Natalie.ayerdis

Join Becca and Ivan every week as they play awesome new games on Game the Game every Friday at 4PM PT on G&S Live!

I need to talk to you about something. Something important. I don’t know how many of you out there are like me, but I feel like I need to step up for all of us and loudly declare that I am in love…with custom dice.

Let’s be clear, I love all dice. I have three fist-sized d20s and two different sets of gaming dice that are both small enough to be near unreadable. I look at the Tablebreaker and start uncontrollably drooling. But more than any of those, I love a game with a set of dice that are completely unique. Because of this, Flatline was a very easy sell for me, but if you need more than just the promise of handfuls of colorful random number generators (weirdo), then let me tell you why Flatline is one of the best games I’ve played all year. But first, just look at these dice.

Published by Renegade Game Studios, Flatline casts you in the role of futuristic emergency room doctors who have a flying ambulance full of patients to treat. To make matters worse, the building’s power supply has been damaged and if you haven’t treated all of your patients before the power goes out, the ones left untreated will die. This game is a spiritual sequel to Renegade’s other game FUSE, but you don’t have to have played that one to enjoy Flatline. All you need to know is that both games are fast-paced and involve putting dice on the right spots in order to save everyone and be a hero.

Like I said, what you’re trying to do in Flatline is save patients. You’ll have a big stack of them, but only enough space in your ER for four at a time. The wounds each patient has suffered is represented by rows of symbols. Your team of doctors will have one minute to treat your patients by placing the dice you’ve rolled onto the matching symbols. At the end of the minute, if you’ve placed enough dice to fill an entire row, you’ll cover it up. If you’ve covered all of the rows, you’ve successfully treated the patient and you bring out a new one. During that minute you’ll also place dice on cards to handle emergencies that have come up, you’ll use dice to activate power stations (giving you more rounds in the game), and you’ll only reroll your dice by placing dice in the special dice rerolling spot. Everything is dice and I absolutely love it. Dice!

No, you have a problem.

Before your minute of dice-based surgery starts a few things will happen. There’s a power tracker that counts down each turn by removing one of its power cubes (basically just featureless dice), and the number below the cube tells you how many cards to draw. These cards represent emergencies that can happen. Blue cards have nasty effects, will stick around until they’re removed during surgery, and may or may not be activated depending on the roll of the Emergency Dice (yes, more dice! Did you think we were done?!). Orange cards on the other hand need to be removed the turn they were drawn, otherwise they’ll start adding up. Let this happen enough times and you lose the game outright. Of course, if you can remove it before that happens, you’ll get to keep it as a one-time power card that’ll help you later in the game.

You’ll also have time to strategize before surgery, and this is what separates the doctors from the medical students. See, this game is extremely stressful in the moment, especially when you add more people. You’re all trying to work together but with so many dice to manage, things can get out of control really quickly. The way to counter this is to work together and come up with a solid plan. You’ll have to prioritize patients vs. emergency cards, some of which are truly horrendous. And occasionally you’ll even decide when not to treat patients. Depending on the timing, fully treating a patient can sometimes earn you either a bonus or a penalty, so it might be in your best interest to leave them on the table for just one more round before putting on the last Band-Aid.

This game does so many things right. The emergency cards provide a great challenge, overwhelming you if you let them pile up, but never letting you forget about their presence. The power track is a great way to handle what in other games would just be a boring old turn counter. Instead, because the number of cards you draw is different each turn, using the power stations to recharge (placing a cube back on the track) requires precise timing. Having only a minute to do all of these things provides such perfect tension on its own, and there’s a free app for the game with a timer/soundtrack that adds just that extra pinch of panic.

There is a minor criticism to make about Flatline in that This Is Not How Surgery Works. As much as I love these dice, and I hope I’ve impressed on you how much that is, you don’t fix a broken leg by just throwing stethoscopes and heartbeats at it. Of course, every board game is an abstraction in some way or another. Flatline chose to focus on the stress and panic of ER medicine as opposed to the mechanics of it, and in that sense I think they did a great job. That being my only real issue with the game, there’s no way I wouldn’t recommend it for gamers of all types.

Oh, did I mention that the dice are pretty good?

Looking for more games? Becca and Ivan will be delving into the world of Valerian in this week’s Game the Game on our Twitch channel this Friday. Join us there and tell us about your favorite dice games in the chat, or in the comments below. 

