Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Vote!

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EV has accompanied me to the voting booth for every election since the 2014 primary, so the people at our polling place know her on sight even when I am an ever-changing chameleon who then was short-haired and in business clothes but now has long purple hair and wears cowboy boots.

“She’s getting so big!” one older woman exclaimed. EV is now too large to perch on the edge of the card tables while I sign my name to the voter rolls

“Are you going to help your dad vote today?” ask another.

EV responded with her shy toddler smile, and I said, “Well, it is the most exciting thing you can do.”

The older woman chastised me, “Your life must not be very exciting, then.”

My response?

“What could be more exciting than having the right to vote?”

Book Notes: Fiction Friday Preamble

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]2012-02-27_01-04-47_524In an alarmingly short amount of time I will post the part of this Patreon launch I am both most-excited and most-anxious about – the first publicly-available material from my 2010 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) novel, which has since been through several rounds of edits and expansion.

This superhero story has been with me since 1994, when I scrawled the title “Crisis Team” longhand on composition paper at seven in the morning before being picked up for Masterman to attend 8th grade. It became fodder for English class writing assignments, and later the first thing I rushed to type on my first Word Processor with a screen and memory. I used to carry a binder of it around with my school books, handing it to Gina for a read in Health Class.

After a few years of carrying it with me, its name became my email handle, which then morphed to Krisis with a K when I found that Crisis was often already taken.

Over the years I got in the habit of constantly rewriting the first chapter – updating it as a proof of concept. Of what, I’m not sure, since I never once would follow through with a second chapter or an outline. Perhaps it was just my way of keeping the story fresh for myself.

In 2010, two factors conspired to make me finally get past the first chapter. I had just read (and heard) Eric Smith’s Textual Healing and was suddenly inspired to write my own fiction. And, Gina had thrown down the gauntlet that she was attempting a NaNoWriMo book and that I should do the same.

Finally, I sat down to think about more than the first chapter. Who were these people? What was this world? How would it change as the result of people with super powers emerging? Were they just emerging, or had they been around for a long time.

I was energized by the questions and dashed the book out in 30 days. Yet, having finished the first draft, I sunk back into old habits – I’ve been revising it for six years rather than writing more.

There’s a start-up saying – “better shipped than perfect.”  It’s fine that the end goal of writing a book is publishing a book, physically or digitally, but publishing requires something resembling perfection – and perfection is my eternal foe. The way I got the novel out of my head was to give myself permission to write badly for a month just to get it on paper. The way I’m going to get the novel out into the world is to give myself permission to post my working draft here for you all to read, knowing there are still changes both small and large to be made before it reaches a final, printed state.

I am so anxious and excited for you to read it.

35-for-35: 1982 – “Maneater” by Hall & Oates

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]When I was slightly older than EV I still did not have my own record player (I know – the injustice), so my mother was in charge of pulling out my favorite songs on vinyl and then dropping the needle into the groove.

hall-and-oates-h2oOne of my earliest musical memories is of her playing “Maneater” on repeat for us as we sat in our rocking chair. I know this was an early memory because the turntable was on a set of ramshackle shelves built by my father before my parents separated, rather than its later home on the other side of our living room.

Here’s what I understood about “Maneater” at the time: it was about a creature, like “Thriller.” She ate people! It had a throbbing bass line that was good for bopping along to. Also, it was on an LP called H20, which meant water but also meant Hall & Oates. Basically, it was the most clever thing anyone had ever thought of.

As a toddler, I may have missed a few entendres.

As with a lot of my early-in-life vinyl favorites, I completely lost touch with Hall & Oates as I grew older and amassed my own record (and, later, CD) collection. In fact, unlike Madonna and MJ, who I began spinning again in college, Hall & Oates didn’t make their return to my collection until 2010 inspired by the requests of my communications-buddy and cube neighbor, MK.

I was even listening to The Bird and The Bee’s H&O cover LP before I was listening to H&O again!

Revisiting “Maneater” as an adult and a musician, a whole new set of elements stick out for me.

The intro is a familiar Hall & Oates gimmick – a long minor-key instrumental that gradually adds additional instruments (bass, keyboards, a trickling water effect, and smarmy saxophone) and then pops into the relative major key for the verse.

hall-and-oates-maneaterThe lyrics are as lurid as those of my other childhood favorite with an awesome bassline, “Billy Jean.” Here, H&O are unsubtly describing falling in love with a sex worker – or, at least a woman who is ready to devour any high-roller who enters her life.

What makes the song interesting to me today is this line: “If you’re in it for love you ain’t gonna get too far.” Who exactly is pursuing the Maneater, in the context of the song? Is it another rich boy, unware that he’s about to be drained dry? Or, is it someone who is genuinely falling for her.

If the latter, who are H&O to warn him off? Maybe he’s the true love that has been missing from all of Maneater’s conquests.

