Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

Too many links … may alienate the majority … let the good times roll.

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I have the day off to get ready for Arcati Crisis’s appearance at the Tin Angel tonight (@ 8:30), including mixing down our limited edition “Live From Rehearsal” EP, and I’m still working on cramming too many links into this single-blog sack at noon.

Typical.


Harvard Avenue posted an amazing time-lapse video showing the steps behind creating an online comic. I wasn’t too impressed until about halfway through, at which point it started becoming stunning.

(When the new season of Trio starts I ought to do a behind the scenes video of Trio – way more complicated than you might think.)

Pioneer Woman posts my favorite chapter yet of her serialized “How I Met Marlboro Man.”

Life suddenly becomes a musical for EJ. This has happened to me before, but with squirrels instead of people.

In the category of “processes I’m trying to improve,” How To Blog Without the Time Sink, via Akkamsrazor.


I’m not much of a gadget monger, but after reading Web log: a20261 I’m seriously considering a Helio Ocean as my next mobile device: it features a numerical keypad as well as a querty in a slim interface. Check out a bevy of photos at Gizmodo, or get a little more technical on SlashGear, or read a full review on CNET. Overall sounds like it’s super convenient, but no feature manages to be best in class. A plus: works with my carrier (Sprint). A minus: doesn’t work internationally.


You are what you eat, but do you know what you’re eating? Ethical eating blog Ethicurean pumps out more great links than I have the time to read, let alone blog, but an NYT quote from a recent post really caught my eye because it explains exactly why I’m edging towards being a pesco-vegan:

Most countries, including China, ban the use of ractopamine in livestock destined for human consumption, but it is permitted in 24 countries, including the United States and Canada.


VetMommy talks about the humane way to declaw a cat.

I’m happy to see the opinion of a concerned professional, but still I vacillate on this one … not because I necessarily have a problem with declawing as a concept, but because I’m uncomfortable with any sort of unnecessary surgery considered necessary just for the sake of aesthetics (in this case, the aesthetics of a leather couch, but in the case of humans, circumcision for the sake of people who don’t recognize the natural form and function of a penis).

Sorry, I got kind of heavy on you there on short notice. I’ve been sitting on a lengthier post on the topic full of facts and figures, but it’s not done simmering yet. (I keep worrying that I may alienate the majority of my audience, but then I think, “hey, it’s only the majority of Americans in my audience.” But, I digress)


From Boing Boing: Rule The Web in 60 Seconds, a blog and podcast. Also from BB, an academic paper exploring how magicians keep their trade secrets safe without the bureaucracy of Intellectual Property law. Even the abstract is interesting.


I love vintage advertisements, not only for the art of them, but to try to understand how communicating to the public was fundamentally different in previous eras. Shorpy, typically a vintage photo blog, posted a great series of ads this week. My favorites were Fort Marion, Yellowstone, and Back to Books. View a gallery of all of Shorpy’s Art & Design images.


The music section.

Scott Andrew sweetens the pot for pre-orderers of his new record by offering a comp disc filled with tracks from his many talented collaborators.

Arjan Writes travels in an more urban circle of music than I do, but he’s worth monitoring for gems like Alice Smith, which on first blush is an R&B tinged KT Tunstall. Download her MP3, New Religion.

Yellow Stereo posts a gorgeous (live) track from a new free EP by Great Lakes Swimmers. I’ve never heard of them before, but at first blush they’re like Sufjan Stevens but without the studied pointlessness. Whether or not you agree with me, get the download from the awesomely titled Gorilla vs Bear.

Also from YS: I’m obsessed with Sia’s new single, “Buttons,” ever since first seeing Four Tet Remix). I wish they’d set a release date for her new disc.

Coolfer has long been one of my favorite music blogs, because it focuses more on the industry than the individual artist. Lately it hasn’t featured as many in-depth essays (I think because its blogger is in Grad school), but the links are as fresh as ever – like this Wall Street Journal article on Digital Sound Quality.

Most people (AKA, my mother) can’t tell the difference between an original MP3 and an album version, let alone the difference between encoding at 128 and 320.

I had my own intangible grasp on the quality gap, but it’s become a lot more obvious to me now that I’m recording my own music with professional fidelity. The quality loss is not always intangible – sometimes you lose punch in a specific frequency range, and its often a punch you mixed quite deliberately. Or, in the words of someone interviewed in the article:

[M]usic producers fret that they are engineering music to a technical lowest common denominator. The result, many say, is music that is loud but harsh and flat, and thus not enjoyable for long periods of time.


