terror in a onesie

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

We all have our skills. I, personally, can find any household object that’s located inside my house. You’d think that wasn’t much of a super hero power, but Stephen and Eli have tested me to the limits of my skill with their ability to pick up the tiniest of objects and put them down again in unbelievably random places.

Liza has a whole set of powers that are by turns cute and annoying. They are things that only she does. Since she’s the only one at our house with these powers, I guess that makes her special.

Open Door Sense
No matter where she is in the house, Liza knows when a forbidden door has been opened. She comes running from her room when I open the pantry door. She can sense the laundry room door opening from her crib. It doesn’t matter where she is or what she’s doing, she’ll find the door that is open, go in, and start rummaging through whatever the door was protecting her from.

Locate Vacated Chair Power
This is probably a sub power to the Open Door Sense. Dang, the girl likes to climb up in your chair when you get up to do something else. I’ve actually seen her set up a lure to get someone out of their chair, leaving her to nab it while they are distracted by that thing over there that she’s done. It’d be annoying if it weren’t so funny.

Mom is Just Dropping Off to Sleep Sense
Her level of talent at this is amazing. No matter what time we go to bed, she always manages to cry at the exact point when I am just dropping off to sleep. Sometimes she’ll cry before we go to bed and most times we don’t have to do anything. She tends to make a lot of noise sleeping. Only when she is sick or teething do we actually have to go in her room and tend to her. Regardless of that, she will give a “whaaa!” nearly every night while I am falling asleep. It’s like the Emergency Broadcast System for my hypothalamus. Stephen’s super hero power is the ability to sleep through this.

The Power of Bugging the Crap Out of Eli
I think this is a super hero power shared by all siblings, but with Liza the Force is strong. Bottom line: she is way tougher than Emo Eli. She can walk up to Eli, pinch the fire out of his arm or pull his hair, and watch him dissolve into a puddle of pain. She thinks this is all very funny. My super power is making her throw a tantrum when I tell her in my Stern Mommy Voice that this hurts Eli and I am disappointed in her.

The Power of Cute
This is her final power and if you don’t believe in this power you haven’t witnessed this expression on my girl’s face:

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Psst, want to play some short text adventures? Each year I organize the yearly Interactive Fiction Competition for text adventures that are playable in 2 hours or less. The competition’s started, and all of the games are available. You’ve got nothing better to do over lunch, right? So download them, play them, and rate them!

And now you know where I’ve been the last several nights.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

We’re still here, we’re just busy as all get-out. More later when we’re not swamped. In the meantime, what have you been busy with?

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

People often say that war-themed first-person shooters are completely unreasonable. No one person, they point out, could really do what your in-game avatar does.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Major Robert Henry Cain, recipient of the Victoria Cross. His weapon of choice was the Projector, Infantry, Anti Tank (PIAT), an early rocket-propelled grenade launcher. During the Battle of Arnhem, on Tuesday, September 19th, 1944, tanks killed many of his men. After that, he made it his personal mission to destroy as many tanks as possible.

On one occasion, two Tiger tanks approached the South Staffords position, and Cain lay in wait in a slit trench while Lieutenant Ian Meikle of the Light Regiment gave him bearings from a house above him. The first tank fired at the house and killed Meikle, while the chimney collapsed and almost fell on top of Major Cain. He still held his position until it was 100 yards away, whereupon he fired at it. The tank immediately returned fire with its machinegun [sic] and wounded Cain, who took refuge in a nearby shed from where he fired another round, which exploded beneath the tank and disabled it. The crew abandoned the vehicle but all were gunned down as they bailed out. Cain fired at the second tank, but the bomb was faulty and exploded directly in front of him. It blew him off his feet and left him blind with metal fragments in his blackened face. As his men dragged him off, Cain recalls yelling like a hooligan and calling for somebody to get hold of the PIAT and deal with the tank. One of the Light Regiment’s 75mm guns was brought forward and it blew the tank apart.

