Crushing Krisis

Song of the Day: “Love Me Down” by Jason Derulo

June 19, 2017 by krisis

It’s often the case in my insular little world of no TV or radio that I’m aware of an artist for years before I hear a single note of their music.

That was the case for Jason Derulo. I knew he was an R&B singer and a good dancer, but hadn’t heard a single song of his before the band tackled “Want To Want Me” when it exploded as a song of the summer in 2015. I don’t know what I was expecting from him, but it wasn’t the sparse, slightly campy, almost retro vibe of that tune.

(We discovered it medleys perfectly with Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”as we tinkered with the arrangement to save me from singing the entire thing in falsetto.)

I was enamored enough to check out the entire Everything is 4 LP from which the song was plucked. I liked a lot of the LP and its breezy, synth-filled, 80s R&B vibe, but no song hit me as squarely as “Love Me Down.”

Comic Book Review: Dark Days – The Forge #1 by Snyder, Tynion, Kubert, Romita, & Lee

June 15, 2017 by krisis

This week DC launches a major event that promises to be the biggest story of the Rebirth era to date. What are the mysteries of Dark Knights: Metal, and is its first chapter Dark Days – The Forge at all accessible to readers not well-versed in DC’s history?

Dark Days – The Forge #1 (digital)

Written by Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV. Line art by Andy Kubert with Danny Miki, John Romita Jr. with Klaus Janson, and Jim Lee with Scott Williams. Color art by Alex Sinclair and Jeremiah Skipper. Letters by Steve Wands

DC Comics has always delivered better mysteries than Marvel.

Maybe it’s down to their “Detective Comics” namesake, or maybe it’s because none of Marvel’s major characters are as dedicated to unravelling secrets as Batman, but DC Events always seem more mysterious to me than their Marvel counterparts.

The Forge is no exception. I went into this quite suspicious that the story would work for me as a minor DC fan. I enjoyed it, despite there being a few elements that went over my head.

I think an even newer reader might actually fare better than me, because a lot of my confusion came from knowing just tidbits of some of the stories and being confused about what relied on history and what was introduced. To fresh eyes, this will all have the ring of a story that’s been in motion for years.

The central thrust of this issue is that Batman has been exploring a worldwide mystery, possibly spurred on by a revelation Court of Owls. It’s not about a villain or an imminent threat to the Earth, but it’s the sort of ball of yarn he cannot help but unravel. Per his usual M.O., Batman has been keeping other heroes in the dark, bringing them in only as-needed while using his vast resources both as Bruce Wayne and Batman to pursue an answer.

He isn’t the only one in the middle of an investigation. Hawkman recounts an unending life of reincarnation as he ponders the mysteries of the Nth Metal. And, Hal Jordan is assigned by one of the Guardians of the Universe to investigate an Earthbound mystery – and it’s no coincidence that the mystery is deep below Gotham City. [Read more…] about Comic Book Review: Dark Days – The Forge #1 by Snyder, Tynion, Kubert, Romita, & Lee

work duration vs. work effort, and walking the (productivity) plank

June 14, 2017 by krisis

Today, my friend and former colleague Stephanie wrote a great, brief article on productivity, procrastination, and burnout for SuperYesMore entitled “The Law of Reversed Effort.”

I tend to approach all tasks in life exactly as Stephanie describes the simple act of walking across a plank of wood on the ground.

[S]ay I put a long sturdy plank of wood on the ground in front of you and asked you to walk across it. You’d tell me “no problem” as you scurried along it. It’s such a simple task.

Let’s say I need 5 hours to accomplish something in our house. Anything. Blog writing. Exercising. Room cleaning.

I look at that personal work effort like it’s a plank of wood I have to step across. If the board is five times the length of my stride, I need to take five steps. If the work I want to do is 5 hours worth of work effort because that’s how fast I can type, exercise, or clean, I find 5 hours over the span of my week where I can accomplish said thing.

I starting thinking about the thing as already being completed if not for the formality of spending the actual 5 hours of work effort.

That’s not always the case, because work effort does not always equal work duration.

In a professional project management sense, that’s tends to result from a constraint on the schedule of the resource which puts in the effort. If you only have access to the designer on your project for an hour each day, it will take 5 days to do 5 hours of work. The work effort is 5 hours, but the work duration is 5 days.

However, let’s say your designer is available all day, every day. That 5 hours of work can be done in the next 5 hours starting at this very second, right? [Read more…] about work duration vs. work effort, and walking the (productivity) plank

she can read (much to my amazement)

June 13, 2017 by krisis

Much to my amazement, our nearly 4-year-old seems to have quite suddenly gotten the hang of reading.

Actual reading. Not just spitting back memorized texted in a simulacrum of reading. I still remember the first time I witnessed that, because it was the day we told all our friends we were pregnant. It was our friend M’s daughter’s third birthday, and she “read” me an entire book from front to back. I was in total shock that she could read so many words and so quickly, until her father pointed out that she had simply memorized the entire thing.

