earlier this year. It’s easily accessible and mercilessly catchy.

Does it sacrifice some of Santigold’s idiosyncrasies to get there? I’m not sure. Santigold is among a number of late-00s Electropop artists that I never entirely absorbed upon their first hit of fame. I don’t know where she’s coming from and I don’t have a raft of expectations to battle against on each new LP.

Maybe that’s s why I don’t know quite know how to talk about “Can’t Get Enough of Myself.”

Its easy, loping stroll topped with a constant bustle of triplets and a whistling high synth flute melody. The sound calls back to Stevie Wonder and post-Motown/pre-Disco 70s soul (even with modern touches, like a slight digital detuning on the flute riff).

(My mother loves an obscure (though frequently-sampled) 1976 LP by the band Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band that occupies that some space in my mind, particularly “Sunshower.” I remember when it was finally released in CD she was rapturous.

Oh, the 90s.)

Is it typical of Santigold? Are these her typical influences? I don’t know, and when a song is this good I’m happy to delay my research while I listen to it on repeat for a few more hours.

Aside from the inherently sunny charm of the throwback sound, there’s the unabashed happiness of the track. It’s infectiously cheerful, both melodically and in lyrics. Here’s the opening verse and chorus:

If I wasn’t me, I can be sure I’d wanna be
I’m pretty major and I’ll say it out loud
Living my life in a fantasy
Living my life in my vanity
Hey mom maybe you’ll see me now

…

All I wanna do is what I do well
Ain’t a gambler but honey I’d put money on myself
All I wanna do is bottle it to sell
Cuz my brand does vainglorious much better for your health

That’s a refreshing take on modern “drunk on my own fumes” braggadocio without lessening the intensity of self-love. It simply removes the component of superiority from self-love. When Santigold sings, “look at them liking me,” there’s no indication that just because she’s the the best she’s any better than anyone else.

In fact, maybe everyone should be exactly this vainglorious in their own heads as they walk down the street. They certainly might feel that way if they had this song pumped into their ears.

Children’s Book Review: Stellaluna by Janell Cannon

September 3, 2016 by krisis

This week EV got her own library card.

She was excited by the prospect. Maybe not in anticipation – even as a book-loving three-year old, I don’t think she really understood the concept of an entire building whose purposes was housing books which you could borrow. Yet, once we arrived and she witnessed the seemingly unending shelf of books she could choose from, the excitement became all too real.

I spent a lot of time at the library as a kid, partially owing to the fact we didn’t have the kind of money that made regularly visiting bookstores an option until I was older. My mother made sure I had books as a constant presence in my life, and though I was late to read I’ve been a voracious consumer of printed material ever since.

I don’t have a good excuse for abstaining from the library until now, other than the fact that E and I both really like owning books. However, three years into the children’s book accumulation endeavor and every possible shelf is filled … which makes this collection no different than our CDs, DVDs, graphic novels, guitars.

You get the idea. We like stuff. Or maybe I’m just a luddite, considering I could have a smaller collection of all of that (even the guitars) if I would embrace digital more.

Either way, E is a wonderful curator of great books for EV, and I’d like to start reviewing our favorites here – as well as covering picks from the library. Even if you’re not a parent, everyone has to get a gift for a kid every so often. I’ll do my best to steer you in the right direction, including noting challenging themes and bad behavior in books, which are both pet peeves of mine.

To start out, I want to highlight one all-star book in our collection which not only is parent-selected and toddler-approved, but also our go-to gift for other kids.

Stellaluna, written and illustrated by Janell Cannon

CK Says: – Buy It!

Gender Diversity: Female protagonist; supporting characters are female or agender
Ethnic Diversity: Not applicable
Challenging Language: “Awful” (so, none, really)
Themes to Discuss: parents in danger, gross food, obeying adults, assimilation

Stellaluna is a charming, positive story full of female anthropomorphized animal characters that includes several interesting hooks for discussion. We’ve found it to be a go-to re-read, not only for the depth of the tale but for its vocabulary and a clever secondary narrative.

Stellaluna is the story of a baby bat who loses sight of her mother and winds up raised alongside a trio of tiny birds in a nest. She has to endure such indignities as sleeping upright and eating worms (she’s a fruit bat), essentially losing touch with her bat identity while struggling to be more birdlike. She later finds her colony of bats, including her own mother. In the process, she learns to love being a bat, but also the differences between her and her bird friends. [Read more…] about Children’s Book Review: Stellaluna by Janell Cannon

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Power Rankings, S2E02 – “All Stars Snatch Game”

September 2, 2016 by krisis

The second episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars came packed with even more surprises than we’d typically expect from a Snatch Game!