I am seriously going to get down to one Make You Go Hmm link per post, because posting multiple links means I’m effectively reading his blog for you, when really you ought to be reading it yourself. This edition’s link: Clocks of every kind, such as the US Crime Clock. I wonder if we could get one just for Philadelphia…


I’m trying to also get down to a link per post on Kottke, but it’s pretty damn hard. E and I love the production company logos at the beginnings of movies and ends of television shows. Who makes them? Not sure, but here’s five minutes worth of them on YouTube.

Learn how panhandlers make more money than police. Read a history and analysis of the Batman logo from comic letterer Todd Klein; here’s the first. A rare comments-on post about how to survive if you are trapped at the bottom of a blender. Finally, Statetris – Tetris with states and nations. It’s hardest on medium, because your preconceived notions of where things are located messes with your intuitive ability to place the recognizable shapes.


Quick hits: Daily Lit makes reading easy by serializing literature for you in daily emails, via Unclutterer. 21 ways to get (really) good at writing. 20 great music apps for Facebook, via Coolfer. Chime TV aggregates the best content from different video sites, like the ubiquitous YouTube. Via Fresh Arrival. How to make NYT-style charts with excel, via Communication Nation.


My final link is a tribute to reviving a memory long since forgotten: Philly music blogger Some Velvet Blog posted a great oldie nugget in his weekly mixtape – “Let the Good Times Roll.” My grandmother used to dance around the kitchen singing this every Sunday morning while she cooked brunch.

Thanks for the memory.


fin.

Uncluttering

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A week ago a blog I’ve become quite fond of – MLarson – quoted my statement from “Why A Link Is Not Enough“:

Links aren’t life.

His reflexive link might have been a thank you for all of the links to him I’ve featured in the past few weeks, or maybe it was an ironic commentary on the fact that I followed up a post stating “Links aren’t life” with a post with several dozen links in it. Or, maybe it was both.

I don’t dispute that links are a big part of blogging. I love posting links. I just like to pair my links with some personal commentary and context so that I at once show you interesting things you may not have read or seen and remind myself about that said things exist when I am old and senile. In, like, a month.

Anyhow, per positive feedback on recent link posts, for the moment they’re going to be a semi-weekly feature.

Unclutterer is to blogs what Real Simple is to magazines. I love it.

Gimme Sanity is back has been back, but I was too dim to look for it at its domain name. Duh.

Axis All Areas is a Garbage fan site with a very comprehensive breakdown of the gear the band has used on every tour. Also, the author has a signed Guild guitar identical to mine! Cool.

Mighty Goods is a shopping blog written by the author of the seminal Mighty Girl. Despite my unequivocal love for her taste in stuff I’ve never bought any of her selected items. The most recent contenders for first purchase are fork easels, and a pattern book that presents patterns in EPS and high res JPG so you can use them for various web and print projects.

Philly Blog The BM Rant tells the tale of the original (ghost)writer of The Hardy Boys. Also from my town, Vintage captures a scene from my daily life. And, XPNer Some Velvet Blog introduces me to Trolleyvox, an awesome local band.

Visual Search Lab is like a user-powered Google Image search, aiming to “find visually similar images.” via Photojunkie.

Brandon Fuller, creator of the technology behind my Now Playing sidebar, laments missing the boat with other big ideas. I feel his pain, having missed out on cashing in on a number of great ideas and web trends due to lack of time or lack of savvy. But, I say, never give up: Friendster seemed to have the annoying lock on social networking before the even more annoying MySpace cropped up, and now they’ve both been eclipsed by the classier Facebook.

10 Future Web Trends is an apt examination of up and coming web technology, via Akkam’s Razor. Also at Akkam’s: the math of making money on your blog.

CNN shares five simple keys to nutrition. Unlike their organization article, I have yet to master any of these habits. Also handy: how to clean your home in 19 minutes. I really enjoy when CNN subcontracts their open article slots to magazines rather than shoddily written AP stories.

Awe-inspiring communications blogger Debbie Millman contributed to A Brief Message – which combines a 200-or-less word essay on design with an accompanying illustration. I love their current one, Arrogance and Humility.

Links from usual suspects: this week TDavid and I chatted about link rot and social networking. Kottke posted a highly addictive web-game, Bloxorz. I grew bored in 15 minutes; Elise beat it within an hour. Also from K, light pollution, and the absence thereof is one of the many reasons I’m jealous of E’s impending trip to Australia.

Largehearted Boy posted a great interview w/Rufus Wainwright; oh, Rufus, if only your album didn’t suck quite so much. Also from LHB, a 69 Love Songs wiki. And, finally, the aforementioned MLarson found an illustrated guide on how to be creative.

Fin.

Did You Know…

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When a show or an actor wants to be nominated for an Emmy, they submit a single episode for consideration. That’s how certain dull and/or niche nominations sometimes sneak through past the obvious choices – they submitted a really good tape.

