My daughters are bummed that I won’t take them to see Deadpool. Apparently, he’s their favorite comic book character. This was news to me — I don’t think they’ve ever read a Deadpool comic book. (As for the reasons why the kids are sitting this one out, read GeekDad’s 7 Things Responsible Parents Should Know About Deadpool (Only 1 of Them Matters)).

For months leading up to the movie’s release, I’ve been subjected to incessant questions about the possibility of them going to see Deadpool — and the answer is always no. But I caught a break last week when Rosanna Pansino, the host of the super-popular nerd-themed YouTube cooking show Nerdy Nummies, released a video on how to make a pizza that looks like Deadpool’s mask.

You see, my youngest daughter is a big fan of Nerdy Nummies. She spends a lot of time watching these videos and the two of us recently stood in line for four hours to meet Ro (as Rosanna refers to herself) and buy a signed copy of the Nerdy Nummies Cookbook.

So I offered a compromise with the kids: I still won’t take them to see Deadpool; instead we can make a Deadpool Pizza. Okay, so maybe not the greatest deal in the history of parent/child deals, but we enjoy cooking as a family, so they agreed.

None of us had ever made pizza dough before, but it turned out to be relatively simple procedure that gave us a great reason to use the KitchenAid mixer’s bread hook. We even took turns tossing the pizza dough into the air before Deadpooling it up, which was a lot of fun — and a little harrowing.

After diligently following the instructions in the Nerdy Nummies video, here’s what our Deadpool Pizza looked like when we pulled it out of the oven.

Okay, so it doesn’t look as good as Ro’s and the dough is a little too thick for my taste, but for a first effort we’re calling it a win.

So if your kids love Deadpool but taking them to go see the Deadpool movie falls outside of your parental comfort zone, making a Deadpool Pizza is a fun alternative and a great activity for families who enjoy cooking together. The whole process takes about an hour from start to finish … not including clean-up.

 

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Daily #DadJoke for February 19, 2016:

How do you drown a hipster?

Throw him into the mainstream.

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Have a great joke that you would like to see in print (complete with a “submitted by your name here” shout-out)? Send it in to GeekDadJokes!

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Saliva Pool

How long would it take for a single person to fill up an entire swimming pool with their own saliva?

—Mary Griffin, 9th grade

The average kid produces about half a liter of saliva per day, according to the paper Estimation of the total saliva volume produced per day in five-year-old children, which I like to imagine was mailed to the Archives of Oral Biology in a slightly sticky, dripping envelope.

A five-year-old probably produces proportionally less saliva than a larger adult. On the other hand, I'm not comfortable betting that anyone produces more drool than a little kid, so let's be conservative and use the paper's figure.

If you're collecting your saliva,[1]This question is gross, by the way. you can't use it to eat.[2]I hope. You could get around this by chewing gum or something, to get your body to produce extra saliva, or just by drinking liquid food or getting an IV.

At the rate of 500 mL per day from the paper, it would take you about a year to fill a typical bathtub.

A bathtub full of saliva is pretty gross, but that's not what you asked about. For some reason—I don't really want to know why—you asked about filling a pool.

Let's imagine an Olympic-sized swimming pool, which is 25 meters by 50 meters. Depths vary, but we'll suppose this one is uniformly 4 feet deep,[3]You can read more of the regulations here; a pool with starting blocks does need a slightly deeper bit near each end, but it can be shallower in the middle. There doesn't seem to be anything in the rules about a maximum depth, so I suppose you can make a pool that continues through to the other side of the Earth, but then you run into trouble when you try to follow the instructions in section FR 2.14 about painting lane markings on the bottom. so you can probably stand up in it.

At 500 mL per day, it would take you 8,345 years to fill this pool. That's a long time for the rest of us to wait, so let's imagine you went back in time to get started on this project early.

8,345 years ago, the ice sheets that covered much of the northern parts of the world had mostly receded, and humans had just begun to develop agriculture. Let's imagine you started your project then.

By 4000 BCE, when the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent had begun to develop in modern-day Iraq, the saliva would be a foot deep, covering your feet and ankles.

By 3200 BCE, when writing was first developed, the saliva would creep past your knees.

Around the mid-2000s BCE, the Great Pyramid was constructed and early Mayan cultures emerged. At this point, the saliva would be getting close to your fingertips if you didn't lift your arms up.

Around 1600 BCE, the eruption of a huge volcano in the Greek island now known as Santorini caused a massive tsunami which devastated the Minoan civilization, possibly causing its final collapse. As this happened, the saliva would probably be approaching waist-deep.

