Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

meta

Scary Monsters, Super Creeps
(or, ReBoot Phase 2: Booting Blogger)

by

In the midst of my rebooting myself and surfing the many blogs of NaBloPoMo i have had brought into very sharp contrast some things i have been long hoping to change about my darling blog. So, in a feat of either bravery or stupidity and after an uncharacteristically short 24-hours of research i will be attempting to – as the saying goes – change horses mid-race.

Either it will work wonderfully and I’ll be back tonight with a completely different website and a new post, or i will destroy all 2,885 posts of Crushing Krisis and update by hand for the rest of the event. Because missing a day is not an option.

Please note that if you are reading this post via a RSS Feed or LiveJournal Syndication you may wish to pop over to the actual domain on Monday to see if it still exists.

Wish me luck.

All About Crushing Krisis

Welcome to Crushing Krisis, previously the longest continuously-running blog in Philadelphia and now the newest oldest blog in New Zealand. I launched it on August 26, 2000.

Crushing Krisis (CK, for short) found its name because my internet handle has always been “Krisis,” and I started blogging to record all the things I was crushing on (or that were crushing me). CK was launched on Blogger and has run on WordPress since 2006.

Today, CK is anchored around a vast set of comic collecting guides which I publish as permanent pages rather than dated posts. However, the front page of the blog still features occasional musings on life as an immigrant, parenting, drag, and popular music,  among other topics. Before comics took over as the primary topic, I often blogged about my experiences as a DIY musician and songwriter, including highlighting other artists in the Philly music scene.

My music has been a feature of CK even before I was actively gigging – my Trio podcast might have been the first singer-songwriter podcast feature on the internet. I gave a brief history of my music on CK.

I’m in my third decade of blogging, so there’s a lot of CK here for you to read. You could take a short cut and read my author bio, or perhaps go on a random dive into the archive, but that’s a daunting journey. If you are interested in the personal side of my blogging rather than the comics guides, I tagged my favorite posts from each year of the first decade: Year 1, Year 2, Year 3, Year 4, Year 5,Year 6, Year 7, Year 8, Year 9, Year 10, and Year 11.

I owe many thanks to the following sponsors on Patreon, who pay for the costs to host and serve CK.

Out of Sleeping In

by

It is Sunday at 2pm and for all intents and purposes i have just now truly become awake.

If this is not your first visit you may have noticed that i’ve put a logo of sorts at the top of the page. I typically eschew such fancy graphic affairs, but i’m rationalizing it because there are honest to goodness strangers arriving here for the first time and i need some sort of branding to greet them. The wonderfully messy font is called chic decay, and it is free. I had to do some major kerning and minor undecaying in photoshop to get it to my liking.

If this is your first visit: hello. I made a logo just for you!

In less than seven hours I am due to make my monthly appearance at The Sidecar Bar for their monthly open mic night, hosted by the Sidecar All-Stars, an affable jazz trio that plays between sets.

After my meant-to-be-one-but-turned-out-to-be-two year hiatus from playing original music, an outing to the Sidebar open mic over the summer was the first time i played in front of anyone but a captive audience of friends. Much to my shock, the crowd wound up liking me a bit. Subsequently, i’ve been trying to attend every month.

Seven hours doesn’t feel like enough time between barely awake me and rocking the mic me, especially since I am completely unclear on what i’ll be playing. That’s what i get for sleeping in.

A Crisis on Crushing Krisis (or, Welcome to NaBloPoMo)

by

You go to Wikipedia to look up one thing and it turns into your entire night. Not a night about that one thing, but a night about all sorts of things you never knew about before.

For example, I never knew that there is a shrimp capable of producing shockwaves with its claws that can kill small fish or break glass. And I didn’t know that DC Comics’ hero Animal Man could manifest that power, or the power of any other animal, proportional to the size of his body.

I do know a bit about DC Comics in general, which came part and parcel with being a young boy in the eighties. I can rattle off the origins of all the major heroes as if reading straight from the origin cards that came with their Super Powers toys: Superman the sole survivor from Krypton, Batman an orphan, Wonder Woman an Amazon, et cetera.

