Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

weblinks

Too many links … may alienate the majority … let the good times roll.

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I have the day off to get ready for Arcati Crisis’s appearance at the Tin Angel tonight (@ 8:30), including mixing down our limited edition “Live From Rehearsal” EP, and I’m still working on cramming too many links into this single-blog sack at noon.

Typical.


Harvard Avenue posted an amazing time-lapse video showing the steps behind creating an online comic. I wasn’t too impressed until about halfway through, at which point it started becoming stunning.

(When the new season of Trio starts I ought to do a behind the scenes video of Trio – way more complicated than you might think.)

Pioneer Woman posts my favorite chapter yet of her serialized “How I Met Marlboro Man.”

Life suddenly becomes a musical for EJ. This has happened to me before, but with squirrels instead of people.

In the category of “processes I’m trying to improve,” How To Blog Without the Time Sink, via Akkamsrazor.


I’m not much of a gadget monger, but after reading Web log: a20261 I’m seriously considering a Helio Ocean as my next mobile device: it features a numerical keypad as well as a querty in a slim interface. Check out a bevy of photos at Gizmodo, or get a little more technical on SlashGear, or read a full review on CNET. Overall sounds like it’s super convenient, but no feature manages to be best in class. A plus: works with my carrier (Sprint). A minus: doesn’t work internationally.


You are what you eat, but do you know what you’re eating? Ethical eating blog Ethicurean pumps out more great links than I have the time to read, let alone blog, but an NYT quote from a recent post really caught my eye because it explains exactly why I’m edging towards being a pesco-vegan:

Most countries, including China, ban the use of ractopamine in livestock destined for human consumption, but it is permitted in 24 countries, including the United States and Canada.


VetMommy talks about the humane way to declaw a cat.

I’m happy to see the opinion of a concerned professional, but still I vacillate on this one … not because I necessarily have a problem with declawing as a concept, but because I’m uncomfortable with any sort of unnecessary surgery considered necessary just for the sake of aesthetics (in this case, the aesthetics of a leather couch, but in the case of humans, circumcision for the sake of people who don’t recognize the natural form and function of a penis).

Sorry, I got kind of heavy on you there on short notice. I’ve been sitting on a lengthier post on the topic full of facts and figures, but it’s not done simmering yet. (I keep worrying that I may alienate the majority of my audience, but then I think, “hey, it’s only the majority of Americans in my audience.” But, I digress)


From Boing Boing: Rule The Web in 60 Seconds, a blog and podcast. Also from BB, an academic paper exploring how magicians keep their trade secrets safe without the bureaucracy of Intellectual Property law. Even the abstract is interesting.


I love vintage advertisements, not only for the art of them, but to try to understand how communicating to the public was fundamentally different in previous eras. Shorpy, typically a vintage photo blog, posted a great series of ads this week. My favorites were Fort Marion, Yellowstone, and Back to Books. View a gallery of all of Shorpy’s Art & Design images.


The music section.

Scott Andrew sweetens the pot for pre-orderers of his new record by offering a comp disc filled with tracks from his many talented collaborators.

Arjan Writes travels in an more urban circle of music than I do, but he’s worth monitoring for gems like Alice Smith, which on first blush is an R&B tinged KT Tunstall. Download her MP3, New Religion.

Yellow Stereo posts a gorgeous (live) track from a new free EP by Great Lakes Swimmers. I’ve never heard of them before, but at first blush they’re like Sufjan Stevens but without the studied pointlessness. Whether or not you agree with me, get the download from the awesomely titled Gorilla vs Bear.

Also from YS: I’m obsessed with Sia’s new single, “Buttons,” ever since first seeing Four Tet Remix). I wish they’d set a release date for her new disc.

Coolfer has long been one of my favorite music blogs, because it focuses more on the industry than the individual artist. Lately it hasn’t featured as many in-depth essays (I think because its blogger is in Grad school), but the links are as fresh as ever – like this Wall Street Journal article on Digital Sound Quality.

Most people (AKA, my mother) can’t tell the difference between an original MP3 and an album version, let alone the difference between encoding at 128 and 320.

I had my own intangible grasp on the quality gap, but it’s become a lot more obvious to me now that I’m recording my own music with professional fidelity. The quality loss is not always intangible – sometimes you lose punch in a specific frequency range, and its often a punch you mixed quite deliberately. Or, in the words of someone interviewed in the article:

[M]usic producers fret that they are engineering music to a technical lowest common denominator. The result, many say, is music that is loud but harsh and flat, and thus not enjoyable for long periods of time.


