Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

little hits (of dopamine)

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I’m an addict.

I don’t drink or do drugs. I don’t smoke or touch caffeine. My addiction is satisfaction and I will mainline anything that can produce it. That chemical feeling of being satisfied. Those little hits of dopamine in my brain.

This week it’s been games. Boring, pointless, meaningless internet games literally in a category called “idle” to indicate that they’re purely engineered for running in the background and wasting your time.

(Think Sim City when you used to leave it running overnight to gather mucho dollars and hopefully avoid an earthquake, only instead of sleeping you are watching raptly as the numbers tick ever higher.)

The urge came on Saturday night. Weekends after bedtime are usually my big opportunity to knock out huge chunks of writing on CK – and, especially for finishing new comic guides! This past Saturday I couldn’t get in the mood. Words were coming in fits and starts. Nothing satisfying.

And so, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, I loaded up Kongregate for the first time in years and started poking around for simple games to play. My drug of choice is usually tower defense, but I stumbled into idlers and my night was gone.

The games were at once awful and great for satisfaction. The numbers tick up constantly! You get to click things! If there is enough ticking and clicking, sometimes new things light up! It’s the adult equivalent of an infant playmat that lights up and makes sounds. The best of the bunch was surely Swarm Simulator, a plain text game all about exponential growth and ratios, with dozens of different numbers ticking up constantly. At least it’s math, I told myself.

Even as I was playing the games I hated myself for it. I’ve had them running all week and I keep hating it. I know they’re a crutch for getting my satisfaction elsewhere by doing things like working out or hitting the “Publish” button.

I just needed those little hits. [Read more…] about little hits (of dopamine)

on punching nazis

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I’ve been thinking a lot about punching Nazis.

One Nazi in specific. The one who founded the “alt-right” moniker for the modern Neo-Nazi white supremacist movement in America and who was punched in the face on live television during the inauguration events on Friday.

I have complicated thoughts on his being punched. I am a non-violent person. Sure, I love superhero comics about bashing up bad guys, but I myself have never thrown a punch and don’t intend to.

So, here is a story about the one time I almost broke another guy’s knees. [Read more…] about on punching nazis

a breath of fresh air

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I woke up this morning feeling warm and comfortable after staying up until 4am editing the last of my work from November’s “Blog of Tomorrow.”

Not like sweaty and sick warm. More like waking up with the sun beating down on you through a window warm. Except, our bedroom windows are blanketed in blackout curtains. It wasn’t the sun.

Maybe the warmth and comfort was the feeling of a job well done?

No, E informed me, it was actually the feeling of our boiler completely ceasing its communication with our thermostat overnight and deciding to heat the inside of the house to 78° Fahrenheit. It just so happens that my side of the bed is an arm’s reach away from the radiator, so I was probably considerably warmer than 78° by the time I awoke.

(For reference, with the heat off for over 12hrs right now it is a comfortably cool 66° inside while it’s more like 40° outside.)

I was alarmed by this information, but not surprised. I am not a science denier, but as far as I am concerned the thermostat is a work of sorcery. I don’t understand how a little box with mercury in it on the dining room wall (which we replaced with a digital touch screen version) could possible dictate the actions of the boiler in the basement. The internet tells me such a thing was possible as far back as the 18th century.

In response, I will again refer you to: work of sorcery.

After some tinkering and turning the boiler on and off we determined that the problem was somewhere between it and the thermostat. E had to leave for work and, as we’ve established, I am not the handy person in this relationship, so our agreed-upon strategy to avoid manually turning the boiler on and off all day was that I would let the heat pump up to a slightly too-warm level and then coast on that through the evening.

Of course, a house-wide “too warm” equates to “nearing spontaneous combustion” when standing next to a radiator working overtime.

As a result of this plan, at one point earlier today I found myself sitting in our front hall (which contains a radiator) in a t-shirt and pajama bottoms staring out of our open door while EV drew on our walk with chalk just eight feet away, bundled up for Autumn.

It only lasted for a few minutes, but it was one of those memories. There was just something about the picture compared with the inherent comedy of our heating situation.

(We also watched the second half of The Wiz today, which made EV cry and make the saddest face I’ve ever seen on a human being. More on that later, maybe.)

I swear, I did not sabotage our thermostat purely to create this analogy, but today on CK feels a lot like our front hall. On one side I have a month so full of content that it would constitute a quarter or a year depending on how you measure, and on the other side I have a vast expanse of open air.

I’m going to take a couple of days to relax and begin to cook up what comes next for CK. Rest assured, you’re safe from multiple posts a day for the time being. I’ll also be reshuffling some of the daily themes (e.g., no live streams this month, while I get some gear repaired), but before I do that I’ll be back tomorrow to finish up Issue #1 of my novel, Krisis.

This Has Been “Blog of Tomorrow,” A Patreon Launch Event

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What a month!

patreon-wideThis is the final post of my “Blog of Tomorrow” event, where I blogged as if it was my full-time job for the entire month of November. The event celebrated the launch of a Patreon campaign to offset the costs of running CrushingKrisis.

I enjoy both dreaming up big, seemingly insane projects and participating in big, seemingly undoable events. That’s how I got myself into things like recording a song an hour for Blogathon, volunteering with Blame Drew’s Cancer, and participating in National Novel Writing Month.

I knew that launching a Patreon for CK had to be accompanied by one of those big, insane, undoable things. Thus, the content overload this month. Seriously, it was an epic, unwarranted amount of content. Writing it may have been the single most difficult thing I’ve achieved in life. There were points where I just hated words. And comic books. I definitely spent some time hating comic books.

I also proved to myself that I really do have the energy, inspiration, and focus to create the kinds of content I’ve wanted to feature on CK for so many years. All I’ve ever lacked was time.

All of November’s content was written between October 12th and this very moment, with the exception of the skeleton of the Ultimate Comics Guide, which I started researching in September, and Friday Fiction, which was originally written over the past six years and edited for this month. Since linking and editing takes time, I’m still including them both in the wordcount. 

That content totals 133,746 words, or about one adult-lengthed paperback book. That was split between 109,944 words in 92 posts (including this one) and 23,802 words in 4 new pages.

While 92 posts could maintain daily posts on CK for an entire quarter, an average month of CK content is historically only a little over 10,000 words, which means this month contained the effective content of an entire average year of Crushing Krisis.

This month represents 6.33% of CK’s total word count in .5% of its lifetime, 2% of its 16 years of posts, and 3.45% of its total pages.

The material took 182 hours to write, edit, and illustrate with media. Had I done it all in a single month, it would have required 42.5hr work weeks.

Spread across the days since October 12th it represented 25.5hr work weeks. That doesn’t include time I spent on any of the content on Patreon itself, time spent on social media posts to promote CK, or time spent setting up and playing the streaming concerts. And, aside from calling in Mother of Krisis for a day and a half of relief over the course of the month, I spent all of that time doing my typical amount of parenting.

So, to answer my own question: yes, I really could turn CK into a full-time endeavor. In fact, I’d be happy to, if if that’s what my Patrons wanted – but, that’s has never been the goal of this month.

If you’ve found this month entertaining, or interesting, or useful, please consider contributing to my campaign.

If you have a suggestion for a pledge goal content reward or a pledge level reward that would make you want to pledge, please comment to let me know.

Thank you!