Image credits: Shea Parker

Panel three of this comic contains one of my rare attempts at actual cartooning. It’s not too bad, overall, but Duke’s hands on the steering wheel need work.

Another idea I had for a children’s book based on a completely inappropriate book for adults was a version of Fight Club called Friend Club. The plot of that move mapped pretty naturally onto the concept of a lonely boy with an imaginary friend—some might say more naturally than it did to the actual concept.

I’ve scrapped the entire idea, because in the end nothing I come up with would ever be funnier than the actual, not made as a joke, series of DUNE coloring books.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

"In the brand new adventure Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the tables are turned as four teenagers in detention are sucked into the world of Jumanji. When they discover an old video game console with a game they’ve never heard of, they are immediately thrust into the game’s jungle setting, into the bodies of their avatars, played by Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, and Karen Gillan. What they discover is that you don’t just play Jumanji –Jumanji plays you. They’ll have to go on the most dangerous adventure of their lives, or they’ll be stuck in the game forever…"Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, an upcoming 2017 adventure film that's a sequel to the classic 1995 film, Jumanji. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, which stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, Nick Jonas, and Jack Black, comes to theaters on December 22nd, 2017...(Read...)

These are a pair of hairy leg leggings available from custom clothing printer Contrad, allow customers to print their own designs on their garments and their latest number is a pair of elasticated leggings covered in dark hair. Terrifyingly realistic, the hairy leggings are matched to your skin tone so will hopefully make strangers think you’ve forgone any shaving routine and are embracing au natural this summer...(Read...)

Yet again, sadly, this comic is based on an actual conversation. A coworker of mine told our supervisor he was smarter than her, and was surprised when she didn’t take “the news” well.

This comic was made way back when one would have to “go get” a video camera. Now, many of us just happen to have HDTV cameras on us at all times, attached to the supercomputers we use as phones. You never know what’s going to date a comic.

Hey, by the way, my latest book, Run Program comes out Tuesday, the 20th! It's a book about a rogue AI that has the intelligence of a child. You might think that would make the AI less dangerous, but you'd be wrong. Anyway, I'm quite proud of it. Please check it out, if you have a chance.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

I’ve tried several different types of razor, and found that they all workd equally well, if the goal is to lacerate my face-meat.

Two different razor manufacturers ended up sending me free samples of their products to review after this comic ran. I found that I was perfectly capable of cutting my cheeks and neck to ribbons regardless of what razor I used. I’m currently using a Panasonic electric razor, with which I’m very happy. I’ll admit that if you keep up with replacing the blades and screens it doesn’t work out to be all that much cheaper than disposables, but I lose a lot less blood, and I get to use a gadget!

Hey, by the way, my latest book, Run Program, is out now! It's a book about a rogue AI that has the intelligence of a child. You might think that would make the AI less dangerous, but you'd be wrong. Anyway, I'm quite proud of it. Please check it out, if you have a chance.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

"In years past, we’ve asked you to spray your dad with a hose, to serve him breakfast in the shower but this year the challenge was simple. Just sneak up on your father and yell “I love you Dad” as loud as you can. We got hundreds of videos, we went through all of them and whittled it down to the best of the best."..(Read...)

As I remember, this comic was actually inspired by an episode of America’s Next Top Model. (Missy used to watch. I would be in the room, doing other things, within sight and earshot of the TV . . . DON’T JUDGE ME!)

Anyway, they had the contestants work with a runway walk coach who started by informing them all that he was far too important to make any effort to learn any of their names, and would be calling all of them “Pumpkin Pie.” Then he had them, one by one, show him their runway walk. Each contestant took three or four steps before he barked, “Wrong. Sit down,” but offered no explanation as to what they’d done wrong or how to fix it.

Applying military boot-camp techniques to teach something as low-stakes as stagecraft struck me funny, so I applied it to office technical support.  

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While it’s true that you can pretty much grill anything, nothing takes to an open flame quite as keenly as a generous cut of beef. Take advantage of peak grilling season by learning how to grill the perfect steak, and practice cooking your favorite cuts, like sirloin, New York Strip, ribeye and more, in flame-broiled fashion.

Grilled Rib-Eye Steaks with Chipotle-Lime Butter   With more marbling than New York Strip, T-bone and porterhouse steaks, rib-eye is arguably the most indulgent cut of beef. Pair it with a Southwestern-inflected chipotle-lime butter, and you’ve got a cut of beef that’s sure to melt in your mouth when you eat it.

