Natalie.ayerdis

Just this week I had a dental hygienist explain to me that modern dental insurance is, for the most part, a discount plan. I pay a company a monthly fee, and in return I get the discount they negotiated with the dentist when I pay for my dental care.

I forget who told me this, but someone once said, “There’s very little you can learn that isn’t bad news.” The older I get, the more I see the wisdom in that.

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The previous comic was about health insurance. This one is about working from home. These feel weirdly appropriate to current events, considering they were written seven years ago.

The first job I ever had where someone else paid me to do work from my home, at my own pace, was writing for a computer game nobody played for a company that no longer exists. I remember one morning I got up, put on my bathrobe, kissed Missy goodbye as she left for work, sat down at my computer to write, and aside from bathroom and snack breaks, stayed there until Missy got home. I was surprised how little it seemed to impress her. It’s hard to convince someone how hard you’re working when you never bothered to put on pants.

I should also point out that The Venture Brothers has recently been canceled. It remains my favorite TV show. If you like my work, particularly the Rocket Hat and Knifeketeer stuff, I strongly suggest you give it a shot.

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I enjoyed the all-female Ghostbusters. I also enjoyed Ocean’s 8.

A lot of guys ask why the teams in those movies had to be all-female. It’s not hard to figure out. When your car is veering left into a ditch you don’t just straighten the wheels out, you steer to the right for a while first to get back on the road. All-female protagonist movies are us course correcting until we can straighten out and center ourselves in our lane (By that I mean, have an even mix of male and female protagonists in movies, the way we should have to begin with). Women are 50% of the population, why shouldn’t they be 50% of our heroes?

The question to ask isn’t why we have all female teams in film reboots now. The question is why the originals had to be all male. The original Ghostbusters had, I think, six speaking roles for women. Aside from Sigourney Weaver and Annie Potts, there were the frightened librarian, the student Venkman hit on, the realtor who sold them the firehouse, and Jean Kasem as the tall woman agreeing to dance with Rick Moranis.

It was a different time, and I hate to second-guess Dan Aykroyd, but if dealing with Gozer and Zuul was such an emergency, why not give Janine a pack? You can’t tell me Annie Potts wouldn’t have been funny in an ill-fitting jumpsuit.

I’ve written here more than once about my how much I enjoy Ocean’s Eleven (Clooney, not Sinatra), but why were all eleven men? Again, that movie had five speaking roles for women: two off-camera parole board members, a blackjack dealer who is going on break, a thieving stripper, and Julia Roberts as “The Prize.” (Tess doesn’t split eleven ways!)

There’s no one actor of the team I would single out as needing to be replaced, but almost any of the characters could have been a woman and it wouldn’t have changed the story.

This is only tangentially related, but if they ever do another Ocean’s movie, one where team members from 11, 12, and 13 mix with the cast from 8, I hope that they’ll have Thandie Newton play the wife of Basher (Don Cheadle), and that she will do a terrible American accent.

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This one’s based on a real conversation, one in which I was in the wrong. Working at a theme park, you get really familiar with hand sanitizer. I know a lot of people don’t like the stuff, but I suggest you spend a work day touching things that have been touched by thousands of strangers in just the last hour. You will learn to appreciate hand sanitizer.

While I was working there, stories began to surface that the alcohol in some sanitizers could be absorbed through the skin and affect the user as if they’d been drinking. I am skeptical, but the possibility did nothing to curb any of my coworkers’ use of the stuff.

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The world and the observable universe around it are so amazing, surprising, and mind-bendingly weird that any set of beliefs that tries explain how it all works can be made to sound crazy, simply by stating those beliefs simply.

To prove it, I will now state something that I believe in such a way that they will sound crazy:

Solid matter is mostly empty space.

See? If you know how the atom is constructed, and the scale of the protons, neutrons, and electrons, then you know what I said is true. But to someone who doesn’t know those things, or doesn’t believe in atoms, telling them a solid chunk of granite mostly isn’t there at all will get you written off as a nut.

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For the record, the items MacraMayhem carries on his back are two giant knitting needles and a crochet hook. I considered having knitting needles come out of the backs of his wrists like Wolverine’s claws, but that would have been genuinely menacing, and for one of my villains, that is unacceptable.

