Review: Astro Boy Movie

Saw this film yesterday with the kids at a local "dollar cinema." Of course a dollar cinema doesn't cost a dollar anymore, but this one is reasonably priced and pretty clean, and five minutes from our house.

As for the movie itself, the kids liked it. My seven year old son was particularly entertained and enjoyed all the action sequences. My ten year old daughter, who has read some of the Astro Boy manga in translation, thought it was fine, but wondered why they made so many changes to the storyline of the manga.

Ah, the ageless question of why adaptations make the changes that they do to stories that we love. Although I can't say that I cared a lot about Astro Boy one way or the other coming in.

The film's narrative is very simplistic. The villains are foolishly and almost pointlessly villainous, the comic relief is slapstick, and the whole question of how humans should interact with intelligent beings that they have essentially enslaved is sort of waved at in passing. There's probably more action than necessary. You won't get any insights into human dependency upon technology or the emotions of robots as you do in Wall-E. As far as the animation, it's fine but not breathtaking in any way; the characters are cartoonishly exaggerated but without much subtlety of expression, kind of like a big screen Jimmy Neutron film with less humor.

All in all, not a film I'd recommend seeing or renting unless you have younger kids interested in it. Then it's not bad to sit through as far as such things go. The enthusiasm of children can compensate for a lot of visual and narrative shortcomings.

Field Trip

My hand enfolds yours
As we stumble through the cold water
Bare feet shivering in rubber boots
Soles slipping on slick stones

We are not going to fall

We are here to catch mayflies and fish and crawdads
With nets and buckets

But we won't

Instead we'll find little blobs of jelly from snail eggs
Big stones encrusted with small clusters of sand
(these hide tiny larvae)
And slip on rocks covered with green slime
(this is alive too)

I will stand in clear shallow water and see nothing
A moment later, a child dips in a net and scoops up a fish

We won't catch big things, much as we try
But we will see
A crawdad growing back a lost claw
(I feel the splint on my wrist and can only laugh with envy)
Mayflies dancing on sunbeams before they die
(They have no mouths, so their ballet is their mating song)
Little things alive all around us
That I never notice
And that I'll probably forget again

But I won't forget the feel of your hand in mine
As we made it back across together

Star Waiters

The weekend of kids wrapped up this morning when we went to the historic Egyptian theater (shown above) in downtown Boise to watch the short film Star Waiters (link goes to the full movie on YouTube).

This film was shot and produced locally by the Make-A-Wish Foundation and a lot of local film talent, including volunteers from Riverstone School, to fulfill the wish of local 6th grader Mitch Kohler.

The film is cute, not particularly great in terms of the acting or the satire, but I will say that both my elementary school age kids enjoyed it immensely. There were not a lot of people at this screening for the Idaho Independent Film Festival, but it was standing-room only at the original premiere, which took place back in May.

It was also amazing to see how many people it takes to put together a film that was shot in three days and then heavily edited in post-production to add sound (LucasFilm donated use of the official Star Wars music and sound-effects) and special effects. Very touching and a great display of what the community can do when it comes together.

So, much like the moon rock experience yesterday, this was much more fun than it would have been on my own. Now I'm tired and would like to spend some time simply reading. More chores ahead, however.

I Touched a Moon Rock

On a whim, and because my wife had reading and grading to do for school, I took the kids down to Julia Davis Park on Saturday, where an odd mix of vintage cars, Medieval folks from the SCA, a few military reenactors dressed in assorted WW II gear, and a touring NASA bus were all arrayed.

With all these things to do, the activity that my son was most interested in pursuing was getting on the NASA bus, where they had a couple very short video presentation, a real Moon rock that we could touch, and a little bit of NASA swag--including little pins in the shape of the first boot-print on the Moon.

So my daughter went and watched the various Renaissance duels while my son and I waited in the line for the NASA bus. For 1 and a half hours. In the sun. But he was willing to stick it out, and I was willing to stand there with him. Thankfully I had my iPod and he was able to play some videogames to keep himself entertained for a good bit.

I had a long and polite conversation with a conservative Christian who happened to like comic books and classic cartoons. (How did I know he was a conservative Christian? Because, like pretty much all conservative Christians I've ever met, he made sure to tell me at several points. This is apparently a rule.)

At last we made it into the thankfully air-conditioned bus for about 10 minutes of presentations that were fairly dull for me, to be honest. At that point my daughter had showed up and I let her get in line with us and go in, largely because I'd seen a good twenty kids appear at the last minute to join adults who had been waiting in line. This is one reason the line never seemed to move--groups of kids would just pop up and join the line. Frankly, it pissed me off, but after waiting so long, I wasn't going to stand on principle anymore and my daughter came in with us.

The Moon rock itself? It was a black, poorly lit sliver the size of my fingernail.

