I said I would quit Candy Crush when I got to level 200.  That level was chosen because it was a nice round number, a fat number.  I felt as if Level 200 would say, “I got bored of this game; it didn’t get me.”  And I felt as if I had to quit because… you know… that thing called attention that I’m not paying when I’m playing out my 5 lives each night.

And then I got to level 200 and beat level 200.

And then I started to feel that gnawing emptiness that comes when you’re not quite ready to part with something, but you have to say goodbye anyway.  The end of a really good night out with friends.  Those last minutes before you have to leave for work.  The kiss at the end of a visit and then the drive backwards down the driveway where you can still see the person.

INSTEAD OF DELETING IT, I CONTINUED ON.

I yelled at myself once I crossed over to level 201, messing up my exit on a gorgeous, round number.  Now I’m stuck until level 225.  Or at least 250.  Maaaaaybe 300.

*******

On the other hand, I thought I would update to iOS7 the second it became available.  Not for myself but because the Wolvog can’t stop talking about it.  He could barely wait until the release date; expecting him to wait beyond the release date was asking too much.  He had already crooned about all of Jony Ive’s contributions while he followed me around the kitchen, insisting that his involvement meant it would be beautiful and functional.  He repeated the operating system like a mantra, “iOS7iOS7iOS7iOS7.”

I was going to download it while he was in school, but then I started seeing updates from people who upgraded and didn’t like it.  At all.  And I am such a creature of habit, so loyal to keeping things exactly the same.  A case in point: I spent the afternoon mending a jacket that is 17 years old rather than buy a new jacket.  I like this jacket.  I am familiar with this jacket.  So, if I am the type of person who keeps a jacket for 17 years, you can probably deduce that I am also the sort of person who likes her phone interface to look similar from update to update.

The Wolvog was beyond disappointed when I told him that we wouldn’t be upgrading on the first day.  Crushed.  Continuously repeating his iOS7 mantra until we banned the word from our house for the time being.  He got around it by calling it “the upgrade” or “you-kn0w-what.”

“I’m going to post about iOS7 and ask for people’s opinions,” I promised the Wolvog at bedtime.

“How come you can say it?  How come you can say you-know-what?”

“Uh… because I’m an adult?  Good night!”

So I’m asking you about it if you upgraded.  What do you think of iOS7?

The ChickieNob and Wolvog move through video games faster than Superman.

Allow me to be crotchety and old for a moment.  In my day, if you wanted a fancy new Intellivision game such as Pitfall or Utopia, you had to beg your parents for several weeks.  You had to make empty promises, such as the fact that you’d make your bed every single day before school.  Then you actually had to make your bed once or twice to give your parents a sample of the orderly world that would exist if you could have said game. (But just a taste, I mean, why buy the proverbial cow… or in this case, video game.)

You had to save up your allowance or babysit the kids up the street.  You had to do your homework very quickly so you could run over to your friend’s house and play their copy of the game a few more times to be certain that it’s a game you really really wanted to get.  And then, after writing an essay complete with a thesis paragraph, explaining how playing Utopia will help you to better understand the plight of farmers and fisherman in America or how Pitfall will make you a more adventurous, scorpion-jumping person, your parents would relent and purchase said game.  And you would play it, gratefully, for the next six months.  And not make your bed so you would have something to bargain with when it came time to beg for the next video game several months later.

And we liked it while we trudged uphill to school both ways.

Screenshot of Jetpack Joyride

Game obtaining is unsurprisingly very different for the twins.  If they want a new game, we don’t need to leave the house to get it.  Every game they want to play can be downloaded directly onto their iPods.  They don’t have to promise to make their bed to get it; not that I’d ever believe them but almost every game they want is either free with in-app purchases or the cost is minimal — less than a cup of coffee at the gas station.  Which means they ask for a new game pretty much on a weekly basis.  By the time I figure out what Hay Day even is, they’ve ditched their farms and are now Jetpack Joyriding around with Barry Steakfries on a grand adventure.