First, Adore Delano decided to the leave the cast before the challenge. Second, a trio of high-quality, gag-worthy queens wound up in the bottom two – including both top queens from last week!

Of course, this entire cast is high-quality and gag-worthy, which makes every elimination a painful one – especially since the queens are the ones doing the eliminating. However, this one couldn’t help but be controversial because Alaska found herself choosing between her Season 5 BFFs Detox and Roxxxy Andrews and relatively forgotten (though wonderful) Season 2 queen, Tatianna.

Let’s check out where the rankings wind up after the carnage, and then I’ll get back to Alaska’s decision to cut Tatianna from the cast. [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Power Rankings, S2E02 – “All Stars Snatch Game”

Marvel announces Monsters Unleashed series from superstar team

September 1, 2016 by krisis

This post is not about the X-Men. I really thought it was going to be. Instead, it’s about Monsters Unleashed.

Marvel unveiled a string of five nearly identical teasers in the past few days. Each teaser shared an anonymous acronym (“MU” is frequently used to mean “Marvel Universe” or “Marvel Unlimited”), and all the same information save for a differing headline artist.

2016-bunn-mu_1 2016-bunn-mu_2 2016-bunn-mu_3 2016-bunn-mu_4 2016-bunn-mu_5

It seemed that – unless Marvel planned on pulling a fast on on us – the teasers certainly were X-Men related. [Read more…] about Marvel announces Monsters Unleashed series from superstar team

Thanos – Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Mar 22, 2025! The Thanos comic books definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated March 2025 with titles scheduled for release through August 2025.

Marvel has a handful of characters whose appetites for power and wakes of destruction single them out as a pantheon of the deadliest villains of the universe, and Thanos The Mad Titan is chief amongst them.

Modern audiences are just as likely to have met Thanos in his cheshire-grinning cameo at the end of The Avengers film as through comic books, but fans of every era of Marvel comics from his 1973 debut forward know of him – even if they’ve never read him directly. That’s because Marvel has used him judiciously over the years, keeping him largely under the pen of Jim Starlin and never making him a regular character, trivial guest-star, or easily-defeated foe. Thanos’s arrival has always been a main event.

The result is a tidy, eminently-readable back catalogue of Greatest Hits caliber stories.

thanos-INFINITY2013004_Gen It all begins in an unlikely fashion – with two anonymous, oddly-colored, muscle-bound aliens having a knock-down, drag-out fight in the middle of an unsuspecting Iron Man issue. Those aliens were Drax and Thanos. While Drax has undergone a considerable update for the modern day, Thanos remains true to that first appearance.

Soon after, he was adopted by Jim Starlin for his cosmic saga spanning Captain Marvel and Warlock, which together account for the first great Thanos story. It’s so great that it spills over to a pair of unrelated annuals for its resolution after Warlock’s title ends.

That was it for Thanos for over a decade aside from an interlude in Starlin’s landmark graphic novel, The Death of Captain Marvel.

Thanos remained out of play until Starlin took over Silver Surfer in 1990, immediately bringing his favorite obsessed-with-death villain into play. After over a year’s saga of lead-up issues, the result was one of Marvel’s most memorable events: The Infinity Gauntlet, which saw Thanos wielding the legendary weapon against the entire universe of heroes.

However, many readers of core titles like Spider-Man, Iron Man, X-Men, The Avengers never even knew Thanos was threatening the Earth! That’s because 90s mini-series events only intruded into lower-selling titles while borrowing top-selling heroes like Wolverine from their own books to boost the mini-series sales. Two more events followed in the same fashion, Infinity War and Infinity Crusade, which gradually twisted the narrative until Thanos was forced to fight alongside the heroes he so often sought to destroy.

After another relatively quiet period, Thanos returned (again, under Starlin) in Infinity Abyss and a resulting ongoing series, his first. Then, Thanos is thrust onto center stage at the start of Marvel’s blockbuster 2000s cosmic saga, Annihilation, and he reappears to terminate it with The Thanos Imperative.

Finally, concurrent with the release of The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy films, Brian Bendis and Jonathan Hickman formalized Thanos as a villain who can square off agains the assembled might of the Avengers. For many Marvel readers who hadn’t read the Infinity or Annihilation sagas, it was their first exposure to Thanos.

It wouldn’t be their last exposure, as Marvel has kept Thanos visible in their books every few years as an iconic MCU villain.
[Read more…] about Thanos – Collecting Guide and Reading Order