But it’s okay: half an hour later his sight returned, so he ignored medics’ advice, grabbed a PIAT, and went to town. At one point he found and used an anti-tank gun instead of a PIAT, but its recoil mechanism broke. He fired so many rounds that by Friday his eardrums burst, so he shoved scraps of field dressing in his ears and kept going. When PIAT ammunition ran out, he switched to a two-inch mortar, at times firing it nearly horizontal.

By the end of the week-long battle, he had destroyed or disabled some six tanks, four of which were Tiger tanks, the most feared in the German arsenal. Oh, and he was thirty-five at the time.

Doesn’t that make you feel like a complete slacker?

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

When I was in middle school, I was–well, “pudgy” would be the kindest word for it. I weighed about what I weigh now, but was half a foot shorter. I resembled Jerry O’Connell in Stand By Me. When I went to Space Camp, staffers took a picture of me in the Moon gravity chair. I look like a young Old Elvis, all pasty white and bloated in my blue jumpsuit.

Unsurprisingly, I was not great at sports. The bane of my existence was Physical Education. The PE instructors didn’t help. One coach made us play a version of dodge ball where all of us students ran around the gym’s perimeter while he hurled balls at us. The last person standing won. Given that the coach once knocked a student unconscious, I guess what you won was freedom from a concussion. Later on he was fired for making advances on 12-year-old girls, so he was an all-around good guy.

One day we ran relays. Our whole class was divided into teams. I don’t remember if the coaches running the class did the dividing or if they picked relay leaders who in turn picked their teams, but either way, my team wasn’t happy to have me on it. I was fat. I was slow. I was not going to help our team win.

We were all sixth graders, with the social skills that implied, so my teammates were happy to tell me that I’d better run fast, that I’d better not lose the race for them. Eventually something snapped inside me. I smiled at all of them and, when I was handed the baton, sauntered down the length of the gym and back like a debutante strolling into a ball.

One of the coaches pulled me into his office. “PE may not be a perfect example of how life works, but it’s the best one we’ve got,” he told me. While I was still puzzling out what he meant, he spanked me with his fiberglass paddle.

I’ve thought about this episode a lot while watching Eli play soccer. In games, especially those played in the morning, he loses focus. He’ll run vaguely in the direction of the ball, or stop and hope the ball comes somewhere near him.

On the one hand, I want to tell him to keep his mind on what he’s doing and play as hard as he can. One thing soccer can teach him is the need to follow through on what you say you’re going to do — in this case, playing ball as part of a team. On the other hand, as my checkered athletic career taught me, there’s a big difference between intrinsic and extrinsic pressure. While I’d work as hard as possible if the sport interested me, if it didn’t, I wasn’t going to waste my time. I expect Eli to do the same. On the third hand, he’s four. As long as he’s having fun running around, he’s good. I’m stockpiling worries for the future, I suppose.

But if he ever gets punished for walking in a relay race, I’m going to smile and tell him a story.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

The English translation on signs does not necessarily tell the whole story.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

“Wall Street has rocket scientists creating securities…. A scientist sort of in the back room with lots of test tubes and bunsen burners–they’ve created monsters. They’ve created these securities that no one has a handle on.”
Nancy Kimmelman, former Wall Street economist

That’s right, it’s all our fault. We’re done creating V-2 rockets to rain down poorly-aimed destruction on England and Peacekeepr ICBMs with MIRV warheads bearing 200 times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. No longer are we content with splicing genes until we have glow-in-the-dark bunnies. Now we’re taking over the financial systems of the world! Mua ha ha ha!

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Drink Boss Coffee, or Tommy Lee Jones will cut you.

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Bubbling is preeminent.

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Courtesy of Abovenyquist, the NY Times weighs in on parents writing blog posts in their baby’s voice on sites like “Totspot”.

Really, now. Who would do something like that?

