Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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For those of you who didn’t realize that Philadelphia was the sexual technology Mecca of the East coast, check out this msnbc story about two women who were arrested for running a “sex dungeon” out of their residential “computer solutions” storefront. This local flavour story was brought to national spotlight [sic] by my local NBC affiliate, who didn’t even bother to blur out the number on the store’s sign. Good job, guys.

Philadelphia’s NBC10 news crew is the largest local collection of yellow journalists and hyperbole artists that i’ve ever had the opportunity to witness in action, and their newscast tends to be aimed directly at people who circle Access Hollywood and Wheel of Fortune in their teevee listing every week (which is a double whammy, because not only are those two syndicated gems typically aimed at the lowest possible denominator possible, they tend to be on at the same time every night and thus don’t generally require circling). Lead stories on their news teasers feature (in this order) (without fail) death, fire, breaking news on weightloss, & NBC-centric entertainment news. This station followed each NBA Championship game with a half-hour of local coverage featuring reporters standing in every sports bar in the Greater Philadelphia Area rather than run the normal nightly news or the NBC post-game show. They break into soap operas to report a dusting of snow that had been forecasted the night before. Their anchors are local glamourpusses who marry local politicians and are in-turn reported on by local gossip columns. In other words, it’s a quality all-American news organization that focuses on the subject-matter that an alarming number of Philadelphians actually care about.

Please don’t fail to take note of the wholly unspecific and incidental (though ironically written) reporting on this story by Lu Ann Cahn, who recently reported on a “Flash Fire” at Drexel that was really a small propane tank explosion. Aside from her tantalizing lead-in mention of the women possessing a “large knife,” there’s the explicit name-dropping of “medical bondage.” Unless Lu Ann has mistaken “bondage” for the ever popular “masochism” angle of S&M, i can’t imagine what she meant by “medical bondage” other than maybe wrapping ace bandages around unusual body parts. My favourite part of of the article was, without a doubt, friends and neighbors who didn’t mind the (apparently) openly operated sex shop as long as “they would be dressed real nice” and that their customers were “guys in Mercedes.”

B&D, S&M, E&P, and the shocking news about your favourite Friends star’s personal life, tonight on NBC10 at 11! And, for more unsual explorations of sex and computers, head over to Ernie at LYD, who blogged the article all the way from California.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4364274/

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You know how i’m always talking about how totally pornographic i’d be with a webcam? Or, alternately, are you a SurvivorCam fan? Well… a small brown box just arrived in admissions, and all it contains is packing material and your gateway to my luscious naked ass. Be very, very afraid.

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As if i wasn’t distracted enough at work already, now i have a new toy. I’ve always been really horrible with vector-related games like this because i naturally bring my mouse way in back of the vector to get finer leveraged control of it, but here that’s the equivalent of shooting a golf ball out of a cannon. Via the ever-distracting and much-loved Meg.

Update: I was only one over par on my second try, but i feel as though playing against other real players will scare me and i’ll be awful. For such an incredibly straightforward and simple game, MiniGolf has too many damn subtlies!

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/4026894/

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So, this morning Shafted.org finally gave up the ghost. You can go to read the final message of apathy and disinterest if you’d like, but i’ll spare you the link.


Sometimes bands break up because their overall creative urge started to diverge, and sometimes the various members of those bands go on to do beautiful things. Rather than use the obvious example of the Beatles, take a look at Ben Folds Five: they recently broke up because as a band they weren’t functioning properly, but Ben Folds has a new solo album coming out in a matter of months picking up where his creativity left off. I hope Robert and Darren have similar projects up their sleeves…

Anyhow, my point is that despite the old administration of Shafted losing interest in the interactions therein, those of us doing the majority of the interacting remain engrossed. As a result, today i uploaded the very basics of Repulsed using Noah Grey‘s spectacular GreyMatter as the backend. Only time will tell if we still have anything interesting to say, but at least now we have somewhere to say it.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/05/3820815/

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(logged via lyd:) Have you been to Cloudmakers.org? In my inestimably humble opinions, it is by far the best and most innovative use of the web ever, for anything… or, more accurately, is is the result of that innovation (and it only took me two whole hours of reading the same html document to come to this conclusion). Cloudmakers it the group that monitors the web-integrated real-time story that ties in to the new Spielberg flick (originally Kubric) movie AI, except this story takes place nearly a century after the movie and seems to include only one or two of the same characters. And, even more thrilling and chilling, the game has integrated into real-life with actual rallies that dispersed clues… so that if people didn’t attend the game would have stalled out. With a month left still until the movie is released, the mystery seems to be still far from its end. Meanwhile, the game features a full cast of characters, hundreds of dynamic pages of html, (long distance) phone numbers with actual messages to hear, email responders that continuously talk back, fax numbers to obtain information from, and nearly impossible puzzles that integrate information from all of the above sources and more. At a recent panel about the movie there were business cards for an special effects director who shares a name with the first character introduced into the game, and the back of the business cards contained a clue that wasn’t released in the web aspect for a few more day. The game itself occasionally refers to Cloudmakers as a multi-person problem solving scheme that equates to group AI, and occasionally links fan sites as in-game news. Also, if you’re the first person to solve a puzzle you can occasionally effect the game environment, as one person got to write a faked autopsy for one of the primary players in the puzzle.

The game itself is a bit too involved for me, but following it is nothing but a delight and joy. Second to journalism (or stardom), i’d love to be employed to design stuff like this, whether it be storyboarding or web designing. In the meantime, i can just hope that the movie is half as good as what has been conjured up to accompany it.