HUNGER GAMES COMICS

PART 2

From Serious Eats: New York

[Photographs: Niko Triantafillou]

It's no secret that I love Paris Baguette business model—high quality French- and Asian-influenced pastry and sweets at prices that are significantly below most bakeries in New York City. And they're always introducing something new to their massive line-up up. On a recent visit, the glossy stack of blueberries on top of the Green Tea Blueberry Cup Cake ($5) caught my eye.

This dessert is really a cross between a verrine (parfait) and a fruit tart. Two layers of green tea sponge cake are surrounded by a delicious green tea pastry cream with just a hint of sweetness. More than two dozen lightly glazed fresh blueberries sit on top of the cake layers, mimicking a classic French fruit tart minus the crust. A thick blueberry syrup keeps the blueberries in place.

The secret to enjoying this dessert (and most parfait style desserts) is to make sure every spoonful contains a little bit of each of the layers. Enjoy.

And don't forget: Three weeks ago, with almost no press or fanfare, Paris Baguette opened up another location in Manhattan at 52nd and Lex. The new location has two floors and is larger than the 32nd Street location.

About the author: Native New Yorker Niko Triantafillou is the founder of DessertBuzz.com his photographs of desserts and pastry chefs have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Dessert Professional Magazine. He is an unabashed foodie nerdling. You can follow him on Twitter at @DessertBuzz.

So recently, I yelled at my 4 year-old after repeated failed entreaties to get her to leave the playground:

• “Please.”
• “PLEASE!”
• “Five more minutes, okay?”
• “It’s ten minutes now. You promised!”
• “I’m serious! Papa asked you nicely. Do you want Papa to yell?”
• “I have to cook dinner for you and Mummy. Do you want Mummy to be hungry?”
• “I’m going to count to three. One… Two…”
• “Okay, I’m going home without you.”
• “I’m going. Now. Watch me go.”
• “I mean it! You’ll be here in the playground in the dark, all alone, and the possums will come out and bite your bottom!”
• “I SAID, PLEASE!!! NOW!!!”

Then the inevitable happened:

It worked, but not without a lot of tears. Believe me, I thought I felt bad about it, maybe even worse than she did.

But then, later I spotted this on Yakuza Baby’s drawing table:

I melted, and though my brain was babbling stuff about “discipline” and “she has to learn about consequences” yadda yadda yadda, what came out of my mouth was, “Papa is very sorry he yelled at you.”

But in a sign she might grow up to be the lawyer I never was, “sorry” was deemed insufficient.

Following an arbitration by Mummy, it was decided that for Halloween, we would all dress up as her favorite cartoon characters – the Powerpuff Girls.

And as I would actually not be around on Halloween itself, and for the longest stretch I’ve ever been apart from Yakuza Baby since her birth, (I’ll be appearing at the Singapore Writers Festival), it was further agreed that we would pose for photos and post them online.

So here, in full and final settlement of the matter, are pictures of us as Townsville’s finest. Naturally, since I hulked out, I had to be Buttercup.

My costume was actually a 7XLT-sized t-shirt – God bless American sizes! – which I think you’ll agree is far scarier than any storebought zombie or serial killer outfit!

Yakuza Baby was really, really pleased by all this and I’m now her favorite person again.

What else can I say but: So once again, the day is saved thanks to the Powerpuff Girls!

Click here for Colin’s schedule at the Singapore Writers Festival!

ellievhall:

Patrick Stewart. As a lobster. For Halloween. [x]

Deus Ex actor claims he was original voice of Far Cry 3's Brody originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 28 Oct 2013 15:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

faitherinhicks:

isaia:

I LOVE GRAVITY FALLS
I LOVE SLEEPY HOLLOW



I might redo the colors, but for now this is a quickie crossover thing. 

oh god yes yes yes

I LOVE IT

#inktober 19. Another #crossover. #ET ‘s hiding spot got a lot more crowded. #toystory #monstersinc #pixar #r2d2

#inktober 18. #StarWarsCrossover OTD Was #ET a #jedi ? #yoda #ThatsNotAMoon #deathstar

Star Wars: Tiny Death Star coming soon from Tiny Tower devs originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 04 Oct 2013 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Microsoft buys Xbone.com originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 12 Sep 2013 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

For those seeking a Mega Man 2 soundtrack with a gentler sound, look no further than Mark Polydoris' lullaby renditions.

Polydoris recorded 11 tracks for his nephew; songs include the opening and closing themes, "Crash Man," "Bubble Man" and more. Listen below, or check out the 30-minute collection on SoundCloud and Polydoris' website.

Continue reading…

Infinity Blade 3 launches alongside iPhone 5S on Sept. 20 originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 10 Sep 2013 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

DIDN’T WE ALMOST HAVE IT ALL?

Time magazine asked if having it all means not having children. Urk! Was my becoming a parent an act of self-sabotage?

The cover of the August 12th, 2013 issue of Time, features a smiling couple relaxing on a soft, sandy beach beneath the title ‘The Childfree Life: When having it all means not having children’.

Time magazine, August 12th, 2013: ‘The Childfree Life’

Inside, the article is even less subtle. Now titled ‘None is Enough’, it shows the same couple clinking cocktail glasses under a beach umbrella, while in front of them, a father, trailed by his wife and children, strains as he drags along a wagon heaped high with spades, buckets, coolers, beach balls and miscellaneous other sand-flecked inflatables.

