Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

The king of memetic Twitter comedy is just some guy

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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.

my weighted blanket is hungry

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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.

mall-based time travel

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Yesterday, the kid and I made nearly a full day excursion to the Queensgate Mall to buy clothes and various other supplies for the upcoming new school year.

There are many things about New Zealand that delightfully feel retro to me. For example, it’s exceedingly common to see cars with all manner of advertising wraps on them for local businesses that clearly proclaim a phone number but no internet URL.

Nowhere else in New Zealand is that feeling magnified more than in a shopping mall. By the time we left the states malls had either begun to wither and die, or had becoming echo chambers filled with only the biggest brand outlets – each one a copy and paste of the next. The surviving malls feel like they lost their identities. There weren’t any weird little stores like the ones I remembered from my youth – before you could find anything you could imagine on Amazon and have it shipped to your doorstep in under 48 hours.

Walking into a mall here transports me back to my 1990s youth. I’m not sure how to explain it. It’s not just the absence of Amazon. New Zealand has startling few of the kind of “we sell everything” big box retailers that altered the American shopping landscape before Amazon’s ubiquity.

Are you old enough to remember when Circuit City started carrying $13-dollar CDs, but then Best Buy swooped in with more floor space and more electronics and $12-dollar CDs? Or when going to your local Clover, Sears, and K-Mart got superseded by going to even bigger Targets and Wal-Marts, which added things like furniture, groceries, and automotive sections?

Do you also remember how their side effect was killing off not only downmarket shops, but upmarket department stories? Or when massive category retailer warehouses like Bed Bath and Beyond started popping up as shopping destinations of their own?

Those types big stores really don’t exist in New Zealand – those apex predator brands whose entire raison d’etre is to choke out the local market. Or, at least, I think they are confined to Auckland or Christchurch, because Wellington does not have them. The only big-box-ish, category-spanning store we have here is The Warehouse, which feels a lot like early American versions of Target – right down to their signature color red. [Read more…] about mall-based time travel

the early bird gets the eggs

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Today I woke up at 6:55am, laced up my running shoes, and walked to the supermarket because it was 6:55am and I was definitely not jogging at that hour.

Why? Because New Zealand has run out of eggs. We are officially in a national egg shortage. It’s an ovo-crisis!

I mean, New Zealand has some eggs. Personally, we’ve got about 23. But there are not enough eggs. Few enough eggs that it has become common over the past month to visit the grocery store to see an entire bank of egg shelves picked entirely clean, which didn’t even occur during the height of our lockdowns.

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

Yes, people are even buying that one last carton in the corner with the cracked egg in it.

Apparently one measures these things not in terms of eggs but in terms of laying hens. Literally, the chicken came first, in this scenario. I have learned from the prestigiously-titled Stuff that we currently have 3.5 million egg laying hens (a 68% hen-to-people ratio), but we ought to have 3.8m egg laying hens (a 74% hen-to-people ratio). Those hens (and their predecessors, I suppose) laid about 92 million eggs in the year ending in June 2022, down an apparently staggering amount from 101.2m in the prior egg-laying calendar year.

Long story short, today I learned you need three hens for every four people.

The thing is: it’s not like New Zealand just found a whole lot more people. Even if we count tourism, we don’t have as many people in our borders as we did back in 2019, and there hasn’t been any chicken-specific diseases (that I’ve heard about, anyhow – and, we do have a line into the chicken community).

How did New Zealand run out of eggs?

To the best of my understanding, we actually ran out of eggs 10 years ago and just didn’t realize it until last week. [Read more…] about the early bird gets the eggs

family, but make it camp

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Today is the day of the annual family camping trip, where “family” means all relatives currently within the borders of New Zealand except for me.

I abstain from camping not only because it means sleeping near bugs, but because skipping it presents an incredibly rare occasion for to be alone in our house.

Both E and I have worked from home for the past two years and will continue for the foreseeable future, but I serve the role of our errand-runner-in-chief. That means that if anyone is occasionally left at home alone, it’s E rather than me. That means the family camping trip might ne the only time alone in the house for more than 15 minutes for all of 2023 – just as it was in 2022!

I claim to love being alone. In reality I like it for about twelve hours.

After that, I get lonely and want to make some food for someone.

It turns out that what I crave isn’t necessarily “alone time,” it’s uninterrupted time. It’s hard to choose that for myself when the alternative is a rare hour where E and I are both free to hang out, and even harder when I’m in the same house with an awesome and highly-entertaining kid during her waking hours.

I walked away from the perfect work/life balance of my dream job just to spend more time with that kid – so, of course I’m going to give up some potential quiet time to hang out with her!

Sometimes the only way to enjoy uninterrupted time to myself without feeling guilty is for the kid to be nowhere within a 100-kilometer radius of me. Maybe camping is that far away? I’m not sure. All I know is that it involves sleeping in a tent in a well-managed slice of wilderness with questionable access to plumbing and electricity. That’s a combination of factors I would only endure for a reality show with a significant cash prize. [Read more…] about family, but make it camp