We’re not meant to know. Hall & Oates wrote fantastic songs, but they weren’t ever especially known for the complete narratives of their lyrics. If you don’t believe me, please share – what is the “That” for which “I Can’t Go For”?

Even without a coherent story, there’s no doubt that “Maneater” is one of Hall & Oates’ stone cold early-80s classics.

Crushing Krisis: Blog of Tomorrow (a Patreon launch event)

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Behind-the-Scenes at the Patreon Introduction Video

Behind-the-Scenes at the Patreon Introduction Video

patreon-squareWelcome to a very special month of Crushing Krisis, which I have dubbed “Blog of Tomorrow”!

Why is it so special? I’m glad you asked!

I am marking my ten-year anniversary of using WordPress with the launch of a Patreon campaign. Patreon allows readers to become Patrons who cover the costs of running CK.

Rather than tempt you to pledge your support with promises of future content you can only imagine (and that I might not be able to produce), I’m bringing you the real thing – along with the 16 years of blog posts and comprehensive Marvel Collecting Guides you already love.

For the next 30 days you’ll get a future vision of what I think CK could be a year from now with your regular support and interaction, and with my full non-parenting attention on blogging. It’s something I’ve never had the opportunity to do before. My hope is that if you love it, you’ll become a Patron to help me make this a reality for CK.

Here’s a glimpse of the content you’ll read on CK this month:

I want you to feel the need check Crushing Krisis every single day the way you would all your other favorite websites. The difference is that I’m doing this all on my own without other contributors, artists, editors, or advertising dollars. And, while posting won’t remain at this insane intensity come December, it will still feature regular content just like what I’m producing this month.

Here’s my pitch video from Patreon, where I’ll be making another series of almost-daily posts to explore behind-the-scenes details of running a 16-yr-old blog.

At the end of the month, commenters, mailing list subscribers, and Patrons will help me decide what future content to focus on first. We’ll unlock new and regular features as the pledge total rises.

Want Wonder Woman and Maurice Sendak readalongs instead of Image and Dr. Seuss? Want more original music and less music essays? Wish I’d talk more about movies? I’ll be asking you at the end of the month.

Read on for more of the backstory on this unprecedented month of content. [Read more…] about Crushing Krisis: Blog of Tomorrow (a Patreon launch event)

things blow up sometimes

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If you visited CK anytime between 5pm this afternoon and 10 minutes ago you witness a really confusing muddle of a half-installed WP theme and a cascade of PHP errors.

That’s all due to some sprucing up I did today to prepare for my big November plans for CK. November will mark my 10th anniversary on WordPress, and my ninth anniversary on this lovely, plain little WP theme, Very Plain Text.

I don’t tend to give a lot of thought to the interoperability of old things until they up and die. I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn that E’s iPad from 2010 is trapped on version 5.something of IOS and cannot load any apps from the App Store since the lowest IOS they’ve been developed for is v6. I was puzzled when my old PreSonus FirePod didn’t have drivers to work on the newest operating systems – sure, it’s a decade old, but I payed good money for that hardware only a decade ago!

The sad fact is, a decade is now forever when it comes to technology. Heck, four years is practically an eternity. It’s not so much planned obsolescence as forced obsolescence.

Which brings me to tonight. I did a bad developer thing and changed multiple variables of my WP install at once without backing up first, and as a result none of my plugins wanted to speak to each other on the Admin Panel anymore. To make things worse, when I turned on debugging in WP_Config, a massive litany of errors unfurled because apparently when your WP theme was last updated to work with WP2.6 and you’re on WB4.6 pretty much every function call it uses has been deprecated in some way. It was impossible to figure out what other things were broken through the waterfall of complaints about my theme.

Three frantic hours of pulling back-ups later and everything was back to normal (well, normal for my 9yr-old theme) except for my one most relied-upon plugin, WordPress Editorial Calendar. It was still borked.

I’ve written about my love for WordPress Editorial Calendar before, and that love has never ceased. Nothing ever gets done here without it; if you notice I’m making halfway decent posts at a rate of more than once per week, it’s because I am spending quality time with my EdCal. Yet, even after all of my rollbacks it was still throwing a “Unable to Parse” and “Unexpected token” error. I was tearing my newly re-purpled hair out. There was only one hit on Google and WordPress.org and it had no guidance for me. I had reversed everything to the state it was in when I woke up this morning!

Except… except when I rolled out of bed this morning and immediately started doing SQL in Sequel Pro (seriously: not working at an analytics company anymore, but that is still my life), I noticed a few recent post titles that had wrong punctuation and edited them directly in SQL. And some of that punctation could be escape characters in some contexts. Could it be that even thought the rest of my blog was fine, those unescaped title characters were killing my EdCal?

Yup.

So, if you’re ever getting those errors on EdCal, try going far into the future and then scrolling back week by week until you hit a week that throws the error, then review your post titles for that week.

And, I’m very grateful that everything is back to nine-year-old normalcy here on CK. You should take a moment right now to appreciate some of the older things in your life whose function you take for granted.