While games have gotten less expensive (depending on the gaming system) and easier to obtain along with graphics obviously leaps and bounds ahead of when Pitfall consisted of a brown blob retracting in three jerky steps to indicate a growing and receding mud pit, the speed in which kids obtain and release games has created a new crop of problems: vetting overload, flighty attention, and lessons missed.

There isn’t enough time to research games thoroughly before download.  I work a full time job, and I can’t keep up with the game request research.  We have fairly strict rules about violence in games since I know the twins will end up in our bedroom with their nightmares.  Of course every child is different, and what rolls off one child’s vinegary brain like a blob of oil will emulsify in another child’s imagination.  So we can’t always go with popularity or another parent’s vetting of a game since every child is different.  There are plenty of times when I have to say no not because there is anything wrong with the game, but because I don’t have the time to explore the reviews and look at screenshots.  By the time I can get around to looking at the game, that game is already on its way out with the elementary school set.  If you want to keep up with the video game talk, you need to pretty much download and start playing instantly.

Rapidly downloading and discarding games means that kids — at least the ChickieNob and Wolvog — aren’t deeply exploring a single world, immersing themselves so deeply into a game that they start imagining themselves an actual owner of a farm or a jetpack.  Back when my sister and I played epic games of Utopia, I would feel actual joy when the rain clouds watered my crops, imagining my villagers excited by the bounty of invisible food.  I cared about Pitfall Harry, constructing a backstory for him that explained why he would brave quicksand and rattlesnakes to collect diamond rings.  We stayed so long with one game that we ended up knowing every single screen.

The twins don’t even remember some games when I bring them up months later, trying to figure out if it’s okay to delete them from my iTunes account.  With the exception of a few games that have sticking power, most games are barely explored and quickly forgotten.  I can still remember every single game we owned on both of our gaming systems as well as any computer game my parents purchased for us during a twenty-year span.  Will my kids be able to recall video games when they’re older to annoy their kids with how life used to be back when graphics were merely three-dimensional or allowed the gamer to place themselves squarely into the action (which was back when we all lived above ground before the zombie apocalypse)?

And lastly, there are the lessons missed that video game playing afforded us in my youth.  We stuck with a game until we solved it (and then we photographed the television screen with a Polaroid camera to prove it to friends at school the next day).  We stuck with it no matter how frustrated we got because it was our only game option.  We couldn’t cajole our parents into buying us two games in quick succession, so we stayed with a single game of Super Mario Brothers until we found every single portal and collected every single coin.  Playing games that way made me feel as if I accomplished something after all those hours in front of the screen.  I felt as if I had used my brain, solved a problem, seen a story unfold in front of my eyes.

Right now, with games so plentiful and easily (and cheaply) obtainable, they don’t stick with a game very long once it gets frustrating.  If they can’t figure it out after a few tries, they delete it and move onto the next game.  I realized that I was starting to do it too; download dozens of hidden object games, play them for a few minutes, and then delete them when they ask me to make a purchase or connect to Facebook.  Maybe this new tendency of game creators to push us into playing socially in order to build their word-of-mouth non-organically is what makes me turn away from games in a hurry, but certainly my twins aren’t thinking about how annoying it is to be manipulated into giving game makers access to your friend’s eyes in exchange for a few minutes of entertainment.  The ChickieNob and Wolvog are deleting because easy come, easy go.  They got the game easily, the game turned out to be a challenge, and they deleted it in favour of the next set of shiny graphics coupled with catchy song.

This problem isn’t solved by forcing my kids to buy their own games; after all, when a game is free or 99 cents, what I need them to learn can’t be learned without a foot coming down to make a few rules.

