Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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9 posts from Year 9 for my 9th anniversary

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Today is the ninth birthday of Crushing Krisis.

I have hundreds more words to share on that topic, but they’re still simmering. In the meantime, I am counting down my top nine posts from Year 9 of the blog on Twitter, adding them to this post as I go.

#9: Groom Team Style, pt. 1, wherein I am nearly ejected from David’s Bridal. Twice.

I love having this sort of madcap adventure so I can present it in a slightly-enhanced-reality post (surely influenced a bit by my love of H. S. Thompson). This one is made all the more amusing by how little I had to enhance the reality. All of the dialog is real, except for maybe the bit about the cloven hoof (although E claims I might have actually said that).

#8: “I’m not old,” and other stories from my actual life, wherein I meet @brimil, watch a house burn down, and have way-out dreams about the impending financial holocaust.

I followed the seemingly disparate thread of my day through a post to something coherent – a story disarmingly framed by an unlikely pair of Kelly Clarkson references. I love that blogging can tie together the themes of our lives, and here they really did come together to something larger … and maybe a little poignant.

#7: … – – – …, a brief SOS wherein we are stranded in London on our honeymoon.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard as much in-person feedback on a post as I did on this one. It was certainly meant to be funny, but the actual direness of the accommodation situation made the situation (and the post) even more ridiculous. All of the Honeymoon posts rank pretty high on my list of favorites.

#6: Tattooed/Colorblind & Shake It Off, my best audio and video recordings, respectively.

My favorite single recording of the year is definitely “Saving Grace,” but its post didn’t make the cut for my list. The “Tattooed/Colorblind” double A-Side still kinda blows me away – recorded them both in a matter of hours.

#5: whiling away the hours, wherein Gina and I discuss the ramifications of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers and sing harmony to Hezekiah Jones.

Not all of my favorite posts are flashy, funny, or memorable. Some of them simply document moments in time. Many of my favorites occur in the company of Gina, my best friend and bandmate in Arcati Crisis.

#4: Nothing But Rock & Why I Blame Drew’s Cancer, pt. 1, my skydive photo and the start of the story behind it.

It’s impossible to exaggerate the effect #blamedrewscancer has had on my year, which included me leaping out of a plane with a bunch of people I met on Twitter.

#3: right now, wherein I live-blog my wedding vows. (not really) (but kinda)

The last thing I did before Team Groom left my hotel suite was set this post to go live when Elise and I would be saying our vows. Unfortunately, it does not capture the hilarity of my ad-lib Battlestar Galactica vow, delivered to the great amusement of E and our collected geeky friends.

#2: pipes and glass, a stream of consciousness on my childhood drug-addict neighbor.

Blogging gives you so much power over formatting and media richness, but sometimes the most powerful evocation of a memory is words arranged in just the right way.

#1: President Obama, wherein I (& my mother) react emotionally to the election of our 44th president.

I was extremely hesitant to make a post about Obama my top post of the year. However, it’s a not a post about his politics, or really even about him as a person. It’s a post about me, my family, and America, and I’m proud to have written it.

My traditional birthday post will be up tonight.

Blog Spotlight: Meish.org

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I’ve decided that as frequently as I can I’d like to highlight a specific blog I love by talking about the blogger and linking to my favorite recent entries. It’s only fitting that I start with the single blog that was at the top of my link list when I launched nine years ago, and continues to be a daily read today:

Meg Pickard’s meish.org.

Meish wasn’t always Meish – it was once Not So Soft. In that capacity I consider it my parent blog, as I created my own specifically to ape what Meg was doing daily.

I’ve read Meg ever since, and she’s never stopped being compelling. She lives in London, was schooled as a sociologist, and spent time abroad conducting ethnographies. She presently works in some capacity for The Guardian.

Meg has a way – as all great bloggers do – of making the common seem very compelling. She also writes wonderful lists (frequently etymological in nature), takes clever and pretty photographs (even with an iPhone), and shares thoughts on social media.

And, as borne out by her original blog name (an Ani reference), Meg has wonderfully eclectic taste in music (and shares some of my OCD organizational qualities).

Some other recent highlights: she tracks the occurrence of “Flying Ant Day” with uncanny accuracy; she ruminates on the concept of time tourism (which I have discussed at length with Rabi); attempts to create a universal theory of measurement; dissects nationalist “visit us” campaigns; makes tables out of old maps; details past packing mishaps; and she bemoans a lack of adjectiveless sandwiches.

And that’s all just in the last year. Meish posts a few times a week, which makes it easy to follow in RSS; more voracious readers will want to subscribe to Meg’s many-times-daily tumblr.

Having met Rabi a long time ago, and Alison more recently, I’d say Meg is probably the blogger I’d most like to meet in real life.

Tuesday Morning Tech Links

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I flag a lot of techie links, as if I’m going to go and use 39 how-tos or 87 productivity tools right there on the spot. That’s not how it works. You tuck that information away for when you need to look back on it. And a scattering of bookmarks across my five different computers is not a good tucking method.

Hell, even cloud bookmarking doesn’t really do it – for me a bookmark is for a page (in a book or on the web) I know I will come back to at a specific time. This sort of thing is more open-ended.

Luckily, I have the ultimate in permanent memory technology – a nearly decade-old blog.

Elise has been doing a lot of CSS work lately, which is an area of web design where I’ve fallen behind. Thus, I love this Getting Started with CSS guide, which is packed with 20 starter tools. (via @mayhemstudios)

Handy list of the 22 most useful free apps for your PC. At the beginning I was like – um, duh – but as it continues it will surely slip you a surprise or two. (via @robangeles)

In a similar vein, 30 open source apps for web designers is a litany of code- and image- editors and FTP apps that I’ve never even heard of before. (via @bkmacdaddy)

I sometimes have a blank moment where I’m futzing with my server can’t remember exactly what I’m supposed to be doing with my .htaccess file, and the next time I have that moment I’m going to re-read 16 Useful htaccess tricks.

If you are several dozen levels of “Internets Wizard” higher than that, perhaps you’d be intrigued by the Ultimate Round-Up of Fireworks Tutorials. I have Fireworks now, but what I haven’t had is time to level up my skills in it.

If you or someone you know is still Twitter-averse or a Twitter-virgin, they should refer to the mammoth Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter, which covers just about any question you could conceive of. (via @Sharonhayes)

Alternately, for the power-user, how about a guide to how to use twitter when you follow several-thousand people? Around 300 I felt hopelessly lost, and started searching for an external app to sort people into groups. This article takes a more organic approach. (via @danavan)

Finally, not really a tech link, but it appeals to this same crowd: What to include in your design contracts.

Filmstar. Rock’n’Roll Star. Wife.

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Elise & Co. (aka Filmstar) rocked an amazing show tonight at the M-Room, followed by the obscenely sexy and awesome Stone Thrown (like Muse, but Philly-local and half-Asian).

Here’s Filmstar’s newest tune, which I am in love with. Note the Bowie / Karen O. dual influences.

(Or, head to YouTube to watch “Rock & Roll Star.”)

There is prelim talk of a worlds-colliding Filmstar v. Arcati Crisis party/show sometime in the fall. If that were to happen, I would play the shit out of a tambourine on that song.