• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

  • Archive
  • DC Guides
    • DC New 52
    • DC Events
    • DC Rebirth
    • Batman Guide
  • Marvel Guides
    • Omnibus & Oversize Hardcover DB
    • Marvel Events
  • Star Wars Guide
    • Expanded Universe Comics (2015 – present)
    • Legends Comics (1977 – 2014)
  • Valiant Guides
  • Contact!

Personal

The HiX-Men Report: House of X (2019) #5

September 20, 2019 by krisis Leave a Comment

HiX-Men Report is back with House of X (2019) #5, which is the issue that reveals everything about Xavier’s master plan in the present day.

This was a tough episode for me – and not only because we just moved into our new house 24 hours ago! I had a lot of problems with how this issue was constructed.

As it turns out, it’s also a controversial issue in the X-Men fan community due to the near-religious fervor shown by our beloved mutants. We spend some time digging into what’s so unsettling about new mutant rituals.

Filed Under: thoughts Tagged With: HiX-Men Report, House of X, Jonathan Hickman, Video, X-Men

20 X-Men Questions with an X-Pert & a New Mutant – Part 1

August 17, 2019 by krisis Leave a Comment

As a complement to our weekly HiX-Men Report, Fangirl and I assembled on our own to tackle 20 big questions about the X-Men.

Part of what makes the Report so unique is that Fangirl is a relatively new X-Men reader, despite being a voracious consumer of thousands of comics each year. She comes to every issue of Hickman’s X-Men with fresh eyes, but we don’t get to tackle every one of her X-questions in our panel format. Also, as someone who has been making guides aimed at new X-Men fans for almost a decade, I also had some questions for Fangirl’s fresh eyes!

In this first of four episodes, we talk Magneto’s helmet, the Phoenix Force, the best leader of mutantkind, and more!

Filed Under: thoughts Tagged With: Video, X-Men

Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #2: Second Genesis (The Phoenix Era)

October 12, 2018 by krisis

This is available to everyone, but it was made possible via the support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis:

The Revised & Expanded X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #2: Second Genesis

This era covers every X-Men story starting with Giant Size X-Men #1 in 1975 through “Days of Future Past” in Uncanny X-Men #141-142 in 1981. That includes every back-up from Classic X-Men.

The guide allows you to read every X-Men story from the period perfect continuity order, but also presents a simplified version of that order so you can enjoy bigger chunks of the most important stories without inserting every minor guest appearance.

This was a fun reading order to revise for a few different reasons. [Read more…] about Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #2: Second Genesis (The Phoenix Era)

Filed Under: thoughts

happy birthday to this

August 26, 2018 by krisis

The Location.

What makes you happy?

It’s a simple question that is deceptively hard to answer, because happiness is a spectrum. There are different dimensions of happiness.

On one side of the spectrum, a picture of a cute animal might bring a smile to your face. It makes you happy in the moment, but seeing a cute animal picture every moment of every day won’t make you feel constantly happy. Eventually that little rush of joy and cheer yields diminishing returns

Fulfillment lives on the other side of the happiness spectrum. The complex set of physical and emotional requirements that comprise your long-term happiness make your life satisfying, but they don’t make you happy in every passing moment. Fulfillment is like a big, beautiful house (and may, in fact, include living in a big, beautiful house): it’s a space that’s only as happy as the things you do within it.

Clouds rolling in over our view of the the harbor.

Long term happiness as a house you build and live inside is a metaphor that speaks to me because it’s more than a little bit literal. Usually, life bends in the direction of trying to attain some level of physical, material comfort. That doesn’t have to mean living in a mansion, but no one aspires to be elderly and hate their doorknob or the color of the wall behind their couch.

Happiness isn’t just how your house is built. As they say in business, it’s location, location, location. Even if you have an uncontainable wanderlust, there are probably aspects of your local life that fall somewhere on that spectrum of happiness. The view out of your window. Being close to your friends and loved ones. Eating at your favorite restaurant. Visiting a museum or historic site. Seeing your city’s skyline as you drive towards it.