The article features couples who chafe against what they see as the socio-cultural imperative to have children. At a time when the costs of providing for a family are extremely high, never mind the pressure to arm kids for success, being childless can seem eminently sensible. In fact, the article quotes a London School of Economics study that correlates childlessness with high IQ.  The article seems to suggest that questioning a couple’s decision to be childfree is not just blinkered and illogical, it’s even anti-modern.

Forced to put down the article by my four year-old daughter yelling for me to come and wipe her bottom after a poop, I couldn’t help wishing I was lying on a soft, sandy beach somewhere sipping a cocktail.

This was odd, as I’m usually a beachophobic teetotaller.

‘We’ vs ‘Me’

Some have criticized the Time article as irresponsible for seeming to encourage people to stay childless when the US birthrate is at the lowest in recorded history, and the moribund economy sure could use a few more taxpayers.

Most such attacks I’ve read betray a very simplistic reading of the piece and more of the critics’ own political leanings, judging by how many of them seem to think that adults who choose to avoid having kids are merely being selfish. That is pure nonsense.

It’s very clear from the article (and our many childless friends) that the decision not to have kids is never taken lightly, and is often followed by feelings of guilt or having missed out on something fundamental to existence. Very often, the choice is made precisely out of the fear that one will be an inadequate parent. As Leah Clouse, an art teacher in Tennessee, told Time, “I don’t feel we can do what we can do and be great parents – and for me, the emphasis would be on being great parents.”

That’s far from selfish – in fact, it’s downright noble.

So why did I feel dissatisfied with the article?

Thinking about it, what bugged me was the reduction of the argument to an abstract one between  the conventions and perceived needs of society at large (‘We’) and individual choice (‘Me’).

While I didn’t appreciate the way the “We’s” were judging the “Me’s”, I  also felt that the “Me’s” contemplated in the article had omitted people like, well, me.

Papa in the Middle

My feeling is no doubt shaped by the fact that there’s not a day that goes by when I don’t look at my daughter and think that (a) she’s the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me while simultaneously wondering if (b) she isn’t also the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.

The Wife and I became parents comparatively late, at 39 and 38 respectively. We weren’t against having kids, but at the time, all our energies were directed towards trying to reinvent ourselves as writers and filmmakers, and money was extremely tight. To pay the bills, Yen was an entry-level university professor, while I scraped by on freelance writing and cartooning assignments and we all know how well those gigs pay. At one point, I even swept floors for extra cash. We were far from the model of what parents should be. Plus we were in New York, far, far away from our family support network back in our home country of Singapore.

Were we being selfish? Maybe. I was, after all, a qualified attorney in three different jurisdictions, and if I’d really, really wanted to, I could have scored a well-paying job or gone back to Singapore with all its comforts.

But that would have felt like defeat.

Because New York had tantalized us both with creative possibilities we’d never even contemplated, and we were actually making progress at fulfilling our ambitions – ambitions which were extremely rare for Singaporeans of our vintage.

In 2009, despite not having gone to film school or accrued any significant industry experience, we had written, produced and directed a feature film that won, amongst other things, the Montblanc Screenwriters Award (at the time, Europe’s largest, and yes, conferred by those dudes behind the super-expensive pens) at San Sebastian, one of Europe’s premier film festivals, as well as the Best Asian Film Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival. We were nominated for many more awards at other festivals, the film had played at venues like the Smithsonian Institution and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and had also been picked up in many countries.

To me, ‘selfish’ connotes stuff like wanting to, oh, play with the Xbox all night or eat at expensive restaurants before catching a Broadway musical or a Godard marathon at the Film Forum. Whereas we were struggling and suffering far more than the vast majority of my peers, living in rat-infested lodgings and on credit card debt, all to challenge ourselves.

Like every couple in the Time piece, we resented the pressure coming from family and friends to join their Family Plan.

Frankly, I think we probably had it worse than the Time subjects – since (a) we’re Asian and (b) both my dad and sister were medical doctors whose exhortations to have kids also came with scientifically-backed warnings about the risks of delay.

What You Don’t Expect When You’re Expecting

We learned we were expecting in the most unexpected way.

Tired of years of handing over our hard-earned cash to feckless landlord after feckless landlord, we began contemplating buying our own little apartment with our prize money and what little savings we had.

While checking out kitchen countertops in a small tile shop, Yen lifted a slab of Caesarstone up for closer inspection.

On seeing her, the proprietress barked, “Careful! It’s heavy and you’re pregnant!”

“No, I’m not!” Yen gasped, nonplussed.

“Then… you just gave birth?” frowned the proprietress, skeptical.

“Do I look that fat?” Yen grumbled later in the car, then we laughed.

We hadn’t been trying for a child at all. Sure, we’d been thinking about it, but we were working on our next film – one even more ambitious than Singapore Dreaming, with – a tighter script! More sophisticated production values! More ambitious themes! Interest from important people!

And we knew the rollercoaster tempo and punishing schedules of filmmaking, not to mention the meagre budgets of the indie projects we had in mind, made parenthood impossible. We weren’t Hollywood types who could demand a trailer and childcare on set.

Maybe after we’re done with the movie, we said somberly. If ever. It would be sad not to have kids, we conceded, but many people don’t. Parenthood isn’t the sum total of being human.

Personally, I also knew that if I became a parent, I would do the responsible thing for my child, even if that meant suppressing my own ambitions.

If I don’t have kids, then the only one who’s sad will be me, I reasoned. But when you’re an unfulfilled parent, you’ll invariably visit your resentment on your children, making them sad too. The math was simple.