I am seriously going to get down to one Make You Go Hmm link per post, because posting multiple links means I’m effectively reading his blog for you, when really you ought to be reading it yourself. This edition’s link: Clocks of every kind, such as the US Crime Clock. I wonder if we could get one just for Philadelphia…


I’m trying to also get down to a link per post on Kottke, but it’s pretty damn hard. E and I love the production company logos at the beginnings of movies and ends of television shows. Who makes them? Not sure, but here’s five minutes worth of them on YouTube.

Learn how panhandlers make more money than police. Read a history and analysis of the Batman logo from comic letterer Todd Klein; here’s the first. A rare comments-on post about how to survive if you are trapped at the bottom of a blender. Finally, Statetris – Tetris with states and nations. It’s hardest on medium, because your preconceived notions of where things are located messes with your intuitive ability to place the recognizable shapes.


Quick hits: Daily Lit makes reading easy by serializing literature for you in daily emails, via Unclutterer. 21 ways to get (really) good at writing. 20 great music apps for Facebook, via Coolfer. Chime TV aggregates the best content from different video sites, like the ubiquitous YouTube. Via Fresh Arrival. How to make NYT-style charts with excel, via Communication Nation.


My final link is a tribute to reviving a memory long since forgotten: Philly music blogger Some Velvet Blog posted a great oldie nugget in his weekly mixtape – “Let the Good Times Roll.” My grandmother used to dance around the kitchen singing this every Sunday morning while she cooked brunch.

Thanks for the memory.


fin.

Uncluttering

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A week ago a blog I’ve become quite fond of – MLarson – quoted my statement from “Why A Link Is Not Enough“:

Links aren’t life.

His reflexive link might have been a thank you for all of the links to him I’ve featured in the past few weeks, or maybe it was an ironic commentary on the fact that I followed up a post stating “Links aren’t life” with a post with several dozen links in it. Or, maybe it was both.

I don’t dispute that links are a big part of blogging. I love posting links. I just like to pair my links with some personal commentary and context so that I at once show you interesting things you may not have read or seen and remind myself about that said things exist when I am old and senile. In, like, a month.

Anyhow, per positive feedback on recent link posts, for the moment they’re going to be a semi-weekly feature.

Unclutterer is to blogs what Real Simple is to magazines. I love it.

Gimme Sanity is back has been back, but I was too dim to look for it at its domain name. Duh.

Axis All Areas is a Garbage fan site with a very comprehensive breakdown of the gear the band has used on every tour. Also, the author has a signed Guild guitar identical to mine! Cool.

Mighty Goods is a shopping blog written by the author of the seminal Mighty Girl. Despite my unequivocal love for her taste in stuff I’ve never bought any of her selected items. The most recent contenders for first purchase are fork easels, and a pattern book that presents patterns in EPS and high res JPG so you can use them for various web and print projects.

Philly Blog The BM Rant tells the tale of the original (ghost)writer of The Hardy Boys. Also from my town, Vintage captures a scene from my daily life. And, XPNer Some Velvet Blog introduces me to Trolleyvox, an awesome local band.

Visual Search Lab is like a user-powered Google Image search, aiming to “find visually similar images.” via Photojunkie.

Brandon Fuller, creator of the technology behind my Now Playing sidebar, laments missing the boat with other big ideas. I feel his pain, having missed out on cashing in on a number of great ideas and web trends due to lack of time or lack of savvy. But, I say, never give up: Friendster seemed to have the annoying lock on social networking before the even more annoying MySpace cropped up, and now they’ve both been eclipsed by the classier Facebook.

10 Future Web Trends is an apt examination of up and coming web technology, via Akkam’s Razor. Also at Akkam’s: the math of making money on your blog.

CNN shares five simple keys to nutrition. Unlike their organization article, I have yet to master any of these habits. Also handy: how to clean your home in 19 minutes. I really enjoy when CNN subcontracts their open article slots to magazines rather than shoddily written AP stories.

Awe-inspiring communications blogger Debbie Millman contributed to A Brief Message – which combines a 200-or-less word essay on design with an accompanying illustration. I love their current one, Arrogance and Humility.

Links from usual suspects: this week TDavid and I chatted about link rot and social networking. Kottke posted a highly addictive web-game, Bloxorz. I grew bored in 15 minutes; Elise beat it within an hour. Also from K, light pollution, and the absence thereof is one of the many reasons I’m jealous of E’s impending trip to Australia.

Largehearted Boy posted a great interview w/Rufus Wainwright; oh, Rufus, if only your album didn’t suck quite so much. Also from LHB, a 69 Love Songs wiki. And, finally, the aforementioned MLarson found an illustrated guide on how to be creative.

Fin.

Did You Know…

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When a show or an actor wants to be nominated for an Emmy, they submit a single episode for consideration. That’s how certain dull and/or niche nominations sometimes sneak through past the obvious choices – they submitted a really good tape.

