An online acquaintance of mine was recently complaining that “nobody uses labels correctly.” Which is absolutely correct.

I mean, seriously, what does “submissive” mean? What does “polyamorous” mean? Hell, what do “liberal” and “sports fan” and “Jewish” mean, aside from a too-nebulous set of traits? Hell, I’m buddies with a number of atheist bacon-lovin’ Jews – so how the hell can the term “Jewish” be utilized well when it can encompass my reject-the-faith pals and the new zealous convert with no Jewish relatives?

The solution my friend suggested, however, was completely off: Let’s all utilize labels properly, with each label meaning a specific and concrete thing. Or, barring that, abandon labels entirely to look at each person as a unique individual.

…That’s not gonna work, said I.

The first step, defining correctly, would fail because large numbers of people are absolute shit at understanding who they are. Ever sit down with someone at your job and say to a co-worker, “Look, I need someone who’s responsible, comes in on time, and does their job?”

And your slacker co-worker, who routinely shows up ten minutes late, gets lousy performance reviews, and sticks you with all his leftover work, goes, “Yeah, that’s totally me”?

The problem is that that co-worker genuinely thinks that they are responsible, on-time, and does their job…. even when the definition is exact and they are wrong. Sure, the job description says “Be in at 9:00 a.m.,” but to them, 9:08 is like9:00 a.m. – and even once you convince them that you staying on-board an extra eight minutes to cover for them while they deign to show up is fucking with your schedule, they’ll then claim that everyone’s late sometimes, they’re not late all that often, and when they are they’ve got really good excuses.

They genuinely believe they’re punctual.

They will apply this definition, incorrectly, to themselves.

And if they are left unchecked, as they meet new employees at this job and trainthose fresh fish that “on time” means “plus or minus ten minutes, usually plus,” they will mutate the definition as it’s used in this environment. Eventually, as other people come to learn the culture from the slacker, his definition will replace the “book” definition….

…and so chaos begins.

So even if we all agreed that “love” meant “valuing your partner’s goals more than your own,” some dude would be all like, “Yeah! I totally value her goals!” even as he made her feel guilty for having them and never offered to do the housework while she was out pursuing them.

This is why we can’t have nice things. Because humans are awful, awful, awful at knowing who they are.

So why don’t we just take everyone as individuals instead? That’s the better plan, amiright? We’re all unique, don’t categorize anyone, just have no expectations except that person!

Labels are utilized so poorly, so often, that we never think of all the benefits of labels.

Because really, evolutionarily speaking, you probably know more celebrities than most Stone-Age people knew in person. We’re just not equipped to deal with the thousands of people we run into over the course of a lifetime – our brains are actually really inefficient little machines, in their own strange way. We do a lot with them, which is amazing only because the world is even more complex, but we only function because the brain takes a thousand shortcuts.

We don’t actually see a whole object. We see bits of it at a time as the focal point of our eye wanders over portions, then stitch it together.

We don’t remember well. We condense it down to something memorable, which is often not the same as “what’s accurate.”

Our whole life is actually one big magician’s trick.

And the awful thing is that if we never used labels, most of us would probably find it impossible to remember much about people we never knew. Asking people to meet hundreds of folks and saying, “Well, none of them can be lumped together by any similar qualities!” is asking a lot of folks.

We’re just hard-wired to think of people as redheads or Republicans or what-have-you. I’m not saying that’s great, but that’s the shortcut we use to cope.

And in many cases, that shortcut is fucking awesome. I’m polyamorous. What does that mean on its surface? Well, hell, a lot of people I’d call swingers refer to themselves as polyamorous. And a lot of people I’d refer to as “callous psychopaths” also call themselves polyamorous. And a lot of people who live perfectly nice poly lifestyles without my wife-as-quote-unquote-”primary” or my rules on who I have sex with or any of my permissions systems call themselves polyamorous.

As a label, it’s kind of a mess.

But then again, how much do you really need to know?

When you get down to it, if you’re making chit-chat at a party, do you really wantme to give you a forty-minute lecture on all the aspects of how I date women in my polyamory and the agreements and the emotional bonds we have, so you can see me as a truly unique individual? Or do you just want the overview so we go on to talk about Star Trek?

Trick is, labels are not the end point, they’re the start of the negotiation.

If someone tells me they’re a submissive, I can generally assume that they prefer to be acted upon rather than to act within a sexual relationship, and maybe more so. That’s really vague.

That vagueness may be all I need if I’m just making small talk.

If I intend to play with them at a club, however, “Submissive” is a wide starting point that gives me some information as to whether I’d enjoy playing with them or not. If I choose to pursue them, then I need to drill deeper to determine how that particular person’s submissive approach affects my scene.

And if I intend to date them? “Submissive” can mean a bunch of things, and now it is my duty to descend from the general to the person-specific, determining whether their unique interpretation of “Submissive” is compatible with the kind of submissiveness I’d want in my day-to-day life. (It often isn’t. I like bratty spitfires who submit, a comparatively small subset of the “Submissive” label. Still, they’re Submissives, too.)

But really, I don’t need to know someone’s Gorean history if I’m just here for the checkers tournament.

These labels are nebulous and inexact – which is a bug, not a feature. Poly probably means someone’s all right with fucking multiple people. Liberals usually mean a distrust of government control when it comes to violence, a trust of government control when it comes to economics. Programmers generally work with computer languages.

The trick is to remember that the label is not the person. Even if the person self-applies that label. There are poly-fidelitous folks, liberals who like the right kind of governmental war, programmers who don’t use languages. A label is a general place to start, and that’s wonderful, but you commit some ghastly fallacies when you decide that all Republicans are anti-abortion or all Liberals love Che Guevara or all Doms crave pretty young things.