The problem that DC Comics was having in the 1980s was that the origins weren’t really that simple, and neither was anything else. As a new influx of readers emerged from the simplified realm of cartoons and toys they discovered that Superman wasn’t exactly a sole survivor… Supergirl was his cousin, and Krypto the Superdog was his long lost pet. So much for being Krypton’s last son.

Other heroes had similarly puzzling paradoxes. The problems weren’t the fault of any single writer or editor so much as they was the fault of almost fifty years of accumulated comics continuity. Eventually the continuity became so splintered that some of the odder stories were explained away as occurring on alternate versions of Earth, but even this couldn’t solve all of the confusion.

The result was Crisis on Infinite Earths – a DC Comics event whose stage was the entire multiverse (and every comic title), and whose stakes were the very existence of life as we know it. Various Supermen and Wonder Women from other realities were knocked off over the course of the event, along with their confusing accomplices (like the aforementioned Supergirl).

When the dust settled the DC Universe was “rebooted” with a single Earth, containing heroes with discernable backstories that could be easily portrayed by cartoons and toys. Ever since, any continuity-impacting event is a “Crisis.” Last year had an Identity Crisis, this year an Infinite Crisis.

I swear, there was a point to all of that. Hang in there.

Crushing Krisis has been around for an extraordinary six years without interruption; it’s the longest running blog in Philadelphia.

Longrunning blogs are just as confusing as those pre-Crisis comic book stories. Blogs easily mix the present with the past, and the longer a blog exists the more and more of the present becomes the past in the form of archives. Past personal dramas continue to be referenced and – aside from the occasional backlink – a new reader is expected to keep up with the narrative without the benefit of comics standards like toys, or trading cards. Or stories set on alternate Earths.

In honor of National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo), here at Crushing Krisis we are having a DC Comics style Crisis. A Crushing Krisis Crisis. Krisis’s Crushing Crisis. Krisis of Infinite Crises. I don’t know, choose whatever you think is catchy.

The point is that – for the entirety of November – I’m rebooting.

Because of my participation in NaBloPoMo I’ll be posting at least once every day, and my posts will contain everything you need to know about my life. Every character and plot strand will be introduced anew. No assumptions, no backstory, no backlinks – not even to reference things that were really funny the first time around. And, to up the ante, if I want to link to one of my original songs in order to refer to it, I will need to provide a brand-new recording of the song, commissioned especially for NaBloPoMo.

I hope this novel idea piques your interest enough to stay tuned through NaBloPoMo and Beyond, whether you are a regular reader or a random surfer. Welcome to the all new Crushing Krisis!

NaBloPoMo

by

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), because prior to this incarnation of songwriter-Peter there was a lengthy iteration of fictionwriter-Peter who always was slaving away at the concept for a book or two.

Those days of thinking in character motivations and complete sentences have been eclipsed by chord changes and internal rhyme, and every November when NaNoWriMo comes around I wistfully browse its website, wishing that I could have that high school inspiration back for just a month to churn out a completed novel.

I’d also like to be able to fit into my vinyl pants from high school. We should all have dreams.

Since my novel-writing days would seem to be over, or at least on long-term suspension, I was intrigued by the idea of a parallel National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo), which I found on Fussy roundaboutly via Dooce. NaBloPoMo doesn’t really roll of the tongue like NaNoWriMo, so I have for-short deemed it “Nablo,” if only because “Namblo” just made me think of half of “Rambo” and half of “Nambla”, which as a combined thought was not an entirely pleasant experience.

I might not be able to plot a book liked I used to, but surely I can supply meaningless blather as good as I ever did? I mean, lest we forget, I was the #1 Power Blogger on the entire freaking internet on several occasions, and I Blogathoned 48 posts in 24 hours every summer for three years running. (not to mention I remain the longest running Philly Blogger, and the originator of a singer/songwriter “podcast,” but I digress).

So, here we are on the threshold of November, and I’m going to attempt to make an entry for each day of the month. Some of the entries might be photos, or songs, but somehow, someway, we’re going to make it through this, gentle reader. Somehow.