Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

It’s time to DIE – pre-order the deluxe hardcover AND the role-playing game!

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DIE is a brilliant comic book about role-playing from Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, and Clayton Cowles.

DIE is also a brilliant storytelling role-playing game (RPG) from Kieron Gillen and Rowan, Rook and Decard.

This takes some explaining.

The thing you need to know right now is that if you want a deluxe physical copy of the RPG you have only three more days to Kickstart it, and if you want a deluxe physical copy of the entire comic run you can pre-order it right now (including pre-ordering from your local comic shop – yes, it’s already time to pre-order November hardcovers).

Okay, now on to the explaining!

DIE is one of the most-fascinating indie comic books of the past few years, both in concept and execution. The comic has already come and gone – it ran for 20 self-contained issues from December 2018 to September 2021 in four tight 5-issue arcs with no fluff.

(Mild first-issue spoilers lie ahead.)

The story started something like Stranger Things: 25th Anniversary Reunion.

A group of friends used to play role-playing games together in high school, but it ended with their sudden, inexplicable disappearance – and just-as-sudden reappearance years later, minus one member of their party and with a bevy of physical and psychological scars.

Where were they? They’ve never uttered a word about it to each other or anyone else and went on with their lives. Some of them were successful, some started families, while others could never shake their trauma and subsequent guilt.

On the anniversary of their disappearance they receive an unsettling reminder of their shared experience and they cannot help but be sucked back into something they know is much more serious and deadly than any game.

There are plenty of “real world people are transported into fantasy” stories out there, but DIE had a special, undeniable magic to it.

Central to that were the real world characters – five wounded adults, some of whom had spent their lives trying to be completely different than their game characters while others chased after becoming more like their fictional selves. They each had relatable stories about loss, addiction, identity, and disability, and those themes were amplified by the fantastical world around them.

As the story progressed, it became clear that this was a fantasy story with a very specific structure. In fact, the structure was so well-formed we could refer to it as a set of rules.

That’s because Kieron Gillen, in all of his wild genius, not only scripted a 20-issue comic story, but also the complete ruleset of the role-playing game the characters were playing in the story. [Read more…] about It’s time to DIE – pre-order the deluxe hardcover AND the role-playing game!

Music Monday: “King” – Florence + The Machine

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We all experience music in different ways.

When Cecily told me there was a new Florence + The Machine song out a few months ago, she said, “the first time I listened to it, I saw colors.”

Seeing (or otherwise experiencing) colors when you hear music is a form of Synesthesia. Explained simply, Synesthesia is when you experience one kind of sensory input, but it triggers a secondary perception or sensation. A common example is that some people think or see the color blue when they see the number “8” – even if the number is written in black or yellow.

Cecily’s comment made me consider how I experience new music.

As a musician, when I hear a song for the first time my brain usually begins to dissect it. How does the story in the lyrics track, what are the intervals in the melody, what is the chord structure, how do both change in the chorus, etc.

Yet, if I can press pause on my musician brain for long enough, I also hear music in a different way. Sometimes when my musician brain is switched off I hear a song and I get an intangible feel from it, separate from its genre or musical structure.

I don’t meant that the song makes me feel something, like happy or sad. It’s hard to describe. It’s almost more like a sensation. Some songs feel cold, slick, and metallic, like if I were to lick them my tongue would get stuck. Others feel like rubbery bubbles in a roiling boil, all ricocheting off of each other. Some have a sensation of fullness, even if their arrangements are sparse. I’m not picturing an image or a scene, but a concept.

I don’t get a feel from every song, and I don’t necessarily like a song if I get a feel from it. Sometimes I get the feel and I’m like, “Oh, so that’s what this song is,” and then I never need to hear it again. Sometimes the feel is addictive and I immediately crave more of it. Other times it is fleeting, and if I don’t jot it down in the moment I lose it forever.

Is that also a form of Synesthesia?

It’s hard to say, partially because I have so much difficulty defining it. My “feels” are not frisson, or “musical chills,” where certain musical passages give you physical goosebumps. I get those, too, especially on big crescendos! But, they’re distinct from this other sensation.

This was all on my mind the first time I listened to “King” with E (a major Florence fan). We pumped it out at maximum volume through our stereo speakers in the living room. [Read more…] about Music Monday: “King” – Florence + The Machine

Captain Crunch and the Butterfinger Cowboy

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The tastes of many American snack foods have become a distant memory after five years spent living in New Zealand.