Labels are useful tools to categorize, a shortcut that minds take. When you start believing the map is the landscape, you make critical errors.

Don’t do that. And don’t think that labels are bad, either. They’re a helpful way to condense a pretty confusing universe, and the more you contemplate the need for them, the humbler you’ll be.

Ain’t a bad thing, really.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/332463.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.

Yesterday Warner Bros. announced that they have a new spinoff series of films in the works, set in the world of Harry Potter: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Potter creator J. K. Rowling herself will write the first screenplay, which will also be her first venture into such work. The films are based on the fictitious textbook of the same name, from which Harry studies while at Hogwarts, and they tell the story of the textbook’s supposed author, Newt Scamander.

These will be prequels to the Harry Potter books and films, and the first starts out in New York seventy years before Harry’s story. That’s the first time any of the stories have appeared in the US, although given Scamander’s wandering nature, they could now take him anywhere in the world. Read the stories in the UK’s Independent and over at IGN.com for more details.

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From Up on Poppy Hill is the first film from the team of Miyazaki father and son, Hayao and Goro, and while it has some of the elements I’ve come to expect from Miyazaki animated films, this movie is unexpected sweeter and gentler, with no hints of magic.

Instead, the magic comes from a nostalgic tale of a girl growing up and coming to terms with the death of her father, as the community around her seeks to move into the future and wavers between forgetting the past and honoring it. Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa wrote the script, and it’s the second feature film directed by Goro Miyazaki.

Umi, the teenage girl at the center of the story, is juggling many roles, as a student, as a caretaker for her younger siblings, and as the help for the household borders. The story begins with a scene that I’ve come to associated with Miyazaki films: a cooking sequence that made me wish Umi was fixing me breakfast.

Shun, the teenage boy who becomes the object of Umi’s affection, notices Umi’s habit of putting up signal flags each day in memory of her father, a seaman. He has his own crusade, which is to save the Quartier Latin, the school clubhouse. In another classic Miyazaki-style scene, everyone works together to clean up the Quartier Latin.

The movie is very much a slice of life story set in 1963 in an fictionalized area of Japan that is still clearly recovering from the difficulties of past wars, including World War II and Korea. I couldn’t help seeing the renovation of the clubhouse as a symbolic renovation of Japan’s past, an attempt to respect what happened while looking to the future at the same time. And while the romance is sweet, there is a dark secret at the heart of the bond between Umi and Shun which is, fortunately, resolved positively. This could be another metaphor for the past being tragic and sad but perhaps not dark and twisted as was first thought.

For adults, I’d recommend this movie, especially if you’re already a fan of Studio Ghibli. The story is simple but the characters that inhabit it are not and the tale has stayed with me since I watched. I watched with my 14-year-old son and he was enthralled but for younger children, the slower pace and lack of magic might cause a little bit of boredom.

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Japan has just raised the bar on pranks forever. There's putting buckets of water above doorstops, filling someone's cubicle with packing peanuts, and now there's making a dude think he's being chased by an actual fucking velociraptor.

Read more...

I get a lot of press releases from Nintendo. They hit my inbox nigh-weekly, generally touting some upcoming release or a bump in sales numbers. Still, yesterday’s announcement was different.

Lumped in with the long-rumored Wii U price drop — the Deluxe Set will be available for $299.99 beginning September 20 — and a handsome Wind Waker HD bundle was a most unexpected reveal: a new 3DS model… without the 3D.

The Nintendo 2DS is a budget-priced system that will launch on October 12, alongside Pokemon X and Y. The chief difference is that the system boasts full compatibility with all current 3DS titles (not to mention DS backward compatibility) while eschewing the titular 3D feature.

Still, this most surprising announcement has led to an interesting string of question from the gaming (and GeekParenting) public:

No 3D? Doesn’t that mean it’s just a DS?
Nope; with a beefier processor, widescreen top LCD, 3DS eShop support, cameras, integrated motion controls and a unique system interface, the 2DS is definitely a current-gen handheld.

So it’s just an original model 3DS with no depth slider?
Not exactly. What Nintendo called “a distinctive fixed, slate-type form factor” basically means “no clam-shell.” Imagine a 3DS that doesn’t close.

Wait; how does sleep mode work if you can’t close the system?
Apparently there’s a switch for that.

So will 3D games look grainy or muddy in 2D mode?
Actually, 3DS titles generally look a bit sharper in 2D mode, even on the current 3DS/3DS XL.

But who is this thing even for?
A fair question, but one with more than a single simple answer. Obviously the $130 price point makes it a more tempting option for thrifty gamers, but parents wary of allowing younger children — specifically those under 7 — to game in 3D mode will similarly find this option a bit more suitable. Then there are those gamers who simply can’t use the 3D feature in the first place: those prone to eye strain or headaches as well as those with medical conditions or eye damage. Our own GeekDad Chuck, the father of a child without stereoscopic vision, was quick to express his interest in this new, more inclusive handheld.

So should I pick one up?
If you already have 3DS or the larger XL model, probably not. And personally, I’m a rather iffy on the overall design. The placement of the d-pad, circle pad and face buttons all seem… a little odd in the promotional photographs. Still, I’d honestly love to get a little hands-on time with the 2DS before I criticize its design too harshly. If you’ll remember, I was a little turned off by the Wii U GamePad until I actually picked it up for the first time.

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No, I don't apologise in the slightest. If you risk coming here, you know the sort of things you're liable to read.

---

2013-08-24 Rerun commentary: Can I think of another weaving pun? 'Twill be the last thing you expect...

