Personal

The king of memetic Twitter comedy is just some guy

April 16, 2023 by krisis

It has been a tumultuous year to be a Twitter power user. The birdsite that unites us all and has yielded endless good things in my life has turned into a hellscape as a certain Elongated Muskrat has taken it over and gutted it for fun and profit. Yet, one thing that has sustained throughout my entire Twitter experience is Dril.

Dril is an acerbic king of single-tweet comedy. Since 2008 he has churned out so many ludicrous tweets that he has achieved a Simpsons-esque sense of ubiquitous omnipotence. Or, in fewer words: it seems like there’s a Dril tweet for everything.

I never put much thought into who is behind the Tweets. Maybe it was a famous comedian ranting incoherently on Twitter as their side gig. Or, maybe it was a collective of individuals, sweating away all day like monkeys at typewriters to churn out a handful of pithy tweet-lengthed absurdities.

Nope. As I learned from this brilliant Ringer write-up from Nate Rogers, Dril is just some guy. A guy whose identity has been widely known for a few years now, and who has even appeared on his own comedy show on Adult Swim! Yet, even with his previously-secret identity revealed, there’s still some question as to how much of Dril is real and how much is just another layer of performance art.

New for ALL CK Readers: Guide to The Maxx by Sam Kieth (to end my Indie Comics Month!)

March 31, 2023 by krisis

It’s time to bring the first ever Crushing Comics Indie Comics Month to a close! This month I’ve already added 15 new guides to the Crushing Comics Guide to Collecting Indie & Licensed Comics. This final guide of the month is for one of my favorite series, one that changed what I expected from comics (and, in a way, what I wanted from life). It also arrives exactly when I always wanted it to – to mark the 30th Anniversary of the debut of this title! I’m incredibly happy to share with everyone my Guide to The Maxx by Sam Kieth.

Guide to The Maxx by Sam Kieth

I never planned to have an Indie Comic Month on Crushing Krisis.

My original plan was to begin the expansion of my Guide to Collecting Indie & Licensed Comics for my birthday back in September. I always like to spend a little me-time on a special project as a celebration of a new year of life. 2022 marked the 30th anniversary of the launch of Image Comics, and as of September I would have had to launch five guides to get caught up with celebrating the individual series anniversaries that had already passed. Then, I could roll out more Image Comics guides at a pace of one or two per month as new anniversaries arrived, plus expand to other, more-recent indie books I love.

Then, just as I was starting to build the initial Image guides, life happened… in the worst possible way.

I’ve largely lived a charmed existence with comparatively few low points along the way. I’ve lost one dear friend and had to preside over one excruciating layoff, but beyond that there’s just not that much hardship or tragedy in my adult life. Being a kid sucked by comparison – starting in poverty and detouring through bullying before I met my BFF Gina and the rest of a tribe of people who allowed me to finally, gradually become myself.

I picked up my first issue of The Maxx shortly before I met Gina, two years before it hit MTV as an animated show. It was weird and somewhat hard to follow, but I liked it. It was telling a deeper, more mature story than most of the other comics I was buying every month – certainly more than any of the other Image launch books. Who was this muscular purple man with his weird buck-toothed mask? What was the secret of mysterious Outback he roamed?

I loved the comic, but I also loved the letters pages and back matter. I always loved that sort of thing back then. I was the kid who read the TV Guide from cover to cover every week, who endlessly re-organized my GI Joe file cards, and who devoured every letters page. I think I liked them partly because some of the letters were from other kids like me, who obsessed over the small details of storytelling. At that point in my life I hadn’t met that many of those.

The Maxx had more than a letters page – it had a pen pals directory. A directory I was never allowed to take advantage of, per my mother’s ruling. I first wrote about that back in 2006 – long before I was back to collecting comics, and highlighted it again in the series of posts that I wrote to launch my first X-Men guides back in 2010. It was a formative point in my life. In a way, my burning desire to meet the people who listed their addresses on that page is what spurred me to convert my comics budget into a dial-up internet budget back in 1996. I wanted to reach out to a wider world to find more kindred spirits.

That 2006 post begins with this line:

Even before I had the internet I was always interested in connecting to people who I could understand on some intrinsic level.