Could you tell me what makes you happy if I took all of that away? If the house that your happiness built was transplanted to a faraway location that was alien to you?

That has been the question that I’ve been trying to answer with every day of the past year of my life here in Wellington, New Zealand. I’m living in what is essentially my personal version of paradise with my immediate family and all of my personal belongings, but it’s without all of the constants that existed outside of the walls of our home in Philadelphia.

View from the top of the Wellington Cable Car.

For every local, tangible thing that used to make me happy, I’ve had to find some new therapeutic alternative – from where I like to walk to the food I like to eat. It hasn’t been the easiest process. You can replace walks and foods, but not places and people.

Sometimes I find something that’s far on one side of the happiness spectrum and try to force it to work on the other side.

We’re renting a house that I love with one of the best views on this blue planet, but sitting inside of it doesn’t make me happy in every moment.

Conversely, I finally found a brand of ice cream that I like, and while eating 4 litres of ice cream in a 36 hour period is very filling, it isn’t very good at creating long-term happiness when you do it again and again.

(Mostly, it just helps you gain 10 pounds in a very short period of time.)

This has been the weirdest, hardest, most-exciting year of my entire life. In my efforts to redefine my happiness in ways that don’t necessarily include eating ice cream every minute of every day, I have had one amazing, enduring constant to turn to: this. Crushing Krisis, the central trunk to a myriad of roots and branches of my telepresence on the internet, representing my connections to things and people I love all around the globe. It makes my “local” global.

I don’t think I could have survived this past year without it, which is why I am so happy to be here today celebrating such a massive milestone – the eighteenth anniversary of my first post to Crushing Krisis.

EV6 meets the Tasman Sea.

The Parent.

I am a parent of two offspring: a five year old who is starting primary school tomorrow and a blog that is now old enough to be considered an adult in the vast majority of the world.

Crushing Krisis is old enough to buy alcohol here in New Zealand and to vote back in America – one thing I am totally disinterested in and another I’d be totally into if it wasn’t voter fraud.

When you give birth to a child you usually do so with every intention of keeping them alive for eighteen years. You might love some parts of getting them to eighteen more than others (personally, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Age 4), but you’re in it for the long haul with the hope that they become functional adults at the end of the journey.

We embark across a very precarious suspension bridge.

You don’t tend to have the same intentions for starting a blog. I didn’t. Most bloggers don’t make it through the rough spots if they last any longer than teething does with an infant, let alone the Terrible Twos or whatever other awful long phase most people’s kids go through. Playing “Let It Go” on repeat. Being teenagers.

In many ways, blogs are easier than kids. They survive neglect without any ill effects! They don’t throw a fit if they don’t like the color you’ve dressed them in! The tradeoff is that they take a lot more effort. As kids get older their lives become increasingly independent. They can exist without you. Blogs can’t.

EV6 is getting old enough now that she is starting to fall out of like with some things in her life. It’s a strange phenomenon, because you tend to define your kid by their interests (or, at least, I do) and suddenly that definition isn’t so simple.

All at once, your child isn’t this adorable little button who loves hugs and the color blue. They are their own dynamic person with constantly shifting preferences and opinions.

CK is the same way, although I needed all of these years of perspective to understand that. Like a person in the world, it cannot be entirely defined by what it was interested in the most in the past or at the present moment.

Some of its interests have persisted since it’s first day, like my writing about music. Some aspects arrived later, like my comic guides. Others have disappeared, like bitching about my college classes. Crushing Krisis has grown through its adolescence and its terrible teen years. It has been confused about what and who it wants to be.

Many people would tell you that a child is unlike a blog because the child thinks for themselves. A blog is the opposite of that. It’s like a Schrodinger’s Child. You don’t know what it’s thinking until the next time you decide open up the little white box and start typing in it.

Then, all of a sudden, it’s something new all over again. Just like a child.

The harbor at sunrise, shot by E.

The Lottery.