In what is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the funniest TableTop episode to date, Wil and friends, Felicia Day, Pat Rothfuss, and Brandon Laatsch play the incredibly fantastic strategy game based on Dungeons and Dragons lore, Lords of Waterdeep.

This episode, the next to last before the halfway mark in season two, premiered this past Sunday at Gen Con in Indianapolis. A couple hundred people laughed and cheered as the game unfolded, enjoying every moment of the episode. The showing was set up with some narration from Wil and his associate producer, Boyan Radakovich. Wil said Waterdeep is a game he knows inside out and he was certain he would win. Radakovich coached him on strategy and, well, the outcome … is one you will just have to see.

Lords of Waterdeep, if you haven’t played it, is a really great Euro-style game from Wizards of the Coast. You are one of the lords running Waterdeep, a city that’s famous in D&D history. You are battling for control of the city with the other lords, but you don’t do the dirty work … oh, no. You send your agents out on your behalf, recruiting fighters and wizards to do your bidding, rogues and clerics to work against your competition, buying property and completing quests. It’s dirty work, but the kind that’s backstabbingly fun.

It’s a really fantastic episode and one that epitomizes why TableTop is more than deserving of winning the Diana Jones award and an ENnie award, both given during Gen Con. You should definitely watch this episode. You owe it to the owlbears.

Note: The next episode, in two weeks, will feature the super-fun Days of Wonder game, Shadows Over Camelot.

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pasturemud:

iampetershervheim:

rkidd:

d0esntmakesense:

This is probably the coolest GIF I’ve ever seen.

now there’s some perspective.

I once saw a storm roll like this once. It was beautiful.

i love watchin rain roll in

I’m always on the lookout for games or books that help inspire some creativity in my children, and I’ve recently stumbled upon an interesting game that, although more likely to be pegged as a game for adults, has a lot of potential with a younger audience. The game is called Disruptus, and my oldest (age 6) has been enjoying playing a round or two each day. Let me show you how it works.

First, the game’s box and components are all high quality stuff — the box is small and cube shaped and contains a notepad, an oversized die, a timer, a rulebook, and a thick stack of heavy stock cards. There are some blank cards that you can use to create your own along with a few cards that have text on them that explain to a larger group what type of action the current player is attempting (for example, a Create action or possibly an Improve action — will explain these shortly), but the majority of the cards can be broken into two types — small sketches of simple items like a skateboard or a water bottle. The other stack of cards contain photographs of familiar items such as a parking meter or an airport chair.

Play is fairly simple… a player rolls the dice that can come up with one of four categories of action — Create 2, Improve, Transform or DISRUPT. The other two options that might come up are Judge’s Choice and Player’s Choice. For those two instances, either the Judge picks one of the four categories or the player chooses from two action cards picked by the Judge. While the game is ideally suited for 3 or more players (with players taking turns as the Judge), the game provides rules for solo and 2 player action.

The purpose of Disruptus is defined by the company on its website:

Disruptus asks players to look at objects and ideas and use different approaches — as determined by the roll of a die — to innovate.
Disruptus draws inspiration from the very important practice of ‘disruptive thinking’. Disruptive thinking is one of the most powerful ways to innovate.

 

So, after shuffling the cards with images on them the player rolls the dice. Assuming one of the four categories is rolled (versus Judge or Player choice), the player will turn over one or more cards and attempt to draw, sketch, and explain a disruption of the item(s). My son, for example, rolled Create 2, requiring him to turn over two cards — a toilet and a shopping cart. (I could already see the smile on his face.) He proceeded to draw his idea of how these two items might be combined or altered somehow to create a new item.

His drawing might have been crude, but his explanation (to me) for his new idea was well developed. To him, there was nothing unusual in putting a toilet on wheels and adding in steering controls. To a 6 year old, a drivable toilet just makes sense, I guess. But it was my questions to him to try and prod him for more explanations that I really enjoyed. A later Create 2 roll had him pick railroad tracks and a water bottle. I worried he might get stuck trying to find a way to combine these two, but I should have really known better. His solution involved replacing the railroad ties (the wooden beams) with water bottles that would crush and squirt out water as a train went by… drenching kids who were playing by the tracks. The parent in me was a bit worried about my son thinking it’s fun to play besides the tracks as a train screams by, but again… it’s about brainstorming and having my son think of fun ways to combine, modify, and twist the world around him.

For the Improve dice roll, he turned over a small image of a bicycle. I explained that he needed to keep the basic concept of a bicycle, but find a way to improve it… and he didn’t let me down. He learned to ride his bike last year and was quite proud of himself… so his improvement to the bike was obvious — add wings. I asked him to explain how that might be safe to ride/fly and he just kept explaining as only a kid can — I would tether the bike to the ground with a really long rope so he couldn’t fly too far away. The wings would fold back so he could pedal normally when on the ground. I absolutely loved it.

The Transform action is perfect for kids — that die roll asks the player to take an image and use it in a completely different way than the object is intended to be used. The Disrupt action asks players to pick an image and then come up with a completely different way to accomplish the task. Trust me… kids will have zero problems with these kinds of crazy creative assignments, and my son was smiling constantly. When I decided to end the game, my son asked for one more roll. And then one more.

The game designers have put out Disruptus as a way to get adults and professionals in lots of different areas of industry thinking and exercising their creative muscles, and I can totally see how this game could be used by a variety of professionals (advertisers, inventors, artists, etc.) to let loose and go crazy with ideas. But I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much fun a 6 year old could have playing the game, too. With over 100 cards containing images such as a helicopter, motorcycle, coil of rope, name badge, whisk, camera and many more… my son isn’t likely to run out of potential objects from which to draw inspiration. (The simple nature of the sketches of images and the basic photos of extremely ordinary objects are both easily identifiable by kids.)