Yen and I were both so sure the lady at the tile shop was wrong, but felt rattled enough to buy a test stick from the pharmacy. What the pee-on-a-stick revealed to us rattled us even more:

To this day, we have no idea how the woman knew – Yen’s hormones floating through the ether? Some telepathic message from the womb? Divine intervention?

Our immediate reaction was to begin writing and plotting treatments and screenplays madly, hoping to stockpile enough film projects so we could hit the ground running once the initial frenzy of new parenthood settled down. In our fevered imagination, we thought the delay would be, what, a year or two at most?

Except. Except. Except… What is it Woody Allen said? If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.

Labor Day

At 2.15 a.m. one cold March morning, 3 whole months before our baby was due, Yen stumbled out of the bathroom and woke me, saying she’d begun gushing and couldn’t stop.

“I think I’m in labor,” she said, to which my idiotic response was, “Are you sure?”

“You ask me, I ask who?” she barked, the Singaporean in her surfacing with a vengeance.

We rushed to the E.R., where she was hurried into Triage and informed that yes, her water had burst and she would have to stay in the hospital till the baby was born.

This was a shock as Yen had never mentioned feeling any prior contractions, though in hindsight, maybe there were early signs that she, in her stoic strong-as-a-horse Shaolin kung fu heroine mode, had dismissed – like backaches, indigestion-like stomach pains, and little stomach waves.

The attending doctor told me that Yen was very likely to deliver prematurely, but that they would try to prolong labor as long as possible, as our baby’s lungs were still too immature. They pumped her with antibiotics to ward off infection, steroids to help the baby’s lungs mature faster, and also magnesium sulfate to try to slow down the contractions and inhibit labor.

My head began to swirl. While trawling through the usual pregnancy books, I’d come across all the possible risks and complications for premature babies – from major disabilities to learning delays. But I never expected it to happen to us.

Even when my sister, who by then was working at one of Singapore’s top neonatal hospitals, tried to reassure me that many preemies have done well “in the long term”, I was still freaking out.

It didn’t help that Yen was reacting very badly to the magnesium sulfate. I had never, ever seen her in so much pain, gasping and tossing her from head side to side. I felt wretched and helpless. (I would have said I felt impotent if my potency hadn’t led to her being in this state.)

Thankfully, after they switched her to another drug, Terbutaline, her system began to calm down. In fact, Yen began responding so well that her obstetrician started saying she might even be able to hold things off for several weeks.

After two days, they took her off Terbutaline, as prolonged use can affect the heart. So upbeat were they that they even took her off the monitor before transferring her out of the delivery ward to a mother-and-baby ward.

I was a little disturbed by this, since Yen was saying she still felt contractions, albeit small and far apart.  But the nurses didn’t seem to think it was an issue. After some remonstrations from me, the crazy kiasu husband, they restored the monitor.

By this time, Yen’s contractions were getting closer together, and lasting longer, but the monitor didn’t always reflect what she was feeling. I was very anxious, and began keeping my own log of her contractions and her rating of the pain on a scale of 1 to 5. Every time Yen said she felt something, I’d summon the nurse. And almost every time, the nurse would say the monitor wasn’t registering anything we needed to be concerned about. I think she was also beginning to be annoyed at me.

To distract ourselves, we began watching Takashi Miike’s Crows: Episode 0 on my laptop. [ref]The prodigious Miike has always been one of our favorite directors, even though he’s also responsible for the only movie I’ve ever wished I could un-watch: Ichi the Killer.[/ref]

I’d been itching to watch Crows Zero since I was forced to miss it (and also meet Miike in person) at the Tokyo International Film Fest, because I had to attend our own screening of Singapore Dreaming.

We paused the DVD every time Yen felt contractions, whereupon I’d buzz the nurse to come in and check on her, only to be told the monitor showed everything to be OK.

Sometime after this nurse went off duty (her parting words were, “I’m sure we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!”), Yen began gasping and sweating.

I rushed out of the room to corral the new duty nurse, who dutifully stepped in, first checked the monitor, then raised Yen’s gown. (You know, priorities.)

And we both saw it – a tiny foot emerging. Not only a premature birth, but a breech to boot. (Pun not intended.)

To this day, it’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. Ridley Scott’s chestbursting Alien has nothing – nothing! – on my daughter’s bloody foot.

Not as scary as my daughter’s birth.

The only thing that might have been scarier would be seeing Sadako crawl out of there.

The duty nurse began screaming for the other staff, while I grabbed Yen’s hand and babbled ineffectual nonsense in a pathetic attempt at calming her.

But she continued yelling and bucking in a way I’d never seen or heard before, clutching the bed rails till her hands were white. I wondered if what she really needed wasn’t a doctor, but an exorcist.

Okay, so this is a little over the top, but you get the idea.

In a flash, a team of around 15 doctors and nurses had swarmed around Yen, urging her to “Push, Mommy! Push!” It was like some scene out of E.R., and I had to suppress the urge to whip out my video camera to film it all.

A nurse tried to usher me away to the waiting lounge, but I pushed past her and came back in time to witness a doctor holding my tiny, tiny daughter, all covered in blood and shit, in his hands. Because the birth had caught everyone by surprise, they didn’t have any isolette on standby.[ref]Let alone a machine that goes ‘Ping!'[/ref]

Speeding past me, he told me they heard her cry (“A good sign!”), then, unable to wait for any elevator, he darted into the stairwell and charged up the stairs to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

As I watched them clean Yen up, I felt faint. Most breech births require a caesarean section, but because our baby was so small, she had slipped out fairly quickly, so much so that Yen only needed the tiniest of sutures. I wanted to tell her she was lucky, but we both knew that assessment would be, well, premature.