New games need to be played for a few weeks before they can be rotated off the device, so choose wisely, kids, since you won’t be able to download another one this month.  Before a game can be replaced with a new game, they need to explain why they’re removing it.  Too many “it’s too hard”s on games that I know are playable will result in me meanly telling them to keep at it until they’ve figured out three more boards.  Games that only allow them to progress if they make in-app purchases or connect to a social media account may be deleted immediately considering in-app purchases are blocked on every device in this house and my children aren’t old enough for social media accounts.  And lastly, they also need to choose a game and play it with me, slowly solving it together and talking about it incessantly to build their imagination.  Infocom games are particularly good for this torture.

Hopefully this will ensure that we stop having conversations such as the one that occurred a few weeks ago.  The Wolvog’s iPod was recharging and I offered him use of my phone since he had just started his screen time for the day.  He turned down the offer, informing me that my phone was boring:

It always has the same games.

I hit a point this summer where I was starting to pick myself and surroundings apart, only looking at the negative things around me and within me.  If anyone had needed me to, I could list out all the things bothering me in a heartbeat.  In fact, Josh often got to hear all the negative things I thought about myself and various situations in list form.  I couldn’t really do the same for things I felt good about.

That all changed last week.  Nothing set the change in motion; it was just an internal decision that I wanted to start bettering things that were wrong vs. feeling like crap about them.

Body

I stopped doing daily yoga and running last fall, and while I haven’t put back on the weight I originally lost, I have felt sluggish and soft.  My back and shoulders have started hurting again on and off, something that had stopped happening while I did yoga.  And moreover, I felt less productive, my mind jumping from thought to thought like a monkey, leaving me feeling frantic after work time because I hadn’t gotten enough done.

I decided to return to the yoga app last week.  Every single morning.  I now spend a half hour with Lily before I shower and start working.  It pushes back my morning coffee (which I was becoming way too dependent upon) and yogurt too.  It’s helping me focus and sort of reducing my anxiety. (My anxiety may be too large to expect yoga to really make a dent in it.)  It’s making me feel focused and grounded when I sit down to work.  And it’s helping my back.  So yoga for the win.

Very soon, I’ll probably start adding in running twice a week.  But I want to make sure I’ve established practices that are sustainable before I start stressing out those practices by overloading them.

Brain

I decided I needed a mental challenge, so I went with learning programming.  I like that Steve Jobs quote, “I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.”  And writers need to think in a very calculated, precise way, piecing together a story much in the same way that a computer program is constructed.  Frayed storylines and loose threads of plot are just as problematic as coding missing a character.  Plus, it’s something I can learn that is very important to the twins.  There’s a nice hum between all of us as we work.

I wrote about how the kids are learning coding.  I’m tagging along for the ride, using the same books since they speak to someone on my level.  Right now, I’m trying to learn Python.  The Wolvog is faster than I am at picking it up, but I know a lot more mathematical theory so it balances out, especially when I slow us down by droning on about tuples.  He loves that.  So as long as my programming partner doesn’t ditch me or refuse to answer my endless questions, expect a really cool game that the ChickieNob is helping me design uploaded to my blog some time this year.

Personality

I rarely say no.  My thought is that if I can say yes, then I should say yes.  What I didn’t realize was how often I couldn’t really say yes, but was saying yes anyway.  So this year, I’m saying no.  I’m not over-committing and then feeling frantic in the process.  I’m offering things once, and if the person wants to take me up on the favour, the ball is now in their court.  I’m not going to chase them down in order to provide them with a favour (something I often did in the past that left me feeling resentful afterward).

I am saying yes to things I enjoy, things I think are important, things I can do to be helpful that don’t detract from my own sense of well-being.  And all other things, I am apologetically saying no and not obsessing about the opportunities I’m turning down.  It leaves me more time to enjoy or do a good job on the things I am saying yes to.