I have no idea what sorts of interests my son will pick up as he grows, but I feel strongly that creativity is beneficial to any career, hobby, or task. I’m a big fan of anything that helps my son express his creativity, and Disruptus is one of those rare products that I plan on pulling out every few days for just a few minutes of fun brainstorming. (I also plan on collecting the sketches — many are priceless!)

You can read the complete instructions here or watch a video example of gameplay here.

Note: I’d like to thank Julien with Funnybone Toys for providing a copy of Disruptus to test out with my son.

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(661): Sockward: that moment during sexytimes when you realize your socks are still on and you have no idea how to remove them in a non-awkward fashion.

So my essay “Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have (Fucking) Awesome Sex” was reposted at The Good Men Project, and now it’s all over the net.  Over 31,000 people have “liked” it on Facebook, and I’ve gotten requests for interviews.  (Sadly, all on a weekend I’m presenting at the Geeky Kink Event, so I’m booked.)  And with this comes a lot of weird emotions:

1)  I’ve had a lot of people claiming I’m either a good father or a bad father, which makes me uncomfortable.  That turns the essay into a moratorium on whether my daughters are appropriately well-raised for society, and I don’t particularly feel like dragging them out into this spotlight.  I don’t often discuss Erin or Amy on this blog because I arrived in their lives with a (much smaller) audience, and early on I decided that they should choose their own level of involvement.  They, quite wisely, chose not to play.  And so inadvertently having this essay blow up as a spotlight is a little awkward, since it does kind of invite the question, “So are his daughters happy?”

They are.  But how much of that is due to me is questionable.  I think if we’re honest as parents, we acknowledge we are but one oar in turbulent waters; my kids arrived pre-baked with their own genetic inclinations towards specific mischiefs, and all their relatives weighed in (often against me, sometimes rightfully so), and then when they got to be adolescents then the approval of other children started to matter a lot.  You can be a very good parent, I think, and have a child who is quote-unquote “bad” (which I define as “unhappy” or “in a life’s situation that makes them unhappy”), and you can be a terrible parent and luck out.

Being a parent is a lot like being the President: there’s a lot more luck involved in good results than anyone wants to admit.

2)  I had one guy telling the world, “HE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE DAUGHTERS!  CHECK HIS BIOS!” which struck me as supremely weird.  One of my proudest moments was when I was on a panel with John Scalzi, discussing blogging, and he looked at me and said, “…I didn’t know you had daughters.”

I was proud because I have a reputation for being an oversharer, but my kids?  Have their own lives.  I’ve kept them shielded from that aspect of my D-list celebrity fame, and that feels good.  So to have a guy using that strength as proof I’m making all of this up?  A little strange.

(I tend to treat idiots on the Internet as though they’re stray dogs, confused and baffled by the world.  I’m not mad, just trying to figure out how any sane person would come to this conclusion.)

3)  I’m not a great father.  I have some strengths, and open communication about sex and drugs is one of them, but I’m also introverted, short-tempered, and hate phone calls like they were acid poured on my genitals.  I’m glad what I said resonated, very glad, but there’s a lot of dads who are way better than I’ve ever been.  One solid opinion does not greatness make.

4)  Some of the comments involved people saying, “Oh, man, so you wouldn’t mind if I had sex with your daughter? Mind giving me her number?”  Which completely misses the point.  Would I give you her number? No, because – as mentioned – I don’t own her.  If she wants to give you her number, then she can.  Because I don’t think it’s bad that they have sex with people.

I do think it’s bad if they have sex with idiots, which is why I try to encourage them otherwise.  But I’m also not sold on my own infallibility.  Maybe you’re not as much of an asshole as I think you are.  I’ll suggest, but ultimately she has to come to her own conclusions.

But, you know, I’m pretty sure she’ll spot you as an idiot off the bat.  And if I have taught them one lesson, it is in fact not to fuck the terminally stupid.

5)  I’m glad I’ve had enough pieces hit it big to handle the criticism, praise, and misreadings that come with any article that blows up.  (Though the blowback on this one is nastier than almost anything I’ve weathered before now.)  The thing people never get about these sorts of essays is that, despite all I’ve written before, the article is only tangentially about you.  People share things this widely because they wish they’d said it themselves, and as an author, I just feel grateful that I’ve articulated this churning wellspring enough that it resonated.

Basically, if you shared it, thanks.  I’m glad it helped.  I hope it convinces someone.  That’s all the good I can do.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/323692.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.

There’s a piece of twaddle going around FetLife called 10 Rules For Dating My Daughter, which is packed with “funny” threats like this:

“Rule Four: I’m sure you’ve been told that in today’s world, sex without utilising some kind of ‘barrier method’ can kill you. Let me elaborate: when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.”

All of which boil down to the tedious, “Boys are threatening louts, sex is awful when other people do it, and my daughter is a plastic doll whose destiny I control.”

Look, I love sex. It’s fun. And because I love my daughter, I want her to have all of the same delights in life that I do, and hopefully more. I don’t want to hear about the fine details because, heck, I don’t want those visuals any more than my daughter wants mine. But in the abstract, darling, go out and play.

Because consensual sex isn’t something that men take from you; it’s something you give. It doesn’t lessen you to give someone else pleasure. It doesn’t degrade you to have some of your own. And anyone who implies otherwise is a man who probably thinks very poorly of women underneath the surface.

Yes, all these boys and girls and genderqueers may break your heart, and that in turn will break mine. I’ve held you, sobbing, after your boyfriend cheated on you, and it tore me in two. But you know what would tear me in two even more? To see you in a glass cage, experiencing nothing but cold emptiness at your fingers, as Dear Old Dad ensured that you got to experience nothing until he decided what you should like.