But I would do the whole thing over if asked, because my son was very excited by the tour itself and I was really proud of how well he was able to stay in the line with me without melting down or giving up. A case of the kids making the experience more enjoyable than it would have been otherwise.

Carnival with the Kids

On Friday, we attended our first Collister Carnival at the kid's elementary school. The children upheld the fine family tradition of winning a cake on the cake walk--got one in the first go 'round, in fact. This practice dates back to my sister and I cleaning up at cake walks during our early years.

My daughter won and was looking at a variety of cakes with sprinkles and gummy worms adorning them. I made it clear that her actual choices consisted of one of the chocolate cakes on display or the German chocolate brownies. When she tried to argue, I explained that (a) she could always do the cake walk again, but when you've got one cake on the line, you always go for chocolate first; and (b) if she got any other kind of cake, she would be carrying it around for the rest of the Carnival, because I wasn't going to take it back to the car for her.

We got chocolate. You have to teach these principles early.

The Carnival was fun overall. We know more parents now, so there were other adults to talk to, including a couple who also attended the University of Texas. And a group of kids who know me from volunteering gang-tackled me and dragged me off to a jail where I had to be ransomed. Then they tried to do it again, but we were out of tickets to redeem me because my daughter had lost one of the passes we bought. This leg to the spectacle of me carrying two elementary school boys and dragging several others because I couldn't afford the bail. My back is mostly recovered.

Bionicle Creations

My daughter has a lot of talent and imagination when it comes to building with Bionicles and LEGOs. She builds all the kits that she buys pretty much the day that she gets them, but after that she creates her own stuff, mixing and matching parts. Here is one of her recent creations, a guitar-playing alien.


And from the side:
One of the things I like best about this particular figure is that it can stand up on its own and it has multiple points of articulation in the legs and arms, which can be a little hard to see from the pictures. I've also seen a variation playing the flute.

Egg Parachutes

A couple weeks ago, I agreed to man a table at the student and parent picnic for the Highly Gifted classes in our school district. My idea was egg parachutes, as the picnic was being held in a park with a large tower--about two stories in height--from which the kids could drop their chutes.

I looked online for some instructions and got a mixed bag of results. Here's the system that I came up with:

1. Cut out squares in various sizes from plastic trash bags to use as chute material. The smallest that I cut out were 10" x 10", the largest 30" x 30". Bigger chutes seem to work better from greater heights--from shorter heights they don't fill up quickly enough. Small chutes begin working quickly but don't slow the descent enough from big drops.
   
2. Buy a roll of twine and cut the strings for the chutes from the twine. I also cut these in varying lengths. For a shorter distance like our tower drop, a shorter set of strings works best--it unfolds most quickly and allows the chutes to unfurl.
3. Attach each of the strings to the corners of each chute using tape. I found that clear duct tape worked much better than masking or scotch tape.
4. Attach the other ends of the strings to paper clips.
5. Take a small Dixie cup and punch four holes around the perimeter. Snap the paper clips into the holes--this lets you change chutes or attach more than one chute to a Dixie cup. You put the egg in the Dixie Cup, which acts as a little gondola.
   

Put your eggs in small Ziploc bags! This helps cut down on the mess.

This system worked well. If I had to do it again, I would pre-assemble more of the parts--chutes of different sizes, pre-cut strings with paperclips attached--and have the kids do the taping and prep for the cups. I'd also remind my wife to bring the camera so she could take some pictures.

We went through four dozen eggs, all the duct tape and other chute materials, so I think it was a success and interesting to do.

Squirrel Baby Funeral

Last week while we were walking the dog, my daughter found a very tiny, hairless, dead baby squirrel lying beneath a tree. It's eyes were not fully open yet, like a baby mouse.

She wanted to take it home and I thought that was rather gross, given that her first thought was to perhaps dissect it. But she cleverly asked her mom and got permission before the two of us could talk it over. She scooped up the squirrel with a shovel, put it in a shoebox, and brought it home.

Quickly her empathetic side emerged and she decided to have a funeral for the baby squirrel. First she built it a coffin (which was for display--the coffin was not actually buried with the squirrel).


Then she made a headstone for the squirrel:
This is the shot of the squirrel's final resting place in our backyard:

First Day of School

Dropped the kids off for their first day of school. My daughter is in a highly gifted program where the fifth and sixth graders actually attend classes at the nearby junior high, though most of their classes are with other kids their age rather than with junior high age kids and the elementary age kids are on a different school day schedule than the older kids (sort of a compromise between a normal elementary schedule and a normal junior high schedule).

Still, this is her first year at the new school and she's somewhat nervous about it, as is my wife, who handled dropping off our daughter this morning so she could help her find her new classroom and such. I'm waiting to see what happens before I start worrying too much on this one, though I will undoubtedly worry at some point.