You can see this year’s complete list of tape submissions at Gold Derby Forums. It’s sometime surprising to see the episodes that your favorite shows and actors have pegged as their best (or, at least, most obvious).

Watch the 59th Annual Emmy Awards tonight on Fox. Or, don’t.

Instead, you can read the article that Alison posted in a comment to my last entry, which illustrates some more of Heroes‘ obvious faults (mostly in comparison to Lost, but also to Buffy and Battlestar).

Acting Agents, Resizing Smart, Blue Collar to Middle Class, Indie Rock Stars, et al

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Speaking of which, here are the links I’ve accumulated since last week.

I’m a great fan of Television Without Pity, a snarky website that recaps all of the best (and worst) serialized television shows, so imagine my delight to find their new feature “Ask An Agent.” Sure, you’ve seen talent agents in movies and teevee shows, but are they as heartless (and charming) as Entourage’s Ari Gold? TWP correspondent Wing Chun examines every angle with Canadian super-agent Bryan Misener, including perspectives on the differences between Hollywood and Toronto.

In a random hunt for some sort of Madonna content (god only knows what) I came across a Drowned World Tour recap on Troubled Diva, which I have since taken a bit of a liking to.

If you are a communications or graphic design nerd of any size, Communication Nation’s post on smart image resizing is absolutely required viewing. That’s the sort of thing I’ve always imagined computers would be able to do. Amazing.

What If No One’s Watching puts words to a sensation I’ve experienced but never been able to articulate: transitioning from working class roots to middle class adulthood. Now, I don’t fall so squarely into “working class,” but I (and my family) have definitely shifted upwards into the “middle class” category in my lifetime.

The transition has never been a threat or a disheartenment to me, but sometimes in my newfound yuppy life I am caught off guard when I realize that hardly anyone I know or work with has, say, been on food stamps before. At least Lindsay and I can reminisce about standing in line for government issued cheese.

Did you know that theversion of “Labor Day” in other countries such as Germany correlates not to their own nationalist labor movement, but to that of the United States? I sure didn’t, but Theatrical Milestones offers an explanation. Also, foodie blog Ethicurean draws a dotted line between unions and America’s agriculture.

Oh, and a link from Epi: Organic To Be.

Okay, I can admit I am not an automaton, and some things make me laugh. Such as this narrative eBay description linked by Writing Aspirations. The seller (a blogger) took an unusual approach to describing her product that, in this case, garnered something like a 3000% markup over what she originally paid.

Sometimes a link gets so memetacular that you can witness it sloughing through your RSS feed, as an illustrated coffee guide has been recently. Usually I ignore these sorts of things, but I cannot tell you how often I’ve explained the contents of this chart to family members and co-workers since my barrista days came to a close. I’m going to post it in my freaking cube for reference.

Longtime read Coolfer informs me that uber-producer Rick Rubin is now the co-head of Columbia records (via a great NYT article). And, yes, the idea of this one heavily bearded wise man saving the entirety of the music industry is a little hyperbolic, but clearly he comes down on the side of artist development, if only based on how many bands he’s produced where they’ve wound up sounding more like themselves than ever before.

And, while we’re on the topic of music, I must reiterate my addiction to my two recent mp3blog finds The Yellow Stereo and Philly-based Some Velvet Blog. Why? Because they like indie music, but they still have good taste – a trait critically missing from those who wet themselves over every yowling tuneless indie band that galumphs down the pitchfork pike.

Georgie-James is one of the rare bands that shares genre-space with our Arcati Crisis duo. Listen to “Cake Parade,” which is especially Gina-ish. I hope we get that catchy when we fill out to band size. The Magic Numbers seem to be in that category as well, except Gina can sing circles around their chick(s).

Säkert is cool, and all the more catchy for not being in English. I’m also inexplicably into “Summer In the City” by The Boys And Girls Club. Amos The Transparent seems to have some merit, but is not making my needle quiver, so to speak.

Closing out the music topic, Scott Andrew. He was half of the fabulous Pet Rock Stars, who wrote and recorded two songs from across the country during Blogathon 2003. In the intervening years he’s become the rocker/blogger than I’ve always aspired to be, seamlessly integrating his music into his page while keeping it a blog.

Scott has a new record coming out, the progress of which you can follow back to the cover shoot, or even the decision about whether it was going to be an album or not.

I would support Scott in concept, except for he’s an amazing singer and songwriter, so I can support him in reality instead. I’m looking forward to catching up to him a bit this year.

(Also, note to self: you have three days left to sponsor the new Mieka Pauley disc, which is going to be excellent. Check out her mindbendingly awesome “All The Same Mistakes” on Myspace.)

Finally, some quick hit links.

Ffffound is, in the words of Fresh Arrival: del.icio.us for cool photos you find online. Handy when you’re looking for a post topic in a pinch.

