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rabi

But I Regress, pt. 4

October 26, 2010 by krisis

In my last installment I had given up pretty much all elements of boyish whimsy in favor of being REALLY SERIOUS about college, music, and dating, not always in that order.

Then came graduation. Or at least the specter of graduation on the horizon. I was zeroing in on a something-cum-laude diploma, my relationship with E was going well, and I was no longer maxing out my credit card to keep up with my new CD acquisitions.

In short, the pressure was off.

I let a little bit of whimsy back in to my life. When my mother bought a house I brought all my old comic books to my college apartment, slipping highlights to Erika and Gina under their doors. On a whim E and I bought Warcraft III, but our addiction was elastic – it never waylaid an assignment.

Then came what I refer to as my lost year. Actually, it was a year and a half. No, not the Behind the Music period with the evil girlfriend and all the vodka. (I’ve already blogged about that enough.)

I should have been so lucky. Nope, this time it was all me. Me, and City of Heroes.

Having drawn my comic collection back close to my bosom, I had gotten to wondering what was up with all of my former favorite heroes. In reading about their recent histories I also caught up with other industry news.

In my reading I kept catching rumors about a game that would totally immerse you in a comic-book world. I never retained the name. Whenever E and I would hit a mall I’d snoop around for said game, but I never saw it.

Then, smack in the middle of completing my Senior Project, I found myself reading an article about City of Heroes.

This was it – the superhero game. It was completely non-denominational – not Marvel or DC, but a continuity-free universe to plan your own hero in.

It was a long weekend at the end of April, and I decided to download the game client for a trial. It would be a way to let off steam between bouts with my Senior Project. I created some characters, including my sardonic superhero version of Rabi.

The incomparable Cassandra Lewis in action.

The next thing I remember is Autumn of 2005.

Okay, not really. Well, sort of really. I mean, I recall the rest of 2004 and most of 2005. I finished my Senior Project, graduated, moved in with Elise, and got a job. We moved into our house on Greenwich street and had a big party.

I just don’t recall anything else.

City of Heroes wasn’t a video game – it was liking living inside of a comic book. That’s what I always wanted – way back from my original comic book days when I was writing my Crisis Team novella on the bus.

I was playing it semi-professionally – like, 7.5 hours a day on the clock, double on weekends. I didn’t socialize. I didn’t write very many songs. Essentially, I worked, dated E, and played the game. THAT WAS IT.

I was known for showing up at 6pm on the dot with a martini in hand. My main character, the Rabi-derived Cassandra Lewis, was well-known to higher level folks on my server. I was a numbers guru, with lists and spreadsheets calculating damage and detailing game badges. I was a captain in my super-group. My under-bill consisted of dozens of other characters who – in my mind – all knew each other.

I even started talking about the game at work – a sure sign of deep, intractable addiction. In fact, on my lunch breaks I had begun penning a novella to tie all my characters together in a single sweeping narrative.

It all ground to a halt in the fall of 2005. The CoH staff made a big change to how they calculated data, and I realized that all of my spreadsheets and characters and stories didn’t really belong to me.

I was doing exactly the thing i swore never to do again when I started Crushing Krisis – write within someone else’s continuity, someone else’s editorial control. Quite suddenly my heroic bubble burst. I wrote a calm letter to the head game designer thanking him for 18-months of fun and went back to writing songs.

Thus came the second dark-age of my geekdom, which was spoiled this June by Mikeyil.

Tune in Thursday for the next installment in my saga. In the meantime, have you seen my Guide to Collecting X-Men Comics as Trade Paperbacks? That’s what started us down this whole geeky rabbit-hole of memory.

Filed Under: comic books, games Tagged With: rabi

Blog Spotlight: Meish.org

July 30, 2009 by krisis

I’ve decided that as frequently as I can I’d like to highlight a specific blog I love by talking about the blogger and linking to my favorite recent entries. It’s only fitting that I start with the single blog that was at the top of my link list when I launched nine years ago, and continues to be a daily read today:

Meg Pickard’s meish.org.

Meish wasn’t always Meish – it was once Not So Soft. In that capacity I consider it my parent blog, as I created my own specifically to ape what Meg was doing daily.

I’ve read Meg ever since, and she’s never stopped being compelling. She lives in London, was schooled as a sociologist, and spent time abroad conducting ethnographies. She presently works in some capacity for The Guardian.