My son is nervous about being at school without his sister there. I've tried to remind him that this will be the first time he's ever come back to the same school with the same teacher and the same classmates (they combine 1/2nd grade classes for HG), so he should be feeling confident. But he's anxious and increasingly aware that it's hard for him to find friends to play with. This morning he said that no one understands his sense of humor.

It's one of the difficult aspects of being a parent that you have to let your kids learn some lessons and overcome some challenges for themselves while also being supportive and trying to step in when they are over their heads. During the summers everything is hectic but we have a pretty close family and a generally relaxed routine when we aren't traveling, so we support each other and understand each others' foibles. School forces everyone back out into the world and brings with it more schedules and commitments.

Postscript:
Well, both kids seem to have had a good first day at school. So I'm happy for that.

Family (Mis)Adventures

So, yesterday my wife and I took our two kids to the water park to celebrate my son's seventh birthday a bit after the fact. It was his first time at the big park.

(On the weekend, we had taken him to see his first movie in a theater, Monsters v. Aliens. It was at one of the local dollar theaters and he did a great job. Stayed in his seat, didn't talk through the dialogue or ask an endless stream of questions, didn't ask to go to the bathroom, etc. His only insistence was that he get some popcorn, because "I know from watching movies at home that people in movie theaters always have popcorn.")

He did a great job, enjoying the large wave pool in particular, going back multiple times. Dad, who isn't quite as big a fan of waterparks as his wife or daughter, did okay outside of the big tube rides. Waiting in line a long time for a ride that ends up being over in a flash just isn't my thing. Maybe it reminds me too much of my early sex life, I don't know.

And naturally at the exit of a ride called the Viper, I ended up coming out of the chute backwards and flipped upside down, smacking my head on the concrete floor of the shallow exit pool hard enough to raise a lump, give me a headache, and make me dizzy--but thankfully not enough to cut my scalp or result in a concussion. I also somehow managed to cut my foot. The next hour or so was not so fun-filled for me, but the kids continued to have a good time.

So, all things considered, I took one for the team and my son had a great time.

That night my daughter was helping her mom prepare dinner when she sliced off part of her fingernail while peeling some ginger. Finger bleed a lot, so there was a bit of trauma as that got squared away with gauze and bandaids.

Then this afternoon my son came screaming into the house. At first I literally thought he had severed an artery or set himself on fire. Turned out it was his first bee sting, on the bottom of his foot. He shrieked in my ear for a good two minutes straight (Ow! OWW! AHHH! OWWW!) as I sat him in a chair and my wife brought me the tweezers to pull the stinger out. Then he howled a bit more when she put the baking soda on the sting, and I put some ice on the sting to calm him down.

This evening he said at dinner, "I can't even remember what the sting felt like."

It has been an adventurous couple of days. Hopefully we will all heal up. :-)

New Blog Direction

Slowly but surely I'm planning on moving over any of my setting-related material residing on this blog to my web site, Dreaming Empires. Much of the material has been moved already and there is a lot of additional stuff on science fiction and superheroes.

I'm going to try to shift the emphasis of the blog toward posts about my family (still using the anonymous approach where I don't reveal names and such), books I've read, and current events.

Because the majority of people who happen to stumble across the blog, who are largely friends and family, aren't really interested in the setting material anyway. My web site can keep focusing on that aspect of my interests. Might still keep the vignettes here, though.

Supercrew Redux

Last weekend the kids and I played another game of Supercrew. (You can see more about the rules and the character my daughter created in this earlier, much longer post.)

I have a cold and wasn't entirely up for the experience at first. My son also seemed a bit reluctant. But my daughter really wanted to give it a go and my wife needed time to do some work, so we headed down to the basement.

My son made up a new character with telekinetic powers and a Rank 1 utility belt. For a long time we were simply calling him "Mr. Silent," because my son just went blank whenever we asked for the hero's name. But eventually we settled on "T-K" as a good nickname. My daughter continued to play Alien Z, although now the character sheet was cleaner as I understood the intended mojo of her trained pet monkey power.

I happened to have a Heroclix map of the Justice League headquarters, so I grabbed a couple figures, whipped up a few sentences to describe the villain's powers, and made up a plot on the fly. I find that it works well to think of these games as episodes in one of the recent animated series like Justice League Unlimited or Superman: The Animated Series. Or even a story in one of the Justice League Adventures comics.

Basically you have to be able to sum up the plot in a couple sentences. A storyline that simple is easy for the kids to follow and can be wrapped up in an hour or so of gaming, which seems to satisfy them at this age. I haven't worried about continuity or a campaign arc at all at this point.