The best way I can think to describe the past year of my life is this: imagine you won the lottery and the prize was a one-way trip halfway around the world and zero dollars.

I still marvel at the fact that we were invited to immigrate to New Zealand. In that very literal sense, it was winning a lottery (a lottery that happened to involve E being an amazing and highly-employable genius). I was never remotely interesting in living abroad, let alone around the world in a different hemisphere. The entire process happened abruptly within three very tumultuous months of our lives last year.

People love to speculate about what they’d do if they won the prize-money sort of lottery. Financial independence. Splurging! Living your best possible life!

Where would you begin? What would you do? Would you still cook yourself dinner or wash your car on a sunny day?

I’ve asked myself this question many times before our big move. Given infinite time and resources, would I still blog? Would I be interested in the same things I am today, or would I evolve to doing something entirely new?

What if you had the chance to create your best possible life in the best possible place, just without the part where you won a life-altering amount of money?

The quarry at the end of my regular bush reserve hike (and Petone out beyond it).

I’ve been answering that question daily for the past 365 days. Crushing Krisis has been surprisingly central to that process, even when I haven’t been writing on it. I keep challenging myself to try new things and chase new opportunities, and CK has either defined them, recorded them, or acted as the negative space that surrounded them.

I’ve lived so many lives in the past year, many of them new to me. There were the familiar ones, like blogger, full-time father, comic book expert, music critic, drag fan, and business consultant.

Others were new – or, at least, unfamiliar. Talk show host. Hiker. Video editor. Ocean swimmer. Importer of goods. School parent. Job applicant. International home-seller. Gym rat. Gourmet home chef. Board game playtester.

CK was a place to record some of that, but also a way to define myself to people I met along the way. EV6’s daycare manager read CK. I referred to the inner workings of CK for a consulting gig about digital transformation for a business. I sent links to particular stories to new acquaintances, and introduced others to my comics content. My daily YouTube talkshow referred to CK’s comic guides as much as its posts about blue hair and encountering ghosts. Some of my activities started out as fodder for blog posts and then turned into their own independent adventures.

With that comes my regular, unceasing lament of the past 18 years: it would be nice if I had written about it all. Seeing it listed here reminds me of how epic this year has been and how much of it has passed unremarked.

I start almost every day thinking about what I ought to blog, but I’ve come a long way from regretting when I don’t wind up blogging a thing. Now I draw power from it. Life is a Venn Diagram of things and some number of them overlap to make me happy.

That intersection doesn’t have to perfectly overlap with things I blog about. Some happiness can pass by unremarked.

One of the oldest trees in the Otari-Wilton Bush Reserve.

The Pivot.

This was the year of CK’s unintentional pivot to video.

That makes talking about this year of CK extra strange. It was among my most-successful years, no matter how I measure success – most fun, most regularly-updated, most-seen, most-commented. Yet, it included some of the least written content of all 18 years of the blog.

The pivot wasn’t intentional. Or, at least, the videos were intentional, but I didn’t intend for them to become CK’s primary content or for them to supplant my writing quite as much as they did. They were one of those lottery-winning best-life things – something I was always curious about doing but never had the time to wrestle into existence.

All I knew at the start was that I had the compelling visual of hundreds of comic books wrapped up in butcher paper and bubble wrap and it seemed a pity to go through the effort of unwrapping them all without some sort of documentation.

I had no idea that the process of documenting my unwrapping would wind up as an 80+ episode web series that drew hundreds of subscribers and dozens of commenters. Clearly I knew how many books I had to unwrap, but I had no concept of the scope of what I was getting myself into – or that it would spin off several other video series along the way. I would have never guessed that I would spend five months staying up most nights until 2am or later editing and uploading video.

Much of the musing and introspection that used to fuel short, pithy blog posts moved out of the realm of the written word and into the introductions of the videos. On one hand, that meant there were five straight months of daily content of me talking about my thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams. On the other hand, very little of that content made it out of the videos and into writing.It doesn’t count towards CK’s legendarily huge and always expanding word count. I cannot search it, excerpt it, or bind it in a book.