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Hello Kitty wants you to be pretty.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

“If the world was to end, and I could plan it because I was God, it would have to be something stupid, like the Chinese have built the Transformers to bomb us back ’cause they were pissed about the Hiroshima bomb.”

–Top Design contestant Natalie, from Montgomery, AL

Yes, that would indeed be something stupid.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Fruits has power.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve never been a full-blown comic book addict, but from time to time I go on a bender and read a bunch of comics collected as trade paperbacks. The benefit is that I don’t have to wait every month for the next installment, and I can check out reviews to get an idea of which ones are any good. Yes, yes, I’m the one with my jackboot on the neck of the comics industry because I’m not buying monthlies. I’m evil like that.

To assuage my guilt, I will now tell you what 5 comics from the majors (i.e. DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, and Image) you should go run out and read right now, especially if your knowledge of good comic book stories begins and ends at Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. I’ve thrown in small scans of a panel or three from most of the comics so you can see what they look like. All the comics in my list are genre works, though they run the gamut from straight-up superhero comics to fantasy retellings of fairy tales to the equivalent of a complete science fiction novel. All are available in trade paperbacks. Given each title’s vastly different goals, and that I’m only focusing on the major comic book publishers, don’t take this as a “BEST COMICS EVER!” list.

1. Blue Beetle. (Ongoing, with the first four arcs collected in TPB.) Blue Beetle is a DC hero who’s had two incarnations since 1939. In 2006 writers Keith Giffen and John Rogers (yes, that John Rogers) introduced a third, Jaime Reyes, a Latino teenager who discovers the scarab that gives Blue Beetles their power.

This has the most mainstream-comics approach of all five picks, which means that you have to deal with a lot of cross-overs. Bits of Jaime’s story show up in comics that aren’t collected in the TPBs. Thankfully, the stories in the TPBs stand on their own, and you don’t need an advanced degree in DC history to follow the stories. Even better, the writing, after a slow start, catches fire. Jaime has a family and a life outside being a superhero, and the relationships between him and his friends and family are tremendous fun. In fact, “fun” describes what this series is aiming for and what it delivers. It’s the comic-book equivalent of macaroni and cheese done exceedingly well. If you give the series a try, stick with it past the first four issues. By issue #11 (in the second TPB), writer John Rogers is flying solo and has found his footing, mixing great pacing with fun — and funny! — storytelling.

Plus in one issue Jamie gets to say, “Huge fancy-talking guys with swords on top of giant super-horses fighting evil! I take it back! Outer space is very cool!” Yes, indeed, Jamie, it is very cool.

2. Y: The Last Man. (Finished, with 10 TPBs.) Brian K. Vaughan’s concept is simple to sum up: what would happen if a plague killed off every mammal with a Y chromosome except for one guy and his pet monkey? From that premise Vaughan builds a fascinating and realistic story, aided and abetted by Pia Guerra’s understated artwork.

What makes me the happiest about Y is how Vaughan avoids a lot of apocalyptic end-of-the-world tropes. Civilization doesn’t break down overnight; instead, parts of it start grinding to a halt. A lot of the US government is now dead, and there’s practically no Secret Service left to protect the remnants. The preponderance of engineers and electricians were men, so the electrical power grid starts having problems. Holes fray in the fabric. The apocalypse is here, but it’s distributed unevenly.

And the last man isn’t really a hero in the traditional mold, nor does Yorick really grow into one, even as he’s smuggled about the country in the hope that a cure for the plague can be found before all mammals die out. All the characters — Yorick, Agent 355, Dr. Mann, Yorick’s sister Hero — respond in believable ways to an unbelievable event. Here’s a comic book series grounded in people and their reactions to each other.

Y: The Last Man is complete, so you know the series didn’t end before the story. Go grab it now.