The kid's heroes were being given a special tour of the Justice League Watchtower by Plastic Man, the only Leaguer present as the rest had been called away to save a distant planet. Of course two villains, a trick boomerang wielding guy named Zoomerang and an ice manipulating Ice Queen, snuck onto the tower, up to no good.

Ice Queen quickly froze Plastic Man and the kids had to save the day. Alien Z jumped out and drew most of the villainous firepower, avoiding the majority with agile dodging and getting in one good surprise attack on Zoomerang. T-K whiffed with a telekinetic attacks and a failed gadget from his utility belt (getting a hero point).

Then Ice Queen made an ice wall, shutting out the heroes while Zoomerang ran into the trophy room. Alien Z charged the wall and bounced off once (using her Rank 1 Armored Costume power) before plowing through with a better roll and Superspeed the next turn. (The villains were using the time to execute their mission--see below) Alien Z ran right into a ice slick and took some damage bashing into the wall. T-K then unleashed a great roll, spending a hero point to use his Power 3 Mega-TK-Blast, and expanded cracks made by Alien Z to topple the entire wall on Ice Queen.

T-K knocked the dazed Ice Queen out with a thrown chair while Alien Z saved the frozen Plastic Man from an exploding boomerang but got wrapped up by a snare (in retrospect I should have awarded her a hero point or something for this selfless act). T-K got another lucky roll and clocked Zoomerang in the head with an ice shard just before the villain reached the teleporter.

But the heroes had not yet won. From the trophy room came the giant floating head of the Monster Mind Master (aka M3--I used a figure for MODOK, one of the sillier Marvel villains ever). The villains had been hired to free him from where he had secretly stored a hard energy holographic copy of himself in the very helmet the Justice League had used to drain his powers during their first (completely made up and non-canonical) encounter. He was still a little groggy, so the heroes had to act fast.

T-K used his Utility Belt (power 1) and its "turn one die to a 5 trick" ("Just the Right Gadget!") to produce an exothermic gas that melted the ice around Plastic Man, who promptly gave the kids the clue to how to defeat M3. Alien Z used her Heat Vision (Effect 2) trick to cut away the snare holding her.

M3 wiped out Plastic Man with a telepathic stunning blast, then fended off T-K's telekinetic attacks in spite of T-K using his last trick, Effect 2 ("Precision Telekinesis!"). (M3's stats were simple-Rank 3 Telepathy, Rank 2 Telekinesis, and a bonus that let him roll two dice for a reflex defense.)

Then Alien Z unleashed the power of her Trained Pet Monkey. Three dice, 2 6's and a "turn one die to a 5" trick later she had generated the 4 successes I deemed necessary to retrieve the Power Drainer Helmet from the trophy room and put it back on the holographic M3 to suck up his power.

Thus the kids defeated the villains. Plastic Man came to, took credit for the victory, and put the villains in the clink before continuing the tour. Alien Z asked him if he could get her Flash's autograph and T-K tried to swipe a batarang or something from Batman's room as a keepsake, both of which I thought were nice touches.

All in all, another successful game. I like Supercrew a lot for this sort of thing.

Supercrew with the Kids

I recently purchased a .pdf of a very simple superhero roleplaying game called Supercrew. (You can read a review of it here.) The game rules are presented in the form of a 28 page color comic book, which is a nice touch.

A few days ago I read the game to my daughter and son, who are nine and six, respectively. Tonight mom was out at a work-related function and I asked the kids if they wanted to play a boardgame. My daughter suggested that since Mom isn't really into rpgs, we should try playing Supercrew.

Mutant Mayhem
I should preface this by saying that I tried playing Mutants and Masterminds with my kids about a month ago, with disastrous results. This was really my fault. My son, who has Asperger's Syndrome, reads at a high level and loves anything with numbers, so he's been reading my MnM books with joy. He's memorized a bunch of the rules as well. But I neglected the obvious point that being able to recite the rules doesn't mean comprehension, and that my lack of gaming experience with those rules would make me less effective as well. So that experience sucked, because the kids were confused, I was hesistant to make rulings, and my son got distracted by the Heroclix we were using as miniatures. Not my finest hour.

The Rules
This time was much better. With Supercrew you pick three powers for your character, each rated 1, 2, or 3, respectively. That determines how many dice you roll when using the power. A roll of 4, 5, or 6 on a die equals Effect 1--a 6 is re-rolled and any additional effect is added to the total. You also get to describe three tricks (which mechanically work the same for all characters--re-roll the dice, turn one die result into a 5, or automatically get Effect 2--but are described differently for each character's unique powers and style). You can use each trick once per gaming session.

You need to spend a hero point to use your level 3 power. How do you get a hero point? By using your wimpy Level 1 power and/or as a compensation for getting knocked out. Everyone has 3 toughness unless they've got a special ability that changes that (rules are kind of vague there). You define all your powers--there's a simple framework presented, but you can be pretty free-form.

