Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Week-Weary

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I’m absolutely beat after this week of working hard, hard workouts, and bloggerific whinging, so I turn you over to two of my Philly compatriots for your nightly content.

First, via my absolute #1 favorite client in the world, Music Snobbery, a local blogger who gets featured in places like NYT and VF, and who threw himself a third blog birthday bash that – upon the breakup of and corresponding cancellation from The Teeth – lured Moby to fill in. Yes, that Moby.

Gee, I wonder who I can get for my blog’s upcoming eighth birthday? Hmm…

Second, Jen @ 1000 Times No is a particular favorite of mine, but last year whenever I’d stop by she seemed to be on a hiatus. Right now she’s active and I’m active, and it’s a beautiful thing – her random assortment goes well with my own.

And, with that, I will now return to the land of recline, wherein the heavy thing I have to lift is the remote control.

Goodnight, Personal Moon

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After a sleepy first hour or two last night’s fundraiser was wildly successful, and kept me plenty busy with serving drinks, working the door, ordering pizza for the famished hostesses, and playing “name that sample” with Suz during New Age Crew’s set.

After some light cleanup I was deposited back in my home slightly after four in the morning, my hair a tangle of cigarette smoke. (Before Philadelphia’s smoking ban went into effect I would not go out to bars because I had so much hair, and it would suck up smoke like a sponge, leaving me in a nicotine cloud for the remainder of the evening.)

As a result, today I needed a bit of a recharge, which mostly consisted of sleeping through the majority of Fellowship of the Ring. I did, however, managed to catch up a bit on my blog reading, which only compounded the massive backlog of links I have queued since my last link-centric post way back in mid-October. As such, I have the following bounty of links to share.

Every post through Friday on Brenda’s Babes featured an illustrated vintage pinup girl from a classic magazine or advertisement, often accompanied by the history of the image and its illustrator. The blog was cultivated as an entry into a $20k blogging contest, and it won!

Aside from a brief-but-fascinating glimpse into screen-printing, No Commercial Potential produced The Octophant. It’s an image I’d pay major dollars to have on a t-shirt (it strikes me as very Arcati Crisis), but for now you have to settle for a print.

Zen Habits’ article on Fiscal Fitness compares effectively righting an unkempt budget with a sustained weight-loss program. I think it’s an apt analogy; it’s exactly how I got on-budget, and as of a month from now I’ll have stayed that way for four years.

I illustrated this sign on a note from my personal memo pad two years ago, and it has hung at my desk ever since.

An extremely well-written and poignant entry from Nancy at Naked on Rollerskates.

Tokyo-based design publication Ping Mag recently looked at the most eco (-nomic and -logically-friendly) packaging in the country. Fascinating to see, as well as to consider the impact of culture on the design process.

The simple-yet-effective logo for Portugal’s Presidency of the EU. I doubt anything so literal yet abstract could ever emerge from the U.S. government.

I missed the current-event boat regarding NY Girl of My Dreams, but it’s still a fascinating story of the intense power of the internet. Cribbed from Mark Larson.

Useful: 10 questions it’s illegal to ask in a job interview. Reflexively, it’s also information you shouldn’t give away. From Kottke.

Philly gets annoyingly hip with it’s new “One Book” choice: Dave Egger’s What Is the What. (Actually, maybe I’ll be able to stomach Eggers’ writing if it’s constrained to a concise fictional topic.)

I was fascinated by a Mental Floss entry on Dubai’s super-resorts. That’s a little out of my aforementioned budget, though.

Similarly, I’d love to have a personal moon, but I’m not sure that’s in the budget either.

For now I will settle for rockin’ ice stirrers and call it a night.

A Montage! I’m All Sewn Up.

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Okay, before I can blog about anything else I need to address the pressing issue of a several-day backlog of interesting links.

Have at them.

I’m sure all of you savvy people have seen these already, but just in case you haven’t, via Debbie Millman: Dove has released two videos that play on the image of female beauty in media – first one that follows a supermodel from first call to final poster, and a second that’s a montage of images of feminine beauty. You could argue (as Kottke did) that Dove’s parent company Unilever is a major offender in the image war, but, regardless of whose on which side of the line, both shorts are fantastic.

Layer Tennis is a volley of increasing oneupmanship conducted in consecutive layers of a design file. Coincidental to my prior topic Debbie Millman explains in more detail. Ages ago Jett was the narrator of a round, but I’m not sure that old-skool layer tennis was organized by the same people as this newfangled one that’s drawing links from everyone and their mommyblogger – partially due to killer narrators like the above mentioned pair of Dovebloggers.


You know all those annoying distorted words you have to transcribe for highly discerning websites to prove you’re not a robot? They’re called captchas. However, you could also use the word “captcha” to describe a word or passage in a scanned book that is not definable by OCR software. Are you sensing some synergy? Well, a team at Carnegie Mellon University did – they’re farming out book captchas for websites to use as entrance captchas, logging all of the user generated solutions. The result? Recaptchas, which crowdsources its way to about 3,000 hours of captcha deciphering per day.


Everyday Goddess wants to break into episodic television directing, but she’s having trouble finding a foothold. The means of production for specific industries like this are all sewn up by the major players, and the entrance requirements are often paradoxical – she’s been told that she should direct an independent feature so that she gets noticed. But she doesn’t want to direct features, she wants to direct TELEVISION. So, if you know someone who knows someone, drop her a line.


DIY internet musician BradSucks is seeking volunteers to record themselves singing along with his new tune, “Out of It.” I’m going to try to find a moment to record myself this weekend.


Quicker hits:

The Rum Bar was nominated by several independent auditors as a location for our next upscale bar crawl.

