Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

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So, i’m in Florida. Hi.


Florida is entirely queer is basically what i’ve decided. I feel like an endless cliche saying things like “well, in Philly…” every other sentence, but it’s honestly a entirely different culture than what i’m used to. Case and point: cars. Most of the peope i know at Drexel have their licenses, because where they live they basically need a car to get from anywear to anywhere. However, these people mostly don’t bring their cars to Philly … there’s just no point in it.


Here if you don’t have a car you’re stranded. Going to the movies last night was utterly unaccomplishable via bus. Getting to the airport would involve a pricey cab ride or a ride to an out of the way rail-station and then a pricey cab ride. Today was like the Greatest-Hits of lacking public transportation: getting to see Martha involved a lengthy car ride to the out of the way train-station, followed up by a doubly pricey cab ride down the highway. And then i got lost in Jupiter.

Well, really, this tiny development inside of Jupiter that gives one the impression that there was a Disney race in Starcraft who came to Earth to colonize our territory. It’s not exactly the town of Celebration, but’s it’s got that pastel-and-stucco, pre-fab, homogeonized-milk sortof feeling to it. Which, was even creepier when i thought the entire thing was Martha’s college, but then she informed me that it was really just one big creepy pre-fabricated expensive housing development — where you can pretend that you live in an amalgamated every-state of the USA minus anything with a population density higher than… oh, shit, what the hell do i know about population density.


But, anyway, now playtime is over and i have to do the pricey two-hours journey back to the geriatric imprisonment that is my grandmother’s condominium.

On the bright side, Martha is as obsessed with Buffy as i am, and tomorrow i’m having lunch with JillMatrix!!! Rock on!

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/8085417/

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How did it get to be midnight? I guess this is what happens when you stay up until dawn alternately playing StarCraft with your hostees and trucking through the 600’s of Infinite Jest. I deserved it though, if not for getting an A in Philosophy then for my all-day cleaning binge. And, so, up i stayed, mindlessly click-clicking on my Hatchery to “build more zerglings, goddamnit!”

In one of those between-game intervals i happened to glance out of my back window to find that my oft-spied-on neighbor had his lights on. I idly kept my eye on his window as i delved through page-long paragraphs in Jest until i saw a bit of movement and perked up — to find him taking a naked post-shower stroll through his room. The whole seeing him naked bit is rather anti-climactic after all this time (but, really, who the hell gets dressed before they get back to their room after a shower?), but i suppose he forgot that i had been spying on him after i left him alone for a while. Now he seems fond of sitting directly in his window with a huge drawing-board; i can’t imagine why he draws there … it’s not as though there’s any natural light. Could that be his convenient way of spying back at me? He has such an easy bead on my computer from there that he easily catches me turning around to glance at him before i can even see him in my peripheral vision.

Or maybe he just likes to draw. I wonder if he does nudes.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/8008575/

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For all of you who’ve read the Plagiarism post: yes, i am aware that the offending site is back in operation. A quick Tom-aided perusal revealed similarly stolen posts from Paul Jarvis, Amy @ TeamMonkey, the venerable MegNut, Christine @ Maganda.Org, and TheBooge. I’ve notified all of the authors and have begun correspondence with the owner of Bellylicious; please refrain from harassing her — i posted her address only because i thought her site was down, not because i wanted to attract attention to her. However, i never edit things out of my posts, so it’s going to stay there.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7993721/

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I just (for the first time ever) caught wind of someone plagiarizing my content for their own nefarious uses. The site itself seems to have disappeared, but Google has faithfully cached the one offending page here. Strangely enough, i located it via a referral from a the search “that the only way to convince me of its worth is to do amazing,” which sounded oddly familiar because i wrote it here. Further perusal reveals that this post was also partially lifted. The only other pages from “Bellylicious” that Google seems to have cached are all just index files or in other languages, and i can’t seem to locate an active email link on any of them, so i’ve hit a dead-end in locating the perpetrator.

I don’t know what i find the most bothersome out of this entire happening. First, the search itself is rather odd … anyone searching for that exact phrase would have had to have read it on either my site or on the plagiarist’s … anyone doing the former would have no reason to search for it, so someone read the latter and found it familiar (maybe the author forgot where she stole it from?). The second thing that bothers me is that i would’ve never even imagined someone was using entire paragraphs of mine to say what they were feeling, let alone known about it. In a way it’s almost flattering … she wasn’t using whole posts, but just succinct sections of them that she found applicable to her life. At the same time it’s rather chilling — as though i’m a blogging thesaurus that anyone can tap into to to find some relevant emotions to spruce up their post with.

The third thing that bothers me is… well, it’s just the stealing itself. I’m sure if someone emailed me and asked if they could use a lengthy excerpt from my page i would probably let them so long as they attributed it to me. Frantically trying to track down the person who has been stealing from CK via Google has led to this tiny kernel of panic in my stomach that is saying “what happens when someone takes one of your songs? you won’t even know… you’ll never know it.” And, it’s true … most of my songs are copyrighted enough to hold out in court, but anyone could be covering them on MP3.com with different titles and i would never even know it. The entire concept bothers me… i’ve never stolen anything in my life … i don’t even eat spare grapes in the produce section of the supermarket! The fact that someone could be stealing from me right now… not only stealing, but stealing something that i spent time and emotion on so that other people can enjoy it totally disconnected from me … it’s almost enough to make me tear all of this down right now.

Of course, i can’t do that. This is my life, and my therapy, and my fun. And, if it brings on a couple of more crises along the way, so be it

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7979713/