Home

We started home improvements this past spring.  There are A LOT of necessary home improvements, and most of them feel fairly urgent, at least from an aesthetic standpoint.  We took care of replacing the windows first.  Window replacement sucks because it’s one of those things that cost a lot of money but doesn’t change the look of the house.  So, for the most part, our house is EXACTLY the same as it was before they came with the exception that we can now open the windows.  Which will soon become more helpful than I realized at the time.

After we finished the windows, we realized that they had cost a lot more than we had budgeted, and we would need to wait a while to make cosmetic changes to our house.  It filled me with dread to live in this ugly space and it filled me with dread to think about a time when we’d be spending a shit-ton of money and have workpeople in and out of our home.  You’ve probably also picked up over the years that I’m a little overexcited when it comes to things such as evenness and symmetry.  Neatness.  I am the woman who bleaches the inside of my dishwasher.  So I spent a lot of nights lying awake, worried that the painters would  — let’s say — leave a tiny sliver of extra paint in some unnoticeable corner of the wall, and it would drive me crazy forever.

The only person I trust to deal with my neuroses is me.  And maybe Josh.  But mostly me.

Over the last few months, we’ve gotten estimates for the work we need done, and whenever they tell me the price tag and the length of time (remember, I work out of the house, so it also means a loss of work time for me when we have people in here), I would spend the rest of the day curled up in a little ball emotionally.  I didn’t see how we were going to do this in a way that didn’t demolish our savings and retain my sanity.

And that’s when I decided to do it myself.  Like almost all of it myself.  Like watching YouTube tutorials and then doing the whole ding-dong home improvement project mostly on my own.  When I tell people who know me well that this is what I’m doing, there are long pauses of silence.  But everyone eventually comes around to the idea.  And for the first time in many many years, I feel calm about it.  I feel in control.  I feel like I own this renovation; that it will be done my way with all lines very very very evenly measured.

Redoing every room in my house on my own feels very Riot Grrl.  I have a feeling it may also look a little Riot Grrl when I’m done, hence why I’m starting with low-stakes rooms such as my bathroom and building up to redoing my own kitchen.  I’ll need to hire out for some of the plumbing and electrical tasks, but anything carpentry?  I taught woodworking.  I mean, sure, it was one summer and our projects ranged from wooden napkin rings to alphabet blocks.  But it was woodworking nonetheless.  And painting the walls: I have an MFA and six of those credits had to be in a different medium.  Sure, my visual arts course work was in printmaking and my background is general illustration.  But how different can painting on a wall be from painting on a canvas?  Not that I ever really painted on a canvas but we can overlook that for a moment.

I am probably not going to post before pictures because they’re too embarrassing.  But I will post after pictures.  I’ve given myself a long window of time to complete this, and I’m going to do it in small pieces at a time.  All the better to obsess over every rotation of the paint roller.

Coda

So that’s where I am.  Not working toward perfection (except in terms of evenness of the distribution of paint) or anything silly like that.  Just bettering.  Making myself and the space around me better than where it is right now.

Anyone want to join along with their own personal bettering over the course of the year?  It’s pretty laid back.  Not too much stress (unless you count the fact that I am planning to lie on my side on the floor so I can be eye-level with the baseboard when I paint it).  Just tiny, sustainable change.  No, I’m serious: tiny, sustainable change.

I read a post that affected me deeply the other day. Danielle LaPorte writes about why she burned her journals.  20 years of recorded moments, up in smoke.

Image: Thomas’s Pics via Flickr

Like LaPorte, I love clutter-free living, but while I’m happy to toss away favours from parties or donate unneeded kitchen utensils, I don’t see my old journals (or my blog) as something I could part with willingly.  All my words somehow stand outside that idea of clutter, along with my sofa and stand mixer and all the other tangible objects I can’t imagine purging either because they mean a lot to me or because I see them as well-integrated into my daily life.