You’re not me. Nor are you an extension of my will. And so you need to make your own damn mistakes, to learn how to pick yourself up when you fall, to learn where the bandages are and to bind up your own cuts. I’ll help. I’ll be your consigliere when I can, the advisor, the person you come to when all seems lost. But I think there’s value in getting lost. I think there’s a strength that only comes from fumbling your own way out of the darkness.

You’re your own person, and some of the things you’re going to love will strike me as insane, ugly, or unenjoyable. This is how large and wonderful the world is! Imagine if everyone loved the same thing; we’d all be battling for the same ten people. The miracle is how easily someone’s cast-offs become someone else’s beloved treasure. And I would be a sad, sad little man if I manipulated you into becoming a cookie-cutter clone of my desires. Love the music I hate, watch the movies I loathe, become a strong woman who knows where her bliss is and knows just what to do to get it.

Now, you’re going to get bruised by life, and sometimes bruised consensually. But I won’t tell you sex is bad, or that you’re bad for wanting it, or that other people are bad from wanting it from you if you’re willing to give it. I refuse to perpetuate, even through the plausible deniability of humor, the idea that the people my daughter is attracted to are my enemy.

I’m not the guard who locks you in the tower. Ideally, I am my daughter’s safe space, a garden to return to when the world has proved a little too cruel, a place where she can recuperate and reflect upon past mistakes and know that here, there is someone who loves her wholeheartedly and will hug her until the tears dry.

That’s what I want for you, sweetie. A bold life filled with big mistakes and bigger triumphs.

Now get out there and find all the things you fucking love, and vice versa.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/322783.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.

bassdogs:

NAPALM DEATH BASS DOG. (Props to Shane from Napalm Death for being the best guy.)

As Ben mentioned in our previous post, our top priority right now is improving the stability of The Old Reader.  To start, we’re going to get The Old Reader a much needed hardware upgrade.  This week, we’ll be relocating the application to a top tier host located in the United States, tripling database capacity and adding over 10 times the network capacity.

The move is going to entail exporting all of the posts from about 6 million subscriptions, moving that data approximately 5000 miles and then importing it into the new database servers. This is a big move, and unfortunately it’s going to require about 48 hours of downtime.   

The new environment will be ready to roll on Tuesday at which point we will begin the transfer and maintenance window.  We’re shooting to begin that maintenance window at approximately 12AM GMT Wednesday.  During this time, we’ll be frequently updating Twitter, Facebook and Status page to make sure you know as soon as it is back up and running.

(954): Why did you fed-x me a peanut butter sandwich?
(305): It seemed like the thing to do. There's popcorn on it too.
(954): STOP smoking sooo much weed. Damn.

Find the Dork Tower webcomic archives, DT printed collections, more cool comics, awesome games and a whole lot more at the Dork Tower Website.

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There’s a lot of hand-wringing in nerd circles because Pacific Rim wasn’t a monster hit; it came in third at the box office this weekend, behind Adam Sandler’s Grown-Ups 2.  And that’s because Pacific Rim is a deeply flawed movie that reminds me of, of all movies, Titanic.

Because Pacific Rim is immune to criticism in the same way Titanic is.  Yes, it’s full of cheesy dialogue.  Yes, some of the action sequences don’t quite make physical sense.  Yes, the plot falls apart to the point where you’re actively questioning the plot points as they arise.

It’s also, like Titanic and Starship Troopers before it, tremendous fun if you hop on board.

The thing about Guillermo del Toro is that he swings for the rafters on this; he has a beautiful eye for scope, and so these huge robots feel terrifyingly, gloriously, large.  He keeps finding the perfect shot to make them large, putting smaller things next to them so you never forget the scale; a seagull, a school of fish, a schoolgirl.  When they’re stomping through downtown Hong Kong, goddamn if they don’t look like they’re titans battling among skyscrapers.  You feel small, and strangely ennobled, getting a ringside seat next to such massive violence.  And visually, it’s one of the most stylish movies to come along in a while, because everything has this worked-over feel that the original Star Wars had; these robots are banged up, scraped, they feel well-used.  If you’re looking for eye candy, your eyes will be swimming in diabetes by the time it is all done.

As for the plot, well, it has one.  This film gets by on sheer audacity, with people making such boldly bizarre statements in that Charlton Heston way of delivery that you either buckle under the strain of this bizarre reality and let it invade you, or you despise it. I mean, of course when two-hundred-foot high monsters start invading from the sea, the only answer is to build even larger robots to fight them. Of course, despite this apocalyptic scenario, there are only two scientists in the entire world devoted to analyzing the biology of these bizarre sea creatures.  Of course each of the monsters arrives on a schedule, so we can better plan our robot-fighting techniques.

But all my attempts at snark wash off.  I was grinning like a schoolboy the entire time, because if you pile absurdity onto absurdity, eventually it collapses into a sort of bizarre Axe Cop-like black hole where you realize Pacific Rim is not trying to emulate reality, it is trying to assemble a whole separately new reality that’s twice as entertaining.  It is staring logic in and eye and saying, “…but what fun would that be?”

On one level Pacific Rim is a hot mess of filmmaking… but on the other, it surpasses all of its flaws to be strapped together much like the robots in the movie: functioning despite all disbelief.

Pacific Rim claps its hands together and dares you to mock it.  What it loves, it loves hard, and unapologetically.  If you’re looking for giant fucking robots to judo-toss Godzilla, well, Guillermo Del Toro said, “I want that to happen.”  And he welded all that together with dialogue straight from frommage and special effects to make you gasp and a story that kind of sort of hangs together, and either you decide to hop on board or you hipster your way out of a hell of a lot of fun.