You can see this year’s complete list of tape submissions at Gold Derby Forums. It’s sometime surprising to see the episodes that your favorite shows and actors have pegged as their best (or, at least, most obvious).

Watch the 59th Annual Emmy Awards tonight on Fox. Or, don’t.

Instead, you can read the article that Alison posted in a comment to my last entry, which illustrates some more of Heroes‘ obvious faults (mostly in comparison to Lost, but also to Buffy and Battlestar).

Could We Be Heroes

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In eighth grade I started writing the story that would eventually give me my longtime internet handle: Crisis.

It was half a high school drama and half a superhero comic, paralleling puberty with the onset of special powers that brought with them the life and death choices of adulthood.

I wrote and re-wrote the story endlessly. Sheaths of handwritten pages, endlessly revised files on my first word processor, and an infamous purple binder in which I worked in parallel on a sequel novella, allowing Gina to read it once a week in the back of Health class.

I never finished Crisis Team on paper; it mostly existed as a narrative daydreamed in slow moments of class and long waits at the bus stop. Still, I knew every beat of the story, and how they broke down across every chapter. If someone had sat me down at a keyboard for a week I could have typed it in a single unbroken string of sentences.

Then came Gen 13.

I can’t even remember why I ordered it at the time, but when I cracked the first issue I realized that Crisis was over before it was finished – Gen 13 copped my entire storyline almost beat for beat, and it did it’s job very well.

It was too late to change the core concept of my story. all I could do was rewrite and revise and hope to transcend our shared archetype to create something more distinct.


For the past year I’ve been reading breathless media coverage of Heroes, and how it is the next generation of television, way better than 4400, and a comic fan’s wet teevee dream.

I admit, I let my hopes get slightly up as details of the plot saturated the media and eventually leaked to me through magazines. The Wolverine/Cheerleader wakes up from an autopsy. The Japanese Nightcrawler learns how to use a sword.

It all sounded fascinating.

Now that we’ve Netflixed the DVDs my hopes are proven to have been in vain. I can’t detect anything beyond the mundane about the show, except for Mohinder’s hair. The best I can say for it is that it’s nice to watch so many standard comic archetypes being explored on screen. Not thrilling, or must-see. Just nice.

By contrast, Elise returned from her pre-Australia shopping trip to inform me that, so far, she loves it. She even powered through an extra four episodes while I was asleep and out at rehearsal.

I was annoyed for a moment by the disconnect; Elise and I share a perfectly tuned kismet sort of taste in sci-fi television shows from which we hardly ever deviate. The Pretender. Buffy. Alias The 4400. Battlestar Galactica.

A second later I was all caught up.

Elise is Gina in Health class, reading from my big purple binder. She can pick an X-Man out of a lineup, but she isn’t connected to the collective comics unconscious that stores all of those many standard stories – that place that Crisis and Gen 13 and Heroes draw their underlying structure.

I, unsurprisingly, am me, and in my mind Heroes is the same thing as Crisis – just a different medium spinning a familiar archetype.

Of course, you can argue that about almost any concept. Aren’t most of my songs just reconstituted versions of songs by other people? Haven’t I written this post about this feeling before?

What’s the difference?

The difference is the execution.

I kept rewriting Crisis, hoping that at some point my skillful execution would transcend my story.

I was hoping the same for Heroes, but it’s all archetype and no execution. The script is inert compared to Buffy (chosen one fights evil, fate) , the pace sluggish compared to The 4400 (people gain and struggle with powers, are discriminated against), and the acting pale in comparison to the revised Battlestar Galactica (original Battlestar Galactica crossed with Star Trek Voyager (original Battlestar Galactica)).

I was so hoping for something along the lines of that trio of shows – a done-to-death concept rendered thrilling through unusually outstanding execution. And, though Heroes has plenty of story, and plenty of network gloss, it’s that extra ingredient that’s lacking.

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There’s that point where you think you are drowning but suddenly realize you are swimming. It’s the same as that point on the rollercoaster where your stomach keeps traveling upwards while your body has already begun to settle.

That was today, to a tee – breathless and fumbling until around eleven, where I realized that my definition of fumbling is everyone else’s state of enthusiastic focus.

Somehow it carried through the end of the day and past my mad dash to the train (run past the liquor store at full tilt; realize I have overshot my goal by a block; run back to the liquor store at full tilt), floating me through our meeting until it was just us finishing our wine and Gina and I singing our harmony for Lindsay, and a room full of people saying they can all tell I sing better now.

It carried through the slightly damp walk to my threshold, within which I slipped off my headphones to discover Elise blasting WOGL in the room. “Love the One You’re With.” (it’s been following us this week)

Her head emerged from her office. “I just wanted to make sure you would dance with me.”

I’m sure I’ll eventually figure her out, too.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2007/09/3230/