The saliva would continue to rise throughout the next three millennia of history, and by the time of Europe's industrial revolution it would be chest-deep, easily enough saliva to swim in. The last 200 years would add the final 3 centimeters, and the pool would finally be filled.

It would take a long time, sure. But it would all be worth it, because at the end of it all, you'd have an Olympic-size swimming pool full of saliva. And isn't that, deep down, all any of us really want?[4]No. It is not.

Some games are compact little bundles of gaming joy, put together by magical elves whose only raison d’être is to make sure setup is a breeze and that you don’t just start a game but erupt into it, like Athena from Zeus’ skull.

Then there are games that, once you get the box open, make you want to go see what’s on TV instead. This could be because they are intentionally complicated to set up. (Mage Knight’s introductory mission is designed mainly to teach you how to set up the game components!) Others are so poorly organized–if they’re organized at all–that setup is a Herculean chore.

I hate to say, Imperial Assault is the later.

I got the game and most of the available add-on minis last year for Father’s Day and, while the unpainted figures were holding me back from playing, I’m working on that. Now it’s time to tackle the Bantha in the room. All the painted figures in the world aren’t going to convince me to play when I open the box and am greeted with this:

Fantasy Flight Games did provide a box insert, it was a pretty one that had the box art printed on it. You don’t see it here. You know why? It did absolutely nothing to keep the components and figures in place. Assemble the AT-ST and add in a few new figures and buh-bye flimsy insert. Lucky for me, there’s a vast gaming community out there, many of them with much more craft and architectural skill than I could ever hope to muster. With a quick Google search, I found the Esoteric Order of Gamers’ plans for an Imperial Assault insert that would not only house the components, but would keep everything neatly separated for quick setup.

I gathered my components:

And failed miserably. Those two pieces of foam board? Chewed up like Hannibal Lecter’s last supper as a free man. While the plans were fine, I quickly discovered that doing the pieces as I went along left me with cuts that were rarely straight. I also had the wrong tool for the job. X-Acto makes great hobby knives, but your inclination with this blade is to jam the point in and pull it across. This results in jagged, uneven cuts. Once I started in on the smaller interior wall pieces, I was lucky if I got something that even remotely resembled the neat rectangle I was trying to excise from the foam.

So it was back to the drawing board, literally. I grabbed a new knife (a utility knife like this one–it’s better at cutting long straight lines in cardboard, and the blade keeps you from cutting at an angle). And this time, instead of just hacking at the board willy-nilly, I mapped out the pieces I needed, numbering them as I went along. If you’re comfortable doing things on the fly, this step is probably unnecessary, but I knew this would be a multi-evening project for me, so I did this to maintain my sanity later.

Now, the fun part, the cutting! This went pretty quickly and easily with the new blade. A couple of tips:

• Remember to use the metal ruler to ensure your knife cuts are straight.
• Make at least two cuts–one to break the top layer of the board, then another (or more) to cut all the way through to your mat. If it’s taking more than three cuts, or you’re having to apply a lot of pressure, snap off your blade to get a fresh, sharp edge.
• Cut. Slow. The mangled tip of my left thumb can attest to how important this is. Especially when you’re halfway through the project, it’s easy to forget how sharp that utility knife really is. Respect your tools or you’re going to bleed.

At the end, you’ll have a little pile of clean-cut parts, all ready for assembly.

Then it’s just a matter of following your plans, glueing and pinning the pieces together, and trimming where you need to trim. Sometimes even the best plans go awry and pieces will be too long or too short. Luckily, I had a lot of foam board left over from my failed first attempt! You’ll want the cards handy when you get ready to finalize a few of the trays; being able to ensure your spacing is correct with the actual components before you start glueing is invaluable. Speaking of glue, the Elmer’s Extreme Glue I used turned out to be fantastic. My son, in his infinite wisdom, was tossing the football around the house the next morning and managed to connect solidly with my pinned together insert–there wasn’t a piece broken or out of place.

Then you just need to place everything in its spot and sit back and wait patiently for your next play session!

Click to view slideshow.

Incidentally, this easily housed the entire first wave of expansion figures, minus the extra cards and scenario inserts. I’ll have to come up with another way to store those. While I could definitely fit more regular-sized minis in the box, if I get the Twin Shadows or Return to Hoth expansions, I’ll create inserts for those boxes to house their oversized figures.

The next step to upgrading the game will be finally getting some paint on the minis. But for a novice like me, getting this many figures painted is a daunting task. Luckily, I’ve got some friends at Army Painter that are going to help me with that. Stay tuned!

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My daughter came home from school the other day. She was late, but not too late–she’s in grade 7 now and, in general, a responsible kid, so a little leeway is okay from time to time.