It’s up to you, man.  But I’d ride the robot, if you can.  It’s worth it.  (And doubly so in 3-D, which I hardly ever say.)

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/318074.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.

Whether it’s Mad Magazine, Saturday Night Live, Family Guy, or one of the million-plus web comics out there, I love, love, love me some parody. So, naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to review a copy of the Robot Chicken DC Comics Special. Seriously. Jumped. Before I popped in the disc, I had only seen season three, in its entirety, along with the occasional, random episode. I already loved the Robot Chicken sense of humor and figured there wasn’t much to improve upon. Then, I heard of the DC Comics parody special, which originally aired on Adult Swim, back on September 9, 2012. Sure, a parody is always good for laughs, but it’s that much sweeter whenever the audience is in on the in-jokes. As a life-long DC Comics fan, with way more trivial knowledge under my Batman-logoed cap than is purely healthy, I was definitely digging it.

You could practically feel the geek-love that went into making the special just oozing off the disc. And, that’s further supported by the hours of bonus content included. While the feature itself was edited down to fit a 30-minute time slot, the richest of the pitched material made it through. Included, for the pleasure of those completists out there (Isn’t that all of us?), you’ll find the animatics and scene breakdowns for a slew of other skits that just barely missed the mark. While not as cool as having a fully realized scene, we at least get to hear the various voice talents in character for these.

Speaking of the talent… What a geektastic group of actors!

• Seth Green as Batman, Robin and Aquaman
• Neil Patrick Harris as Two-Face
• Alfred Molina as Lex Luthor
• Nathan Fillion as the Green Lantern
• Megan Fox as Lois Lane
• Breckin Meyer as Superman
• Plus, Abe Benrubi, Alex Borstein, Clare Grant, Tara Strong, Matthew Senreich, Tom Root, Zeb Wells and Kevin Shinick

While the Robot Chicken DC Comics Special had me in stitches, my favorite part was the behind-the-scenes commentary of the Chicken Nuggets re-watch segment with the show’s writers Seth Green and Matthew Senreich and DC Entertainment Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns.

Other bonus material includes The Making of Robot Chicken DC Comics Special, Robot Chicken DC Comics Special’s Aquaman Origin Story, Writers’ Commentary, Actors’ Commentary, DC Entertainment Tour, Stoopid Alter Egos, Outtakes, Deleted Sketches, and 5.2 Questions.

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While summer is still in session, I don’t give my oldest son (age 6) too much grief in the mornings about getting out of bed. He’s got some camps left to attend, but my wife and I try to let the boys sleep in and get a good rest while they can. Now, when school’s in session, it’s a whole different story…

I work from home, so I drop off and pick my boys up from school. I don’t mind doing it, but it does mean my workday is a bit shorter than usual (so I do the occasional evening or weekend writing at the coffee shop). Because my work hours are precious during the week, I am very punctual when it comes to waking them up and dragging them out of bed to get ready for school. My oldest is now at an age where he really needs to be getting himself out of bed, but I’m no dummy… given a choice, he’s going to stay tucked away until I no longer give him a choice and/or my patience runs out.

I had an alarm clock growing up and a dad who expected me to use it. The problem was that I would always wake up about a minute or two before it would go off. I then had a choice of either turning it off right away (and risking falling back asleep) or waiting until it went off… and then definitely falling back asleep. There was no motive for me to get out of bed, so the alarm clock remained to the right of my bed, easily in reach.

I’ve been looking for something to motivate my oldest to get out of the bed. He has a strong aversion to Barney songs (and who over age 3 really doesn’t?) as well as a few other popular songs (again, with the 3 and younger crowd), so I’ve found a great solution. It’s called the Tocky Touch alarm clock, and I’m actually looking forward to putting it to work when school starts up. I took it for a spin and oh, yeah… I have a strong feeling this is the droid I’ve been looking for. Uh, I mean alarm clock.

First off, it’s an alarm clock. You can set the time (12 or 24 hour), the volume, and the alarm time. But this one is also touch sensitive — you set the time and alarm by dragging your finger (in a circle) around the Tocky’s front ring. It’s touch sensitive, so it’s really a nice way to set the time and alarm. Super easy.

It’s got snooze (set in minutes using the touch option) and the ability to toggle on or off the sound effects that are musical and chirpy at the same time. The volume goes from 0 to 9, and I can tell you that, at 9, this thing is too loud for me. Perfect for my son, though.

Now, here’s where the Tocky really starts to get cool. First, it rolls. Unless you turn off the Roll feature, when the alarm goes off, this thing will roll right off your nightstand and just randomly roll around. The idea, obviously, is to get you out of bed and on your feet, trying to turn off the LOUD and REALLY ANNOYING blips and bloops. But the second really cool feature is that you can ignore the sound effects by uploading up to two hours worth of mp3 music directly to the Tocky. You connect the Tocky to your computer with the (very short) included USB cable, and place the songs in the queue of the Tocky drive that shows up on your computer. There are ten music track slots (0 is for the blips and bloops and cannot be deleted) and you can choose which track is the first to play (bypassing the blips/bloops) by using your finger to increase or decrease the track number (1-9). There a good video here (5 minutes) that demonstrates most of the Tocky’s features.

Not into music? Feel free to record up to six hours of voice if you like. The Record feature is touch sensitive, and once again you just tap the screen to start recording and tap again to stop. Perfect for uploading your own voice and pushing just the right buttons to irritate the sound sleeper. (“I’m going to give your little brother the last of the Lucky Charms. If you’re not down in five minutes, I’m also going to make you wear the pink bunny shirt your Aunt E gave you for Christmas.” You get the idea.)

