Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Terms & Conditions

As you read Crushing Krisis, please note the following:

All content is written by me unless disclaimed otherwise.

I am the sole author of this blog, and its written content is original (unless I say it’s not). This includes songs!

If I have mistakenly excerpted a piece of your content or displayed your copyrighted image, please let me know.

The opinions expressed are my own and do not represent the positions of my current or former employers, bands, or volunteer organizations.

Self-explanatory, yes?

Posts are published at times convenient to me and my editorial calendar, and may have been published automatically without my intervention or have had their timestamps altered.

The blog may appear to be active while I am at work, asleep, or otherwise indisposed. You might even see a post that was published while I was chatting with you on the web or in person! I plan around those things, when necessary.

Comments remain the intellectual property of their authors, but may be re-published or moderated per my editorial discretion. I will provide credit to the author whenever possible.

When you leave a comment on CK your words and thoughts belong to you, but I might later excerpt them in posts, reviews, or marketing materials. Also, I occasionally need to edit comments – usually to redact personal information.

Links to external sites selling products or services may be affiliate links.

I may use special referrer links to preferred web vendors when I refer you to something you can buy so that I can benefit from your purchase. The most common example of this is my using Amazon, eBay, and iTunes affiliate links when I refer to books or music.

I’ll never link you to something that will specifically upcharge you for my own profit, but I may not be referring you to the cheapest vendor (unless I said that specifically). Profits from affiliate links help to pay for CK, which I prefer to keep ad-free.

Here’s the official, legally required version of this disclaimer:

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.

I may blog about products, service, or other experiences that were discounted or provided at no cost due to my career or my blogging. If I review, rate, or recommend that item I will disclose my relationship. However, I may refer to the item in passing without a specific disclosure.

If I endorse something I will let you know if I received special treatment that may have affected my opinion due to my occupation or being a blogger. If I just reference it in the course of a larger story, I might not say anything.

For example, I received a free meal from a local kitchen service for my job. I wrote a specifically disclaimed piece about that for my work blog. Here, I might make this in-passing mention within a post on a different topic: “…and that time I ate an awesome free meal from [CHEF]!”

I’m not going to specifically disclaim that mention.

I may blog about promoters, artists, performers, or events who I have a personal and/or business relationship with in the capacity of organizing, marketing, booking, or performing. I am sometimes furnished free or bartered admission, participation, or products as a result of those relationships.

Posts might not include a specific disclosure unless I received special treatment explicitly so that I would blog about the experience.

I occasionally get free stuff or opportunities as a result of my daily life as a musician and active social media user. For example, sometimes I am unexpectedly waved into a local event as if I was on the guest list, a musician won’t take my money at their merch table because we are friends, or a bartender will serve me a free cranberry juice while I watch a show.

I might blog about those shows, albums, or bars! These relationships are a part of my decades of experience as a professional and as a musician, and I cannot possibly disclose them all. That would be like asking an actual famous person to name every movie they starred in that resulted in them being invited to a certain awards party – improbable, but also annoying.

Bottom line: If I am blogging positively about something it means I actually like it.

If you have questions or comments on these disclaimers please use my contact form.

A Moment of Krisis

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The first glimpse at our new house and my first vlog, all rolled into one. I promise this will not devolve into another semi-pornographic web cam unless I acquire a set of Brad Pitt abs.

Good idea? Bad idea? Sign of the Armageddon?

Blackouts

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Today I woke up at six.

Yesterday and the day before I woke up at six. On Saturday it was close to seven. Friday, six fifteen.

Do you sense a trend?

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In our old house sleep was a black box.

I remember the conversation we had when we first moved in. Three bedrooms, and only the front and back ones were big enough to hold E’s queen-sized bed.

“Well, the front is bigger – more room around the bed, and for beaureaus and things. But it’s at the front of the house – streelights, cars passing, people talking, kids playing – it will all be in the bedroom with us.”

We wound up in the back. Smaller, cozier, and immune to all that street noise. Except, the backyard world of our home had its own noise – yapping dogs and yellow security lights, always on watch.

We adapted. I slept some nights with headphones, or earplugs. Our curtains were blackouts, thick and inpenetrable. Eventually E bought me a sunrise clock complete with chirping birds, so I could still wake up with some semblance of morning in my life – even in the black box.

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People joked that I would be freaked out by the quiet at our new house. They weren’t wrong. Everything is silent at night (save for crickets), with everyone tucked into their discrete living rooms hundreds of feet from our door.

Sometimes I feel sheepish even playing guitar, before Elise reminds me that they could easily be doing that (or louder!) in their own homes. Such as is the silent expanse of our street.

Our bedroom is in the front of the house. No earplugs. Yes, blackout curtains, but not drawn carefully across every inch of every window from frame to frame. It’s just out of habit – to make sure no moonlight falls across my body as I drift to sleep.

The difference is the morning. Still quiet. Still no traffic. Yet in place of the sunrise clock I have … sunrise.

It turns out, I’m a morning person. For five years I had fooled myself, because my tiny electric sun was no replacement for an entire world of delicately spun light.

Tomorrow I will probably wake up at six.

Monday Morning Remainders

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A collection of some of the links that have captured my attention in the last few weeks:

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Breaking yesterday, The Guardian reports an unprecedented leak of US military documents on the war in Afghanistan – 92,201 internal records from January 2004 and December 2009 exposing “hundreds of abuses.” You can see for yourself on WikiLeaks.org.

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ReadWriteWeb goes behind the scenes of the recent viral Old Spice videos. You can force something to go viral but, as the article shows, you can certainly plan to make your content sticky (see also: Tipping Point).

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This is actually from two months ago, but it continues to capture my attention: Caitlin Moran may have penned my new favorite piece of rock journalism, “Come Party with Lady Gaga,” in The Guardian.

(My old fav was a Courtney Love article in RS where she gives herself accupuncture, but my Google-Fu is failing me at the moment. Speaking of Ms. Love, ExploreMusic conducts a multi-part interview with a sharp-tongued Courtney, who sounds more coherent than she has in years.)

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(Man, I guess I need to subscribe to The Guardian, eh?)

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I delight in seeing @SmallBizLady Melinda Emerson speak – her mission in life is to make sure no small business ever fails again. I’ve never visited her blog before, but it dispenses great advice like How to Turn a Hobby Into a Small Business and 7 Questions Hobbyists Should Consider When Starting a Small Business. Something to consider if you’ve contemplated turning your fun into freelance.

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Tynt is a small piece of script that helps you track who is copying and pasting text from your blog.

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IP addresses are 340 days from running dry, because governing protocal IPv4’s four billion unique IPs are about to run dry. We’ll be rationing IPs unless the entire industry adopts IPv6, and that includes both ISPs and hardware/software manufacturers. A great quote about IPV4:

It seemed to be a reasonable attempt at providing enough addresses, bearing in mind that at that point personal computers didn’t really exist. The idea that mobile phones might want an IP address hadn’t occurred to anybody because mobile phones hadn’t been invented [and] the idea that airconditioners and refrigerators might want them was utterly ludicrous.

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A disturbing collection of images from the BP spill zone – more photos like these need to find their way to the public to keep the outrage and support alive. (this and the IPv4 article via @valerieeev)

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Audobon Magazine goes behind the scenes to explain how many nature photos are staged. (via @themartorana)

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The elephant in the middle of the Glee club is a glance at the hidden copyright issues behind the fiction of Glee. The article goes a bit over-the-top – plenty of college acappella groups do mashups with few legal reprecussions.  (via @Level3Media)