When we decided to move to New Zealand, it never occurred to me just how many of those intrinsic connections I was giving up by leaving Philadelphia. I never though that it would be not only difficult to build new ones in New Zealand, but seemingly impossible. [Read more…] about New for ALL CK Readers: Guide to The Maxx by Sam Kieth (to end my Indie Comics Month!)

RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, Episode 12 – “Wigloose The Rusical” Review & Power Ranking

March 18, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the twelfth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15 – “Wigloose The Rusical.” It’s a winking drag lip sync parody of Footloose that arrived at the perfect time, plus an “Everybody Say Glove” runway theme.

Drag Race couldn’t have gotten the timing of the release of this episode any better if they had consulted a crystal ball. This Rusical about outlawing drag comes just as many states in America are passing anti-drag bills that cast drag queens as inherently predatory and indecent.

Of course, the idea that drag is inherently adult or sexual is absolutely ludicrous. Drag and blurring the lines of gender has always been a staple of entertainment for all ages, whether that’s in Mrs. Doubtfire, Steven Universe, or William Shakespeare.

A drag queen reading a storybook to children is truly no different than the reading coming from someone dressed as a Disney Princess. Both are forms of exaggerated femininity, and it’s up to each parent to decide when that’s appropriate for their children.

Really, these bills are a simply an old tactic brought back to life in the ongoing war on transgender Americans and all LGBTQA* people waged by hate-filled Republicans.

Legislating against drag is often synonymous with restricting all forms of presenting yourself in a gender non-conforming way. It tries to enforce gender norms with threat of public shaming, felony charges, court costs, and even jail time.

It’s important as part of this conversation to state clearly that doing drag is not synonymous with being trans. Trans women are women dressing as themselves – they are not doing drag. Not all drag queens are trans women, and not all trans women have done drag. However, if it is illegal to perform in drag, does that also make it illegal for a trans person to perform as themselves? If it is criminal for a drag queen to be seen by children, does that also mean it’s criminal for a transgender person to be seen by children?

Republicans are interested in blurring those lines if it means they can harm more queer people and erase them from being visible in every day life.

If I grew up under one of these drag bans, I would not have been able to dress androgynously in high school. I would not have been able to give one of my first performances in a theatre, which was in drag as Jackie O. And, in the present day, I would be at risk of being charged with a felony as someone who sometimes drives my car while wearing long hair, make-up, and high-heeled boots just because that’s how I like to look.

Of course, these laws are not all about me – and, I don’t even live in America anymore! However, I use myself as an example to show the kind of intentional side effects that come with these laws.

No anti-drag law is truly about keeping drag confined to night clubs or removing children from risky situations. They are about trying to enforce gender norms in all walks of life, which has the side effect of criminalizing being visibly trans or queer.

I often struggle with whether I should be writing about drag on Crushing Krisis. Do people who like comic books want to see these posts? Should I be writing them as someone who is not a drag queen and is not active in a queer subculture? Is it somehow embarrassing or inappropriate for me to be writing about drag as a business professional? What would my clients think?

These laws and their accompanying discrimination is why I write about drag. Drag deserves to be visible. Drag is for everyone. Drag is art just like comics are art. Drag artists deserve essays and analysis written about them just like artists who create comic books, movies, music, and other forms of popular and fine art.

Drag isn’t going away and neither are LGBTQA* people. It’s important for everyone who can safely do so to show their support and resistance to the advance of hate in the world in any way they are able. It felt good to see my favorite television show make its own silly statement about it in a week where any form of queer joy is welcome.

(It didn’t hurt that it may have been their best Rusical of all time.)

This highly-enjoyable, highly-relevant episode of Drag Race slightly shuffled the rankings compared to last week’s comedy challenge. However, it mostly confirmed what we’ve known all along to be our top four, with one very lovely, very loose fourth-runner up.

Readers, start your engines. And, may the best drag queen win!

one thing leads to another

February 12, 2023 by krisis

Sometimes getting older feels a lot like the old lady who swallowed a fly. One thing leads to another. One minor inconvenience that you might not have even noticed in your youth quickly cascades into bigger and bigger problems until your entire life is a wreck.

That’s not just my pessimism at play! I’m actually hot off of a few miserable months after just such a bit of bad luck.

Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay

The bad luck involved our sectional couch. It was destined to happen. The day I met the couch, I turned to E and said, “I’m going to hurt myself on one of its legs. I just know it.”