Grilled Flank Steak Salad with Tomatoes   Flank steak is flavorful and takes well to marinades, which means it’s a natural pairing for the grill. It’s also lean and relatively inexpensive, so it’s ideal as a weeknight protein in a summery salad with onions and tomatoes.

Grilled Skirt Steak with Chimichurri   Skirt steak takes well to searing, which means it’s just about meant for the grill. For best results, give each side a quick kiss on the grill grates, leaving the center medium rare. Pair it with a punchy sauce, like the piquant, herbaceous Argentinean condiment known as chimichurri.

Sliced Sirloin with Garlic-Sauteed Artichokes     When selecting boneless sirloin steaks, look for pieces that are bright red, which indicate freshness, with as much marbling as possible for the best flavor. In this recipe, which works well when you can find baby artichokes in season, keep a close eye on the sirloin so it doesn’t overcook, which can impact flavor.

Grilled New York Strip Steak with Salsa Verde   Many claim that New York Strip is the best steak of them all—and with its triple threat of tenderness, even marbling and full flavor, one can see why. Cook it only until pink on the inside (we prefer medium rare) and it’s well-marked on the outside.

The post 5 Fool-Proof Recipes to Master on the Grill This Year appeared first on Williams-Sonoma Taste.

I have a young relative who lost her hearing at a very early age. When she was in junior high she had high-tech hearing aids surgically implanted. When she told me about them, my response was “Cool! You’re a cyborg!” I’ve always felt good about that response. When in doubt, going positive is almost always the right move, and instead of having the conversation move on to how much the procedure had sucked, instead she told me all about how the implants also worked as Bluetooth headphones.

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All greetings are weird, if you think about ’em.

Let me clarify that statement. It’s not that greetings are inherently weird, it’s that they all become weird if you give them the slightest thought. You want your greeting to come off as natural and effortless. That sense of effortlessness will be destroyed by even the slightest doubt in your mind, the kind of doubt that comes from briefly thinking should I wave and say “hi,” or just wave? Or just say “hi”?

Once you’ve given your greeting any thought whatsoever, whatever you do will come off as weird and forced.

Now that I’ve pointed this out, the next time you greet someone, this will happen to you. Feel free to curse me under your breath. That’ll make it even more awkward.

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So you’ve got a collection of guides for game masters, a playlist’s worth of GM tips from Geek & Sundry, and a group of players who are happy to be your test subjects. In order to become a great GM, all you have to do is clock in ten thousand hours* of practicing those techniques in order to become great at gamemastering, right?

Not so fast.

According to the research, simply reading a book, watching a video, or listening to a podcast and giving those concepts a try isn’t going to make you better. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool details the process, as backed up by data, of how to get good at just about anything. You have to apply your newfound knowledge with practice, but you have to practice the right way.

If you just do something repetitively for a long time, you’re not actually likely to become an expert at it. You need to try, fail, recalibrate, and try again. In this book, the authors discuss the method that’s proven to work for the world’s top athletes, musicians, surgeons, chess grandmasters, and more: it’s called deliberate practice, and it’s designed to help you create stronger mental representations.

Mental representations (or ways of thinking about something) are what separate the good GMs from the great ones. Well-developed mental representations enable GMs to juggle multiple considerations such as plot twists, NPCs, and pacing in their heads all at once: they’ve trained themselves to be consciously thinking of those all those things and more at the right times during game. Mental representations also give GMs a model for predicting how different rulings or story choices will play out at the table, and for making the right call when presented with the players’ unexpected plans or unanticipated dice rolls.

Here’s what the authors of Peak say you have to do in order to practice deliberately and forge those mental representations.

Set Very Specific Goals

To make the GM tips work for you, you have to create for yourself an exercise that makes you practice one very specific part of that tip. It isn’t enough to have a vague goal like “do better NPC voices.” Have goals like, “I’m going to vary the energy levels of five NPCs this session,” and have a series of checkboxes in your notebook that you can tick off each time you do. In your GM notes, make sure to give all your NPCs a low, medium, or high-energy voice. Next time your run a game, add another checkbox, then another. Don’t stop until it’s become automatic to think about NPCs’ voice energy levels whenever your roleplay them.

In another example, say your goal is to “pace my sessions better.” Become conscious as to whether you’re dramatizing or summarizing a scene. After you can remember to do that, experiment with cutting scenes short during a session. Finally, try dragging out scenes longer and see what happens.