Unlike LaPorte, I am nostalgic.  I love reopening old journals or scrolling back through my blog.  I’ll be looking for an old post, and I’ll read the ones before and after it, remembering moments — good or bad — which have faded from memory.  Maybe the right trigger would organically bring back those memories from my mental basement, but I get nervous over the idea of needing to wait for a trigger to access my past, by which I mean, my life.

LaPorte breaks us down into historians and burners, and I think there is a lot of truth in that we really aren’t a blend of both but more one or the other.  There are those who like to document their present and reflect on their past, and there are the ones who like the fleeting nature of the present and like to dream about their future.  And despite my dislike of clutter, I am a historian to the core.  I like to remember where I’ve been, even the unhappy times.

At the same time, I don’t really love the idea of people reading my personal journals after I’m gone.  My blog, sure; I’ve chosen to publish those thoughts and put them out there.  But my rage-y journal from my high school years: do I really want the kids to read those without me there to give those passages context?  Still, I can’t imagine burning them to prepare for the day I’m not here.

Are you a historian or a burner, and can you ever imagine burning your old journals or deleting your blog?

cross-posted with BlogHer

 Image: 1derwoman via Flickr

I took the twins to a comic convention.  It was a much larger venue than the convention I took the twins to a few weeks ago, which was their first convention.  So, I think they entered thinking it would have a similar feel.  I certainly thought it would be just as kid-friendly due to the scope of kid-focused programming (which it was, but in a very different way from the other convention).  But it was, from the very start, a very different experience.  There were tens of thousands of people at this convention, and a cavernous room of artists and vendors (not to mention panel discussions).  We wandered through Artist’s Alley, looking for the children’s programming.

While there was certainly cosplay at the smaller convention I took them to a few weeks ago, the sheer number of people increased the sheer number of costumes exponentially.  What has always been overtly there on paper suddenly brought with it an entirely new understanding as the page came to life in the three dimensional world.  Namely, that female superheroes don’t wear very much.  At all.

It’s not the fault of the venue or the fault of the cosplayers or the fault of the artists who create female superheroes either in skin-tight outfits outlining their voluptuous bodies or in mini bustier-like contraptions that cause their breasts to spill out the top, yet the problem exists: we have an activity that naturally draws both children and adults that hasn’t found its balance yet to cater to both ends of the age range and we have artists presenting a very limited fantasy that isn’t shared by the wide-range of consumers of their art.

In other words, if we don’t talk about it, we run the risk of alienating the very people we’re trying to bring into the fun: the next generation of geeks (and specifically, girls).

I got to watch the ChickieNob process in real time.  She came to the event, proudly wearing a female comic book character on her t-shirt.  The shirt shows a fairly tame version of the top-half of the superhero’s body.  The first time she saw someone dressed as this superhero, she started jogging towards her and then stopped, whispering to me, “that woman isn’t really wearing anything.”  She… uh… sort of wasn’t.  What looked fairly chaste two-dimensionally suddenly became all about the cleavage three-dimensionally.

“Do you want your picture with her?” I asked.

ChickieNob shook her head and we kept walking.  But I could see her now noticing just how tight Catwoman’s outfit is when it’s on a body rather than on a page.  And how much Poison Ivy’s breasts leak out the top of her green merry widow.  And it just didn’t seem… real.

“Real female superheroes wouldn’t dress like that,” ChickieNob decided.

“It doesn’t seem very likely,” I agreed.

“They’d wear a t-shirt and shorts,” she decided.  “So they could move around easily.”

“And they’d probably wear knee pads and elbow pads to protect themselves,” I added.

She shrugged at the idea of protective gear but she laughed when I leaned down and whispered, “It’s almost like men think that we like to fight crime by whacking bad guys with our boobs.”