The Set-Up
My son made a size-changing character with Shrinking 1, Growth 2, and SuperSizeShift 3 (which let him go back and forth in size in a single turn). He named the character SuperSizer.

My daughter made a character called Alien Z. Alien Z had Bulletproof Costume 1, Superspeed 2, and Trained Pet Monkey 3. Yes, my daughter's superfast character (who for some reason had heat vision as one of her tricks--I assumed it was based on her costume but let her make it her automatic Effect 2 trick) had as her most potentially powerful ability a trained monkey. She's very creative.

I basically copied the stats for two villains (even simpler than those for the characters) out of the book. One could control flocks of crows. I named her Blackbird. The other was called Miss Decibel and had sonic powers. And there were stats for a gang of ninjas, so I used those.

The Call to Action!
On the fly, I decided that the high-tech toy company where SuperSizer worked in his secret identity was being robbed by a gang of ninjas--he got a text message from a terrified co-worker. At the time he and Alien Z were working on her costume in his garage lab. He shrank to tiny size, hopped on Alien Z's shoulder, and held on as she raced at superspeed to the toy company's warehouse.

Back in Black--Ninja/Crow Throwdown
There they encountered a gang of ninjas robbing the warehouse. Alien Z decided to surprise attack the ninjas by racing toward them from a distance at high speed so they wouldn't see her coming, while SuperSizer snuck up in shrunken form once Alien Z left him by the side of the building. Alien Z rolled very well and took out half the ninjas on the first turn. SuperSizer cornered a ninja in the warehouse and grew to giant size. This, plus a series of bad attack rolls/good defenses on the part of the ninja, led to a comedic sequence where he put his head through the ceiling, then tried in vain to stomp the frantically dodging ninja. Alien Z knocked off another ninja, catching a shuriken in the back for her trouble, then noticed that a bunch of crows were flying off with the computer chips the ninja had previously been loading into the back of a truck.

(You may ask--if Blackbird could simply have had her minions fly off with the chips in the first place, why were the ninjas loading them into a truck? This is what happens when you take 5 minutes to set up a game and have a map handy that shows a loading dock with trucks on it. The kids never thought twice about it.)

Alien Z saw Blackbird guiding her flock of feathered fiends and tried to charge the villain. Blackbird used one of her trick powers to send a swarm of crows against Alien Z. Blackbird scored a higher Effect, so her attack went first. To make matters worse, Alien Z flubbed the defense roll, resulting in enough damage to knock her out after the shuriken hit. I ruled that the crows kept Alien Z from seeing where she was going, sending her careening into a truck at super speed and knocking her out. Blackbird then summoned a bunch of crows to lift her up into the air and fly her away.

SuperSizer sees all this because his head is sticking out of the top of the building. He uses his SuperBreath trick, rolls well, and blows away all the birds holding Blackbird, who tumbles to the ground and is knocked out.

SuperSizer and Blackbird engage in some rather awkward roleplaying banter with their captives before the police arrive. My daughter is good with the quips but just keeps asking the same questions and wants to use her heat vision to set Blackbird on fire. She says violence against prisoners is not against the law on her home planet. My friend Aaron might recall that my daughter gets her direct approach in these matters from my wife.

SuperSizer gets caught up in explaining to the villains just how they were defeated, possibly the first hero monologue I can recall. A little nudging gets him to threaten to shrink super small and crawl up the nose of one of his captives, which is sufficiently gross to get a little info out of a ninja--they were supposed to rendezvous with their employer at the docks. Then the other ninjas shut him up.

The police come for the prisoners and Blackbird uses another of her trick powers to turn into a bunch of birds and fly away to freedom.

Awkward Sleuthing
The next part did not go smoothly, as I eventually had to railroad the kids into trying to find clues to help them figure out what ship on the docks the bad guys were heading toward. I had this idea that a Japanese engineer had left from a military company because he didn't want to use his artificial intelligence breakthrough to control war robots, but to create lifelike robot pets for kids. The Japanese company wanted to steal the chips back and had hired ninjas and two supervillains to do it.

I don't think the kids got much of that. Eventually they figured out that ninjas were from Japan (a blatant, silly clue that my son actually grasped). Then they talked to the people in the warehouse and got enough info for my daughter to look up ships headed for Japan from the dock that evening. They found one and headed for it.

I probably should have just let the kids do whatever popped into their heads, but I really couldn't understand what they were trying to do. So my bad for not realizing they weren't getting the hints I was dropping.

Final Act
They got to the docks to see the ship ringed by crows keeping lookout. I can't really accurately relate what happened next, because I didn't quite understand it. But my daughter unleashed her pet monkey, which snuck on board the ship and rigged up a zipline that the two heroes used to swoop onto the deck at high speed past the startled crow lookouts. SuperSizer went giant-sized on the ship as Blackbird and Miss Decibel came to confront them.