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When we were kids, my younger brother developed a diabolical strategy for winning at Monopoly. If I asked if he wanted to play, he’d say yes, but only if I would set up the board. I’d carefully count out $1500 per player in various denominations and organize the deeds so that the banker (me) would have an easier time later on.

When the game was ready, my brother would look at the board, say, “You know what? Naw. I don’t feel like it.”  Then he’d go outside.

Yeah, technically we didn’t play the game, but I can tell you, as I sat there, putting all of the bills away, I didn’t feel like a winner.

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I loved the idea of trained attack bees so much I ended up using it in my novel The Authorities, available . . . well, it used to be that a book plug like this would end with the phrase “Available anyplace books are sold.” Times have changed, I’m afraid. The Authorities is not available anyplace books are sold, but it is available in the one place where the vast majority of books are sold.

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I was a member of the Junior Grange. For those who don’t know, the Grange is sort of a cross between 4-H and the Freemasons. Our mom joined us up as a means of allowing us to socialize with other farm kids our own age, which is a good thing when your nearest neighbor is a half-mile away.

Junior Grange also taught me about parliamentary procedure. Each meeting involved a highly formalized meeting with specific roles and a structured order of events. The very first meeting I attended, when I was in something like the 4th grade, I was made Gatekeeper. I learned many valuable lessons about “grown-up business.” Primarily that it is stupefying boring, it usually accomplishes nothing, and that you shouldn’t ever agree to do something until after the person asking explains, in detail, what is involved.

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So that’s what they were doing after the Snap.

Avengers Doctor Strange, Shuri, The Winter Soldier, and Falcon might not have made it to the other end of the snap in Avengers: Infinity War, but their real-life counterparts were around to take on Thanos in a very different way. The actors assembled in a special Avengers: Endgame-themed escape room with director and game master Joe Russo on hand to generously give tips and guidance to the stumped heroes.

Benedict Cumberbatch, Letitia Wright, Sebastian Stan, and Anthony Mackie took on the challenge undaunted, although Russo was quick to spot when the group needed a hand. The escape room featured classic puzzles like uncovering combinations to door locks by placing objects in the correct order, all with an Endgame theme that probably made the players feel like Thanos was mocking them from the corner of the room.

While the video is all too short, it’s impossible not to smile when you watch some of your favorite actors think their way through the game. We propose that there should be a complete series putting all of our favorite actors from around the Marvel cinematic universe trapped in a room together. Actually, we just really want to see Spider-Man Tom Holland in particular adorably muddle his way through, if we’re being honest.

If you like escape rooms, be sure to check out Geek & Sundry‘s show Escape! hosted by Janey Varney. There aren’t any Avengers in those escape rooms, but you’ll see some familiar faces. And there are definitely some heroes who save the day by spotting a clue that ends up being the key to freedom.

Are you a master at escape rooms? Tell us your strategy in the comments.

All Images: Marvel Studios

“Let me put on a Speedo and ride you to Thailand” is one of the best things I ever came up with.

If you think about it, Omnipresent Man could transport any object from any place, to any place, instantly, for free. That’s actually a tremendous power. At the very least he’d be great at serving subpoenas.

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If you watch any episode of House Hunters, it seems like you’ll hear the phrase “happy wife, happy life” at least once. It’s usually said by a husband who does not look happy.

I’ve tried to come up with a male equivalent, but the only words I can come up with to rhyme with groom are broom, womb, doom, and tomb, so any poem made with them would be horrific, sexist, or most likely, both. I don’t want that.

How about this for an alternative: “Make each other happy, and you’ll both be happy”?

I know. It’ll never take off. It doesn’t rhyme, and it’s not nearly adversarial enough to be repeated on House Hunters, which seems to be a show built on the idea of taking a pleasant couple and pitting them against each other.

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I fully expected to own a sword cane by the time I reached this age, and I’m more offended by the lack of a sword cane in my life than I am by the lack of jet-packs and flying cars. I know, I could just go buy myself a sword cane, but that feels like bad form. A sword cane seems like the kind of thing you either inherit or take from a corpse. Specifically, a corpse wearing a top hat.