Stay Engaged the Whole Time

When you practice at the table, ensure you’re really engaging with the exercise. Become highly conscious of what you’re doing and why. Continuously dig into your thought process behind a certain decision and then extrapolate what you think the results will be. Write notes if you can to help you remember your reasoning and predictions after the fact.

This likely means that you’ll need to run shorter, more focused sessions, as the typical four-hour game sessions are going to be exhausting if you’re truly being conscious of what you’re doing the whole time. Alternatively, pick out 25-minute segments of your regular play time and resolve to really focus during those. Quality over quantity is the name of this game.

Incorporate Feedback, and Adjust

Now that you know exactly what you were doing and how you thought things would go, how accurate were you? How close are you to your desired outcome? Find out what’s working and what didn’t from your players, and then get their take on why. Solicit feedback from GMs you admire as well (and maybe get them in a one-shot session if you don’t get the chance to play with them usually). That way, you can learn whether the choices you were making were the right ones. In the next session, make it your conscious goal not to repeat those mistakes. The more feedback you receive and internalize, the better you’ll get at self-evaluation as well, so you’ll catch yourself right before you do something that won’t get the desired result or adjust your tack on the fly.

Find the Appropriate Challenge Level

Ensure that you’re always reaching farther than you are comfortable. This means pushing your exercises to the next level to make yourself reach beyond what you know you’re capable of in a given session. Try to balance on the edge of being challenged without being frustrated by failure. Dial it back a notch or two if you find yourself consistently failing the challenge, and then try again.

Revisit Previously Learned Skills

Ensure that you’re not forgetting a skill after you’ve learned it by sprinkling in the related exercises into your new routine. That way, you’re also building up your ability to juggle considerations about all the different things you want to improve as a GM. Make a plan to review an exercise you did before and ensure it’s still incorporated into your practice. If it’s hard to keep up both techniques, minimize the number of things you’re juggling and slowly build up to executing all your GM’s tips at once.

By using these techniques, you should be able to tell whether or not you’re improving, and you’ll be improving more quickly than if you just had vague goals about “being a better GM.”

Try them out, and let us know how they worked for you in the comments below!

*Fun fact: If you only ran a four-hour game session weekly, it would take you over 48 years to reach “expert” level!

Featured Image Credit: Canva

Image Credits: Margaret Dunham

Found yourself at a crossroads and terrified of going in the wrong direction?  Not sure if you should have kids or just eat a Toblerone?  Life is full of twists and turns!  Write to us for advice!

Hi, I’m a woman in my late 20’s.   I’ve been married for 3 years but we fight a lot and it seems to be getting worse rather than better.  I felt like if I got pregnant it might help give our relationship an anchor—something we both love that would bring us closer together??  What should I do?

Solution:  EAT A TOBLERONE

Thanks for writing.  If you’re really worried about your relationship, a fun thing might be to eat a Toblerone Lady-and-the-Tramp style, each of you starting at one end of the Toblerone while you gaze into each other’s eyes and then later your partner could roll a separate Toblerone toward you with his nose?  (Hard though, because Toblerones are triangular and will not roll easily.)  Probably do not have a baby though, sorry!

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Hello!  A lot of my friends have settled down and started families and I feel like I’m behind—like I’m somehow less of an adult than people (even people younger than I am) who have started families.  I want to finally feel like I’m a real grownup.  Advice?

Solution: DEFINITELY JUST EAT A TOBLERONE

Eating Toblerone is the quintessential adult activity!  Do you regularly see little kids walking around eating Toblerone?  If you answer, “Yeah, all the time!” then maybe you should just be thankful you have the money to visit Europe so often.  Eating a Toblerone will make you feel like an adult, whereas having children will more likely make you feel like an anxiety-ridden basket case with a minivan full of rotting fruit.  Hope this helps!

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Hi, I love my job but don’t have children.  I’m worried that I’m going to throw myself into my work my whole life and find that when I’m old there’ll be no one to take care of me. 

Solution:  OBVIOUSLY THE ANSWER IS STILL EAT A TOBLERONE

Look, I’m not sure what line of work you’re in, but have you ever thought of getting a job with Mondelez International, the parent company that owns Toblerone?  Because that might offer you more financial stability than two children who will use up all your resources and then throw you away like a sheet of one-ply toilet paper in a truck stop restroom.  I have two children and am fully prepared to die in a field somewhere, to be devoured by vultures, probably.  I harbor zero illusions that either of my kids will ever be able to take care of me, nor do I even know what the world will be like when they’re my age and I’m sitting in some sort of futuristic wheelchair, grinding down my dentures (my regular teeth having succumbed years prior to Toblerone-related decay).