At this point it was getting late and it was increasingly hard to keep my son even remotely focused on the game. So I wanted a quick ending with a bang. Thus I decided not to pull out any additional ninjas (they don't come cheap).

It was even faster than I expected. My son unleashed his SuperSizeShift ability, combined with his re-roll trick and a 6, to generate an Effect 4. Miss Decibel's defense roll of Effect 1 meant she would be knocked out. We described this as SuperSizer suddenly shrinking as Miss Decibel unleashed her sonic blast harmlessly overhead where his giant body had been a moment earlier, then leaping toward her like a flea, landing at her feet, and finally enlarging to full size with a punch that sent her skyward and into the water with a splash. Awesome.

My daughter engaged in some witty banter with Blackbird and then came up with a neat plan--to use the water nearby to soak the crows so they would be unable to fly, negating Blackbird's power. She got a 1 die anecdote bonus (another once-per-game-session deal) for an entertaining story about how she got the idea. Then she unleashed a staggering roll: 4, 6, 6, with the two re-rolled dice coming up 4 and 6, and the re-re-rolled 6 coming up 5, for an Effect of 6. Particularly considering that Blackbird had used up her power tricks for the session, she was toast even with an excellent full power defense roll.

Unfortunately, I could not for the life of me understand how the actions that my daughter described taking had anything to do with the plan she had laid out. It's like she forgot the water aspect entirely. Which was fine with me, I just can't remember it. The way I recall the conclusion is that she ran past a surprised Blackbird and leaped onto the water, creating a massive waterspout that shot up and drenched all of the crows, rendering them helpless as Alien Z rode the waterspout onto the deck of the ship, tapped a dazed Blackbird on the shoulder, and cold-cocked her when she turned around. Because that's more along the lines of what my daughter had said she was going to do, and that was beyond awesome.

There was no denouement, as it was time for pajamas and teeth brushing. But I was really happy with the visuals of the two final coup de grace moments, which would have looked great on a splash page or in one of the DC animated cartoons.

Afterthoughts
Much happier with this game session. If we started it earlier and perhaps took a break in the middle, we could get a could couple hours of fun. The rules are pretty simple and the tricks, particularly their limited resource nature, added some fun. My son seemed to have the best grasp of the rules, which I had to explain a couple of times to my daughter. She had the better focus on the game itself and contributed pretty much all of their clever dialogue.

My daughter tends to want to control the story more than the interactive format allows, especially as she's not the GM. The oddest aspect of this is that she keeps trying to hold the non-player-character's side of the conversation, talking back and forth with herself. On the other hand, she's getting better at thinking up stuff to do and tends to keep the action moving, which is a critical skill and much appreciated. My son has the attention span you'd expect of a six-year-old but also the associated enthusiasm when things go very well or very poorly. Basically great success or disaster got him equally thrilled and anything in the middle lost his interest fairly quickly. I also need to learn to hide the box of Heroclix when we are actually playing!

I think if I have just a little more fleshed out in terms of options (which wouldn't take long) so the kids could have more freeform choices (which I need to be willing to accept no matter how odd), and I figure out some ways to nudge them more gently into getting moving/doing, and they get more of the hang of how roleplaying games work (or narrative--you'd think that with all the animated adventures they watch, they'd recognize cliches and plot points more easily, but that just isn't natural connection for them), that they we will all continue to have fun.

I'm very happy that they gave me a second chance and that they did such a good job of being creative and fun, and I told them that.

Confessions of a Math Illiterate

This morning I was volunteering in my daughter’s gifted class. The students were given a handout with ten or so tricky math problems on it. Some dealt with deciphering the pattern in an unusual sequence of numbers, letters, or shapes and predicting the next entry. A few involved area estimations for odd shapes. My job was to help the kids out without giving away any answers.

For the most part it went fine, although I have to admit I was thoroughly flummoxed by one of the sequences, which ended up being almost painfully simple: the capital letters written using only straight lines went on top of the line, while those with curves went below. That’s one of those questions that seems like cheating to me, because it’s handwriting, not math! Or more accurately, it’s typography, because you will hard-pressed to find a single capital letter in my handwriting made up of only straight lines.

(Untold episodes of the television show Numb3rs have as yet failed to convince me that everything in the world is simply pretty pictures overlaid upon a skeletal framework of mathematics. Because if that were true, I would be guessing my way through life without showing any of my work. Read on.)

However, one very talented young girl who was all the way to the end of the sheet asked me a question that I could not answer for an equally simple reason: I had no idea what the math-specific terms being used in the question meant. We’re not talking sum and product here, but something edging closer to binomials or some such. I can’t be more specific because the word in question was literally a foreign language to me.