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I really like the drawing of me in panel one. It’s a shame I never came up with another use for it. Sitting here looking at it, the several ideas for comics that might have worked are suggesting themselves.

How to pretend to be a party DJ.

How to sneak up behind somebody on a chilly fall day.

How to play keyboards for a band called The Unabombers.

Note from Missy: It occurs to me that every guy in this comic (besides Mustache Boss) is wearing a gray hoodie. Dear Scott, did you choose which coworkers to highlight in this tale for that reason?

Note from Scott: It was not deliberate. Now that I think about it, most of the people who allowed me to use their images for characters in the first couple of years of the strip, except you and me, were sporting the layered look. That’s because the pictures of you and me were taken in our nice, warm home, and everybody else’s were taken in various locations around Seattle.

Later, when we moved to Florida, new characters tended toward t-shirts.

As for the color, one way or the other, every garment everyone in the strip wears is either black or gray.

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I don’t think the Invisible Naked Man ever appeared in Basic Instructions again. I guess, technically, he might have appeared in all of the strips. I can’t prove he didn’t.

If I did use him again, I could have maintained the lazy-artist joke by having him attack the Knifeketeer with easily drawn weapons.

“Now I’m going to bludgeon you with this perfect sphere!”

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How parents can encourage mixed-gender friendships and help kids question gender stereotypes.

"Girl-boy friendships matter. They give kids a chance to explore themselves outside of constrictive gender scripts, and, ideally, question stereotypes," observes writer Elisa Strauss on CNN. "Girl-boy friendships can help undo some of these socialized gender constraints. When parents and teachers approve of these relationships, they are sending their children the message that it's not only okay to play with the another gender, but it is also okay to play like them."  Continue reading →

Renegade Game Studios and WizKids have teamed up to make the kid-friendly Dungeons & Dragons adventure parents have been hoping for! The Wardlings is an all-ages 5e compatible campaign setting that’s paired with pre-painted, high quality miniatures that will have the entire family excited to come to the table.

The supplement, which hits the shelves of your friendly local game store this fall, is penned by RPG veteran Elisa Teague.

I was international waters on @JoCoCruise when this news broke yesterday but I AM SO EXCITED to be writing this campaign setting and rules mechanics for this amazing property! #Wardlings #dnd5e #5e @PlayRenegade #tabletop #games #rpg https://t.co/lPRVv2kVU8

— Elisa Teague JoCo Cruise (@GeekyPinup) March 12, 2019

As you might be able to guess from the incredibly detailed and colorful minis, the world of Wardlings is focused on nature and creature companions. Renegade describes the setting as a place where “the minds of the youth, uncorrupted by the vices and responsibilities of their elders, are able to perceive magical creatures and events in the world around them that adults cannot.”

In this world, the children are the heroes of the land, something that’s certain to appeal to your own little adventurers who have been waiting for a campaign to call their own.

If your kids are itching to get going, sign up for the Renegade Society for up-to-the-minute updates on The Wardlings.

More Family-Friendly Fun!

• My Little Scythe: How This Father and Daughter Melded Scythe and My Little Pony
• Board Game Buyer’s Guide: The Best Family Games Around
• Five Great Games to Play with the Older Gamers on International Tabletop Day

Featured Image: Renegade Game Studios / WizKids

Professor Hubert Zitt, who is widely known for his fascinating lectures on Star Wars, Star Trek and other science fiction, had transformed the perfectly shaped Zweibrücken Observatory of the Natural Science Association into a giant replica of R2-D2...(Read...)

The Avengers 90's Cast Trailer - Fan made..(Read...)

If you’ve ever played board games with your preschooler, chances are among the countless hours of Chutes & Ladders, you’ve also played a few rounds of Guess Who. The Hasbro classic teaches kids logic and deduction, and involves picking out and eliminating characters based on questions about physical traits. Game designer Playeress has taken this concept one step further and created Who’s She?, a guessing game based not on looks, but accomplishments of real women past and present.

After a successful crowdfunding campaign, the gorgeous two-player game is now available for pre-order. Each wooden game board is laser cut and makes the perfect frame for the stunning art by Daria Gołąb.