Meg has a way – as all great bloggers do – of making the common seem very compelling. She also writes wonderful lists (frequently etymological in nature), takes clever and pretty photographs (even with an iPhone), and shares thoughts on social media.

And, as borne out by her original blog name (an Ani reference), Meg has wonderfully eclectic taste in music (and shares some of my OCD organizational qualities).

Some other recent highlights: she tracks the occurrence of “Flying Ant Day” with uncanny accuracy; she ruminates on the concept of time tourism (which I have discussed at length with Rabi); attempts to create a universal theory of measurement; dissects nationalist “visit us” campaigns; makes tables out of old maps; details past packing mishaps; and she bemoans a lack of adjectiveless sandwiches.

And that’s all just in the last year. Meish posts a few times a week, which makes it easy to follow in RSS; more voracious readers will want to subscribe to Meg’s many-times-daily tumblr.

Having met Rabi a long time ago, and Alison more recently, I’d say Meg is probably the blogger I’d most like to meet in real life.

Filed Under: bloggish, linkylove Tagged With: Ani DiFranco, rabi

Bad Teenage Poetry Blogging Day

August 12, 2008 by krisis

Yesterday Rabi pointed out that Superlagirl had declared today to be bad teenage poetry blogging day, and issued a challenge for other bloggers to join her in participating.

Alright then, Rabi. I’ll see your four pieces of (debatably) bad teenage poetry and – against my better judgment – raise you my (less-debateably) bad teenage poetry website preserved in all of its framed glory, directly imported from Geocities.

Behold: Synonyms for Damage. Even the name is bad teenage poetry!

Honestly, I only reinstated it for the novelty of having it there – I wouldn’t encourage you to surf through it, as I will share the chief passages of note below.

[Read more…] about Bad Teenage Poetry Blogging Day

Filed Under: high school, linkylove, poetry, self-critique Tagged With: rabi, red hair, Tori Amos

My Favorite Trio Tracks: #13 – Colorblind (from Trio Season 2, #7)

September 5, 2007 by krisis

Sometimes it takes someone else to hear the good in my own songs, and if it wasn’t for Trio that good would never come out.

Such was the case with “Colorblind,” which was one of the many songs I quickly tossed off in my post- Queen of Darkness period. I had so many songs to pay attention to at the time that quite a few of them slipped away (infamously, “This Long” wasn’t recovered until last November).

Rabi saved my song and I from repeating that fate by requesting it – first in the middle of a field, and again for the first Blogathon.

I repaid the favor by playing “Colorblind” of my own accord in Season 2, Trio #7 to mark the first anniversary of us reading each other’s pages. Knowing that Rabi was on the other end of the speakers made me appreciate the song much more as I recorded it, and makes it one of my favorite Trio recordings.

“Colorblind” was brought back to life this summer in anticipation of hanging out with Rabi in NYC, and now it’s become something it’s never been before – a solidified ballad that’s finally a comfortable part of my primary rotation of songs.

I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to hear it turn up in Trio Season 6…

Colorblind - 11/25/2001 [ 3:46 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Filed Under: Trio Tracks Tagged With: rabi

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

August 31, 2007 by krisis

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.

Filed Under: bloggish, comm, linkylove, over-achievement, weblinks Tagged With: lindsay, rabi

Happy Birthday To This

August 26, 2007 by krisis

I spent the majority of my day yesterday moving my best friend & bandmate Gina and her boyfriend Wes into their first house.

We were a small team of movers – just five, plus one in the truck – yet the move went as smoothly as it could possibly go… with the exception of one instance of Gina and I collapsing into giggles while trying to carry her futon around a bend in the stairs, and the fact that the laws of physics bar them from sleeping on a queen-sized box spring anywhere other than their living room.

Gina and I have now known each other for over half of our lives – through middle school, high school, college, post-college, and now whatever this is. It was amazing thing to be a part of her big move yesterday, just it continues to be amazing to be able to see so far into the past of someone, someone with whom silliness comes so easily, and with whom I am the epitome of comfortable, willing to speak my mind even when I know we disagree.

Crushing Krisis has now been alive seven years – since August 26th, 2000. That’s more than half as long as I’ve known Gina, and nearly as long as I’ve known the rest of my best friends.