Under the impression that I am more or less competent (a hard-won impression among this group of children), this girl assumed I was just refusing to help her by feigning ignorance. Which left me in that dreaded no-man’s land of an argument with a precocious child: I could pretend to be deliberately unhelpful or admit to being ignorant. I went for honesty. “I don’t know what that means,” I said earnestly.

Her reaction was one of shock. “You’re a grownup. Don’t you need to know this?” The unspoken questions being, “Didn’t you go to college? Don’t you have a job?”

Having taken the first step on the slippery slope and feeling my footing giving way, I went for broke. “Truthfully? I haven’t used any of this stuff in years. Not even in graduate school.”

Her eyes were narrowing. I saw wheels turning behind them and began to hear the angry ringing of parental phone calls in my future. “Now, if you are an engineer, or a scientist, or a computer programmer, or maybe even a doctor . . .” I qualified hastily.

“My daddy is an engineer,” she nodded. The relief I felt washed away the details of her mother’s career. Based on this girl’s mind, mommy is probably a nuclear physicist.

“Well then, if you want to do something like that, then this is very important.” She didn’t seem fully convinced. Still sliding down that slope, I went for the most shameless ploy available in a grade school setting.

“Plus, all your test scores will be part of your permanent record. Where did you say you wanted to go to college?” There are some children under the age of ten who have actually considered where they might want to go college. At that age I wanted to be an officer on the Enterprise or a Rebel X-wing pilot.

“Harvard, maybe. Or Stanford.”

Of course. “Well, those are very selective institutions. Your knowledge of this kind of math lay an important foundation for excelling at the kinds of tests that will get you where you want to go.” She sighed. I saw the folly of my honesty in her eyes, resigned to the necessity of years of boring tests and jargon. “Or you could always skip this problem and work on one that seems more interesting,” I offered.

“Okay.” Her face brightened. “Neat, a graphing problem!” I retreated to the safety of a child using a calculator.

Those of us who aren’t comfortable with math like to make up and then perpetuate all sorts of stereotypes about the people who enjoy equations. They can't or don't read anything complex. Human emotions confuse them. They're physically awkward. Over the years I’ve found that most of these aren’t true. The starting center on my junior high basketball team was math whiz and the only one on the team who could dunk.

Some stereotypes do ring true at the extremes. Those that are true are not exclusive, however. You are just as likely to find a socially dysfunctional fanatic/lover of literature, religion, music, guns, or art who speaks about daily life in a foreign language as you are a number-crunching nerd who does the same. They all just dress differently and register at different degrees of "cool" on the popular culture thermometer. At a certain level it’s all about the obsession with perceiving reality through a particular lens.

What does set the math folks apart is their insistence that their obsession describes the world in empirically concrete terms. (Well, some of the gun fanatics are pretty confident of this as well and more than happy to demonstrate.)

I’m willing to concede the "math explains reality" theory for pretty much anything involving electronics, mechanical parts, or laws of nature that I can actually feel. (Okay, and x-rays and hard radiation as well. I grew up on White Sands Missile Range and everything in the category of "invisible rays that pass right through you" still scares the crap out of me.) When you get to dark matter and alternate quantum universes, the process moves into the self-referential realm of math proving or disproving other math as far as I can tell.

I simply try to muddle through with my mathematical dyslexia, with the full knowledge that in a few years my daughter will be working on math problems I do not understand. This knowledge hangs over my head like a polygonal sword of Damocles. (Oh yes, I went mythological on you—that’s just one of my own conceits. We’ve each got our boulders to roll.)

Until then I enjoy my Sudoku and marvel daily that a calculating machine capable of thinking only in ones and zeros can be such a diabolical pain in my ass.

Being/Loving in the Moment: The Children's Gift

Every Thursday afternoon I volunteer at my son's class. He's four years old and has been diagnosed as a high functioning autistic, most likely with Asberger's Syndrome. If you are told that your child is autistic, that's about the best diagnosis you can hope for, so my wife and I feel very fortunate. He's a very loving, very intelligent, very wonderful little boy.

My son is in a developmental preschool program with nine or so other children whose diagnoses fall along a similar spectrum. Some have greater physical challenges, some greater speech and mental challenges, and some you would not suspect have issues at all until you see them emotionally disturbed.

Generally I assist the physical therapist in working with small groups of children from the class and help the teacher and her aide run the classroom. This involves helping children with craft projects, doing some individual occupational therapy with them, and a lot of taking kids to the bathroom.

I also volunteer every other Tuesday morning for my daughter's Highly Gifted 3rd/4th grade class. This is also a small group of ten children, but these kids are considered to be on the high end of the spectrum, with skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic far above their age peers. At the same time, these children are also fragile in their own ways. Some have trouble making friends, some have attention deficit or sensory overload issues, and some (like my daughter, in many ways) are simply young children struggling with expectations of social maturity based on their academic achievement rather than their real age.