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Hello and looking for advice!  I don’t have kids but I love my job and my life.  I travel a lot and have a good circle of friends, many of whom also don’t have kids.  We have awesome talks about pop culture and art and books and human nature and life.  It would be hard to give up the amount of freedom I have to settle down and raise a family.  I hope to one day retire in Miami with a series of quirky housemates who (like me) have always loved the Golden Girls, never feeling angry or bitter that my child who I think about all the time isn’t calling me and instead, being fully able to enjoy my existence.  I am also extremely allergic to nuts.

Solution:  I AM SO SORRY, UNFORTUNATELY IN THIS PARTICULAR SITUATION YOU WILL NEED TO HAVE A BABY

I am so, so sorry, but as Toblerone contains almonds, you should almost definitely have a baby.  I almost never give this advice to people, but depending on the severity of your allergy, having even a small piece of Toblerone would be extremely unwise.  I apologize profusely for the loss of your freedom.

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 If you’re headed to a baby shower (or you’re in that year of your life where you’re headed to literally nine baby showers every weekend) please consider picking up and gifting the new parents a copy of my book, Welcome to the Club: 100 Parenting Milestones You Never Saw Coming, which you can purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Indiebound.  If you’re curious as to whether you yourself should have a baby or eat a Toblerone, feel free to comment below and/or e-mail me at BabyOrToblerone@gmail.com.  Also, you can follow The Ugly Volvo on Facebook or Twitter, if those are websites in which you are emotionally invested.

Thank you for reading.

Hey Sydney! We need your BAHFest proposal! Only a week left to get it in!

I’m shocked that nobody has made a movie about an old man who commits some crime in an attempt to use prison as a nursing home, and that Robert DeNiro hasn’t starred in it.

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Jimmy and Gal Gadot take turns trying to stump each other about what items are hidden inside their mystery boxes...(Read...)

Andy Wood and Matt Kirshen test the limits of everyday AI against a variety of accents in linguistics tests designed to determine which AI is the best at understanding the most people. Featuring Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Siri...(Read...)

The Amazon Echo Silver is specifically designed for the greatest generation (Kenan Thompson, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, Kyle Mooney, Aidy Bryant)...(Read...)

 I could have done a full comic on the concept of a stun ray set to kill.

“If it kills them, it’s a kill ray.”

“No, it stuns them to death.”

“But it still kills them!”

“Yes! that’s the point of the kill setting.”

Looking at the comic, something struck me as odd about it. It took a while before I realized that the Emperor doesn’t get the snot beat out of him in this one! I think, given his record, we have to classify that as a “win.”

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Dear Cabdriver,

First off, I apologize for not remembering your name.  I know you enthusiastically told it to us, but by the time you arrived at our apartment I felt as though someone were disemboweling me with an IKEA can opener and I had trouble exchanging pleasantries.  Please know that under normal circumstances when people attempt to make conversation I do not respond by groaning like the Frankenstein Monster or screaming like a person who is having their eyeballs cauterized.

Secondly, I loved that when my husband told you the name of the hospital and said, “And drive fast—she’s in labor!” you excitedly said the phrase, “JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIES!!”  You even said, “Do you want me to roll down the windows so that you get some air?  I’m going to try not to hit too many potholes!  That’s what the guys in the movies say!!!” Your bizarre devotion to cinematic representations of cab rides to the hospital was weirdly charming.  And I may not have shown it at the time because I felt like I was dying from a bayonet wound, but I thought it was really funny and sweet.

You then spent quite a good portion of the ride mulling over some of your own life choices.  If I remember correctly, you had a girlfriend at the time, and you sort of wanted to have a child with her but you weren’t sure if you were ready.  But she was getting older and you were getting older (mid 40’s?) and if you did have kids you wanted to do it before you were too old to play with them and also something about your mother being young enough to help with childcare.  And again—normally I would have been totally down for talking you through this rough patch, except that I was in active labor and felt like a wolverine had chewed its way through my uterus so I was mainly uttering primeval screams, alternating with the sort of huffing noises a buffalo might make before it dies.  But are you still with your girlfriend??  Make sure you sit her down and tell her how you feel.  Good communication is such an important part of a relationship.  I wish that in my relationship as your customer I had been able to communicate to you more effectively than shrieking the words, “KILL ME KILL ME WHY IS THIS HAPPENING” while rocking back and forth and (I think?) bleeding out of my eyes.

