Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

bloggish

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The two most interesting quotes i’ve read in the last 12 hours:

“Carrot Cake Soup is like the taste of watching girls make out.“

“For one thing, blogs will become ubiquitous to the point of transparency.“

The latter quote has relevance to yesterday’s first post because it implies exactly the opposite opinion of blogging while winding up with the same end result; blogs will be overabundant rather than just being over, and their proliferation will render having your own blog to be a non-event. The idea that personal pages once rife with badly justified text and awkwardly placed image files are soon to be transformed into a neverending stream of well-intentioned but poorly maintained weblogs is somewhat disappointing – even if my blog started out that way, i’ve always hoped the medium wouldn’t be relegated to such “ubiquitous” and “transparent” ends. If that happens, maintaining a domain name blog won’t be any different than having some shitty page on Geocities; not that it was any different in the first place.

As for the former quote… well, i really wanted to try the soup before they even said anything about what it tasted like.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/05/85067621/

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First it was purple … TVaB purple, i declared. Then there was a big to-do about whether or not you could see the side of my face at all or if it was just a puddle of three different colors of gray pixels. Then i decided to go blue, as the logo picture also decided shortly thereafter. And, of course, there is the issue of the menu, which currently doesn’t exist.

The apathy involved in this redesign amazed me. It basically got to a point where i knew there was a redesign coming, and i didn’t really want to blog until it happened, but i didn’t really want to work on it. Which, equated to not wanting to blog at all.

On April 26th at noon i was standing outside of the Electric Factory by myself; i was first in line to see Garbage. Seven hours later the line stretched out past the gate onto seventh street, and i found myself up front with a gaggle of cool people. Conversation ranged back and forth for a while, but at some point Blogging came up, as i was wearing my Blogger T-Shirt. The opinions were strong, to say the least. “Blogger… is that still around?” “Personal publishing is so last year.” “God, i think everyone i know just gave up and switched to LiveJournal.”

Suffice to say, i was definitely stymied by their quick opinions on the matter, and driving to Boston that night with three other Bloggers didn’t exactly help me to forget about our conversation. Rabi expressed shock at the proclamation that Live Journal has supplanted the Big B in functionality or usability, and my fears that my webpage had become suddenly irrelevant were assuaged by the fact that i generally drew blank stares from the gaggle when i started talking about switching to Moveable Type and how PHP & MySQL make GreyMatter somewhat obsolete. They just weren’t hard-core bloggers.

By the same token, I’d expect that they wouldn’t refer to me as a hard-core Garbage fan; i missed meeting Shirley Manson because i was on the phone with Amy trying to bribe her into coming to the show, i didn’t buy the reissued record of Shirley’s old band, and i don’t own a single MP3 of Garbage – not even their apparently hot new cover of the Rolling Stones classic “Wild Horses.” Of course, i have met (and spoken with) the entire band before, i do own a Guild Guitar signed by them, and i did collect a complete set of their B-Sides on over twenty import singles.


They are, as i like to mention, my favourite band.


My point would seem to be that everyone is a fan in a different way – i don’t read fan boards or subscribe to ‘zines, but i do know all of the chords and own (yes, own, not download) all of the songs. It’s really just like how everyone weblogs just a little bit differently; weblogging might be so-last-year for those who jumped onto the bandwagon, but for those of us who found it as a natural extension of our old decaying pages on dreadfully unreliable free servers it never “got hot” and it will never “be over.” And, after all, it’s not how big of a fan you claim to be, but what kind of things you do to prove it.


And to keep it to yourself.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/05/85065287/

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A quick check of the pro page reveals that my two lowest volume posting months are February 2001 and last month.

Incidentally, those are the only two times in my life during which i had a girlfriend continuously for the duration of a month.

What this says about the mutable nature of my free time, my true relationship with personal publishing, or how much i like girls is for you to decide.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/75054043/

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At some point during which i was surely raving about my website and how much fun i have writing for it and meeting people through it, Elise decided to set up house on BlogSpot, though she didn’t tell me about it until i mentioned something to the effect of that she could only get sexier if she — in addition to being incredibly intelligent, acting as an op on a MUDD via telnet, and playing a bit of guitar — had a blog. Of course she did, because her sexiness rates off the scale, and she’s actually had some really sparkling moments of blogging in the month she’s been writing so far. Funny anecdotal entries from math class, reminiscences reminiscent of the stylings of Martha & Rabi, and entirely flattering opposite-view accounts of things i’ve mentioned us doing here.


Without much discussion we decided that my linking to her, via sidebar or upon any mention of her name, would result in too much strangeness to be worthwhile. As such, our two respective blogs exist in entirely separate universes… while hers is anonymous in name and design, mine is here for all to see along with over a year of context, songs, and occasional photographs. Somewhere in that distinction, i have found that i rely on her accounts of our collective life to remind me of what has gone by rather than my own. My reluctance to air actual personal details aside, i am simply uncomfortable with making more than an obscure mention of a day spent in New Hope, marathon sessions of Secret of Mana, and her having fallen asleep in my bed.

I can peg this reluctance for you exactly; it’s a fear of us winding up anything like Selina and i did last year. Rereading entries from the two months we were dating reveals a sickening half-and-half mixture of short-sighted starry-eyed rambling and oddly prescient airings of my complaints. As the relationship lurched towards its final implosion what i said on the page turned my actual words and emotions into something akin to a third wheel — i was trapped between half-fictionalizing what was happening only to be held to the letter of what i said, or relating it in actuality only to be skewered for saying what i felt.


Of course, i can’t honestly compare a healthy and happy relationship to whatever it was Selina and i were drifting through last winter, but with that as my only other experience i’m sometimes left unable to do anything but that. If i had three or five or ten girlfriends’ reactions to my page to go on, i would be less hesitant to chronicle more of my current daily life here. But, i only have one perspective, and a skewed one at that, which means i’m left reading sparkling details of what i’ve been doing with my life over on BlogSpot and i can’t even give you a link to them so you know where i’m coming from.

Watching favourites Shaun and Alison battle with personal disclosures lately has inspired little faith on my part, but the different enthralling ways that they describe those experiences have lead me to realize that if i don’t talk about them at all i’m not only cheating myself, but i’m not being interesting at all.

Speaking of not being interesting at all, i can’t believe you just read all of that :p . Or, am i all wrong; is it not the obscured mentions or the explicit ones that interest you, but instead my inner-turmoil on the matter? I suppose i’m just stuck on how to best portray this particular crushing aspect of my life to you. Dare i ask… any thoughts?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75038525/