3. Casanova. (Ongoing, with the first two arcs collected in TBP.) Pa-zow. Oh, man, where to begin. Casanova Quinn is a super-thief turned super-spy whose father is the head of a S.H.I.E.L.D.-like law-and-order organization. He’s a prodigal son who has a good twin sister — or bad, depending on what timeline he’s in. See, he gets yanked out of his home timeline and into another at the whims of brilliant madman Newman Xeno whose organization’s name, W.A.S.T.E., is a nod to Thomas Pynchon.

In the first issue, Casanova is thrown out of a large flying casino after besting its owner, three men squashed together into one through the power of Zen, in a staring contest. As Casanova falls he shoots two pistols at the casino in a futile attempt to damage it before being snatched out of midair and into his new timeline.

Later on sex bots with mad martial arts skills and a giant WWII-era robot show up, just so you know how this comic rolls.

The art is striking, the story so compressed and so fast-paced that it’ll take you a good two issues to figure out some of what’s going on, and it’s brilliant. I’ll warn you, though, that the sex and violence quotient of the series is insanely high. If a character quoting Ice-T from New Jack City (“I want to shoot you so bad my dick is hard”) sets your teeth on edge, this is not the comic for you. If you’re up for James Bond, a blenderized take on the past’s version of a science fiction future, and a story that could not stop for death, all moving at breakneck speed, then pick this series up. (Comic Book Resources has all of issue 1 online.)

4. Fables. (Ongoing, with 11 TPBs.) Like Y: The Last Man, Fables has a simple high concept: what if all of the characters from fairy tales and folklore were driven out of their fantasy world by The Adversary and had to live in secret in Fabletown, an enclave in modern-day New York City? And like Y: The Last Man’s Brian K. Vaughan, writer Bill Willingham uses his premise to set up a lot of characters and then let them bounce off of each other. While the overarching menace of the Adversary is present throughout, the core of the series is how this group of displaced people adapt to their surroundings and how they deal with each other.

Willingham plays the “what if?” game with his characters. What if Snow White and Prince Charming were now divorced, leaving her to be the deputy mayor of Fabletown under Old King Cole while Prince Charming was forced to depend on the kindness of others? What if the big bad wolf took on human form and was Fabletown’s sheriff? What if Goldilocks grew up to be a political activist who wasn’t above assassinating those who got in her way? What if Jack of giant beanstalk fame became a trickster figure whose schemes often went awry?

Fables is ongoing, but Willingham is good at creating self-contained story arcs. He even took what he had planned as the final Fables storyline involving the Adversary and managed to work it in earlier without killing off the series. Start at the beginning and work your way forward. You won’t regret it.

5. Starman. (Finished, with 1 hardcover out and 5 more to go.) “Wait,” the comic book fans are saying right now, “wasn’t the critically-acclaimed James Robinson Starman over in 2001?” You’re right! But it’s been out of print for years, until the new hardcover omnibus arrived this year. There are five more to go, at which point all of the issues will have been republished. And Starman is so awesome that it deserves this resurrection.

Like Blue Beetle, Starman was a previously-existing hero whose name got passed on to someone else. In this case, the new Starman was Jack Knight, son of the first Starman. Jack becomes the new Starman reluctantly, never dresses in a standard spandex costume, and early on would much rather be doing anything other than being a hero. Where Robinson excelled with the series was in building a compelling story out of cast-off bits of the DC Comics universe, and do it in a way that even I, who knew very little about the DC Universe, could enjoy it. He took a grade-C superhero and a grade-D supporting cast and turned them all into interesting, complex people. He made a comic about families coming to grips with their legacies, whether heroic or villainous. Moreover, he made Opal City, where Jack Knight lives, a character in itself, occasionally offering issues that filled in the city’s history. By the end of the run, Opal City was as much a character as Jack Knight, The Mist, or The Shade.

The careful worldbuilding, the intricate plotting, and the fully-realized characters made Starman one of the best comics in the 1990s, but it wasn’t wildly popular, quickly falling out of print. Now that all of the issues are returning in omnibus format, you can see why so many people praise Starman.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Wonder what we did while Kat was visiting last week? Here’s her photos of the trip.