And had you known more about pregnancy and childbirth you might’ve said, “Wait, why did you wait until you were in active labor before taking a cab to the hospital?”  And that’s when, if I hadn’t been gasping like someone who has had their torso crushed by a flatbed truck full of anvils, I would have sheepishly admitted that I had let labor advance this far because I hadn’t taken a birthing class.  And had you asked why I didn’t take a birthing class I would have said “Because we didn’t have a ton of money lying around and when asked to choose between registering for a birthing class or buying two tickets to see Eddie Izzard in the West Village, I chose to see Eddie Izzard, despite the fact that his jokes contain literally NO information on the stages of labor and/or how to use breathing techniques to manage the pain of contractions.

I remember some vague tangent you went on about how much you value family and how wonderful it was that we—these people you had just met—were starting a family of our own.  And I didn’t say much at the time because I was letting my eyes roll back in my head as I accepted the fact that during late-stage contractions you feel like you are being gored by a bull.  But I wanted to say thank you.  For opening the windows.  For avoiding the potholes.  For your wild enthusiasm about getting to drive a pregnant woman to the hospital in general.  I hope you have that talk with your girlfriend and you both figure out what you want to do.  Apologies again that, due to the contractions and the extremely distracting feeling of having a human baby repeatedly hurling itself into my cervix like a battering ram breaking into a medieval city, I was unable to fully engage with you during our trip.

Best wishes for your future.

Sincerely,

That Lady Who Would Not Stop Screaming The Whole Time

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Thanks for reading!  If you’re looking for a gift for an upcoming baby shower/mother’s day brunch, I wrote and illustrated a book called Welcome to the Club.  If you’re ordering through the Chronicle Website, enter the code GIVEBACK and in addition to the discount, Chronicle donates a percentage of all sales to the Ronald McDonald House Charities.  You can buy it at the Chronicle Website by clicking HERE.  Or you can find it in the normal places like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound, The Library at Alexandria, Some old guy selling a copy on the side of the road, and this person’s bathroom.  

Also, you can’t actually buy it in the last three places I listed so I’ll include another link to buy it disguised as link to a totally different book:  CLICK HERE TO BUY UMBERTO ECO’S THE NAME OF THE ROSE FOR ONLY $12.89

Photo Credit for that hospital photo goes to Joe Shblotnick, who also wins the award for “most fun name to say out loud.”

And happy mother’s day.

Hey there everybody,

Before we do today’s blog, two quick notes:

First, a reminder that we’re running a t-shirt design contest in anticipation of the Geeks Doing Good fundraiser that we’re running in June. If you’re an arty type, we’d love to see what designs you could come up with. Then we’ll vote on them here in the blog, and the winners will become for-real t-shirts that people can buy for charity. (P.S. We’ll pay you, too.)

Fair warning: You have less than a week to submit your designs. If you want more details, you can check out this blog here. (Even if you don’t want details, you can still click the link. If nothing else, there’s a cute video of my kid there.)

Second, we set out our first activism newsletter. It doesn’t have many bells and whistles yet, but those are in development. I think the team did a nice job of providing some good news (with valuable context) for people who want to stay informed (but who are tired of being overwhelmed by getting their news on social media.) Even more importantly, we gave people some good, productive ways to take positive action and help make the world a better place.

We’ve got more than 4000 people signed up at this point. If you’d like to join us, here’s a link.

And now the new coolness:

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Back on the second day of my first booksigning tour, I met a woman who had a tattoo of my signature on her arm.

“Wow,” I thought to myself. “That’s pretty nuts. I guess I’ll never see anything like that again.”

But, as with many things, I was completely wrong. And eventually assembled and shared an entire blog full of tattoos that people got based on my books.

Since then, whenever I see one of these appear on social media, a tuck it away in a folder to share with y’all later.

So here we go. Tattoo blog two:

I’ve seen more than a few of Auri’s brazen gear. That makes me happy.

I like the thought of two people with Fulcrum tattoos noticing each other and becoming friends….

I’m guessing this is the only one of these I’ll ever see. I’m glad they liked Bast’s Rhyme that much….

I’m fond of this quote. (And not just due to… umm… placement.)

There’s some truth in this one that I tend to forget all the time….

