Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

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Remember all my bitching about theatre prior to getting into the play? Well… now i’m not only in the mainstage show, i wound up registering for an acting class yesterday. It would feel like a waste of academic time to me if i had to give up something else to do it, but i hadn’t been able to find any other class for that timeslot. In the end, i’m not really much of an actor. What i am is someone who is willing to get up and try something no matter how dumb it might seem. That one facet of my personality apparently more than makes up for my lack of actual acting, because time and again i’ve been willing to get up in front of an audience to trying something that some other actors weren’t even willing to do. Of course, that leaves me with a lot more in common with Tom Green than the cast of SNL, but i do have an interest (somewhere) to be able to really create a character out of thin air. I can’t do it now… i don’t have character voices or gestures or anything… i tend to just do it with inflection and dramatic pauses. So, maybe i’m ready to head into radio drama. Or, maybe i’m really going to learn something from this class. We’ll see.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/01/1859361/

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Have you made your contribution to the blogger.com server fund yet? Blogger might be a free service, but it’s run by very real and tangible human beings who are obviously trying their best to keep it at peak performance. Lately that standard hasn’t quite been met, and they admit that they need new server hardware to keep the bar raised for the future. As such, they kindly requested that bloggers around the world unite and contribute five or ten dollars towards the estimated $5000 they needed. 24hours later they are nearly three fourths of the way towards their goal!, which just proved how cool the blogging community is.

Of course, some people would argue that this is all rather scandalous and a precursor to Blogger being a service you have to pay a fee to use. To the contrary, i find the whole situation encouraging… the folks at Pyra (the business name for the Blogger folks) would rather turn to their viewing public for a decision than run to corporate sponsors or immediately charging for signing up for service. Do they expect us to bail them out of every funding problem they hit? Hopefully not. But, this situation showed just how much we all really love our little service and that we’re willing to go to bat for it. Although, i do agree with Tom when he mentioned investing in Blogger… sorta a pre-IPO claiming of stocks? Hell… either way i’m in. Maybe you should be too.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/01/1854809/

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I just had my first rehearsal for Good Woman of Setzuan, but it was more of an exercise in movement than a practice. We did a lot of walking… i must have walked for nearly twenty minutes, just examining the way i use my weight and how i can shift it to change the look of my character. During the walking our director Bill actually singled out my character as an example of someone who moves in a specific way (not that i was moving that way), so at once i was psyched and a bit intimidated. After the walking we paired off and moved somewhat interpretively to music. My two favourite motions were: 1 – with a new person where i was sort of courting her and we conducted almost the whole thing with eye contact and the tips of our fingers, 2 – with Laurel, where i was tiptoeing around the stage and she was mimicking me carefully, after which we switched roles. The other interesting tid-bit of information came as we discussed some of the production numbers… i innocently asked if Laurel or Ben would be joining into my song and Bill turned to me and said matter-of-factly “No, it’s a solo,” which shut me up pretty fast. I’m not entirely sure if i want to be playing guitar for it or not… as playing guitar tends to lock me into to certain vocal inflections more than singing without it. Either way, i thought it would be nice to combine my voice with that of Ben and/or Laurel (who are the other two characters in the scene), but apparently i have to go it alone.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/01/1851038/

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I tend to move about a year or so behind big web trends. For example, i held off from using frames as a main design element until 1998, when they had already become quite passé. Similarly, i only utilize minimal amounts of JS, just recently began to use tables to better define my pages’ space, and now have begun to use Server Side Includes. Fun, aren’t i? Part of the issue is that i usually hang onto an old browser until the new version becomes the web-standard so that i’m not tempted to immediately design above the display abilities of the browsers that visit me. Being a former Netscape enthusiast (until it outright wouldn’t work and displayed every page i liked to read incorrectly) i never was too aquainted with the beautiful effects of Cascading Style Sheets because Netscape doesn’t display them correctly. Of course, by now any web designer with half a brain is using CSS whereas i can just barely understand what they’re up to when i check out the code. In the end this is all a facet of my DIY (do it yourself) stubborness; i almost totally refuse to let other people lay a hand on my web designs as much as i shun other people’s input into my music. Sure, i might get better even faster if i would open myself up to direct influence more often, but then i would lose the right to claim that my work was all my own. As it is, when someone complements me on this site i know that the only person to thank is me (well.. the folks at blogger as well, but that’s a given) in the same way that i’m the only person to be credited for the overwhelming majority of my songs. So, if you had ever wondering why i’m just a backwards redneck about webdesign, that’s why. Have a nice day.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/01/1848698/