The twenty-eight faces hiding under each piece feature women of history, chosen because of their “courage to be different and take risks.” From Marie Curie to Serena Williams to Frida Kahlo, thanks to the included biography cards, you’re certain to learn something new about the famous figures.

The wooden set comes with two game boards, the info cards, and a legend to understand the icons describing the person on the board. It’s available for €75,00 plus shipping; if that’s too steep, there’s also a cardboard version of the game available for just €10,00. (International orders are accepted.)

With a bit of reading required and some parts of history you might not have chatted with your young kids about yet, the game is most likely suited more toward elementary age kids. Get your order in now for a family game night unlike any other!

What are your go-to games for the family? Tell us in the comments.

More Family Gaming Goodness!

• Save the Day and Beat Down Your Animal Friends in RHINO HERO: SUPER BATTLE
• Pokémon Meets Jenga in BEASTS OF BALANCE
• MY LITTLE SCYTHE: An Incredible Family-Friendly Adaptation

All Images: Playeress

As my kids get older, their desire to play games with daddy grows. I recently wrote about 5 board games my 3 year old loves. Today I’m here to tell you about Amazing Tales by Martin Lloyd, an RPG system designed for the age 7 crowd but still approachable for younger tykes.

Amazing Tales is a 96-page book; on the surface, it feels like any other RPG book. However, unlike most other RPG books the rules for playing Amazing Tales fit on one page. Character creation and a simple die system are presented early and provide just enough structure to introduce kids to roleplaying without bogging anything down in minutiae. So what are the other 95 pages there for? They’re there to help the adults.

We Already Know How to Tell Stories

It seems silly that I should learn this from a book. My kid — like most other young kids — has a very active imagination. What hadn’t occurred to me until it was spelled out was that he isn’t just making things up, he’s telling a story. It may not be the sort of cohesive narrative that gets published in a novel but that doesn’t mean it isn’t storytelling! Very early in Amazing Tales, Lloyd reminds us parents that it’s us grownups who have lost our natural inclination to follow flights of fancy into the world of make-believe.

If you think about it, he’s right. How many RPG books have you read that provide guidance or structure for telling story? Whether it’s Dungeons & Dragons‘ backgrounds or the structured resolution options in anything Powered by the Apocalypse, it seems that grown-up RPGs continually have to encourage us to use our imagination while playing. Within seconds of playing a short game of Amazing Tales with my little one, we were already riding a bicycle to the moon to find monsters. The details of how we pulled that off weren’t clear but I didn’t worry about it.

That’s something I can take with me into more advanced RPG systems. I have a tendency to want to follow published scenarios, but playing Amazing Tales has reminded me that we all grew telling stories and it’s still inside of us. While I may keep the stories a little more grounded than what a 7-year-old might come up with, I’m definitely going to let go of my inhibitions and encourage players to push the boundaries of their – and my – imaginations.

Just Go With It

Another key recommendation of Amazing Tales is to let your kids drive the story no matter where it takes you. Do they want to play as a knight gallant, armor gleaming in the sun? That’s amazing. Do they instead want to be a motorcycle-riding dinosaur who can talk to fish? That’s also amazing.

Our role as grown-up and GM is to encourage their imagination and work with it. Character creation is very simple and focuses on things the character is good at. The GM is tasked with focusing the story in ways that let characters shine. A good portion of the book is dedicated to helping us do this, with tips on how to handle success and failure. Even the included settings – a fantasy world, enchanted forest, space, and pirate-filled seas – aren’t presented like those of an RPG sourcebook.

Instead, it’s more an outline of the types of trials and triumphs you might see in this world. Telling Amazing Tales isn’t about following specific story beats, it’s about riding to the moon on a bicycle and seeing what you find together when you get there.

Let Go of Expectations

The final less is one of the most important ones. I have in my head an image of RPGs that’s developed over the many years I’ve played them. There are character sheets both complex and simple, piles of dice in myriad shapes and colors, and sprawling adventures that can last years. Amazing Tales is upfront with the fact that it isn’t necessarily designed to provide that kind of experience nor is it likely a 6 or 7-year-old will enjoy that anyway.