Which of two famous Roger Fenton photos came first – one of a road without cannonballs, and one with? Errol Morris writes two fantastic NYT articles on the topic – one of journalistic inquiry via research and interviews, and a second featuring more direct investigative journalism. A final part pends. Via K.

I’m not a great fan of crying at work, but this article about a Pittsburgh professor with a limited time to live did the trick.

Three links from the unstoppable juggernaut of posts that is Mashable: WikiInvest is a wiki community for stock junkies. TIOTI is short for “Tape It Off the Internet.” YouTube + Bittorent = Virtual Tivo. Great for non-teevee owners who still enjoy a show or two (i.e. me) . For those trying to kickstart their blogging, 10 Free eBooks for Bloggers.

FriendFeed aids you in stalking your friends across multiple websites with social networking components, including FaceBook, Flickr, Amazon, Netflix, and more. Via Make You Go Hmm.

OCDblog: Meetimer tracks how long you surf each website, helping you manage your time (and decrease your procrastination).

How fantasy football is like business. A lot of people are probably going to use the former to inform the latter, but it’s the other way around for me.

Go behind the scenes building the Great River of China. From the same source: Animal Logic is a unique series of photos documenting the installation of animals into museum exhibits.

No more taking calls behind the wheel for PA drivers.

We know I love all things colorful and retro, so I love this set of color photos from World War II.

The Starburst Cluster in NGC 3603 is my favorite Astronomy photo of the day in weeks.

(fin)

Endlessly Avoiding Perfection

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Heading East recently shared a theory that each artist has only a single great “story” inside of them waiting to be released. A particular quote really resonated:

Some artists escape by fashioning alternate versions of their story, never actually telling it perfectly, always leaving a bit of mystery in the center, always working their way around and around the one truth they know, but maybe these artists are doomed too as they will always fall short…

Though I don’t agree completely with the one-story-only theory, I do believe that each artist has a limited amount of ways to portray any single given archetype within their sphere of art, with each attempt a facet of a perfected portrayal. As alluded to in the quote, the artist has a choice (though not always a conscious one) of spending a lifetime drafting an incomplete version of their truth, or of crafting one version that is crystalline in its perfection.

I certainly feel that way about songwriting. I used to specialize in a particularly jilted sort of breakup song that I spent most of my time writing and re-writing. Suddenly, early in 2005 i wrote “Regrets,” and I was suddenly no longer bound to tap and retap that archetype for my material. Since then my songs have expressed a much wider array of emotions – I freed myself by closing a door on a particular story.

Penning that perfect story is a frightening concept; what if you finish it too soon? What if you don’t have any other important stories to tell? Yet, as daunting as those questions are, if you let them handicap your creativity you’ll never attain that perfect story. And that means you’ll never get to try your hand at its sequel.

A more rabid month looms on the horizon. Oh, and vegetable percussion.

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In four weeks the second annual National Blog Posting Month will begin, wherein you pledge to post at least once a day for all of November for no reason at all.

This year participation is being managed through social network Ning, where I am curating a music bloggers group.

I also plan to offer some manner of prize since I won one last year, but I have not yet decided on anything suitably awesome.

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Ethicurean posted the truly brilliant Vegetable Orchestra, who perform music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Words escape me; please refer to moving pictures, below:

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When I saw Bettye Lavette @ Bonnaroo in 2006 I described her as a bloodthirsty Motown praying mantis whose goal it was to devour the entire audience before the end of her set. Yeah, Bonnaroo was weird, but it’s an apt description considering how long she was in industry exile; she came back hungry.

Read a great Stylus Magazine interview with Bettye about her new covers disc, wherein she is backed by Drive-By Truckers. Link via Largehearted Boy, who also offers a legal listen to some of the tracks from Scene of the Crime

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The Strand offers books by the foot, a service providing decorative book collections in any style and subject. Prices range from $10- to $400- per foot. A cool gift for your bibliophile friends, and a fantastic resource for set dressing; at $300/ft the Victorian era books are rather stunning. Via Kottke.

K-link part deux: Do you need 8 oz. of dehydrated strawberry powder? You can buy it, and other molecular gastronomy fixins, at L’Epicerie. After you’re done salivating, hit up this exhaustive blog post for info and resources.

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Then there were quick hits.

46 tax deductions for bloggers. Um, hells yeah. Via Akkams.

One time in college Elise did a whole photo project where she painted me with light. If she was here I could tell you the whole story about how her professor was friends with the originator of the technique. In any event, if you have a camera with long exposure time and a tripod you can do it yourself.

More photography: All panoramic pictures, all the time. Want to shoot your own? Read up on Gigapan, an automated robotic tripod. Latter two links from Contentious, former via Mashable; a great feed (if you can keep up with 20+ posts a day).

If your phone and internet errands are swallowing up your free time you should look into outsourcing to an offshore personal assistant; sounds like they’re worth the money if you have the right sort of tasks on your to-do list.

I don’t know that I realized New York City was quite so tall over a century ago.

Free iTunes Songs is a handy RSS feed that links you to all of iTunes free content, including the weekly free song downloads.

Second Rotation is an online pawn shop that pays you for your used consumer electronics up front, saving you the hassle of dealing with an actual buyer. As to where all the items go, the site is a bit cagey. I have one word for you: gnomes. Via recent daily fixation Unclutterer.

Finally, Torrez was very nearly my first favorite blogger (and, not only because he ran Power Bloggers). He’s back, and recently posted some simple advice on increasing blog traffic. After a month of following his own advice his Alexa rank is up ~200k. Probably advice worth taking.