As I get underway on a new season of video production, I’m still not certain how I feel about that. CK was launched as a way to capture my thoughts, and video is a great way to do that. Yet, I’ve always considered myself a writer above most other things in life and, even when they are carefully scripted, videos aren’t writing.

CK is not the CK I know without me being a writer at least some of the time. But, just like a child, CK isn’t all about me and what I want it to be. Sometimes it is its own aggregate thing.

Maybe video is a part of what it has grown up to be.

Your author.

The Thanks.

I have now officially been a blogger for half of my life.

At some point in that half-a-life, working on Crushing Krisis stopped being a goal I measured in single years and started to become a devotion that progressed in fractions of life slowly increasing towards this day.

I’ve pictured this moment – writing this post – for a long time. Now I’m here and I’m not entirely sure what to say or what comes next. This was the biggest milestone I ever pictured hitting. From here on out it’s just decade markers and endless year-long slices of infinity while I watch an ever-dwindling number of longer-running blogs give way to attrition.

As single year slices of my life go, this has been an insular one. It’s probably the least I’ve ever spoken in a year of my life, and while that silence has been healthy it ha also an indication that I’ve been separated from so many of the people I usually thank in these posts.

I am still thankful for them all. Some of them might not even realize how much of an effect they’ve had on keeping me alive and upright from thousands of miles around the globe.

Thank you to all of my Philadelphia friends out there posting on social networks – whether it’s every day or just once in a blue moon.  You keeping me connected to the city I love. To Jess, for hunting me down. To Erich, my fellow fan. To Jill, for being a wonderful mix of love and snark who never tires of me responding to her posts. To Bill, for saving our asses. To Mikey & Allie, the spirit of Philly (or, at least, South Jersey). To Maya and Ben, for keeping me connected to my professional world.

Thank you to my comic book friends, for helping me stay centered and sane this year. To FanGirl, my amazing cohost and an amazing woman in STEM. To OmniDog, for inviting me to be in the video club to begin with. To Sherlock, my down under feminist ally. To Ian, who gets it. To Zack and Thomas and the rest of my X-Twitter crew, who opened their hearts to my weirdness and put up with me replying to their whole day of thoughts all at once when I wake up in the morning (which is their evening).

I had a revelatory, spiritual experience with this massive rainbow. No, I am not joking.

Thank you to all of our Wellington friends, especially my frequent partner in crime M – even if our misadventures didn’t make it onto CK. To L, for keeping an eye on us. To D&A for being the first friends-with-kids we actually hang out with regularly. To everyone at EV6’s school who taught me as much about being a Kiwi as they taught her.

Thank you to Lindsay, for keeping tabs on me and my happiness. To Gina, for remembering what our friendship was about before the bands. To Jake and Lauren and all of the adventures I so wish I could join. To Ashley, because we are still a band even with a whole world between us. To Alison, for never laughing at me for being thankful for lifting one additional kilogram.

Thank you to my Patrons. You have been critical in keeping Crushing Krisis alive and in letting me try new things while every penny is tied up elsewhere because I did not win the actual lottery. There would be no Year 18 without you, no comic guides, no videos. No anything.

Thank you to E, for making this new life possible and fighting for it every day.

Thank you to EV6, who endures more of my crazy than anyone else in this world, who is a new kid every day, and who reads me comic books when I’m not feeling well.

Thank you, and happy birthday to this.

Filed Under: august 26th

free license & drunken birds

August 23, 2018 by krisis

New Zealand is so nice that they gave me a driver’s license just because I asked for one.

It’s probably for the best that they don’t know how long I waited to get my license back in Pennsylvania (and that it involved several months of parallel parking practice). With that in mind, just walking into an auto inspection shop to be magically and immediately licensed with just the barest of visual tests seems both ludicrous and like a grave error on the part of my new country.