Tip for other parents: Here’s the scene we were watching just before everything went crazy. Please, please choose a less exciting movie.

Father and Child Reunion

As Yen recuperated, I went up alone to the NICU. My feeling of anxiety was heightened by the generally tight security of maternity wards in America, where the abduction of babies by, say, estranged parents or psycho strangers, are a real concern.

I noticed the trace of a bloody handprint on the wall, and I wondered if it belonged to the doctor who carried my baby in.

One of the neonatologists waved me over to a row of incubators. And there I got my first real look at my daughter.

She’d been cleaned up, and was now hooked up to a tangle of wires and tubes. Ever the comic geek, my first thought was, “My daughter… is Weapon X!”

But maybe I was subconsciously hoping she would have Wolverine’s mutant healing factor.

The neonatologist told me she was very small for her gestational age – just under 2½ pounds (1.1 kg). I looked around, and it may have been my disquietude, but she looked like the smallest baby in the ward.  In fact, she didn’t even look like a baby. I remember thinking she looked for all the world like a skinned cat. Born at a mere 30 weeks, deprived of her entire third trimester in the womb, there was almost no fat on her.

But she was alive. That was important, I told myself, and willed myself to feel grateful. I couldn’t shake the feeling, however, of guilt and responsibility. Was she like this because I hadn’t taken enough care of my own health? Or because we’d waited for too long?

Believe It Or Not

The next five weeks of her internment in the NICU were both nerve-wracking (is she ever going to be OK?) and oddly relaxing (we just had a baby but we can still watch TV at home because she’s being cared for by professionals!).

We visited her in the NICU twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, bearing freezer bags of pumped breast milk. Because she was so tiny, the supply was way more than she needed, and at one point the nurse told us to slow down because the NICU’s fridge was almost entirely occupied by Yen’s output. (We even asked if we could donate our surplus, but the hospital said the liability issues were too great. I really wish I’d seen this article then.)

Yen and I also took turns administering kangaroo care to Yakuza Baby, as I’d officially nicknamed her in my column for the Sunday Times. She’d entered this world, after all, while watching a Japanese gangster movie.

As she lay on my bare chest, skin-to-skin, I remember singing softly to her. No one had told us that doing so was hugely beneficial for preemie babies, but I guess it felt natural, even for a passionate karaoke-hater like me.

We were both tickled by the songs we wound up dredging from our memories.

Ever the child of the 70’s, the song Yen sang most often was the theme to the old TV show, “The Greatest American Hero”:

But that made sense, with its superhero/beating-the-odds overtones.

For me, I was surprised to find the song I sang most often was Fairground Attraction’s wistful “Allelujah”, and that I could remember all the words.

Fairground Attraction was never one of my favorite bands, and I hadn’t listened to them since the early 90’s. But maybe my brain automatically searched for a song that best expressed what I most profoundly desired under the circumstances – to cut the strings, let the past fall away, and kiss the first of a million kisses.[ref]I have since acquired Eddi Reader’s entire back catalog, with a newfound respect for her talents.[/ref]

Home, Work, Bound

After 4 weeks, Yakuza Baby was freed from the isolette and moved to an open bed.  And a week after that, she was deemed healthy enough to come home – still well over a month before she was originally scheduled to be born.

It was such a momentous occasion that as I bundled Yakuza Baby in her car seat through the front door, I felt compelled to utter, “The Eagle has landed.”

In some ways, we’d been lucky to have had the 5 weeks she was in the NICU to rest and prepare for her arrival home.

Actually, our preparation involved mostly shopping online for baby stuff (because she’d come earlier than expected) and doing everything we probably wouldn’t be able to do for the next few years. Like napping.

But I think it’s safe to say that no matter how many people you’ve consulted, or how many books or blogs you’ve read, no parent is ever truly prepared or can adequately prepare.

Her birth was already a cataclysm, but her homecoming was an asteroid strike on the scale of Tunguska.

I thought I could do a little work while she slept – because that’s what babies do most of the time, right? Right?

But as all parents know, when your baby sleeps, you either have to do stuff to prepare for when she awakes (Laundry! Cook! Sterilize stuff! Buy diapers and other supplies!) or take advantage of the downtime to nap and recharge.

I finally understood why people kept urging us to have kids while we’re younger. There are, of course, many good things about being a more mature parent, but youth wields a real trump card when it comes to pure, dumb energy.

I also felt bad for Yen, who had to be the C.O.D. (Cow on Demand). So I volunteered to bottle-feed Yakuza Baby between 10 pm and 5 am every night, so that Yen could have at least a few hours of unbroken sleep. I would then catch my Z’s between 5 and around 10 am.

I also thought that the still of the night would provide fewer distractions, so I could sneak in some writing while Yakuza Baby snoozed in-between feeds. But everything I wrote during that period was subpar. My brain was often just too fried.

It was also hard to write with just one finger. Because Yakuza Baby was very clingy, and didn’t like to sleep in her crib. She liked to be held – which was fair enough for a child that technically should’ve still been in the warmth of her mother’s womb.

So most nights, I would be cradling her and either typing with one finger on my laptop, or reading books or magazines propped up in a second-hand laptop stand I’d bought off eBay.

When I just couldn’t focus anymore, I would watch some TV – with the audio off so as not to disturb the baby’s sleep. This basically limited me to whatever foreign, subtitled stuff was on in the wee hours of the morning, such as ‘X-Boyfriend’, a profoundly weird Korean reality show wherein a TV crew basically stalks an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend on behalf of some sad sack, and then persuades the ex to come into the studio to decide whether to rekindle the relationship before a live studio audience.