Click on the photo to see all of Kat’s photos from her visit to Huntsville.

We had an awesome time with Kat here while Stephen was gone to Dragon*Con. Thursday, after I had dropped off Kat at her parent’s house and picked up Eli from school, he moped around all afternoon saying he missed Kat and moaning. I can’t say I’ve recovered any better.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

The large towns in Japan are very blind-friendly.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

We were outside at the playset one afternoon this past week and Eli requested I tell him a story. He’s always making up stories so I guess he decided he needed a break from all the work and wanted to hear someone else’s made up stuff.

I might be crafty with a glue gun and paper or even upon occasion fabric or other materials. I think I can cook decently and do a few other things nicely but I am not a storyteller. I guess it is the practical gene in me. Don’t get me wrong, I love to read. I just don’t seem to have the ability to make this stuff up.

So I started telling him the story of a boy named Kreeli who fought a dragon and saved his friends, LukeDuke and Burwill, and his sister, Bliza. Yeah, after that story I was out of juice. I didn’t have much to begin with but I was tapped out after the dragon.

But as in all things with kids, the thing that you most want to disappear becomes the most favoritest thing they can imagine.

Every night this week I’ve had to tell a Kreeli and Bliza story. Sometimes I slip and say Eli and Liza and he reminds me that these kids names are Kreeli and Bliza. I guess he has to maintain the wall or something. I’ve tried to keep the stories fantastical but the last couple of nights they’ve deteriorated into rehashes of the day or previews of the next day. He doesn’t seem to mind as it netted him pancakes this morning since Kreeli had pancakes last night in his story.

The nicest part of this is that it allows me to reinforce stuff we’ve discussed during the day. Kreeli never kicks other kids on the soccer field. He’s kinder than that. Kreeli always watches out for Bliza and takes care of her. Kreeli always does the brave thing, the kind thing, the smart thing. So while in the beginning it was annoying for me to do, it’s starting to grow on me.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

My birthday occurred during Dragon*Con this year. I mentioned it to some of my friends, and said that I wanted to celebrate somehow.

Friday, when the convention is getting in full swing and all of my friends are, like me, crazy busy trying to keep things running, they showed up in the room I help manage.

They brought cake.

(Pic courtesy of Tito)

And this is one of many reasons why my friends are awesome.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Remember the bad old days? The bad old days weren’t so long ago. That last part of sleep training was posted May 20th, so only a few months ago.

In the past week we’ve had another step forward in Liza’s sleeping. She is now able to tell on her own when she needs a nap. She starts grouching and putting her head down on every available surface. I ask her if she needs a nap, if she wants to go get her baa and blankie (pacifier and blanket) and take a nap. She all but runs to her room and waits for me to get a baa down from where they hang. I ask her to close the door. She shuts the bedroom door. I turn on the music and close the blinds. I rock her for about 30 seconds and sometimes not at all. I put her in the crib still awake. She does a face plant on the mattress and waits for me to cover her up. I sneak out of the room. Liza goes to sleep on her own. And at night, she stays asleep all night long.

Those last two sentences are not ones that I thought I’d ever get to write down.

Shhhh.

I’m going to take a nap now too.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

This afternoon we headed outside for popsicles and swinging.

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Eli had to show Kat some Jedi moves. Jedi moves involve him jumping from the step while swinging his lightsaber wildly.

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Here’s Liza producing some Spielberg brand looking or maybe it’s Bono serious gazing, hard to tell.

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He was in heaven this afternoon since Kat and I could take turns pushing him in the swing.

Good thing they make that red die so it washes out these days, otherwise we’d never see this outfit again. Check her “buh-fie” hat that Kat brought her.

It’s hard to resist this much cute. Except when Liza’s awake at 3 a.m. and Eli gets out of bed six times before he falls asleep. Then? Then it is so easy to resist the cute.