Let’s be honest: driving is pretty different here. It’s not just the whole left side of the road thing and all the roundabouts. It’s not understanding what the method is behind when there are white lines versus yellow lines versus double lines. It’s not being able to quickly decipher all of the various “watch out for wildlife” semiotic signs. It’s not knowing the procedure of what to do if you are pulled over by the police.

The woman who issued my license was a gem, like a bawdy and hilarious alternate take on Joni Mitchell. I gave my typical cold steel stare to her camera and when she saw the photo she told me, “You already look like you’re angry for being pulled over for whatever you were doing before the officer asked for your license.”

“Oh, I’m not going to get pulled over. I drive like the most cautious grandmother you’ve ever met. The only problem could be that I don’t know what all the road signs mean.”

“Oh really? Should I be worried?”

“Well, I figured out that ‘Give Way’ was about everyone being very polite, which isn’t possible in the States. But I remain very concerned about the ‘Watch for Kereru’ signs. Have you seen those birds? One flew into the side of my house and it was like a bomb went off!”

Let me back up for a moment.

Kereru are like extremely oversized and somewhat adorable wood pigeons. They are the wild turkey of the pigeons family. E spotted one last year when we were looking at houses, and when she pointed it out to me I said, “That whole thing is one bird? Are you sure?”

I am not a doctor of birds like my friend Lori, but my layperson speculation is that the kereru’s brain is maybe not complex enough to account for them being the size that they are and also a bird that is meant to fly through the air.

They carry themselves very proudly in the fashion of a beast that is completely unaware of anything happening in their immediate surroundings. It gives them the distinct look of something that ought to be extinct. You know what I mean – you’ve seen the museum dioramas. If kereru existed anywhere other than an island with virtually no land mammals they would’ve never made it this long. I’ve seen some kereru in action here prior to the one that hit the side of our house, and they have a very dazed and confused quality to them at all times.

Part of that is the public intoxication factor.

You see, kereru get bombed on ripe fruit. I swear, this is a real thing and not some apocryphal Kiwi myth. They gorge themselves on ripe fruit during the summer. Again, they are the size of a roasting bird, so that is a lot of fruit. Then, the kereru doze off in said heat due to said gorging, and the fruit actually ferments in their crop (which is an extra storage compartment in the esophagus, like pockets in a dress). They are living, breathing, self-fermenting bags of wine.

The result: drunken bird bombs who have no idea of their surroundings and do not know which was is up.

It was not especially warm on the day a kereru tried to detonate itself against the side of our house, so I cannot say for sure if it was drunk. I was downstairs in my office doing some sort of comic book thing. Suddenly, I heard what I was sure was some sort of explosive crash. I assumed a delivery truck had come up our drive too quickly and crashed into our house.

I ran upstairs to investigate the damage from above, which is when I noticed a giant, bird-shaped smear on our sliding glass door and an extremely large, extremely confused kereru looked more dazed than usual on the deck below.

From here, allow me to direct you to this primary source account of the drama, as discussed between E and I in our ongoing chat thread: [Read more…] about free license & drunken birds

Filed Under: thoughts Tagged With: birds, driving, memories, New Zealand

weak in the knees

August 21, 2018 by krisis

Everyone has their own version of what makes them feel physically fit. For some it’s their weight. For others it’s their abs, or how much they can lift.

For me, it’s always been squatting.

Not “squats,” where I have to crouch down with a fraction of the weight of the world on my shoulders and then power that weight up to the sky as I straight my posture. Those came later.

No. Just good old regular squatting to reach something on the ground.

If I wheeze or grunt while I’m doing it, I am not in shape. That’s my litmus test. That’s what sent me to the gym for the first time back in 2011. I was not quite 30 years old and doing that little old man grunt when I bent over to pick something up.

“Uhnf,” I expel on a little puff of breath as I crouched down, or as I pressed myself back up.

A lot of that “uhnf” came from the knees. I was sure mine had gone bad from years of pounding down Philadelphia’s cracked concrete sidewalks at high speeds in my unforgiving pair of Sketchers boots.

