Credulous Skeptic’s blog

I know. I've been totally silent here for weeks. What can I say? I've been busy and lazy. But this is too important not to post about. Spread the word, folks. Olberman is right. He's been saying this stuff for years, and yet nothing happens.

(I haven't posted in a while thanks to two weeks of visits by family and friends. All in celebration of my daughter's second birthday, so a good cause, but exhausting.)

I'm from the New York City area, and I don't think "The City" will every mean anything other than NYC to me. In the past few years, I've gotten to know a bunch of people who moved to New York from other areas of the country (mostly the Midwest). In fact, of the dozen or so people I know in New York, only one (my brother) actually grew up in the area.

For the most part, these people are excruciatingly conscious of performing their New Yorker-ness. And it makes for some funny moments, like the tome one new "real" New Yorker obligingly informed my brother and I, both wearing sandals: "Real New Yorkers never wear sandals. The streets are too dirty."

Or when, after a fantastic meal in a fun restaurant, a friend said: "Yeah, the food is great there, and it's a fun restaurant. But real New Yorker's don't go there; it's too touristy."

New York is an amazing place, filled with more than eight million real New Yorkers, all of them unique.

It's probably my favorite city in the world, but O Genius Loci, deliver us from a New York overrun by "real" New Yorkers!

My company gave me one extra day off the year my daughter was born. I took four vacation days to round the time off to a full week. That was all I could manage.

Since my teen years, I had dreamed of being a stay-at-home father. Economic necessity and family circumstance dashed that hope to pieces. There's no going back now.

And now I have a coworker who's pregnant. She claims that she and her husband can't swing it on his salary, so she says she'll be coming back to work. She and her husband no doubt have a combined income far in excess of my own, though as I understand it he makes less than she does.

In any case, she hasn't said she wants to quit or leave.

And yet . . . my boss tells me that they're going to extend an offer to her of working from home two or three days a week once her time off runs out. (The company doesn't give real maternity leave; they just give women six to eight weeks of short-term disability leave and tolerate the remainder as unpaid, FMLA-protected absence.)

Why does she get such an offer?

Because she's a woman.

Why didn't I?

Because I'm a man.

So much for equal rights.

Twain wrote this several years before the birth of his first daughter, and outliving two of his three daughters must have caused him immeasurable grief. The humor with which he penned this piece makes me imagine him as a doting and affectionate father.

And I can only imagine that he never really meant to encourage girls to pour boiling water on their little brothers, he did wish them a rather more carefree life than contemporary manners books would have advocated.

And I certainly hope my daughter will be able to live life to the fullest, free from unnecessary constraints imposed by people who think they know how a little girl ought to behave.

In its entirety, Mark Twain's Advice for Little Girls:

Good little girls ought not to make mouths at their teachers for every trifling offense. This retaliation should only be resorted to under peculiarly aggravated circumstances.

If you have nothing but a rag-doll stuffed with sawdust, while one of your more fortunate little playmates has a costly China one, you should treat her with a show of kindness nevertheless. And you ought not to attempt to make a forcible swap with her unless your conscience would justify you in it, and you know you are able to do it.

You ought never to take your little brother's "chewing-gum" away from him by main force; it is better to rope him in with the promise of the first two dollars and a half you find floating down the river on a grindstone.  In the artless simplicity natural to this time of life, he will regard it as a perfectly fair transaction. In all ages of the world this eminently plausible fiction has lured the obtuse infant to financial ruin and disaster.

If at any time you find it necessary to correct your brother, do not correct him with mud--never, on any account, throw mud at him, because it will spoil his clothes.  It is better to scald him a little, for then you obtain desirable results.  You secure his immediate attention to the lessons you are inculcating, and at the same time your hot water will have a tendency to move impurities from his person, and possibly the skin, in spots.

If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won't. It is better and more becoming to intimate that you will do as she bids you, and then afterward act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your best judgment.

You should ever bear in mind that it is to your kind parents that you are indebted for your food, and for the privilege of staying home from school when you let on that you are sick.  Therefore you ought to respect their little prejudices, and humor their little whims, and put up with their little foibles until they get to crowding you too much.

Good little girls always show marked deference for the aged. You ought never to "sass" old people unless they "sass" you first.

Here's the press release.

A Game of Thrones (Game of Thrones)

It's easy to over-analyze a press release, and in the end we'll have to wait for more information. I'll have to reserve judgment on whether this is good news or not. I'm not a real D20 player so I'm basically unfamiliar with Green Ronin's previous works.

I am a passionate A Song of Ice and Fire fan. I did buy the Guardians of Order Deluxe Edition of the game and think it's very good. So I'll offer my hopes:

• I hope that whatever Green Ronin produces works with the Guardians of Order product.
• Ideally, I'd like to see GR produce a new version of the GOO product, and then add supplements.
• I hope this will not be a completely new and separate game.
• I hope that GR will produce supplements steadily, quickly catching up with the novels.
• I hope that, if GR decides to make a new game, it is as successful as the GOO product in capturing the feel of the novels and allowing players to bring bits of A Song of Ice and Fire to life.
• I hope the product turns out to be the kind of the George R R Martin will actually want to play. (Yes, he's a long-time gamer.)
• I hope that somehow, those folks who got screwed by GOO's gross mishandling of the business side of things will get justly compensated for their creative efforts.
  

Well, that's my initial reaction to the news. Now I'm off to scour various forum (Green Ronin's and RPGnet's, for example) for any further tidbits to over-analyze.

My dream of being a stay-at-home dad didn't work out. That means I get more time with my daughter on weekends than at any other time.

I want to enjoy those times. She won't be two forever!

But I also have Things to Do. This weekend, I had to build a new shower, a chore that's been put off for almost as long as my daughter's been alive. And failing to do Things to Be Done is also, in a way, failing to be a good dad. After all, she deserves as nice as home as I can give her!

Oh, I got to spend hours of time with her and get Things done. In fact, she's even getting old enough to "help" with some of these things. (That is, be nearby and use similar tools in a manner vaguely like what I'm doing.)

But . . . I'm definitely pulled in two directions at once.

Anyone have any bright ideas?

Marsha posted her "VisualDNA," and I thought it'd be fun to give it a whirl myself.

Doing it myself was kind of fun . . . especially seeing what percent of people made the same choices I did. In most cases, I was in a group with fewer than 5% of people, but I did pick the number-one vice.

(Edit: I see that I made some typos in the text in the attached widget. Annoying, but I haven't found a way to edit the code in Vox, and I don't want to go through the whole process of choosing my images again and all that rot, so I'll let 'em stand.)

The Simpsons episode "Simpson Tide," in which Homer joins the naval reserve, is the one in which I see the beginning of the trend that led to my stopping following the show. In it, the Village People play a song on the deck of a submarine as it submerges, with Smithers present, merely for a gag.

The Soviet Union reawakens, and Lenin himself gets up as a zombie, merely as a gag.

A naval officer is shot from a torpedo tube, merely as a gag.

Penguins man an aircraft carrier.

This is the show packed with things done simply as jokes. It's a series of jokes strung together. And the jokes aren't just a little exaggerated; they're patently unrealistic and stupid.

What happened to plot? Meaningful characterization? Poignant moments? Wit instead of nonsense?