“Hey, kiddo. How was your day?”

“Great, dad! This is my new BOYFRIEND!”

And there he was. A little taller than her, a sheepish and nervous grin on his face. “H-hi,” he said in a soft voice.

Well then. Decision time. How to handle this.

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This is something I’ve thought about for a long time. Ever since she entered my life I knew there was going to be a moment when she brought someone home. A moment that someone would come along and whisk her off her feet, who would become more important in her life than her stuffy old parents.

I mean, it’s probably not this guy–she’s only 12 and this likely won’t last long. But still, you know?

Reactions from people I’ve told have been mixed. There’s been a few mentions of sympathy, a few exclamations of “she’s too young!”, and a lot of comments that made me deeply uncomfortable.

“Time to get a gun.”
“Leave the shotgun on the table when he’s over next.”
“Best put the fear of God into that boy.”
“How long is she grounded for?”

This is terrible.

Before I had a daughter I took part in the jokes. The 8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter mentality. The joke of the dad telling a young suitor, “I have a gun and a shovel, and know how to use both of them.”

But not since she came along.

These are the questions I constantly consider: How do I want to raise her? What kind of person do I want her to be as an adult? Do I want her to be a strong, self-reliant person? Someone who not only feels confident in her own decisions, but is armed with the training to make smart choices? Someone who knows she has caring, supportive parents to turn to when things go wrong?

Or someone who feels she needs to hide? Someone who either buckles to being controlled, or learns to rebel and pulls away from us?

When I was sixteen, I fell for a girl. But we weren’t allowed to be in a relationship. “I’m not allowed to date anyone my father hasn’t met yet. He’s away on a work trip, so we have to wait until he’s home.”

That was a horrible two weeks. I mean, I really, really liked this girl. What if her dad didn’t like me? Was he some kind of ogre?

(It turned out fine. He was a pretty gentle person and we bonded over a mutual love of lemon meringue pie.)

My daughter had a friend over the next day. I overheard her friend saying, “I’m surprised your dad is letting you have a boyfriend. I’m not allowed to have one until I’m 16.”

I poked my head in at that point. “Well, here’s how I feel about that. If I tell her she’s not allowed a boyfriend, I fully suspect she would still have a boyfriend, she just wouldn’t tell me about him.”

They both laughed. “Yeah, probably,” my daughter said.

I want her to feel comfortable to bring her boyfriends home. I want them to feel welcomed, to feel safe. I want this house to be a haven for her and the people important to her. The more welcoming I am about her loves, the more she’ll be willing to talk to me about them, the more willing she will be to listen to advice, to come to us for help, for ideas, for commiseration.

I don’t want her to learn about relationships from YouTube. I don’t want her to learn from the television. I don’t want her to have to draw upon the advice of fellow kids, none of whom really know anything about this stuff. I’m not saying we have all the answers ourselves, but if she feels free to talk to us, then we can explore the answers together.

I also know, when she really sparks with someone, she won’t listen to any rules that I’ve laid down. She will only listen to her heart. If I’m hard-line, if I’m strict and forbidding, she will just brush me off and close her ears to me.

But if I’ve been open, and we have a pattern of communication established… well, okay. She probably won’t listen anyway. But we’ll still have a strong bond and our relationship will always be there. And when her heart is broken, as it will be some day, that bond will be there so we can help her through it.

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“Hey, nice to meet you,” I said with a smile. “C’mon in.”

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The post Organized chaos is a real and beautiful thing. appeared first on Indexed.

Announced today at their CES press conference in Las Vegas, Kia ‘DRIVE WISE’ encompasses all their advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), including both partially and fully autonomous vehicles. Nevada has already granted Kia a special license to test the autonomous Kia Soul EV on public roads and the company is aiming to introduce partially-autonomous driving technologies by 2020, with arrival of fully-autonomous vehicles targeted by 2030.