We were relatively fortunate in that those first 3 months came right smack during Yen’s summer break.

However, we had little time to relax because we were determined to buy and move into a new home before Yen went back to teach in the Fall. This was especially because the place we were renting had very poor heating in the Winter, and also other defects that the Landlord was lackadaisical about fixing, such as a hole in the wall that vermin were using to enter as the weather turned colder.

So most days were spent checking out properties or renovation supplies, with Yakuza Baby tucked into a baby carrier around either around Yen or me. Yakuza Baby was also present at the closing of the small 2 bedroom apartment we’d chosen.

Still, things were relatively orderly.

To our relief, Yakuza Baby was healthy. She was cheerful, and despite her preemieness, had reached the statistical centre of the weight/height chart for Singaporean babies (although she was still below the range of US charts).

Also, as part of their protocol for premature babies, New York State had dispatched Early Intervention staff to come to our house to to test Yakuza Baby for any signs of developmental delay. I was incredibly relieved when the nurse told us that although her adjusted age was only a week old, Yakuza Baby was showing the developmental signs of a 3 month old.

We’d even begun to feel upbeat when Yakuza Baby began sleeping through the night, from around 8 pm till 5 am.

Pity that lasted only for about six weeks.

The stress returned with a vengeance when:

(a) Yen had to go back to teach, as well as to begin the stressful application for tenure.

(b) Because we hired a Cantonese-speaking contractor, Yen also had to oversee the gut-renovation of our new apartment, which hadn’t had anything done since the 1960s.

As the non-Cantonese-speaking freelancer-in-residence, that left me as the primary caregiver for much of the day.

(c) Yakuza Baby, protesting the absence of her food source for stretches of several hours a day, went on bottle strike.

I bought every single kind of bottle and teat on the market, and even some that were not (I had friends from Asia mail over brands from Japan and Taiwan), and Yakuza Baby refused them all. She would go hungry all day till Yen came home, then drain her like a vampire all night.

With me, she would cry almost constantly, no doubt from hunger. She would also not only refuse to be put down in her crib, but even if I strapped her to me with the baby carrier, she wouldn’t let me sit down or do anything. So I had to be on my feet, carrying her the entire day. My back and feet felt like platters of mincemeat by the time Yen came home.

I felt lousy, because no matter what I did, I was just physically incapable of giving my daughter what she wanted. And because she wouldn’t be bottlefed, I would have to pass her to Yen each time she was hungry, leaving her very little time to rest.

It was also especially hellish for me as a writer known for being humorous. Every week, I’d have to turn in cheeky, cheery pieces for the Sunday Times, 8Days and whatnot, when I actually felt like slashing my wrists.

Lawyer of Diminishing Returns

It was heart-rending to see Yen have to work all day, supervise renovation and breastfeed all night.

But as the butt of Yakuza Baby’s fury all day, I couldn’t muster the energy to show enough sympathy. In my misery, I resented the fact that at least Yen had somewhere to go every day where she could be respected as a professional, whereas I was stuck at home, the failed writer and father.

This period remains the one in our marriage when we argued the most.

Eventually, I was persuaded that we should seek some form of childcare. But we couldn’t afford any.

So I sucked in my pride and applied for a job as a lawyer. Out of practice for nine years, I felt I had no hope with any of the big Manhattan firms. Also, I wanted a job that would allow me time to still be a father, and which I could leave without too much guilt at the earliest opportunity. So I applied to a mid-size firm in nearby Forest Hills.

I got a call back within an hour of sending my first email. I remember taking the call in the parking lot at BJ’s Wholesale Club, while loading diapers into the trunk of our car.

Returning home, I dusted off my suit – unworn for nearly a decade – and went for the interview.

The managing partner gushed about my Ivy League qualifications and ability to speak and read Chinese. He was positively salivating at how he could use me to gain access to the burgeoning Chinese population, and even asked me to hunt for office space in Flushing for a prospective branch.

I tried to be as positive as I could even though more and more disturbing things emerged in the course of the interview – such as his tremendously bad hairpiece, how his associates’ duties included buying him lunch, and his ranting about how awful “these Chinese people are”. It felt like an hour with David Brent of the British version of The Office.

But the upshot was that I felt the salary he was offering was insufficient. While perhaps reasonable for someone out of practice for so long, too much of it would be going to a nanny or childcare center. It seemed perverse to take on a horrible, unfulfilling job in order to pay someone else to take over my horrible-but-still-worthy responsibility.

Leaving the firm, I felt like I’d taken a shower in slime. Professionally, it was my lowest point in absolutely ages.

When I told Yen I couldn’t take up the job, she was very understanding, and I was grateful for that.

We vowed to find a better way together.

Back to the Drawing Board

Things got a little better after we moved into our new place.

By circulating my resumé, I managed to score a few freelance ghostwriting gigs, which provided some financial breathing space. Even though we still couldn’t afford a nanny, I felt I wasn’t totally useless.

Knowing that the best response to desperation is inspiration, we also began plumbing the depths of our imagination for creative things we could pull off while still meeting our parental responsibilities.

We also consciously looked to Yakuza Baby as our muse. What responses did she trigger in us that we could use? What lessons did we learn from her that we wished to impart? What would we create, if we were creating something for her to remember us by?

Sure, she had disrupted our lives, but we were determined to see her as an opportunity too.

The solution was, surprisingly, to do a comic.