I find these volunteer experiences very rewarding. The specific nature of my interaction with these two sets of children is very different. In my son's class he is the only child who can read. Some of them have trouble with identifying basic colors and shapes. In my daughter's class there are children who can multiply in base three and read at a very high level.

But my basic goals in each class are basically the same. I help the children individually, I praise their achievements, I try to ease their self-consciousness about their eccentricities by accepting them as they are, and I try to make them laugh. Sometimes it is challenging and frustrating. But it puts my mind in a place that is very healthy.

The teachers have a much greater challenge than I do. They need to think about the overall progress each child is making, which with these children is typically a very individualized set of benchmarks and goals. In much the same way I have to keep a careful eye on the progress of my own children in and out of the classroom. I have to be prepared to meet and advocate for their special needs on a constant basis.

But when I volunteer, all I do is think about what will make this particular child happy or successful right now. And I find the easiest way to do that is to love them for that moment as selflessly as I can. I just try to accept them, because in many ways these children are outsiders. Yet they are still young enough that if you treat them with kindness and patience, they will let you in and tell you what they need or want.

There is a girl in my son's class who can't really speak, at least not intelligibly. She's quite shy and has some sensitivities to touch and temperature that can make her uncomfortable at times. But she watches the world around her closely. One day I stumbled across a little game I could play while swinging her on the therapy swing at the start of class that would make her burst into peals of laughter like the chiming of little bells. Now she smiles at me and asks me for help in her singsong voice whenever I am in the class. I can't always help her. Sometimes I'm not allowed to, because she needs to master certain self-reliance skills. Often I can't even understand what she wants from me. But she trusts me, and that trust is a wonderful gift.

A boy in my daughter's class is somewhat emotionally fragile. He's prone to stepping away from the group and isolating himself when he feels embarassed about a situation. During a school Christmas party I saw him pull away to the corner of the room. So I went over to sit by him. We sat next to each other in silence as I tried to think about what to say to console, encourage, or cheer him. Then it dawned on me that for the moment being there was enough. After a while I asked him about the pattern on his shoes, then the picture on his shirt, giving him a chance to be the expert, to teach me, to feel a little confident again. And then I thanked him for sharing with me. He went back to the group and started to play with the others.

And the thing was, I was grateful to him for sharing with me. Being helpful was the best feeling that I had that entire day. And not just because I gave to someone else. It was as though I reached back through time and gave encouragement to the lonely and isolated little boy that I often was.

I try, with limited success, to remind myself on a daily basis to embrace the people I love with love in my heart. To see their frailties and mistakes with compassion and understanding. To see myself and my own mental and emotional challenges in the faces of my children. To try to be helpful because, in truth, it simply isn't always possible to help another person, though you want to with all your heart. So the opportunities to help those you love are little gifts that make life more meaningful.

And maybe, in the end, to become a better person. Because for all the ascetic teachings in the world and the tales of lone artists pursuing their passion, I don't think you fulfill your true promise as a human being on your own.

Personal Post: I Have Become El Asso Wipo

Several friends commented that my first couple posts are rather heavy. That is undoubtedly going to remain the case. I am a heavy dude.

Seriously, this blog is my way of talking about subjects and thoughts that nobody in my daily life typically has the time or interest in listening to (and there are the references to speaking again!). I’m imagining that there is an audience out there interested in these topics.

That being said, it’s not all deep. For example . . .

My son has been diagnosed with high functioning autism, which will most likely be translated into an Asberger’s Syndrome diagnosis as he gets older. He’s smart, loving, and wonderful.

He also loves routine and is slowly mastering certain life skills. Recently he made a breakthrough with his potty training. He graduated from pull-ups and night time diapers and rarely has an accident during the day or evening. This is a big step of which he and we are justifiably proud.

However, he either does not grasp or does not approve of the idea of wiping his own bottom after Number 2. He does recognize that this is a necessary step, but he insists upon me performing it. Given that he shows a remarkable talent for delaying his urges until he is at home or I am nearby and that I usually have several other things going on when he requests this service (“Daddy! Come wipe my bottom!”) he often gets his way.

(As a result I do possess a knowledge of my son’s bowel movements and stool on par with that of a medieval physician perusing the effluence of a noble client.)

Thus, I am truly “El Asso Wipo, wiper of other people’s bottoms.” (Those of you who used to watch Mad TV will get the reference. For the rest, here’s a pertinent link—scroll down to find the name on the list of recurring characters. For those unfamiliar with Mexican wrestling, here's some more context.)

Not a title I aspired to, but one I bear with pride. Now to learn how to "break people's backs on my knee, like so."