Kia is undergoing a very promising and gradual process of introducing partially and fully autonomous technologies to its vehicles. Although the first marketable fully-autonomous car from Kia will not be available in the immediate future, the work our R&D teams are currently doing to develop our range of DRIVE WISE technologies is already improving on-road safety and driver assistance. The innovations presented at this year’s show demonstrate the future direction we are taking.
— Tae-Won Lim, Senior Vice President, Central Advanced Research and Engineering Institute of Hyundai Motor Group

Some of the advanced technologies that Kia is developing will provide the driver with greater levels of assistance, including anticipating and reacting to changing road conditions and potential hazards to improve safety for all drivers. Kia’s exhibit at CES allows visitors to experience some of the DRIVE WISE technologies through a series of interactive displays that include:

• Highway Autonomous Driving (HAD) uses both radar and camera systems to interpret lane markings, allowing the car to stay in its lane or switch into others to overtake other vehicles or follow a different road — without driver input.
• Urban Autonomous Driving (UAD) applies GPS and sensors to identify the car’s position on the road, allowing it to safely navigate through congested city environments while responding to live traffic updates.
• Preceding Vehicle Following (PVF) is an enhanced lane-keeping system that monitors the vehicle in front and allows the car to calculate its own path relative to it, following at a safe distance if road markings are indecipherable due to poor conditions or road layout.
• Emergency Stop System (ESS) operates is part of Kia’s Driver Status Monitoring (DSM) system that continuously monitors the driver’s face, ensuring their attention does not stray from the road for too long. If the system detects that the driver takes their eyes from the road for too long, ESS will automatically direct the car into an appropriate side lane and come to a halt.
• Traffic Jam Assist (TJA) monitors the vehicle in front during congested traffic conditions, maintaining a safe distance from the vehicle in front and moving into appropriate spaces to gain ground.
• Autonomous Valet Parking allows drivers to exit the car and let the vehicle park itself remotely, activated using the smart key or a smartwatch.

Featured in a special cockpit display at CES, Kia’s next-generation Human Machine Interface (HMI) is based on the concept of ‘blind control’, using touchpad gesture recognition to operate the car’s controls. Automatically recognizing individual drivers’ preferences on start-up (based on their fingerprint or smartwatch) the car can immediately change the cabin ambiance for the driver with their favorite music, preferred climate control temperature and the type of information displayed by the instrument panel.

The key to the future of Kia’s DRIVE WISE technologies is the development (and success) of its vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications system… if a true ‘self-driving car’ will actually come to market by 2030, V2X must be fully integrated into real-life driving environments and be able to react at least as fast as a human driver can.

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New comic on WEBTOONS! http://www.webtoons.com/en/slice-of-life/lunarbaboon/ep-41-cartoonist/viewer?title_no=523&episode_no=41

The post Merry Christmas! appeared first on Indexed.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert says “Access to sex is strictly controlled by the women.”

Maybe if you’re Scott Adams. I’ve turned down sex.

And I don’t think I’m unusual in that; I’ve turned down sex because I was in other commitments at the time, I’ve turned down sex because I was tired, I’ve turned down sex because I found the woman unattractive.

I’m not gonna say I turn down sex all the time, but… it happens.

Yet I think there’s this narrative in Western Society that men are these poon-seeking beasts who would hump a dead moose in a bathroom if you slapped a lady-mask on it. Every guy? Wants every girl. All the time. The “Harry met Sally” model, if you will.

And because we’re saturated in that concept of men being sex-crazed beasts, we obscure the times when men do turn down sex. If a guy doesn’t want to have sex with a willing girl, there’s something wrong with him – that guy’s clearly a pussy, right? Or the girl must have something so terminally wrong with her that it’s actually a defect in her character – she’s too ugly, she’s too loose, she’s too something.

If you’re saving yourself for marriage, you’re some kind of brainwashed religious nut.

If you’re too tired and just want to get some sleep, you must be low on testosterone, it’s a medical condition.

If you’re a demisexual who’s only turned on by personality and a mere body doesn’t flip your switches without context, man, that’s crazy.

Because we all know a real guy would fuck a rolling donut if he got the chance, amiright?

What’s happening here is that there’s a narrative that “women control the sex”… And so the times men control the sex get quietly erased. Either there’s a good excuse why the guy shouldn’t have had sex, or the refusal is presented as a man with a problem.

Which would be fine on some level, except this narrative of “women are the gateway to sex, and they’re always *stopping* us” leads to resentment from certain strains of men. They’re taught that women are like some sort of stingy stockbroker millionaire who could pay their mortgage but just won’t – and as a result, women become an obstacle. The reason they’re not having sex? Women. Women are selfish, women are hypercritical…

Women are the problem.

And that leads to a stagnation among that strain of men. They don’t ask the necessary questions like, “What do I bring to the table? What makes me compelling enough to have sex with? How can I improve myself to make the women I find attractive attracted to me in return?”

No. It just degrades into a seething feeling that women somehow owe them sex, and all the times the men don’t want to have sex with someone are, well, different. Somehow.

All that is in quiet opposition to a more sane model that says, “People turn down sex for all sorts of reasons, and nobody is obligated to have sex with you.” I suspect if Scott Adams were societally obliged to have sex with all the gay men who were attracted to him, he’d suddenly switch to the traditional woman’s perspective and complain that he didn’t want to get pounded in the butt by Chuck Tingle.