And this one too…

This is hardcore nerd. Is nerdcore a word. It should be. And this is it.

Clicking to embiggen is of the Lethani….

Sometimes I write something I’m very proud of. It’s hard to express how flattering it it when someone else likes it enough to put it on their skin, forever.

I like this version too. I’m a big fan of the less-is-more aesthetic.

I never expected to see one of these….

This seems to be one of my more popular quotes.

I’ve heard a lot of folks use it in their weddings…

I think this might be the only Amyr one I’ve seen…

Whoo boy. You better hope I wasn’t lying when I said what that translated into…

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a foreign translation tattoo before this one. Or one for this particular quote. I think it turned out lovely….

It reads, “Viajé, amé, perdí, confíe y me traicionaron.” (“I trouped, traveled, loved, lost, trusted and was betrayed.”)

I’m very fond of the Auri tattoos. She has a special place in my heart.

We’ll do some more of them in the next tattoo blog. I’m realizing now I have too many of these to include here…

Way, way too many….

And this is a good one to close on.  It says a lot.

Thanks so much, everyone. You mean a lot to me.

One family,

pat

Mullet Boss’s dialog in panel one is, sadly, the actual climax of an actual story a coworker told me. As in the comic, he was doing this to save a smaller, relatively defenseless dog, but still, I think he could tell from the look on my face that I didn’t think the actions he described were quite as heroic as he did.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad he saved the smaller dog. I was just uncomfortable with the glee he took in describing his assault on the Doberman, at length, while acting it out, and imitating the sounds it made.

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After this comic ran, I received the following tweet from Grant Imahara:

“Hey, @binstructions great comic! How did you know?? ;)”

I thought that was tremendously classy of him, considering I had pretty much accused him of humping a machine.

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Only Imperial Stormtroopers Are So Precise..(Read...)

This comic is partially adapted from an idea I had a long time ago: a pitch for a sitcom called “Nerthus and Ned.” It was a sort of a modern twist on I Dream of Jeannie or Bewitched.

Ned was a normal, modern guy who discovers that he’s reincarnated, and that in a former life, during the bronze age, he was drowned in a peat bog as a sacrificed to the goddess Nerthus. Nerthus, a beautiful woman with a German accent, who wears a sexy dress made of dirty burlap, comes to claim him, and ends up living with him in his apartment. She uses her magical powers to change every aspect of his life.

She has two powers: she can read his mind, and cause him excruciating pain.

I never pitched it to any networks, though it might have been a good fit for Fox.

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Our experience has been that some cats just reach an age where they start throwing up occasionally. One of our cats fell into that category.

Even though I consider myself to be tremendously lazy, I eventually decided that it was better to clean the mess immediately. Waiting only allowed it to dry into the carpet, or increased the chances that I would forget where it was and step in it. Both of those outcomes were worth avoiding.

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My son is in a stage where he wants to be Just. Like. Me.  Everything I like, he insists that he likes.  Everything I do not like, he also does not like (and vehemently insists he has never liked).  He agrees with everything I say and mimics everything I do and it might, it was pointed out, behoove me to speak and act in a way that I would want him to mimic.

This has been harder than anticipated.

 *             *              *

Dear my four-year-old son!

Hi, I am your mother whom you totally idolize and constantly imitate at this point in your childhood, and if there’s one thing you need to know about me it’s that I love cauliflower and not having a complete emotional breakdown when I am asked to take a bath.

What was that thing someone just said about how I don’t normally like mushrooms??  Of COURSE I love mushrooms.  That person must be misremembering.  Everyone knows how much I love mushrooms and how I totally eat them all the time without dramatically spitting them machine-gun style into my napkin when I can feel one in my mouth.  Another thing I totally love and eat all the time is tofu because I just love things with weird, slightly slimy textures that make you feel like maybe you’re eating a phlegm-covered sheep’s eyeball.

Mushrooms are the greatest, but you know what else is great are large, fast-moving insects.  Something I’m definitely not afraid of are those giant cockroach-looking palmetto bugs that are sometimes huddled around a puddle in our basement like African megafauna at a riverbank.  I love those! The reason I let out that very big gasp when I saw them was because I was SO excited to see some and the reason I didn’t want to go near them was because what if I stepped on them?  What I love even more are spiders, which is why I trap them under those giant Pyrex bowls.  If there’s one thing spiders love, it is being trapped in a potato-salad scented, makeshift Bio-Dome, and if there are two things spiders love, it is the Bio-Dome thing followed by being flushed down a toilet.