I’d been cartooning professionally for over 20 years, but had never done a full-scale comic series or graphic novel. In fact, part of the reason I’d chosen to come to New York in the first place had to do with my love for comics. It felt not only right, but overdue. Even better, with comics, we didn’t need a big crew or any expensive equipment.

Some years before, Yen and I had come up with a comic strip idea about kung fu fighting comic characters, which we called “Dim Sum Warriors”.

The earliest iteration of Dim Sum Warriors was as a black and white newspaper cartoon strip.

I’d submitted sample strips to several newspaper syndicates, and got rejected by every single one. I wasn’t surprised. Quite apart from the newspaper business generally being on the decline, it was really hard for a new strip to displace the long-running ones – especially one with a comparatively exotic theme and cast of characters.

So we revisited the concept, fleshed out the characters and storyline into a more ambitious narrative and started planning what we could do with it.

The premise still resonated with us. (I like to tell people it’s “a cross between Harry Potter and a Cantonese restaurant menu.”) We both loved watching kung fu films and going for dim sum, even when we were kids in Singapore.

It thus seemed a symbolically appropriate project to honor our bicultural child – a tale about kung fu-fighting Chinese snacks, as told through that most American of art forms, the comic book.

I then hunkered down and wrote and drew a 30 page pilot to test the concept (which we’ve included in Dim Sum Warriors Vol. 2 – Feast of Fury).

The 2nd iteration of Dim Sum Warriors

We circulated it to various people, to collate feedback for the eventual comic, much as we’d done with our screenplays. Everyone who’d heard our concept  said they loved it, which was very heartening. I began to feel hope, and a growing sense of momentum again.

We raised some investment, ran a very successful Kickstarter campaign and Dim Sum Warriors was launched not just as a simple comic, but an interactive bilingual language-learning app for the iPad.

Dim Sum Warriors has now gotten us even more high profile press than even Singapore Dreaming:

Summary Judgment

So it’s been four years since Yakuza Baby was born.

Every time I hear someone say, “The day your child was born must have been the happiest day of your life!” I want to flash them this:

Because that’s what it felt like for me – horrifying, traumatic and alien.

Did having a child hobble all our professional plans? Yes.

And she continues to do so.

Working with a child is like wading through a swamp while tethered to a ball and chain. Something that used to take me days now requires months. Used to pulling all-nighters on projects, we now force ourselves to be home early.

It is very, very frustrating to begin writing and enter a groove only to have to abandon it half-way to tend to mundane necessities. Your mind also continues to grind away even as it’s ground down by the guilt of knowing you’re not being ‘in the moment’ with your child.

Already somewhat neurotic, I would lie awake at night worrying about how our professional progress was being hampered by things like, well, the laundry hamper.

We were also forced to pass up many opportunities that we might have seized if we were still childless. We turned down a fabulous project that entailed moving to another country, for instance, because although Yakuza Baby seemed to have caught up, we just didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks.

And while certain things became easier (she was potty trained relatively early and easily, plus we finally managed to afford a nanny), other things didn’t (as her intellectual capabilities grew, she became more and more demanding of our time and attention).

There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t wish I had just! A! Few! More! Hours! to work.

But our daughter also brought us fresh inspiration that has taken our work to whole new levels.

Is having a child stressful? Absolutely – like nothing I’ve ever faced. And I’ve argued before judges, government censors, and venture capitalists, I’ve been attacked by angry seamen and nearly fallen off an oil tanker, and the Singapore Parliament has even debated whether they have the jurisdiction to “catch” me for my work.

But I love my daughter like I’ve never loved anyone or anything before. All those clichés annoying parents spout about their kids being wonderful and amazing and magical? I’ve found that they’re not only true, they’re an understatement.

Every time I look at the awards gathering dust on my shelf and wonder if I’ll ever helm another production, I also know that no prize, no five star review, and no amount of box office success can even come close to the joy I feel when my daughter tells me she loves me.

At best, the awards, et. al. are a pat on the head. They’ll never love me back. It’s a revelation I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t lucked out and become a dad.

I’m fully aware that at some point she’ll grow up and hate me for the usual reasons. But I’ll still be comforted that at one point in my life, another human loved me in a really simple, uncomplicated way.

Yakuza Baby’s drawing of herself standing on a stool to kiss Papa. (She got my eyebrows and tummy right.)

Is this ex post facto justification? Stockholm Syndrome? Maybe. But knowing so won’t change my feelings for my daughter.

I still believe no one should judge couples for not wanting to have kids. The decision to stray from the herd is already very hard, and raising a child is even harder.

But Time magazine went overboard by suggesting the decision to be childfree isn’t just a personal one, but an objectively sensible one – that you could have it all if you don’t have kids.

The truth is, being able to “have it all” is pure fantasy, regardless of whether or not you have kids.

There’s no such thing as a life lived without regret or anxiety or sacrifice.

It’s true that having kids may cost you your chance to write that great novel or climb that tall mountain.

But after (or perhaps I should say despite) my experience, I have come to believe that those who deliberately choose not to have children in order to focus on their work and personal goals may be closing themselves off to something truly transformative and transcendent.

Anyway, who’s to say some vicissitude other than parenthood might not come along and frustrate your best laid schemes?

And to be honest, if you think you shouldn’t have kids because you’re worried you might not be a great parent,  that probably makes you more likely to be one.

Worth: In Progress

Every so often I get asked, “So was it worth being a parent?” It’s a dumb question because it suggests parenthood is amenable to some dispassionate cost-benefit analysis, or that it isn’t a continually evolving process.