Amazing Tales is designed first and foremost for our little ones. It encourages us to find joy and fun in the fact that we’re gaming together. The fact that your enchanted forest adventure isn’t exactly the Tomb of Horrors is fine! You’re sharing a gaming moment together. I’ll cling to that now just in case he’s too embarrassed to play tabletop games with his dad when he grows up. Similarly, any opportunity to sit down around the table with friends should be cherished.

Does it matter if your players took a hard left into the woods away from your perfectly planned NPC-town encounter? Nah. Throw a dragon at them and see what happens. It’ll likely be easier to explain than a bike ride to the moon.

Amazing Tales is a fun RPG system for kids, and a wonderful RPG book for adults. It recently joined a very exclusive group of games when it was certified Adamantium on DriveThruRpg, which is a testament to its quality and how excited people are to share RPGs with young gamers. The simple rules make it easy to teach and do help introduce the core concepts of tabletop gaming, while the rest of the book helps us parents become better GMs. I’m looking forward to seeing the tales we tell in the future!

Looking for more GM Tipes?

• RPG Map Hack: Use DWARF FORTRESS to Easily Make D&D World Maps
• 3 GM Tips To Help Restart Campaigns After A Long Hiatus
• Getting Your Kids Into The (Roleplaying) Game

Image Credits:  Amazing Tales

In addition to Geek & Sundry, Raf Cordero co-hosts the gaming podcast Ding & Dent. Chat with him on Twitter @captainraffi.

Tumbling world championships womens final 2015...(Read...)

I would never advocate the plan I lay out in panel four, but it does have a certain logic to it. Over time, we would eliminate our least competent young people, and our angriest and most delusional elderly. You can’t tell me that doesn’t sound good.

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“The Details are Unimportant” is probably the running joke from the comics I get quoted back to me the most. That strikes me as odd, because it didn’t actually appear in that many comics. I think gripping the RJ-17 form firmly turned up more often.

Yet another example of my compulsion to take the things that seem to be working and avoid doing them.

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"Kit Harington and Toothless’ long-lost audition tapes have been found. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019) comes out this February! As Hiccup fulfills his dream of creating a peaceful dragon utopia, Toothless' discovery of an untamed, elusive mate draws the Night Fury away. When danger mounts at home and Hiccup's reign as village chief is tested, both dragon and rider must make impossible decisions to save their kind."..(Read...)

I did have the Star Trek red alert klaxon as my ringtone, and I did get rid of it because it was too startling, but not because it only startled me. In the one day I used it I panicked my coworkers and several people on a downtown Seattle bus with it. I don’t know if it sounded too much like a real alarm of some sort, or if several generations have been conditioned to associate that sound with impending attack by Klingons, but either way, people found it nerve-wracking.

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I feel like words are cheap and sentiment is empty, but I can’t stop thinking about the people who have lost homes due to the fires that are raging all around my state.

I also can’t stop thinking about how much I respect, admire, and appreciate the firefighters who are risking their lives to stop the progression of the fires as well as protect the lives and property of their fellow humans.

I’m watching a man who has therapy dogs with him up near Thousand Oaks. He was asked to bring his dogs to Cal Lutheran after the mass murder a few days ago, and he stayed there so his dogs can offer comfort to people who have been displaced by the fire.

He said that he and his team gather every morning for devotion and prayer, and then they take themselves and the (this is my phrasing, now) ephemeral inspiration they take from their faith to help other people.

I am not a religious person, but I believe as strongly as I believe in anything that this man and his kind, loving, selfless help is what I believe religion should inspire people to be, not the hateful bigotry we so often see from people who claim religious faith as justification for their own absence of compassion and empathy.

I am not religious, but I want to say: God bless this man and his team.

It’s scary and upsetting to see so much destruction and know that it’s going to get even worse before it’s all over, but I am remembering Mister Rogers’s gentle reminder to look for the helpers.

The idea of the Snake-Ape made me giggle like a crazy person when I first came up with it. Judging by the reaction to this comic, and the sales of my Snake Ape t-shirt, I am alone in that.

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The Superheroes: Who Protect New York City..(Read...)

Ah, time paradoxes. I write a lot about those. They are a major pain in the butt. If only I could go back in time and tell myself to write fewer of them.

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