Costumes that are eye-catching and realistic can be done.  Perhaps Michael Lee’s illustrations aren’t your cup of tea, but he has proven that we can make women interesting without placing them in what amounts to colourful lingerie.  I would love to see others reimagine the current pantheon of female superheroes (and even female villains) in clothing that allows their actions to be bad-ass; not the fact that they’ve shown a lot of skin.  This is a Wonder Woman who would emerge from a battle with both her breasts intact.  Or to see more characters like Dust.  Even Batgirl or Rogue’s form-fitting black outfits looks modest next to the cleavage-heaving underroos of Elektra.  I’m not talking about putting Supergirl in baggy yoga pants, but my G-d, would any superhero really want their midriff bare if they were facing down enemies?

Women don’t always feel welcome in the comic book world and certainly, the tech world hasn’t been incredibly inviting.  From the recent Titshare fiasco at TechCrunch (which again was a collision of kids and adults) to the on-going Dickwolves saga, it takes a dedicated woman to plow through this aspect of gaming, comic, and tech culture.  And it’s sad because that aspect of popular culture — that anti-woman sentiment — is such a small part of the larger whole, but it’s the one that gets noted and repeated.

But take aside our generation for a moment: what are we teaching our daughters?  And are we giving them a gaming, tech, and comic world they’ll want to inherit?  Is it possible to keep all that exists today and add to the pantheon female superheroes (and even villains!) that have their breasts protected under clothing while they fight crime?

There needs to be room for both: for female superheroes that fulfill a collective fantasy as well as female superheroes that reflect the sorts of girls we’d like our daughters to emulate in their very human way.  No, I don’t want to raise a crime fighting supergirl, but I would like her to be influenced by the bravery and confidence that goes hand-in-hand with comic book storylines.

The younger generation of geeks are always observing the older generation of geeks, especially when our worlds collide as they seem to do as conferences with digital natives programming alongside adults and new comic book lovers sharing the joy with their comic book loving parents.  Even moreso when adults invite kids into that atmosphere by providing kid-specific programming that encourages their attendance.

We want to raise the next generation of geeks, to bring them into our activities and interests.  We need to make sure what exists on the page translates well in the three-dimensional world.

Coda: I posted this first on GeekDad the other day, unsure of the response it would get from a mostly male audience.  But I was really excited to read a lot of people saying the same thing I said: that this has always been there, but until those outfits came off the page, it wasn’t totally clear just how unrealistic the clothing was in the context of the story action.  It would be like having a school principal wearing a bikini: there is nothing wrong with the article of clothing at the pool, but it makes no sense (and would probably make people a tad uncomfortable) if they saw it in a school.

There was, of course, as you’d expect, the person who used the argument of “if you don’t like it, stay away.”  And yes, that is certainly one way to solve the problem.  But if that’s the approach people are going to suggest, they can’t complain in the future when there are no girl comic book-lovers.  Or girl gamers.  Or girl programmers.  Anywhere girls are currently feeling unwelcome due to the climate AND the message they get to leave if they don’t like it.

And as I pointed out above, that unwelcomeness is a small part of a much larger, much happier world of geekdom.  It’s a shame that it’s the part of that world that keeps getting highlighted.  But it will keep getting highlighted until we do something about it.  Because girls are going to speak up if they don’t feel welcome.  And as my little girl pointed out with that simple thought of “Real female superheroes wouldn’t dress like that,” there is a big disconnect between the realistic-fantasy that could exist and the objectifying-fantasy that does exist.

And that what works on the page doesn’t necessarily work in the three dimensional world.  With the popularity of cosplay, artists need to remember that and work together with the fans who bring their images to life.

Instead of foisting a one-note fantasy on the reader, allow them to build their own fantasy and not get distracted by the details that are pigeonholing the character.  You can present a sexy, confident, ass-kicking, intelligent, beautiful character who just so happens to have her boobs covered up so they don’t fall out as she delivers a roundhouse kick.

And no one is saying that grown women shouldn’t be able to walk around in merry widows.  If that floats your boat, more power to you.  But girls do need to see that there are a plethora of options out there.  If you walk into the comic book store and see what’s on display, you’d walk away thinking that there’s not.