In yoga I could not do “chair pose.” When I ran it felt as though my knees heated up like a paper clip being repeatedly bent. My mother’s knees needed replacement. For me, it was probably just a matter of time.

“Should’ve gone with Doc Martens,” I’d muse. Oh, the folly of youth.

I felt fit at some point in my original gym adventures earlier this decade, which meant my squatting was not bad. No more little puff of complaint at their nadir. My opinion of my knees did not change.

I shared that same opinion with my friend Alison when she coaxed me to start weight training in 2016. Why did I use only half of the weight I needed to use for squats (this time the real sort of squats that required that fraction of the weight of the world)?

The knees, I’d tell her. It’s all in the knees.

It’s now been two years of lifting those weights every week, with a few breaks along the way. I’ve had a lot of little niggling problems in that time – ankles and cramps and my back and a whole litany of other little weaknesses to overcome.

Never the knees.

I realize now that the problem was never my knees. The problem was how I was using them. The only way I used my legs before 2011 were as massive pistons, driving my feet to the ground again and again as I walked four miles at a time. That was the only way they knew how to be strong. Any other kind of leg exercise – from running to yoga to squatting – I’d just rely on my knees to do all the work.

My legs know how to do different things now. I’ve got muscles I never had before, not just those piston pressing thighs. Squatting is fine, with weights or without. When I squat to pick something up I’m using my entire body – my abdominals, my back, my thighs, my calves.

I’ve come a long way from those squats being the delineation of my fitness. They’re not “not bad” now. They feel fine. Good, even. Sometimes I even pretend I am Spider-Man for a moment as I rock back onto my haunches.

How did I get past being weak in the knees? Back in 2016, Alison told me I couldn’t use them as an excuse. “Plenty of people have bad knees and still do modified squats,” she told me. “That’s not a reason to avoid them.”

Yoga teachers had said the same thing to me, but they didn’t know me like Alison did, since sitting on the floor in her dorm room putting together copies of my first demo CD. She met me when I was skin and bones and curly hair, before the singing lessons and the career and my relationship with E.

She knew that I didn’t let minor obstacles stop me from doing what I want, so she made me knees into an obstacle rather than my weakest point. “Just work around them,” she told me, and so I did – and it turned out that working around them was exactly what I needed to do.

I am trying to transport this little lesson about squats and knees into other areas of my life. Sometimes your perceived weakness is about a lack of strength somewhere else. The place where you perceive the symptoms of a problem isn’t always the spot that needs curing. Sometimes your perceived weakness is about a lack of strength somewhere else.

Whether it’s squats or something else, our metrics of success measure more factors than we might realize at first.

Filed Under: thoughts Tagged With: exercise, memories

  • Page 1
  • Page 2
  • Page 3
  • …
  • Page 642
  • Next Page »

Primary Sidebar


Support Crushing Krisis on Patreon
Support CK
on Patreon


Follow me on Twitter Like me on Facebook Contact me
Follow me on Instagram Watch me on Youtube Subscribe to the CK RSS Feed

About CK

About Crushing Krisis
About My Music
About Your Author
Blog Archive
Comics Blogs Only
Contact Krisis
Terms & Conditions

Crushing Comics

Marvel Comics
Marvel Events Guide
Marvel Omnibus Guide
Spider-Man Guide

DC Comics
DC New 52
DC Rebirth

Valiant Comics

Copyright © 2017 · Foodie Pro Theme by Shay Bocks · Built on the Genesis Framework · Powered by WordPress

Crushing Krisis is supported by SuperHeroic Sponsor Omnibuds' Café


Links from Crushing Krisis to retailer websites may be in the form of affiliate links. If you purchase through an affiliate link I will receive a minor credit as your referrer. My credit does not affect your purchase price. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to: Amazon Services LLC Associates Program (in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain), eBay Partner Network, and iTunes Affiliate Program. Note that URLs including the "geni.us" domain name are affiliate short-links.