None of this is to erase the very real reality that women do turn down sex more, of course. They do. But that might not be because women don’t want sex, it might be a combination of “a random guy is likely to suck in bed” and “I’m worried this guy might get too attached and start stalking me.”

But that doesn’t matter. It should be okay if women want sex for different reasons than men do, or even want sex less. The point is that everyone should be able to turn down sex for whatever reason they desire, and that should not turned into some sort of battle scenario where “The person who turns down sex is controlling the supply of a resource that should be FREE TO ALL!”

I get the frustration. There are all sorts of people I’d like to have sex with who don’t want to have sex with me. That happens.

But I think for most men, if they look at it honestly, there are people they turned down sex with as well – because they were the wrong gender, because they were the wrong body type, because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Phrasing these refusals as “controlling access” implies that your body is like a computer, where every resource should be available to the collective unless there are good reasons to restrict it.  Whereas the truth is that your body is owned by a conscious human being, and you are not an unmoderated comments section where any idiot can come in and do whatever they please whenever they want.

It’s not wrong when you turn down sex. And it shouldn’t be wrong for anyone else.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/515972.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.

The post So this one time, on Tatooine… appeared first on Indexed.

Most dads I know have some tricks they do with their kids, whether it’s throwing them in the air, playing airplane, or swinging them around in a particular way.

My own dad taught me a few tricks that he made up himself, and I’ve gotten about a decade of use out of them myself (so far), with my own kids, nieces and nephews, and the occasional toddler whose parents are brave enough to let their kid try it. I’m sure there are moms out there who do these (my wife learned all of these, too), but usually when I see somebody throwing a kid way up in the air, it’s a dad.

Anyway, here’s to my dad, who had a ton of ways to get a kid to smile or laugh. My two favorite tricks that he taught me:

(Or watch it on YouTube.)

And please note: while I’m generally against treating kids like they’re made of glass, do be careful if you try these yourself. Swinging a kid into furniture or a light fixture isn’t going to make anyone happy.

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Daily #DadJoke for November 12, 2015:

I pinged an IP address behind a router in Australia.

The packets came from the LAN down under.

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Have a great joke that you would like to see in print (complete with a “submitted by your name here” shout-out)? Send it in to GeekDadJokes!

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The post Societal sickness. appeared first on Indexed.

An anonymous reader writes: Entertainment Weekly is just one of many reporting that next season will be the last for the long-running show Mythbusters. EW reports: "The pioneering reality series, one of cable's longest-running shows, will stage its final gonzo experiment during next year's 14th season after 248 episodes and 2,950 experiments. But there is some upside: Stars Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman have secretly known the end was coming all year and have been crafting an explosive final run for the seven-time Emmy-nominated series. 'It was my greatest fear that Mythbusters would just stop and we wouldn't be able to do proper final episodes,' Savage tells EW. 'So whether it's myths about human behavior or car stories or explosion stories, we tried to find the most awesome example of each category and build on our past history.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you are a regular reader of GeekDad, then you probably enjoy and good board game. You may even enjoy playing a board game with the kids now and then. I know in my house, it is tough to find games that everyone enjoys. Boys and girls; younger and older; moms and dads – most “family” games are either too complicated or too childish for everyone.

Uno works for everyone in my house. In fact, we have four different versions of Uno – Toy Story Uno being the current favorite. Also, I have a copy of Survive from when I was a kid, but I do not know if it is readily available anymore. Nevertheless, now that my daughter has gotten over Candyland, it has been difficult to all play something fun together.
In my new quest to bring the entire family around the game table, I have come across Who Tooted? Everyone in my home enjoys potty humor – what kid doesn’t? In Who Tooted? everybody gets a wired whoopee cushion shaped controller. The player has to keep the controller hidden, so it does work best at an actual table. Every turn, one of the controllers will light up. When the controller lights up, that player pushes a button on the controller and the game board will “toot” and the other players have to guess who did it. The goal is to keep a straight face, or bluff so the other players will answer incorrectly.

Who Tooted? plays pretty quickly. Every turn, all players have a chance to move by either guessing correctly, or if the player is the tooter, they move by the number of players with incorrect answers. A typical game takes less than 30 minutes, giving ample time to play more than once.

If you are interested in Who Tooted?, find out more information at Goliath Games or pick up a copy here. Also, let me know in the comments if you have any other recommendations for good family games.

Disclosure: A copy of Who Tooted? was sent to me for review purposes, but the opinion and the enjoyment is genuine.

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