A few familiar American snack brands make it to our remote shores and supermarket shelves, usually via companies with an Australian outpost. We can buy Cheerios and the occasional Fruit Loops, and there are $13 pints of Ben & Jerry’s to be had for the big spenders, but the vast amount of familiar expat snacks are absent from most Kiwi grocery stores

Mostly I don’t mind. My solution has largely been to cook a lot more meals and to eschew snack foods like cookies, chips, and crackers entirely. Why start a fresh snacking habit when I can instead scan down an aisle of unfamiliar cookie packages and not know what a single one of them taste like?

Being oblivious to local brands is a terrific diet.

The one kink in this flawless snack free life is that I sometimes catch myself regaling the kid with one of my distant snack food memories. As she has grown older I’ve realized how many of my stories tie to specific foods, like the routine of buying Twizzlers every time I went to the movies (and how it’s essential to enjoy them when they are fresh) or the excitement of discovering I had a Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpet in my lunch (and the process of rubbing them against your shirt to make sure the frosting wouldn’t get stuck to the plastic).

While I don’t necessarily miss the indulgences I describe to her, I do sometimes regret that I can’t give her the same experiences. I don’t need her to like all of the same snacks as me, but being unable to give her the opportunity to turn her nose up at them makes me feel like I’m missing some essential aspect of the parenting experience.

One snack in particular, has come up again and again in these conversations: Captain Crunch cereal. Yes, I know the actual name is “Cap’n Crunch,” but I’m not typing that repeatedly. It’s undignified for a man of the Captain’s position and tenure.

I explained the mouth-shredding experience of eating Captain Crunch to the kid at least a dozen times over. I’m uncertain why Fruit Loops were able to make the ocean-spanning journey to our shores and stores while the good Captain – himself a seafarer of some renown – could not. New Zealand loves peanut butter!

(E’s theory is that Captain Crunch (actually, a Commander) is obviously modeled on historical colonizers, who aren’t as welcomed as junk food mascots here as they are in the states. My theory is that because Kiwis don’t dip cookies in milk, they simply aren’t interested in more cookie-esque cereals since there’s no built-in allure to eating a bowl full of them.)

(Seriously, they don’t dip cookies in milk here. It’s a whole ‘nother post entirely.)

Occasionally I’ll fall down the internet rabbit hole of looking into buying Captain Crunch by the case. Even in bulk, the cost of having it shipped to New Zealand is prohibitive. Plus, I’d be crushed to find out that customs had incinerated a case of contraband cereal for violating some form of border integrity (which has happened to E before while trying to import spices).

It was these memories (and cravings) for the Captain that found the kid and I staring into the tantalizing maw of US import store in our local shopping center a few weeks ago. It is tucked into an odd corner of the parking lot such that I don’t usually need to walk past it, but a rainy day of household errands had us scurrying from from awning to awning to avoid getting soaked.

There we were, slightly damp and slightly breathless, peering through the window. There was the Captain, his smiling face splayed across a row of familiar red boxes, smiling back at me. It was the first time I had seen him in person in almost five years. [Read more…] about Captain Crunch and the Butterfinger Cowboy

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 4 – Fairytale Justice: recap & power ranking!

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Welcome to my recap of the fourth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7 – Fairytale Justice, an improv acting challenge!

I have done improv in college classes and as a warm-up for rehearsals, but I’ve never officially performed improv for an audience. That still gives me a lot more exposure to improv than average TV viewer. I’d guess that the vast majority of people’s experience with improv comedy comes from watching Whose Line Is It Anyway? and having heard of the rule of “Yes, and…”

Broadly, the idea of “yes and” means that you accept what others in your scene have said as reality and then you add to it.

That might be the primary rule of improv, but it’s not a rule in the sense that people who haven’t done improv often expect it to be. It doesn’t mean that you must always say “yes, and..,”, that your character can never disagree with another character, or that the story can never contradict itself. It also doesn’t mean that everything in improv has to be done without a plan or with no preparation.

“Yes and” is simply a guideline for productive collaboration. It’s a means of always moving forward instead of pausing to correct or edit, even if that means you move forward into conflict. Any good conversation you’ve ever had involved an amount of “yes and.” So have most of your successful group projects. Even working from an agenda in a meeting requires an amount of “yes and”!

As it turns out, life is largely a game of improv.

RuPaul emphasizes improvisation on Drag Race because improv is foundational to not only his idea of comedy, but his entire career. Ru loves the idea of “volleying” – being able to trade an escalating series barbs live with another player. That quick wit has been a huge part of what has made him an enduring icon in entertainment. He picked that up from a wide array of silly 60s, 70s, and 80s influences like Laugh-In, The Sonny & Cher Show, comedians on gameshows like Match Game, and late night hosts like Johnny Carson and Joan Rivers.