To the best that I can discern, Crushing Krisis is the longest continuously running blog in Philadelphia, and has been since 2003. It’s an amazing thing to contemplate, especially considering that Philly was recently measured to be the second most bloggingest city in the United States. It also means that CK is increasingly one of the most established blogs on the face of the internet.

Just as significantly, since it’s inception Crushing Krisis has been a home to my original music, featuring the original (and, correspondingly, longest-running) singer-songwriter podcast, Trio.

Maybe more significantly than either of those distinguished roles, Crushing Krisis is a part of me – a persistent virtual reflection that helps me to see myself as I am, as I once was, and how I wish I would be.

This page is a lot of things, and a lot of me, and for each year that passes it gets a little more important, because I am getting older and starting to forget feelings from certain moments or stories from specific parties.

I long ago accepted that birthdays and new years days are not inherently transformative experiences – you don’t come out on the other side a new person more than you would emerge reborn from any other day of the year. Yet, they can mark your graduation into being a changed person.

As I wrote last year’s birthday post I felt as if I had finally reached a stable place in life, and if Year 6 of Crushing Krisis was about finding stability, then this past year has been converting stability into happiness.

Some of that conversion was literal. I went from writing and editing letters to managing publications and ad campaigns. I went from being a house-bound recluse of a songwriter to a semi-regular at area bars. and open mics. I transferred Crushing Krisis from Blogger to WordPress on November 12, in the midst of participating in the amazing National Blog Posting Month. I vowed to have a consumerless Christmas (and succeeded). And, Gina and I finally became the band we’ve always teased at being.

And now I am actually, unequivocally, at an equilibrium of happiness – which, if you read through as many hundreds of old posts as I have in the past few weeks, you will realize is a state I wasn’t sure I would reach. Not so soon, at least, and maybe never.

Year 7 of Crushing Krisis includes a slew of favorite posts. I cursed at the television. I had a headache so profound that I gave it a name. I reinvented myself for NaBloPoMo. I recounted my first heartbreak. During a single Trio I redefined one of my favorite songs, and debuted one that had been incubating for half a decade.

I almost burned down the house baking cookies in the microwave. I finally told the story of my life-altering nap at Bonnaroo. I recorded a perfect version of one of my favorite songs. I took my first trip to a casino. Septa carried out an act of terrorism against my favorite garment. And, I finally celebrated the 4th of July the way I’ve always meant to.

But, for every favorite post there’s another that’s just as essential. I offered the most succinct description of myself ever made. I retold the story of the Queen of Darkness, complete with soundtrack. I mercilessly deceived a toddler to get him to eat his vegetables. I contemplated six years of knowing (and reading) Rabi. I listened to the Beatles entire catalog while racing through my last letter of NaBloPoMo reading.

I examined my role as a narrator in my own songs, comparing it to that of an inanimate object. Elise and I found a new favorite restaurant, where we’ve since become regulars. I documented my seemingly endless struggle with organizing my home office. I started documenting my visual life. I reflected on how far my 2004 resolutions have got me.

I recorded my favorite Garbage song, as well as one of Madonna’s most obscure. I reflected on how feminism sometimes makes me cry. I drank a lot of limoncello. I helped present the fifth annual Lyndzapalooza with hardly a hitch. I recorded my catchiest song, ever. I nearly lost my mind in the middle of Broad Street.

After recapping my year in words or links I usually spend the penultimate paragraphs of these August 26th posts talking about what Crushing Krisis is to me and what I hope to make it in the future, but I don’t know if this iteration warrants the introspection.

After seven years of blogging Crushing Krisis is me or, more accurately, an integral, inextricable part of me that I hope will exist as long as I do and beyond. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how many posts I make in a year (105), or how many unique songs I feature (37), or how many times I tell you how I really feel (?). This is just what it is, and I wouldn’t want it to be anything else.

While the penultimate paragraph changes, the final sentiment never really does: thank you. Thank you, no matter how many posts you have read, or how many songs you have listened to.

Thank you, because each of our identities are half about our self-perception and half about others’ perception of us, and if this is a form of me it would only be half-alive without a you to complete it.

Thank you. And, happy birthday to this.

Filed Under: adulthood, august 26th, betterment, moving, Philly, self-aware, songwriting, Year 07 Tagged With: gina, rabi

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