From the increasingly beloved MLarson: Indexed Blog, which is easier to see than to explain. Monome, an intriguing Philly-based design interface that frankly makes no sense to me but is still quite fascinating (note to self: maybe interview them?). You don’t need a plan, you need skills and a problem. A sentence truer than you think.

From the lengthily adored Make You Go Hmm: G.ho.st is a virtual desktop, useful if you work across several different computers each day. Aerogel is the lowest density product currently known to man, which I only halfway understand (decent explanation here) and will have Gina elaborately describe to me over the weekend. PriceProtectr tracks the things you’ve bought in case the price drops soon enough for you to get a rebate. Did you know that Amazon will refund the difference in price within 30-days of purchase? I bet you didn’t.

Fin: Heather Champ with my photo of the week.

Getting Regular: OCD moms, Suck flashback, pop economics, APOD, and other think-provoking links.

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In case you haven’t caught on, I have lit a bit of a fire under myself on the topic of Year 8 of Crushing Krisis, and part of that flame had extended to reading other blogs.

Blogs don’t exist in a vacuum, but if you pretend that yours does then its reality will conform to your whim. That’s been one of my biggest problems – I have plenty of regular reads, but beyond Rabi, Amanda, Jett, and Alison I don’t make much of a point of regularly reading, commenting and – most importantly – linking to my favorite compatriots.

I’m trying to surmount the first two difficulties by using Google Reader to aggregate my favorite RSS feeds. The reader has a handy “starred” feature to let me highlight my favorite posts, which will hopefully lead to many bounties of links such as the one you’re about to experience.

Okay, so I lied a little – I read more than just those four blogs on a regular basis. Like every other blogger on the face of the internet, I regularly read Dooce, ostensibly so I can chat about it with Lindsay over lunch, but more and more often because I love how she weaves in her OCD with her toddler stories.

(ps: Linds, I know you’re reading. Check out this post about photocamp. Spin any gears in your brain?)

On that same topic (the one before the parens), Whoopee is one of my favorite blogs from NaBloPoMo, as is Flotsam, with the terrifically statistically improbable phrase, “our embryos are the most beautiful embryos that ever underwent meiosis.”

I’m also a long time reader of Acerbia, which tricked me into thinking it was telling the truth for the first time in a while. And, I’m a devotee of Things That Make You Go Hmm, though TDavid often blogs faster than I can read, offering an embarrassment of rich links.

My favorite Hmm-link of the week was a brief feature on Whateverlife, a flashy-as-hell free MySpace layout website run by Ashley Qualls, a 17 year old girl living in Detroit. Oh, did I mention it gets roughly 60 million page views a month? For more interesting background, check out “Girl Power,” an article from FastCompany.

Not only is Ashley amazing, she’s saving us all from having to dumb down our web design skills just to satiate the beast that is MySpace.

God bless her.

Mlarson is another terrific blog for useful and/or thought-inducing links … without never ending commentary of TDavid or, say, yours truly. My favorite of his this week was a link to a diagram illustrating the difference between generalist and specialist approaches to problem-solving. That’s via Communication Nation and how could I not like a blog named that?

Speaking of things you can’t help but like, did you ever read Suck? Back in it’s late-90s heyday it was an utter addiction of mine – a daily dose of irreverence from a snarky group of anonymous writers.

Whether you recall it or not eZine Keep Going featured an amazing article about what they rightfully deem the first great website.

(What I love the most about the article is that it’s a whopping 15,000+ words. I love a piece of journalism that you can really sink into.)

That link was gleaned from Karl @ Paradox1x, proprietor of Philly Future, who has been reading CK a long-ass time. We’re talking early Year 2. This week he made an absolutely essential post (partially) about the problem with Facebook which I later commented upon. Also good: the power of tagging is as a byproduct, not a feature.

Jumping back one topic, another weighty article you might enjoy is The New Economics of Pop Music (via Smokler‘s del.icio.us). Oh, also, while you’re enjoying thing please enjoy my two favorite photos of the week, via Ugly Green Chair and Dooce.

Finally, randomly, the top ten most amazing pictures taken by Hubble. Trivial note: every desktop I work on has a background from Nasa’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, which draw endless complements. At home it’s stars, dust, and nebula, at work it’s blue lagoon. So, clearly I am a nebula fan, but, really, there are so many good ones that it’s very hard to choose.

One Astronomy shot i glanced at while compiling that sentence wasan illustration of the relative size of Earth, which is coincidental, as I had pegged this Debbie Millman post on planetary proportions as a must-link because it’s the first time I’ve ever truly been impacted by such a visual representation (probably because it shows depth).

As a rule of thumb, that’s roughly a fifth of the amount of great reading I’ve been missing out on in the past year just because I didn’t have an RSS reader. Scary.