Our copy of Jumanji came with a CD of the audiobook narrated by Robin Williams. I put off playing it for EV6 as long as I could but finally the asking became more constant. I let her follow along with the book on the couch while I cried silently in the kitchen.

EV6 has always been good at memorization. It started one night when she was still impossibly small when she spat back the final page of Nightsong at me during her bedtime reading.

That was just the beginning. Since then I’ve heard this girl recite dozens of her books back at us – including a word-for-word rendition of Jumanji, and that is not a short children’s book.

Her current favorite thing to memorize is comic books, which I suppose must be slightly easier to do since you can focus on dialog balloons as if you are learning the script of a play. She has the entirety of the first 20 issues of Lumberjanes committed to memory. Sometimes she’s got it down after hearing it only two or three times, it’s amazing.

It’s amazing, and it keeps her nose buried in books all day every day, but it’s not reading.

I haven’t been too fussed with pushing reading skills on her while I’ve been staying at home. That’s in part because I learned to read so late, and partly because I feel like America’s school industrial process is overly quick to push advanced reading and math skills on kindergartners who aren’t always developmentally ready for them.

Despite that, I also haven’t ignored the skills. We’re always sounding out the words we encounter during the day and having little spelling bees on the refrigerator. I’s exclusively directed play and that’s fine. She’s three. I don’t expect her to read.

Or, didn’t expect her to read, because that’s what she’s been doing for the last week. [Read more…] about she can read (much to my amazement)

Song of the Day: “It’s Over, Isn’t It?” from Steven Universe

June 12, 2017 by krisis

Heading into my life as a parent, one of my initial hard and fast rules was “no children’s music.”

It was a rule I held to pretty firmly, not only for my own sanity, but because there is no such thing as “children’s music” or “adult’s music.” There’s just music. Yes, you can scientifically construct a tune that might more easily earworm its way into the brain of a child compared to the typical pop song, but if you can get a kid to like The Beatles, Michael Jackson, and Sia, why bother with anything that’s watered down?

As a part of my rule, I tend to be avoidant of most kid-oriented musical movies and TV shows, because those songs are some super earwormy little fuckers. I watched what parents went through with “Let It Go,” and that wasn’t happening in my house.

(We also have a, “no song more than once in a day unless we are learning to play it” rule in place to protect us in those situations.)

Then came Steven Universe.

Steven Universe is a cartoon about a matriarchal society of planet-conquering inorganic gems whose bodies are hard light projections and who have a tendency to break out into genre-bending song and what happens when one of them rebels against her home world and also gives up her body in order to have a half-human/half-gem, ukulele-wielding, sensitive pre-teen son named Steven with her solo rock songwriter boyfriend Greg.

Got it?

Not only does that sound scientifically constructed for me, but it also came with heavy recommendations from sources I trust as an appropriate show that doesn’t rely on the crutch of crude jokes and traditional gender roles, and teaches positive lessons about sexual orientation and consent.

(At least half of the prominent couples on the show are same gender pairings; when couples feel especially connected and cooperative they can fuse to form a more powerful gem form.)

Like I said, scientifically constructed for me.

Thus, when EV6 turned three and gained the rights to watch TV once a week, Steven Universe was amongst the first things we screened for her.

She was instantly addicted – to the show, to its charming and dynamic characters, and to its mind-blowingly awesome songs.

Seriously: these songs. They carry the story like the best songs in musical theatre but with all the heft of the catchiest pop song, usually in two minutes or less (since each episode has an 11 minute run time).

They thwarted my rule about children’s music, because they just aren’t. And, they skate around my rule against repeats because EV6 wanted to learn to play them herself on piano and ukulele! Like, I wrote out the chords to the theme song to match stickers on her piano and she taught herself how to sight-read the song so she could hear it whenever she wanted.

Mind: blown.

Last week the show finally released an official soundtrack album so we didn’t all have to rely on YouTube rips and occasionally SoundCloud posts for our fix. Of course, we had all the songs already, but having them perfectly edited and with an optimized frequency range got us listening all over again!

I debated mightily on which song to share with you to turn you on to the wonder of Steve Universe, and while I was tempted by one of the many brief pop songs in the show’s oeuvre, I went with what EV6 would play for you first and chose “It’s Over, Isn’t It?”

(Note that this is very much a “Musical Theatre” type song, which is its character Pearl’s style. For a Wonders-like retro pastiche, try “Steven and the Stevens,” for acoustic songwriter try “Be Wherever You Are,” and for indie pop try “Tower of Mistakes.” I’d link to Garnet’s “Stronger Than You,” but it’s a heavy spoiler for the first season!)

Seriously: are these the sorts of lyrics you expect to hear in most children’s cartoons (especially as sung by a female character)?

I was fine with the men
Who would come into her life now and again
I was fine ’cause I knew
That they didn’t really matter until you

I was fine when you came
And we fought like it was all some silly game
Over her, who she’d choose
After all those years I never thought I’d lose

What can you even say to that? [Read more…] about Song of the Day: “It’s Over, Isn’t It?” from Steven Universe