Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

comm

by

But, i think, if there were more hours in the day, then there would be no sense of urgency. As much as my ambitions outstrip my intent, and as much as i lament that i typically have too much energy to be contained within a simple 24-hour cycle, i know that if we just added two, or maybe four or five hours to the rotation then suddenly they’d each become that much more meaningless, like how i always make a trip to Borders on a day that i’ve earned overtime pay — not because i’m trying any less hard to save money than i was the day before, but because it’s harder to remember its value when it comes in a larger amount.

The 24 hours that we’ve got make me conscious of what i’m doing. Contemplating a re-read of all of this year’s lamentably edited Rolling Stone, i instead rerouted my attention to cracking open Atlas Shrugged for the first time; rather than sit down for a second daily helping of The Sims i tidied up my room and rehearsed for the impending fourth season of Trio. How else can i do all that i keep resolving to do, other than cutting out the things that i don’t?

I am convinced that those who claim “There just aren’t enough hours in the day” really need to be given a few less hours to work with for a week or two. After that they’d be fine.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/09/106303981028794987/

by

I feel like a total fucking rock star this morning. I’m not sure what it is: the two incredible songs Gina and I recorded last night for the ‘thon, being asked a question about my intended slate of songs by a real-life honest-to-goodness reporter, or my girlfriend’s adorably punk pink hair.

Well, it’s certainly not from sitting in a cubicle from eight thirty, that’s for sure.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105905465401380800/

by

As someone who has ostensibly spent the last three and a half years of my life studying journalism at times i have a lot to say about the current state of the American news media. Any major US news outlet is over-reporting, under-representing, over-the-top, unprofessional, and altogether useless as far as i’m concerned. However, this isn’t really the fault of the programmers — it’s the fault of the American public. You would think that consumers would reject local news that resembles an erstwhile clip of Entertainment Tonight, or that they would at least demand that Philadelphia have a single daily paper not owned and published by the Knightridder corporation. But, they don’t, and their low expectations and low-brow interests are the undeniable trend-setters of what gets covered, with sometimes shocking implications.

As such, i was initially taken by surprise to see CNN headline with an internet story. My surprise only lasted long enough, though, to realize that the lead-in to the story was rife with buzz-words, and that it primarily existed to address the intermittent but highly-annoying slow-down that began earlier this weekend. The article proclaims that “Experts called the worm the most damaging attack on the Internet in 18 months,” and it was assertion that i found most shocking of all. Plainly, it is incorrect, even without taking into account a conflicting statement made in the same artcile: “It’s not a major risk. It’s not [doing] either of the two things that are terribly damaging,” Paller said. “One is hurting people’s machines, and one is knocking things [off-line].” By contrast, the relative blip on the media radar caused by a distributed denial of service attack this fall that left nine of the thirteen major DNS root servers temporarily down for the count definitely ranks, in my opinion, as possibly the most damaging attack on the Internet. Even the CNN article admits the potential deadliness of this tactic, albiet without acknowledging the recent incident in question.

Before i go on, let me ask: do you know what that means? In case you don’t: Websites don’t really live at the addresses you are used to typing in for them; this one doesn’t really exist at a place named “crushingkrisis.com.” In reality, web-pages exist soley as a set of IP numbers … think of them as PO Box’s that have been set up to forward to your (more meaningful) full street address. DNS servers are what does the forwarding, linking those numbers to names like amazon.com, cnn.com, and whitehouse.gov. And, while there are many local servers around the world that maintain this address information, all of it originates from root servers — the ones that were attacked.

Based on that oversimplified explanation, it should be plain to see how the internet might slowly disintegrate into nothingness if a few more servers had been crippled, or if they had been damaged in a more permanent fashion. Even though sites would technically still work via their IP address, many sites (most blogs included) reference their links and images in such a fashion that they would be rendered useless without a domain name at their source. However, though “[t]his may have been the largest attack on the core of the Internet, it didn’t affect actual users” (Maguire, Newsfactor.com). This, as opposed to an extremely evident slowdown that left many pages totally unavailable this weekend, meant that its coverage was minimal at best

Can you imagine what would happen if the internet broke? Not just your own site, and not just every site you read, use to schedule classes, check email with, or do banking on. No. The whole thing. It would be a catastrophe! John U. S. Doe would find himself utterly helpless at work all day without being able to refer to stocks, research, or company intranets. Jane Americana Doe would be lost without her regular nightcap of Yahoo News. In short, the public should have been really, really, really freaked out by the 2002 attack, as well as this attack and what is implied by them both.