Not all Drag Race contestants fully grasp this idea of “yes and,” let alone how to use it to play for laughs. That has resulted in many uneven improv moments over more than two dozen seasons of the show’s many franchises. Yet, in this episode, we saw two of the best ever examples of “yes and” in Drag Race history!

Do you know which two queens I mean? Keep reading to find out in my full recap of “Fairytale Justice.” Plus, at the end of the recap I’ll update my Episode 3 power rankings to show where the queens stand after another week of Legendary Legend badges. (Want to skip right to the power rankings? Go for it!)

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen… win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 4 – Fairytale Justice: recap & power ranking!

My Dungeons and Dragons Lifeline

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Gather round, folks, because I bring you a tale that begins on the very precipice of the pandemic, extends through a year of extreme burnout, and involves a fantastical land full of dragons, dungeons, and indecisive half-elves.

Picture it: February 2020, AKA the last normal month on Earth. We were all reading COVID-19 articles with a sense of bemusement that grew into dread as they crept from the international news section forward to the front page, but most of our lives hadn’t been changed by it at all.

Three big things happened in my life in February 2020. First, I started what seemed like it was my dream job (spoilers: it was not).

Second, I started playing D&D remotely with my college friends back on the East Coast.

And, third, we were almost deported!

Of these three events, it seemed like starting the D&D campaign with friends would prove to be the least significant. It was the 18th anniversary of when we assembled to play together in college. That campaign ran for just a few months, but it gained an appropriately mythical status in our collective hindsight. When our beloved friend Dante passed away in 2014 we reformed for a one-off night, but none of us ever expected to play together again – certainly not with me halfway around the world!

During a catch-up with Lindsay about my new gig, she mentioned that some of the old gang would be assembling physically for a new campaign. We joked about how funny it would be to have me projected on a screen playing remotely – imagine that! But, the more we joked about it, the more the idea took hold. After making arrangements with our longtime DM, I appeared in that first session live from New Zealand!

I cleared off a desk in our spare bedroom, still packed with boxes from our recent move, and pointed it out the window so I could enjoy the sunny day while I played with friends who were up past midnight back in the US. It was ridiculous fun. We had forgotten all the rules and were all playing newly-invented characters and classes we had never played before. I inadvertently vaporized an entire alleyway of assailants with my first Thunderwave. Even though the session was meant to be a one-off, we agreed to reconvene two weeks later.

Two days later, the New Zealand government informed us we were 40 days away from deportation.

(This is too big a story to explain in full here, but in short: The NZ government told us repeatedly in writing that we absolutely should not renew our visas while we waited on a decision on our residency application. When we (as a pair assiduous rule-followers) did not renew our visas while waiting on said decision, the Ministry promptly informed us that our visas had expired, we were in the country illegally, we had to quit our jobs, and we should make plans to depart immediately.)

The weeks that followed our deportation notice were one of the most stressful periods I’ve experienced in my entire life. We lived every day wondering if we should put our newly-moved-into household into storage and look for a place to stay back in the states even as a global pandemic began unfolding. It was one of the many times in our lives as recent immigrants when we realized how powerless we were and how arbitrary the rules of borders and residency are in every country around the world.

Truly, I don’t know if I would’ve had the emotional fortitude to survive our tense process of getting emergency visas without the fresh connection with my best friends from the states and the knowledge that I’d see them all again in two weeks. We played that second session with all of us remote from each other as the early days of the pandemic reached into all of our cities. I certainly had a thrilling story to share in our “what’s been going on with you in the past two weeks!”

Then, between our second and third session, New Zealand began its first two-month COVID lockdown. That meant no leaving the house, other than for groceries, gas, banking, medical care, or a short walk around the neighborhood.

Even if the states wasn’t in an official lockdown, all of my party members were similarly shut in their houses. It was the perfect opportunity for us to set a regular date to play – none of us were going anywhere! Each session before playing we would catch up, sharing our stories of hunting for scarce groceries or finding the perfect pattern for sewing masks.

As our initial campaign drew to a close, I asked if I could take a turn at being Dungeon Master for a session or two while our regular DM prepped his next adventure. I had always been fascinated by DM-ing as a mash-up of carefully planned math and improvisational storytelling, but I never had the guts to try to convince people to play with me as a first-time DM. [Read more…] about My Dungeons and Dragons Lifeline