The birth of my child was arguably the worst day of my life, but it provided a wonder beyond anything I could have imagined. I believe that my life would have been infinitely poorer without my infuriating, nerve-wracking, magical, smart, loving and funny daughter. Whether that is empirically true or purely delusion is totally irrelevant.

Today, Yakuza Baby will be going to school for the first time, as a pre-kindergartner.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to having more time to work. But I’d also be lying if I said I’m not feeling wistful that this epoch is coming to an end.

We may not have had it all, Baby. But we sure had a lot, and I’m looking forward to having more.

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

 RADIOLAB: 23 Weeks and 6 Days

My blood ran cold when I first heard this podcast from Radiolab, one of the best radio shows in the world. It covers the experiences of a couple whose child was born at 23 weeks and 6 days, even earlier than Yakuza Baby. The account, however, was eerily similar to ours, and touches on very tough issues such as what constitutes life, and whether it’s best to do nothing or everything.

Cross Plane puts a screen in a controller for PC, PS3, 360, Ouya originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 07 Sep 2013 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

(Gonna talk a lot ’bout my experiences as a new dad in this rant. Just a heads up.)

I see people online who are quite vocal at hating new parents. Why do these new baby-makers suddenly seem like their whole life revolves around the new addition? Well, because they pretty much HAVE to. The little buggers require lots and lots of attention. There’s a reason most jobs offer paid leave with new parents.

As social humans, we talk about what’s going on in our lives and what media we consume. A fresh set of parents only have one thing going on in their lives, and they’re certainly not consuming any new media. As a result, the only thing we can talk about is this kid we’re trying to keep alive. Hell, we’re giving up weeks of sleep trying to do it.

I really do miss sleep.

When the kid first starts out, from the dad side of things, there isn’t a lot of engagement. The kid is just sorta there and he needs stuff from you. Your payment is the child’s continued prosperity and a helping of screaming. In the case of our son, Aidan, he becomes upset if he’s alone. My wife is more than happy to be with him all day to fill that need, but I for some reason didn’t feel that way. I felt like there’s this thing that hates me and no matter what I do for it, I’m apparently causing it great discomfort.

You will put up with amazing amounts of frustration and pain for someone you truly care for without flinching. That’s what I saw in my wife. But imagine that same aggravation without being dulled by the love. That’s where I was. I see my wife wading against the current of pain with stone faced determination, not a doubt in her eyes, meanwhile I’m behind her, trying to keep up but wanting to give up and wanting her to not be hurting.

When you cope with hardship and don’t know why you’re doing it resentment can find hold. Imagine my horror when I realized that’s what I was feeling. I thought I was supposed to suddenly be filled with DADDLYNESS immediately upon holding my son for the first time. Wrapped in the knowledge and love that a dad is supposed to have for his child. I wasn’t. I was holding this squirming human, bone tired, panicking.

This wasn’t right. What’s wrong with me? Am I a monster? Fear and disgust for myself set in.

I have never felt so alone in my life.

After all, there I was, watching my wife give everything she had for him and happy to do it. How could she understand? There was no question for her, so why was there for me? Clearly I’m just an awful person and she’s going to catch on to that any day now.

But I continued. I did what I could to help and fight the resentment that was fortifying itself. If I couldn’t find the love I needed to do these things from him, I realized I could pull it from somewhere else. I re-aimed my sights toward my wife.

I would do it for her. After all, I have no doubts about how much I love her.

It got easier from there. If there was a way I could make things easier for her then I could do it. I still feel awful about my feelings toward my son, even now, but at least I am helping now.

Aidan has made it a lot easier to love him. He’s still pushing my wife and I to the threshold of exhaustion, sure, but two days ago he started making little noises. On purpose. He actually seems happy to see me now.

Holy crap, has he been in there this whole time? Happy to be held by me but completely unable to share it?

Hello, Aidan. It’s nice to finally meet you. I hope you can forgive me for being such an ass.

Computer science student Dan Borenstein took nDreams' Oculus Rift-powered skydiving simulator one step further by suspending himself mid-air during play, VentureBeat reports.

Borenstein harnessed himself between two trees 15 feet above the ground. With the Oculus Rift strapped to his head, he then demoed SkyDIEving, in which players virtually free fall from an airplane. Borenstein told GamesBeat that his time with the demo actually made him queasy and gave him a "stomach dropping" feeling.

You can watch Borenstein test out virtual skydiving in the video above. nDreams released an early version of SkyDIEving earlier this month.

Pokemon X and Y's revamped visual aesthetic is nothing short of a revolution for the series, but the franchise's next evolution — which had its hands-on debut at Gamescom 2013 — doesn't just look good for a Pokemon game; it looks good.

Every part of the game has received a significant visual overhaul. Playable and non-playable characters are rendered in more detail than the franchise has been capable of in the past. The game's overworld looks and feels more alive and open, thanks to the fact that you're not bound to moving in just the four cardinal directions anymore. Where the visuals really shine, however, is in combat, where Pokemon are presented in full 3D and with full animations.

If Pokemon X and Y is remembered by series...

Continue reading…

knitmeapony:

pocketaimee:

This is what happened after the end of the movie. You cannot convince me otherwise!!

(Credit for this idea goes to you, anonymous dude on 4chan. You’re awesome.)

YES YES YES YES YES. ALSO YES.