My local news outlets largely did not cover the attack last year. By rights, it should have been the most important story… certainly more significant than impending precipitation or a sports game. Instead i found out about it in class where, unsuprisingly, no one even understood its significance. This attack obviously got picked up by CNN because it affected business and, in an unusually potent turn, disabled some thirteen thousand ATMs. Meanwhile any garden variety email-communicable virus, which i have never once even approached catching in seven years of blithe internet usage, is cause for alarm and coverage. Why? Because it primarily affects the lowest common denominator. That’s what it all comes down.

You may not be able to tell if the chicken or the egg came first — the point is that they both need each other to exist. The same goes for the relative irrelevance of the news and the increasing idiocy of the American public — especially on issues of politics and technology. Individual news organizations should make a change by covering what’s important, and not what’s expected. You should make a change by giving a shit about what they’re telling you. And not telling you.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/01/90238287/

by

If you were to ask me to talk about my biggest hobby, i would simply say, “Music.”

If you were to ask me to elaborate on my favorite elements of music, i would reply, “Hearing it. Making it.” Or, more explicitly, i enjoy being a fan of music and being a writer of music. One can involve being very critical of other people’s work, while the other requires an unending faith in my own.

Sometimes i have trouble reconciling the two. For example, in a book of my agonizingly chosen flying-to-Florida collection of music, the new Bright Eyes disc faces a burned cd of my recent trios. I have no qualms in admitting that i am skeptical about Conor Oberst’s new effort as Bright Eyes; i was skeptical before ever hearing a song by Conor and continue to feel that way now that i have bought a third album of his. He’s not so different from a previous version of me; a recent Rolling Stone article featured a picture of his slight vegan frame with a guitar almost dwarfing it, singing about heartbreak in a style whose lineage includes Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan.

I happen to really enjoy my new Trios;though the imperfections of my performances are more noticeable when crisply preserved in digital format, i delight in hearing the sound of my own voice captured in such a faithful fashion. I have worked hard for that voice… failing auditions, slaving at voice lessons, struggling through choir. Singing and singing until the sound of my own voice became transparent to me; hearing myself on a recording of “Tangling” or “Excuse” feels the same as performing the songs live. I cannot distinguish anything about my vocal performance other than whether i am hitting the notes i intended to. I cannot be critical of it

Conor is just about a year older than me, and i don’t think he is much of a singer. His bio calls his vocal stylings “quak[ing] with the tumultuous energy that only youth can produce.” Tumultuous energy sounds very much to me like unsteady notes and failing vibrato. There are parts of his album Fevers and Mirrors that i physically cannot consume — he screams, yowls, stretches his voice past the breaking point. I do it too, of course, all rock singers do at some point. But, to me it never sounds as rough… as pained. And, i am doing it for my website… him, for an international audience of consumers..

I ostensibly bought his new disc Lifted to review it, but i know that i am really casing up the competition. In the past i have wondered at the success of others who are only slightly older than me, and whose work i adore. Now, i am wondering about the success of someone who i could very plausibly be; who shares the exact years of pop culture inundation with me, if not some of the same influences. I happen to think that i sing better than him; i also think i write more accessible songs. But, i am in college, and he is on the road. I am on the dean’s list, and he is in Rolling Stone.

My two favorite hobbies will be staring each other in the face deep inside my bookbag as i walk through the metal detector this morning, bound for Fort Lauderdale. They will both air themselves, probably more than any other music i will have with me. And, when my family asks me what i did this year, all i will say is “i am on the dean’s list.”


Merry Christmas.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/12/90080825/