It’s an amazingly small and simple device that is guaranteed to get someone out of bed. The real concern is how long until it somehow “disappears.” It’s baseball-sized, and my son does enjoy a good bit of batting practice. I’m just saying I wouldn’t put it past him.

The Tocky comes in a rubbery colorful skin (6 colors in all). You remove the skin to insert 3 AAA batteries. Getting the skin back isn’t difficult, but be aware that you’re going to want to take your time so you get the holes correctly covering the small speakers and the USB port. You can check out images and videos by clicking here. If you like it, you can also order directly.

My son doesn’t need a fancy alarm clock. What he does need is motivation to get out of bed. I’ve already downloaded a few Barney songs and a couple of friendly taunts and put this on the floor under his bed. (Why even make it easy for him to find in the first place?) I’m quite sold on the volume and the hiding/rolling feature: combine it with a choice of fun morning wake up music and my son is ready for schoo!

Note: I’d like to thank Heather for providing a test Tocky and for helping motivate my child on those upcoming dark, Monday mornings.

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This week, Ian McKellen wrapped his Gandalf scenes for the Hobbit films, ending a 14-year journey with the character. Orlando Bloom also wrapped Legolas, and gave a wonderfully silly goodbye.

Read more...

It’s the only qualification necessary to be the ambassador to Siberia. Yes. Just Siberia.

"Take the fifty most murderous, duplicitous, treacherous, and violent people in the world...Now, put them in a room with one seat and make them play musical chairs to the death." Scott Meyer has perfectly summarized the concept behind Game of Thrones.

Link

Today’s stunning gender flip is Mr. Lawrence Croft, the Tomb Raider himself.  You can see him merrily having his half-naked videogame adventures here:

The problem is that while people are investing a lot of time gender-flipping characters to show, say, how ridiculous Batman looks if presented through a girl’s fantasy lens or various male comic characters presented contorted into female poses, that never quite gets across the effect.

Because you show this to your average dudebro, and he barks a laugh.  “That’s hysterical!” he says, and moves on.  And for this to be a true equivalence, you’d have to engineer a culture where he laughs, and moves on, and then realizes that everyone else – in fact, the majority of people he knows – sees nothing at all wrong with this. When he laughs, his friends would have to give him that sideways stare that says, “What’s funny?”

In fact, he’d determine a vast majority of them are for this look.  Actively.  They admire it, and are disappointed that he does not have it.  This ludicrous pose and too-perfect body was precisely what people expected him to be.  The possession of this body would, in fact, be more important than anything else he’d ever done.  If he became the editor of a major magazine or the Secretary of State, people would still weigh in on his body – whether he was too unattractive, what kind of suits was he wearing.  People would fuse their compliments of his performance and his looks effortlessly, so he’d be a smart-looking senior executive, as if to explain that really, a large part of your success is how you look.

But no!  It gets worse!  Because while you’d be pressured to dress like this silly, useless guy all the time – showing up at a club in a popped collar and khakis would have the whole crowd groaning, telling you that you didn’t come dressed to party – if any part of your body failed to meet this standard, you would have let everyone down.  There’d be guys sniggering at your flabby abs, and now that you’ve displayed your ass – as everyone had specifically requested – now its cellulite would be up for grabs.

Your failure to be attractive for them, to fall short of Lawrence Croft, would be treated as a personal failure.  It’s not that they have ridiculous expectations, it’s that you’re not good enough.  This guy on-screen, this candy-physiqued dude that you thought was a joke, is in fact what you’re supposed to aspire to.

And here’s the harshest truth: he’s the best choice.  Out of all the other men in movies and videogames – you know, the ones who swoon helplessly into womens’ arms, standing by placidly while the women choose their own destinies in a hail of gunfire – this guy is comparatively awesome.  At least this guy’s not a prince in a castle waiting to be rescued, he’s out climbing things and shooting them.  He looks stupid, but at least he chooses his own destiny.

Until, you know, all these people who think Lawrence isn’t quite cut enough, or naked enough, get ahold of the franchise and determine that, like every other man in videogames, he’s not really capable of being adventurous until he gets neutered.  It’s a dark and gritty world, my friends, and just like Theon Greyjoy, you can’t have a male hero really motivated until he’s experienced the loss of his testicles and gone on a mad search for revenge against the women who cut them off.  Your only true path to independence lies in being snipped, because otherwise why the hell would a guy be so ready to have adventures?  He must be damaged.

(And you know, a lot of guys are damaged.  You know a ton of guys who had their testicles, well, maybe not torn off, but threatened or severely yanked by women on dates.  Whenever people try to report this, you’re usually seen as overreacting.  Women just do that to balls.  You can’t just let them touch your balls and then not expect them to try to remove them!)

Eventually an outcry from some men – who are largely seen to be overreacting, but whatever, we’ll humor those humorless guys – causes this storyline to be, er, cut off, but you still realize that there’s a lot of guys out there who seem to think that the only way you can possibly be interesting is to either inseminate a woman (and then often die before birth), or to have your insemination rights violated.

That.  That’s a true genderflipping.  And while a few pictures may cause some heads to turn, it can never ever get across the full idea of why those gender flips are important.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/312762.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.