Also, not hitting people is totally my favorite.  I really loved not hitting that businessman who let the door slam in my face while I tried to walk into the drugstore to buy allergy medication this morning.  I was so happy I didn’t hit him and I’m even more glad I didn’t cover him in dead palmetto bugs and sneeze the mushrooms I had just eaten right onto his Ralph Lauren tortoiseshell sunglasses.  Because I love being nice.

Oh, you too?  Wow, four-year-old son, we are like TWINS.

I love listening to advice from people who are sure they know what’s best for me.  Sometimes grandma has lots of good advice like this and goes, “Here’s what you should do!” and I love listening because if there’s one person who knows what I should do it’s a mildly anxious woman in her late 60’s who spends half her time telling me to iron my shirts, and the other half eating boxes of Good ‘n’ Plenty while looking at headshots of young Gregory Peck on Google Images.

(I am kidding!  I don’t think my mom knows how to use Google Images.  I assume she goes to the library and looks at Gregory Peck photos on microfiche.)

I love not looking at an iPhone or iPad all the time.  And you know what else I love?  Flash cards.  Some people like the mindless distraction of iPhones or iPads, but I’d rather cultivate a type of “deep focus,” sitting alone in the living room with my alphabet flashcards and my deepest fears while listening to the beat of my own heart.  H is for Help!

Not that I have any fears to think about, because in addition to not being afraid of spiders and palmetto bugs I’m also totally not scared of rejection or abandonment or the state of the world into which I haphazardly brought you and I’m also definitely not afraid of cicadas, especially in those years when millions of them hatch and they’re all crawling like a plague through the parking lot of a Staples.

*long sigh*

I love peeing before I leave the house even if I don’t really feel like I have to go.  So often I am just so sure that I don’t have to go to the bathroom, but I love love love going to the bathroom anyway so that I don’t wind up crying and asking if I’m allowed to pee on the train platform in the 34^th street subway station.

I love you.  Because you are fantastic, four-year-old.  Please love yourself as much as I love you even though there is literally no way you could ever understand how much that is.

I love going to bed early without making a huge fuss.  Sometimes as early as 7:30 PM.  Even in two years when you realize that most of these are lies, please know that these last two are painfully, painfully true.

Much love,

Your parent

   *                    *                    *

Cicada Photo Credit: Robert Engberg

Thanks for reading.  If you need a Mother’s Day Gift because you’re the type of person who remembers to buy gifts, I wrote a book that’s about as expensive as a dozen tulips but won’t shed limp petals onto your table after four days.  If you buy it through the Chronicle website (HERE) using the code GIVEBACK, they are donating a percentage of the sales to the Ronald McDonald House Charities to help out parents whose children are hospitalized.

You can also buy the book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Indiebound.  You can follow The Ugly Volvo on Facebook or Twitter or you can just write me long letters, fold them into paper airplanes and throw them at my window.

According to the National Sex Study, senior citizens are having a lot more sex. So in the interest of science we went to the LA Farmers Market at the Grove and asked seniors to share their secrets to success when it comes to doing a little something called 'it.'..(Read...)

This comic has what is possibly the best first panel of any comic I ever wrote.

A few weeks after this comic ran, a nationally syndicated comic did a strip based on the same idea. A few readers pointed it out, but I chose not to make a big deal out of it. I’ve been in the “trying desperately to think of something funny to say” business long enough to know that this stuff happens.

Right now, all around the world, there are thousands of comedians, writers, and cartoonists trying their hardest to come up with an original funny idea. It’s inevitable that two people will get a similar idea around the same time occasionally. Plagiarism is, of course, completely unacceptable, but the syndicated cartoonist in this case does original work, and their execution of the idea was different enough that I was happy to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I may seem overly trusting to you, but I’ve been on the opposite side of this problem more than once. A couple of times when I was a comedian, I had people (one of whom I had never heard of, and another whose writing I had ZERO respect for) accuse me of stealing from them. I also once did a comic about the fact that my middle name is Oscar, and I ended up doing a joke that was very similar to a preexisting comic from the excellent webcomic Perry Bible Fellowship.

Heck, just a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a commentary on this very website where I discussed my attitude toward Millennials, and a couple of days later, after I’d written it but before it posted, the author John Scalzi wrote a very similar opinion on his blog.

These things happen. You just have to make sure they aren’t happening deliberately.

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