The legs are set exactly at the corners of the couch rather than in from the edge, and since they are metal they’re surprisingly thin – enough so that your foot could catch on them rather than impacting and sliding off in one direction or the other.

Of course, it came to pass. I was walking across the room for no particular reason and slammed my foot directly in the middle of the couch’s leg, toe-first.

It was more than a stubbed toe. It was a collapsing onto the ground after, seeing stars for an hour, ice-packs all night sort of impact.

It felt exactly the same as when I fractured middle finger just before COVID struck, another one of these inconveniences that put the whammy on my life and my plans for months on end. Something felt internally wrong in my foot.

I visited a doctor first thing the next day. He shrugged at me. “Maybe it’s chipped,” he said. I pleaded for a X-Ray, but he said that even if it was broken, it wasn’t in a way that would require a cast or splint. He thought giving me a boot would be overkill. I’d just have to not walk it off.

Easier said than done. [Read more…] about one thing leads to another

my weighted blanket is hungry

January 29, 2023 by krisis

E gave me a weighted blanket as a holiday gift.

I am the kind of person who likes to burrow under a mountain of blankets to go to sleep. Maybe with some other stuff piled on top – like my laptop on my chest and the contents of several laundry baskets scattered on top of the blankets. That’s a difficult sleep tableau to maintain – it’s given to tangles and things falling off the bed.

(It also means I like to sleep where it is COLD, because I’m going to pull something across my body regardless of the temperature.)

Enter the relatively-recent trend of weighted blankets. They went from a niche product for people with anxiety or serious sleeping problems to something you can find in every home goods store. Sometimes you can even choose between multiple brands and weights!

I’m not sure how exactly they went from nice treatment to retail seller, but every time I’d see or hear about them I’d think, “Huh, maybe I’m piling all of that stuff on top of me not for warmth but for the weight of it.”

Thus, my holiday gift. It is 10 kilograms – 22 pounds! That’s much more than the recommended amount for my size and weight, but I believe my request was, “I want to feel crushed as flat as a pancake and E really delivered. And, let me tell you, 10kg isn’t necessarily a heavy weight to lift as a barbell or even a wriggling baby, but 10kg spread out across a queen-sized blanket? That is hard to wrangle. Think of all the ways you casually toss or fold a blanket over the course of making your bed or slipping beneath it to go to sleep.

Not with this fat mama. It ain’t going anywhere it doesn’t want to go.

When I emerged from my first night of sound sleep with it, I declared that I felt well-rested and “completely flattened.”

All seemed to be well and good for the first few weeks of our relationship. Then, I noticed that I wasn’t getting up as early in the morning, despite it being the height of summer here in New Zealand. I’m used to popping up before my alarm goes off, especially if I leave my curtains cracked. Now, I was sleeping right up to my alarm – and, if I somehow managed to turn it off or it came unplugged I could sleep the whole morning away. I lost that ability when I became a parent nearly a decade ago!

You see, my weighted blanket is hungry. Hungry to do its job. Hungry for companionship. Hungry to crush something beneath its velvety grey expanse.

It’s not even exclusively hungry for me. I noticed this a few weeks ago when my beloved Blogger.com t-shirt went missing. I was sure I had set it out just before a shower, but when I returned it was gone. I searched high and low for it for days to no avail… only to find it nearly a week later within one of the folds of my blanket!

I’m not saying the blanket is sentient. Not necessarily. I’m saying if you take a large floppy thing like a blanket and give it weight, it starts acting like a prehensile tail or the arm of an octopus. If the edge of it drags across the floor, it actually GRABS THINGS as it goes. And, if you give it a solid yank to fold it or flip it as you would with a normal blanket, it’ll curl around whatever it can grab a hold of and swallow it up in its folds.

T-Shirts. Headphones. Pencils. Your entire waking life. All devoured by a ravenous 10kg beast dangling innocently off of one side of your bed.

Maybe this is why the blankets come with weight recommendations. Maybe it’s not about the blanket being too heavy for my delicate frame. Maybe I’m just not enough to satiate it. Maybe if I had asked for a lighter blanket it wouldn’t wake up hungry in the morning and try to swallow anything I placed in hem’s reach.

Maybe so. But… I’m sleeping so well.