Crom

Inventory

120 pieces — 89 magazine articles + 31 blog posts. Span 2001–2008. Magazine distribution: 2001 (21) · 2002 (19) · 2003 (18) · 2004 (16) · 2005 (10) · 2006 (4) · 2008 (1). Blog distribution: 2005 (22) · 2006 (9). Blog presence is concentrated entirely in his 2005–2006 peak — the moment he stopped only writing long-form and started firing off short rants in real time. Magazine login is crom; blog login is Crom (capitalized). Plus 9 game/movie/tech "Tag Team" co-bylines with David Gluzman (login cromd4v, 2001–03) and one Halloween co-piece with Pamela Hruska (anhedoniacrom, 2003).

Voice

Aggressive intelligence wrapped in vernacular fury. Antihierarchical. Attacks corporate mediocrity with the energy of someone punching a wall while quoting philosophy. Signature moves: escalating numbered lists, low-culture metaphors, sudden turns from bombast into genuine social critique, deadpan self-aware asides ("I may look stupid"). Black humor delivered with no softening — jokes about homelessness, death, kidney stones, failure that aren't quite jokes. Tone shifts subtly from moral outrage (2001–02) toward playful performance (mid-decade) without ever shedding the underlying despair. The blog voice is the magazine voice clipped to half its length — same vocabulary, same cadence, same willingness to drop a Tennyson quote into a Wii rant.

Topic mix

Social rage / systems critique ~25% · game + entertainment reviews ~30% (a chunk of which is the 2005–06 blog gaming spree) · tech critique + product design ~15% · absurdist performance pieces ~15% · personal/introspective ~10% · music ~5%.

Collaborations

• cromd4v (2001–2003) — 9 pieces with David Gluzman / D4V. Crom's longest collaborative thread. Almost entirely game and tech reviews built as alternating-voice "Tag Team" pieces: Spy Hunter 2, Halo, SSX Tricky, Wreckless, Jedi Knight II, Dungeon Siege, Rogers/Shaw Hi-Speed Internet, Unreal 2, and the gloriously unhinged Tag Team Commentary: Owen Wilson — a 2003 essay in which the two of them take turns calling Owen Wilson the antichrist. The format is the dual-byline launchpad for half of R4NT's early review section.
• anhedoniacrom (2003) — one piece with Pamela Hruska. Zen and The Art of Getting Candy, a Halloween candy round-table. He brings the lawn-stash strategy and the "Rockets" sugar-pill enthusiasm; she brings the catalog of parental candy-tax violations. Same alternating-paragraph format as the cromd4v pieces — the "Tag Team" was clearly Crom's house style.

Evolution

• 2001–02 — Apocalyptic young voice. Manifesto-rage; launch-era PS2 reviews swamped by cultural despair. Real-stakes urgency. Already running tag-team game reviews with D4V on the side.
• 2003–04 — Persona crystallizes. Discovers the performance mode: literary showdowns, baroque conspiracies, essays that pivot between jest and knife-twist. The voice gets weirder, wittier. The Owen Wilson tag-team is the high-water mark of the dual-byline experiments.
• 2005 — Peak. Most prolific year by far: 10 magazine pieces plus 22 blog posts. The blog turns him into a daily presence — short EA rants, Sony-Mafia jokes, Christmas-tree sermons. Manifesto of a Fat Kid reads like a Whitman sermon for cynics; First R4NT is the rare sincere testimonial; the absurdist Serpentor interview crystallizes the villain-as-puppet bit.
• 2006 — Attenuation, then a hospital stay. Four magazine pieces and nine blog posts. Cooler tone overall. Publishes a retraction on the Wii — "Detonation, Or Why I'll buy a Revolution" argues the console is the last bastion against corporate gaming mediocrity, exactly the position 2002-Crom would have torched. Ode to the Nurses is a kidney-stone-aria thank-you note that closes "Kiss my ass Kidney Stones" — sincerity through gritted teeth.
• 2008 — Coda. One piece. A folk album review that opens with violence and ends in wonder. Introspection outpaces rage.

Standout pieces

1. Everything was Great… till we brought the Wrath of God down on ourselves — Prophetic screed on cultural collapse; the founding manifesto.
2. The 6 ½ Reasons I Woke Up Drunk in Perkins — Masterwork: personal essay disguised as true-crime narration. Workplace humiliation → abandonment → Perkins pancakes.
3. Douglas Adams vs Crom: A Literary Showdown — Play-by-play literary boxing match in technical terms (Dadaism, dysphemism). He reads everything and can weaponize vocabulary.
4. Manifesto of a Fat Kid — "They told us / I'm telling you / Join Me." A ten-paragraph anti-consumerist sermon written in call-and-response. The closest he gets to writing pure Whitman.
5. Crom vs EA Games: The Battle for Fun — Treatise on the death of joy under corporate consolidation; game review as Trojan horse.
6. First R4NT — Rare sincere testimonial: "We are Avatars and Gods." What R4NT meant to him.
7. Ode to the Nurses — Kidney-stone agony as a thank-you note. Profanity, morphine, and genuine gratitude in the same paragraph.
8. Possible Conspiracies Against Me — Autobiography via conspiracy. Real humiliations plotted against imagined ones. Quintessential Crom.
9. Bad Dreams — Surreal nightmare about marionettes killing his grandfather. Darkest, most literary, no punchline.
10. Poison Devil Mac — Love letter to Apple's beauty paired with hatred of its usability; personal desire meets systemic critique.
11. Detonation, Or Why I'll Buy a Revolution — The on-record reversal on Nintendo, with a Tennyson stanza pinned to the bottom. Proof he reread his own back catalog.
12. Terrorist Pizza — The condensed blog version of the voice: NEXIS/CODIS, "Granny's apple orchard" servers, Google to fix counterterrorism in 20 minutes. Three hundred words and full flavor.
13. Tag Team Commentary: Owen Wilson — With D4V. The most committed bit of the cromd4v run.

Throughlines

Tech-as-mirror-of-self — every product review is a self-portrait (Apple's closed systems = locked-down creativity; EA's cynicism = his own despair). Homelessness as recurring metaphor — not crisis but a philosophical escape hatch from consumption. Interview-as-monologue — his villain interviews (Serpentor, Mumm-Ra) are essentially one-man shows where the subject is a puppet. Tag Team as a third register — when he shares a byline with D4V or Pamela, the dual-voice format turns the rant into a routine, and the routine lets him be funnier without losing the edge.

Fun details

• No filler ever. Even MapQuest directions become an essay on systems failure. Every byline earns its place.
• The late softening. By 2006–08 the voice mellows. He admits he was wrong about the Wii, praises folk music, talks about dispelling nightmares. The howl learns to breathe.
• The blog burst. 31 of his 120 posts are blog posts, almost all in 2005–06. He didn't migrate to the blog so much as bolt it onto an active magazine year.
• The Tag Team house style. All 10 of his collaborations (9 with D4V, 1 with Pamela) use the same alternating-paragraph format. He invented a R4NT house format and kept reusing it.
• Ends on a folk record. The final 2008 piece opens with broadsword waving and ends in wonder. A perfect last note.

The arc

R4NT's most internally combustible writer. Brought a literary register the other contributors didn't reach for — willing to be ugly, dark, ridiculous, sincere, often in the same paragraph. Without his nine-year-long howl — and the Tag Team format he ran like a stage show with D4V at his elbow — R4NT would read as a much politer publication.