Extreme Boating

Question:What would it be like to navigate a rowboat through a lake of mercury? What about bromine? Liquid gallium? Liquid tungsten? Liquid nitrogen? Liquid helium? By:–Nicholas Aron Let's take these one at a time. Bromine and mercury are the only known pure elements that are liquid at room temperature. Rowing a boat on a sea of mercury just might be possible. **Mercury** is so dense that [steel ball bearings float on the surface](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGv_YVQHu7U). Your boat would be so buoyant that you'd barely make a dent in the mercury, and you'd have to lean your weight into the paddle to get the end of it below the surface. Image:boat_mercury.png:'Michael, row the boat ashore.' 'I'm TRYING!' In the end, it certainly wouldn't be easy, and you wouldn't be able to move *fast*. But you could probably row a little bit. You should probably avoid splash fights. **Bromine** is about as dense as water, so a standard rowboat could in theory float on it. However, Bromine is awful. For one thing, it smells terrible; the name "bromine" comes from the ancient Greek "brōmos", meaning "stench". If that weren't enough, it [violently reacts](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCwHzTsx5yY) with a lot of materials. Hopefully, you're not in an aluminium rowboat. Imageboat_bromine_aluminium.png:The mercury one was going to be the least deadly, wasn't it. If that's not incentive enough to avoid it, the [Materials Safety Data Sheet on bromine](http://avogadro.chem.iastate.edu/MSDS/Br2.htm) includes the following phrases: - "severe burns and ulceration" - "perforation of the digestive tract" - "permanent corneal opacification" - "vertigo, anxiety, depression, muscle incoordination, and emotional instability" - "diarrhea, possibly with blood" You should not get in a splash fight on a bromine lake. **Liquid gallium** is weird stuff. Gallium melts just above room temperature, like butter, so you can't hold it in your hand for too long. It's fairly dense, though not anywhere near as dense as mercury, and would be easier to row a boat on. However, once again, you'd better hope the boat isn't made of aluminium, because aluminium (like many metals) absorbs gallium like a sponge absorbs water. The gallium spreads throughout the aluminium, dramatically changing its chemical properties. The modified aluminium is so weak it can be [pulled apart like wet paper](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaMWxLCGY0U). This is something gallium has in common with mercury—both will [destroy aluminium](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Ilxsu-JlY). Like my grandma used to say, don't sail an aluminium boat on a gallium lake. (My grandma was a little strange.) **Liquid tungsten** is really hard to work with. Tungsten has the highest melting point of any element. This means there's a lot we don't know about its properties. The reason for this—and this may sound a little stupid—is that it's hard to study, because we can't find a container to hold it in. For almost any container, the material in the container will melt before the tungsten does. There are a few compounds, like tantalum hafnium carbide, with slightly higher melting points, but no one has been able to make a liquid tungsten container with them. To give you an idea of how hot liquid tungsten is, I could tell you the exact temperature that it melts at (3422°C). But a better point might be this: *Liquid tungsten is so hot, if you dropped it into a lava flow, the lava would freeze the tungsten.* Needless to say, if you set a boat on a sea of liquid tungsten, both you and the boat would rapidly combust and be incinerated. **Liquid nitrogen** is very cold. Liquid helium is colder, but they're both closer to absolute zero than to the coldest temperatures in Antarctica, so to someone floating on them in a boat, the temperature difference is not that significant. A [Dartmouth engineering page on liquid nitrogen safety](http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/microeng/ln2.html) includes the following phrases: - "violent reactions with organic materials" - "it will explode" - "displace oxygen in the room" - "severe clothing fire" - "suffocation without warning" Liquid nitrogen has a density similar to that of water, so a rowboat would float on it, but if you were in it, you wouldn't survive for long. If the air above the nitrogen was room temperature when you started, it would cool rapidly, and you and the boat would be smothered in a thick fog as the water condensed out of the air. (This is the same effect that causes steam when you pour out liquid nitrogen.) The condensation would freeze, quickly covering your boat in a layer of frost. The warm air would cause the nitrogen on the surface to evaporate. This would displace the oxygen over the lake, causing you to asphyxiate. If the air (or the nitrogen) were both cold enough to avoid evaporation, you would instead develop hypothermia and die of exposure. **Liquid helium** would be worse. For one thing, it's only about one-eighth as dense as water, so your boat would have to be eight times larger to support a given weight. Imageboat_large.png:Frankly, what they needed was a smaller shark. But helium has a trick. When cooled below about two degrees kelvin, it becomes a superfluid, which has the odd property that it crawls up and over the walls of containers by capillary forces. It crawls along at about 20 centimeters per second, so it would take the liquid helium less than 30 seconds to start collecting in the bottom of your boat. This would, as in the liquid nitrogen scenario, cause rapid death from hypothermia. If it's any consolation, as you lay dying, you would be able to observe an odd phenomenon. Superfluid helium films, like the one rapidly covering you, carry the same types of ordinary sound waves that most materials do. But they also exhibit an additional type of wave, a slow-moving ripple that propogates along thin films of helium. It's only observed in superfluids, and has the mysterious and poetic name "[third sound](http://www.physics.berkeley.edu/research/packard/current_research/schechter's%20web/page2.html)." Your eardrums may no longer function, and wouldn't be able to detect this type of vibration anyway, but as you froze to death in the floor of a giant boat, your ears would be filled—literally—with a sound no human can ever hear: The third sound. And that, at least, is pretty cool. Imageboat_cool.png:Worth it.

@Dolly !!

Dame Judi Dench does needlework embroidery during movie shoots. And the embroidery is all swear words.

"She makes these like needlework embroideries on set in the tedium of filming", says MacFadyen, "but they are all: 'You Are a Cunt'. And she gives them as presents. And it's Dame Judi Dench. And she is doing this beautifully, intricate, ornate (work). You kind of see the work materializing as the shoot goes on. Like: 'You Are a Fucking Shit.'"

http://www.darcylicious.com/drupal/node/11...

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