GOOD

marielikestodraw:

Now that is some SERIOUS 70s vibe holy crap :D

OH NO

OH

DEAR

Did you have to limit your fluid intake when you’re in those fighting suits? [x]

What if a spacecraft slowed down on re-entry to just a few miles per hour using rocket boosters like the Mars-sky-crane? Would it negate the need for a heat shield?

—Brian

Is it possible for a spacecraft to control its reentry in such a way that it avoids the atmospheric compression and thus would not require the expensive (and relatively fragile) heat shield on the outside?

—Christopher Mallow

Could a (small) rocket (with payload) be lifted to a high point in the atmosphere where it would only need a small rocket to get to escape velocity?

—Kenny Van de Maele

The answers to these questions all hinge on the same idea. It's an idea I've touched on in other articles, but today I want to focus on it specifically:

The reason it's hard to get to orbit isn't that space is high up.

It's hard to get to orbit because you have to go so fast.

Space isn't like this:

Space is like this:

Space is about 100 kilometers away. That's far away—I wouldn't want to climb a ladder to get there—but it isn't that far away. If you're in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.

Getting to space[1]Specifically, low Earth orbit, which is where the International Space Station is and where the shuttles could go. is easy. It's not, like, something you could do in your car, but it's not a huge challenge. You could get a person to space with a small sounding rocket the size of a telephone pole. The X-15 aircraft reached space[2]The X-15 reached 100 km on two occasions, both when flown by Joe Walker. just by going fast and then steering up.[3]Make sure to remember to steer up and not down, or you will have a bad time.

But getting to space is easy. The problem is staying there.

Gravity in low Earth orbit is almost as strong as gravity on the surface. The Space Station hasn't escaped Earth's gravity at all; it's experiencing about 90% the pull that we feel on the surface.

To avoid falling back into the atmosphere, you have to go sideways really, really fast.

The speed you need to stay in orbit is about 8 kilometers per second.[4]It's a little less if you're in the higher region of low Earth orbit. Only a fraction of a rocket's energy is used to lift up out of the atmosphere; the vast majority of it is used to gain orbital (sideways) speed.

This leads us to the central problem of getting into orbit: Reaching orbital speed takes much more fuel than reaching orbital height. Getting a ship up to 8 km/s takes a lot of booster rockets. Reaching orbital speed is hard enough; reaching to orbital speed while carrying enough fuel to slow back down would be completely impractical.[5]This exponential increase is the central problem of rocketry: The fuel required to increase your speed by one km/s multiplies your weight by about 1.4. To get into orbit, you need to increase your speed to 8 km/s, which means you'll need a lot of fuel: $ 1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\approx 15$ times the original weight of your ship.

Using a rocket to slow down carries the same problem: Every 1 km/s decrease in speed multiplies your starting mass by that same factor of 1.4. If you want to slow all the way down to zero—and drop gently into the atmosphere—the fuel requirements multiply your weight by 15 again.

These outrageous fuel requirements are why every spacecraft entering an atmosphere has braked using a heat shield instead of rockets—slamming into the air is the most practical way to slow down. (And to answer Brian's question, the Curiosity rover was no exception to this; although it used small rockets to hover when it was near the surface, it first used air-braking to shed the majority of its speed.)

How fast is 8 km/s, anyway?

I think the reason for a lot of confusion about these issues is that when astronauts are in orbit, it doesn't seem like they're moving that fast; they look like they're drifting slowly over a blue marble.

But 8 km/s is blisteringly fast. When you look at the sky near sunset, you can sometimes see the ISS go past ... and then, 90 minutes later, see it go past again.[6]There are some good apps and online tools to help you spot the station, along with other neat satellites. My favorite is ISS Detector, but if you Google you can find lots of others. In those 90 minutes, it's circled the entire world.

The ISS moves so quickly that if you fired a rifle bullet from one end of a football field,[7]Either kind. the International Space Station could cross the length of the field before the bullet traveled 10 yards.[8]This type of play is legal in Australian rules football.

Let's imagine what it would look like if you were speed-walking across the Earth's surface at 8 km/s.

To get a better sense of the pace at which you're traveling, let's use the beat of a song to mark the passage of time.[9]Using song beats to help measure the passage of time is a technique also used in CPR training, where the song "Stayin' Alive" is used to . suppose you started playing the 1988 song by The Proclaimers, I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles). That song is about 131.9 beats per minute, so imagine that with every beat of the song, you move forward more than two miles.

In the time it took to sing the first line of the chorus, you could walk from the Statue of Liberty all the way to the Bronx:

It would take you about two lines of the chorus (16 beats of the song) to cross the English Channel between London and France.

The song's length leads to an odd coincidence. The interval between the start and the end of I'm Gonna Be is 3 minutes and 30 seconds,[10]Based on timing from the official Youtube video and the ISS is moving is 7.66 km/s.

This means that if an astronaut on the ISS listens to I'm Gonna Be, in the time between the first beat of the song and the final lines ...

... they will have traveled just about exactly 1,000 miles.

daggerpen:

Image Caption: A picture of two cosplayers, one cosplaying Velma from Scooby Doo and one cosplaying Cyclops from the X-Men. Both kneel on the floor groping around with their hands; Cyclops covers his eyes, while Velma has hers squinted. On the ground before them lay Cyclops’s visor and Velma’s glasses.

solarbird:

Perfect.

Oh my god.

I’ve never tried to beat the portal multiplayer because I can’t even fathom how frustrating it would be to try to get your reasoning in line with someone else’s to root out the solutions. I mean, it’s probably not that bad, but I’ve seen friendships nearly end over trying to steer a canoe together, compared to that team portal sounds like something multigenerational feuds would start over.