Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Shut In

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The not having a driver’s license is starting to really weigh on me.

I realized this on Friday night in the basement of a bar, transfixed by the noise of  a crowd of friends and the beacon of the Phillies on the television. I heard Jem mention she’d be within a mile of our house the next day, and before I knew it my mouth opened.

“Ohmigod you should totally come over and see the house it’s not far from where you’re going please just stop by we have beer or could order pizza do you think we’ll see you?”

No driver’s license and no $12 cab rides home if I stay out in the city past midnight means even my very occasional social appearances have been greatly curtailed (which is to not even mention open mics, from which I have become extinct). I’m enough of an introvert to think I don’t miss it. But even introverts need people, and the twelvish people that had been to our house before Saturday isn’t quite enough.

As a result, I am expanding my public shame campaign beyond a coworkerly bet with Mel over my cube wall: I am getting my driver’s license. I will report back by next week with news of the physical I need to take in order to get my form filled out in order to take my permit test in order to re-learn how to drive.

If I don’t keep to my promise please unleash an internet’s worth of shame on me.

But I Regress, pt. 3

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Warning: This image actually has nothing to do with the rest of this post. It just makes me giggle.

Holy continuity, Batman! Do you remember where I left off over a month ago?

In short, I had to give up my monthly comic book addiction to fuel my constant need to be online, which brought with it Real-Time Strategy games like Warcraft & Starcraft. Static characters on a page couldn’t hold a candle to tiny sprites with their own hit points and attributes.

Oh, Sega Dreamcast. We had such good times. I will remember you. Will you remember me? Don’t let your life pass you by. Weep not for the memories.


Then idle gamer-me met college. With unlimited bandwidth and nearly unlimited time, Freshman year Peter kept playing Starcraft solo, but added shooters like Unreal and Rogue Spear to his repertoire, playing with his (okay, enough: my) roommate Kenny and the gang from Shafted.org. I got addicted to in-browser games, particularly the deeply strategic Archmage.

I even got into console gaming, playing endless rounds of Madden 2k on Kenny’s Dreamcast.

Yeah, I’m old.

Actually, our college D&D sessions represented a major milestone for me - I RPed a male character!


Then the utopia of free time, free games, and free T1 internet came to an abrupt halt. Sophomore year found me working to pay for my apartment and with a single meager line of dial-up and a teeny 13-inch television with no console. It also found me starting a blog and finally scraping together the money for a nicer guitar.

The result? The Peter who dug comic books and video games evaporated completely long before I turned 21. Elise never met him, aside from a weekly night of Dungeons & Dragons and some in-browser gaming.

Any attention and cash I had left to spare after class and E went to my burgeoning collection of songs – both by other people and by me – and concert tickets, when I could afford them.

I really thought geek-Peter was completely dead and gone. That is, until graduation…

To find out how that happened next, you… well, you don’t have to do anything. I need to write at least two more entries of this transcribed oral history of geekdom. And, hey, let’s not forget that the impetus of this entire thing was my best-in-class Guide to Collecting X-Men Comics as Trade Paperbacks. As of today I am officially caught up to 2010 in X-Continuity!

Monday Music: The Best In Philadelphia

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I have some major musical links to unleash on you this Monday! The musicians are local to Philly, but they can rock you in any remote location due to the power of the internet.

Behold: The Best Songwriters in Philly & The Best Indie/Alternative Bands in Philly. You can spend your Monday (and many subsequent days) getting to know the eighteen artists on those two lists, all of whom are certified awesome by yours truly – both handy guides were written by me!

Now for the story behind the links.

A few weeks ago a national producer from CBS reached out to me to see if I would be interested in writing a number of “Best in Philly” posts for their newly-launched CBS Local guide to Philly. This is the mysterious “freelance assignment” I’ve been blogging and tweeting about.

It took awhile to nail down the topics I’d write, but from our first exchange it was clear that one of them would be “Best Songwriters In Philly,” and that I’d be restricted to 10 songwriters, tops.

The topic and accompanying restriction made me nervous. I have literally dozens of favorite songwriters in Philly. How could I fairly get them down to ten?

In the end I was working from a list of 20+ potential candidates to get down to a group of nine that felt right. I left off many favorites because I couldn’t explain them in 100 words, I wasn’t sure if my opinion was biased, or they simply didn’t fit with my final list – which turned out to be:

Since I have so many more words to expel about that nine and so many left-over favorites, I’m hoping to expand upon the article here at CK in fits and starts.

In the meantime, check out the CBS Local version, plus my Alt-Bands article, and these four other hyper-local music-lover guides: