terror in a onesie

Happy Fourth of July Weekend!

2009-07-03T14:26:39Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Some blogs would put pictures of fireworks here, or possibly embed a Lee Greenwood song.

We give you the best Keyboard Cat ever.

We’re out for the weekend to do family-type stuff. Enjoy!

Has Anyone Seen Ceiling Cat Lately?

2009-07-02T16:08:05Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

First it turned out that the LOLrus died in 2005.

Now I learn that Fatso, the keyboard cat, died in 2000.

Since these things come in threes, it’s clear that we’ll soon learn that Rick Astley actually died in 1995.

Fewer Racially-Stereotyped Robots Would Also Be Nice

2009-06-30T17:25:00Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Last night we watched “Virtuality”, Ron Moore’s TV pilot that became a mini-movie instead. It’s about a crew of astronauts who are on a starship headed to Epsilon Eridani and who are also part of a reality TV series. Thanks to the show, I have a request: Dear science fiction and fantasy TV/movie writers, please stop using rape as motivation.

Urban Fantasy, DCTV Style

2009-06-30T01:30:05Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Saturday was my first opportunity to tape skits for DCTV, so of course there were vampires.

Fine, fine, we had vampire hunters as well. That’s Buffy, Alucard, Edward Cullen, Spike, and Mina Harker in that photo. Why were they all together? Find out in September!

(And thanks to Patrick for the cast photo.)

Weekend Update

2009-06-28T20:39:52Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve been working diligently on the lighthouse cross stitch. And everything was going great until today when I sat down to begin lighthouse #3. I completely miscounted and stitched for an hour only to have to remove all but about 20 stitches and start over. I was so disgusted that I put my tools away for the afternoon. I did take a photo though before I started work this morning.

In other news, on Friday night we had a sleepover for Ashley’s birthday party. Ashley, Jessica, Sheila and Wendy came over. We painted our toenails and watched “Mama Mia!” (Most of which I missed except for the part about Colin Firth playing a gay man. I just about cried.) We ate and talked and in the end decided to go to bed at 1:30 because I knew that Eli and Liza would wake everyone up at six o’clock. It turns out sleepovers in my 30s are exactly like sleepovers in my teens. With one giant exception: I had no idea in my teens I’d spend so much time in my 30s talking about reproductive issues, poop and breastfeeding.

Lastly, New Kid Pictures!
Here’s Liza doing her new thing of dressing herself from the dressup drawer. And of course, what is the one thing you must do once you have on your backwards sideways swim top and wearing one leg warmer on your arm? DANCE!

Geof came over last week and took some photos of the kids as well. We waited until the sun was heading down and then I attempted to art direct but the kids were having none of it. The photos are still awesome anyway.

Click the photo to see more of Geof’s photos.

Michael Jackson Died Today

2009-06-26T02:39:55Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I tell you what: go watch the video for Billie Jean. When you’re done, listen to the entire Thriller album.

Twenty-seven years later, and still one hell of an album.

Together, They Fight Each Other!

2009-06-26T02:08:21Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

We have reached a magical point in rearing Eli and Liza: occasionally they go off and play together for up to an hour. It’s like how Furbys would sometimes spontaneously talk to each other, except Eli and Liza have no off switch. The two of them will come wandering through the room, each pushing a small shopping cart or baby stroller filled with random junk, or they’ll climb up on Eli’s bed and roll around and hide under pillows and fall down yelling, “TIMBAAAAAH!”

They don’t do this consistently, of course. There’s always the problem of toys and who has what. Eli and Liza have to go through their own version of the Great Compromise in divvying up toys, which I guess means Eli is Virginia in this metaphor and Liza is Delaware, so let’s move on, shall we? Eli sees Liza with a toy and decides that he has to have that toy right now Right Now RIGHT NOW! If Liza won’t let him have it, he sniffles, shoulders slumping, as he says, “She’s never going to let me have it! I’ll never see it again!”

Sometimes Eli realizes Liza wants certain toys that he’s done playing with, so he takes them, throws them in his room, and closes the door. If he could set them on fire and scatter the ashes just to deny Liza the pleasure of playing with them, he’d do it.

Sometimes Eli can con Liza. He finds another toy and applies his best used-car salesman tactics. “Liza, do you want this robot? If you want this robot you have to give me the balloon. Give me the balloon and you can have the robot!”

His negotiation tactics still need work. One time last week he told Liza, “Can I have that toy? If you don’t give it to me, I’m leaving!” Liza looked up at Eli and said, “Nope.” Eli shuffled off slowly, looking back the whole time, so Liza gave him a “how can I miss you if you won’t ever leave?” look.

They even fight over bugs. We’ve had a minor infestation of small black beetles. Liza has paroxysms of joy when she sees one. “Hiiii, bug! Hiiii! Look! He’s running! He wants to play wif me!” She’ll pick the poor beetle up, traumatizing it for the rest of its very short life. Eli naturally demands his turn. “When do I get to play with the beetle?”

I can only imagine what’ll happen when they discover cockroaches.

Soon-To-Be Trending Twitter Topics

2009-06-24T16:56:10Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Pirate pickup lines.

Which of Jon and Kate’s octuplets you’d like to be.

That one YouTube video that is unbelievably cute.

Tinted avatars as political activism.

Movie titles that are unintentionally creepy when muttered by Christopher Walken.

Robot sexual positions.

The YouTube video involving Keyboard Cat playing off that one unbelievably cute YouTube video.

Things that, when eaten, pass through the digestive system unchanged.

How Twitter is dying, nuh-uh is not, is too.

Any other suggestions?

Me Versus the Big Daddy

2009-06-23T14:11:12Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

This is a Big Daddy, from the game Bioshock.

He protects the Little Sisters — mutated girls who have a certain resource you need in the game. You can see one to the right of him.

And here’s what it looks like when I try to fight him! Caution: this video contains scenes of violence, gore, and piss-poor gameplay.

I don’t know who bonzot, creator of the video, is, but my heart goes out to him. I, too, suck at dispatching Big Daddies.

We Have Band Does a Stop-Motion Animation Video

2009-06-22T13:17:46Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

What makes this more interesting to me than other stop-motion animation music videos I’ve seen recently is the video’s use of makeup to produce some very disturbing effects.

Ribby the Frog

2009-06-19T18:17:03Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted about any scary kids’ toys. I don’t know if that’s because Eli and Liza’s toys have gotten less scary or because I’ve grown desensitized to them. If it’s the latter, then I’ve finally found a toy to shock me out of my complacency.

Meet Ribby the frog.

Ribby doesn’t look too bad. He’s a cute purple color, with a sweet smile and –

Aaah! Make it stop!

Tom Deutch is Pretty Sure Everything’s Okay

2009-06-18T16:57:08Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

The White House has unveiled their proposed revamp of financial regulations. One of the changes would require banks and other companies that offer loans to keep 5% of that loan on their books. See, one of the causes of the current financial mess was banks offering loans to anyone, knowing they could turn those mortgages into asset-backed securities and sell them off. This securitization (which I’ve previously covered) let banks and mortgage lenders take the commission and pass the risk onto others. The theory is that people will be more cautious if they can’t dump an entire loan. If it’s their money, they’ll be more careful.

Tom Deutsch, who’s one of the directors at the American Securitization Forum, is having none of it.

Deutsch says retaining more risk would require lenders to have more cash on hand to cover losses on loans. That could make it harder for banks to lend money, he says. And Deutsch doesn’t think the reform is necessary. He says mortgage lenders’ inherent interest in their own reputations already gives them enough skin in the game.

“Hundreds of mortgage originators have gone out of business because they sold bad products to investors who wouldn’t buy their product again,” Deutsch says.

This is an interesting view of the world, one in which the securitization industry’s role in the recession is the equivalent of your aged incontinent dog accidentally widdling on your new carpet. He can’t help it, and he does feel bad about it! Besides, we all know people act in their best interests all the time!

Waiting for mortgage lenders to go bankrupt if they make bad loans is like waiting for drunk drivers to crash and die — it may eventually happen, but in the meantime they’re liable to do a lot of damage. Securitization let mortgage lenders shovel bad loans out the back door as fast as they were coming in the front, delaying their day of reckoning until it took the whole economy down. It rewarded mortgage lenders not for making smart loans, but for making lots of loans that they could turn around and sell quickly.

It’s nice that Tom Deutch doesn’t see a problem with how things went. But if he’s not willing to cut back on the booze, he shouldn’t be surprised when others are far more skeptical of his and his colleagues’ driving.

Busy making things

2009-06-17T14:22:07Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve had the notebook crafting bug:

Click to see some of the other notebooks I’ve made over the past week or so.

So, question: Should I put up an Etsy store and start selling my creations?

I’m still hard at work on the lighthouses. I’ll take a photo after tonight’s work and post.

Stay Alert! Trust No One! Keep Your Laser Handy!

2009-06-16T23:11:16Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Sunday night, for the first time in far too long, I ran a game of Paranoia.

Paranoia, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, is an RPG originally published in the 1980s. It was an unholy union of Brave New World, 1984, and the Three Stooges. Players took on the role of Troubleshooters, hapless people in a futuristic underground complex run by the Computer, who is helpful yet insane, and who is entirely obsessed with rooting out traitors. As you might imagine, it finds a whole lot of traitors, especially since the players are given every reason to mistrust each other.

How’d it go? Towards the end of the night, a player managed to catch his one-ton power armor on fire. The fire broke through to the power unit, at which point the player managed to hit the explosive bolts, turning one giant exploding exoskeleton into a smaller exploding exoskeleton and many deadly flaming pieces of metal. Another player fired an experimental tangle gun to try to stop the metal, only to discover that the gun didn’t so much shoot sticky strands away from the user as drape those strands about the user. A third had little choice but to activate his experimental rocket boots, which consisted of two boots with twelve rockets each and a belt with twenty-four adjustable sliders, one for each of the rockets, making the whole get-up incredibly fiddly and near-impossible to use.

I don’t run Paranoia games because it gives me the chance to kill players. I run them because it gives me the chance to put tools in the players’ hands and let them kill themselves.

Gus was a friendly ghost

2009-06-15T03:43:58Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

My mom saved a couple of boxes of my children’s books for me to give my kids. They’ve sat in the bottom of Eli’s closet since before there was an Eli. He’s looked through the books off and on a couple of times and has come up with a few gems that he likes to read. Curiously, the ones he’s picked out are some of the ones that were my favorites. In fact, I think he’s come up with three out of about my top five favorites.

Gus was a friendly ghost is one of them. It’s a kitschy 60s book with decent line drawings. Gus has a dashed outline that I’ve always itched to cut out. (I’ll have to ask Eli if he feels the same way.) My mom always groaned when I pulled Gus off the shelf. It’s amazingly long for a picture book. It takes 15-20 minutes to read and that’s why my mom hated it. It’s why I hate to see it come off the shelf as well. Often, if it’s late and we’ve had a long day I veto it because of its length.

Saturday night though, we read it and it was fabulous. When we opened it, Eli had to examine my five-year-old signature in the front of the book. Eli laughed at all the things in the story I thought was funny when I was a kid: “…on account of mice.” I cracked up the both of us reading it. We had a long discussion of what Tapioca is and why Mouse liked it so well. And when Gus gets mad at Mouse both of us were in the dumps as well.

The 20 minutes I spent reading that book was one of those times I live for as a parent. So thanks go to my mom for making me save those books all these years.

Will work for fabric & floss

2009-06-12T15:18:07Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

You know how the other day I mentioned that I was working on a cross-stitch piece someone hired me to do? Well, that generated a fair number of questions I thought I’d answer in a post.

How did the person find me?
A long time ago, like around the time Eli was born, I was talking with the wonderful women at my local cross-stitch store and the topic came around to people looking for people to stitch for them. I mentioned that I’d be interested in that kind of work. I left my name and number and about a month ago I got my very first inquiry.

How did I decide what to charge?
Everybody told me to charge hourly. I thought about it quite a lot. Hourly is certainly the way to go in most endeavors like this. I looked at some of the work I’d done previously and did some calculations. I came to the conclusion that no one in their right mind would pay me an hourly rate to cross-stitch, there’s just too much time involved.

I decided to do a per job charge, depending on the complexity of the work and what materials were or were not provided. I love stitching and as long as the pattern is something that I would most likely do without getting paid, the money is just fodder for my ever increasing stash.

It just so happened that the dollar amount that I came up with in my head exactly matched the dollar amount that my client came up with as well. I considered that an excellent sign and took it as an indication that I should take the job.

Am I going to be able to get it done in time?
We set a date of the end of September. My client wants to give it as a gift so I am working very hard to make that September date. I’m actually doing better time-wise on this project than I do on my own stuff. I know I need to spend a certain number of hours per day working and I haven’t been skipping very often. There are five lighthouses and a compass rose in the pattern and I have one lighthouse done and have more than half of the compass done as well. If I work as I’ve been working the past few days, I’ll be able to finish the compass today.

Does having a set deadline take the joy out of the work?
I haven’t found that to be true yet. Ask me again at the end of August.

I think I’ve covered all the questions people have asked. If you have others, post them below and I’ll answer them.

The 360 is Better Than Cats

2009-06-10T18:05:22Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Look what I got!

That’s right, thanks to Misty’s gift, I’ve leapt into the future of 2005. Finally I can play Bioshock on my TV, like God intended.

What’s that, Xbox 360? What do you mean, an interloper?

Oh, him? First-generation Xbox? He’s harmless. I mean, it’s not like he’s really any threat to someone like you, with your –

Kill it? No! That’s crazy talk! That Xbox has served us faithfully. I’m going to send him to a farm in upstate New York, where he can frolic in the fields and –

I won’t do it! I won’t!

Oh, well. It had to be done.

What have we been doing lately?

2009-06-10T03:26:17Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

The list is long but boils down to this: trying to acclimate to Eli’s last summer before school starts.

In an effort to keep things light this summer, I didn’t schedule any camps or lessons of any kind for the kids. Ironic, since this is the first summer Eli’s been old enough to be eligible for most activities that run in the summer. Instead I opted for just hanging out with our friends, especially the ones with pools, and getting Eli extra time with Josh before they go to separate schools in the fall.

We’ve gone and developed quite the schedule anyway. Mondays we play at church. Tuesdays are my morning off. A girl from church is coming over to keep the kids so I can run errands or grocery shop alone, which is a mother’s nirvana. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays haven’t quite settled out yet but will be some order or combination of going to the Botanical Gardens, spending time with Josh and his family or having Hallie over so the two of us can experiment in the kitchen.

This summer is already more bittersweet than I expected it to be. Eli is so ready for school, I’ve been saying it for a year now. And yet. And yet. It seems a giant corner to turn. A street he will go down mostly without me. I thought I would have NO problem with that. I’m looking at the couple of months until school starts and I’m wondering what else we can pack in before he goes.

The big news around here is another dishwasher leak. The first one, Stephen and his dad repaired in a day and cost less than $20. This time, the part wasn’t in stock so today marks a week of me washing dishes. It’s still not going to cost very much to repair the dishwasher and Stephen can do it. The bad news of the story is the slow leak ruined the kitchen floor. I had the folks who installed the hardwoods send someone to look at it and he gave us an $800 estimate. We’re thinking about replacing the hardwood with tile since this is the third time in seven years we’ve had water damage somewhere in the kitchen.

In crafting news, I’ve been working on a cross-stitch for hire job. It’s a lovely set of lighthouses that I need to get done before October.

And making notebooks for folks. I’ve made and given away a few and made a few more. I especially like making them now that I have an actual paper guillotine instead the 1-sheet cutter I used when I first started the process.

(Yes, I know Narwhal is misspelled. They’ve sent me a new card to replace that one.)

So all in all, shaping up to be a really busy summer. I’ll make sure to take my camera to the gardens this week so I can post some new photos.

At Least We Didn’t Go Into Tashi Station

2009-06-08T16:14:56Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Saturday, to celebrate its decade anniversary, we watched Star Wars Episode I with the accomanying Rifftrax.

I hadn’t watched it all the way through in ten years. Holy cow, I’d forgotten how bad it was. It’s like those Anita Blake comics where nothing happens. Even with part of the old MST3k crew making jokes I could barely sit through it, and even Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy were reduced to shouting, “Will you just shut the hell up?” every time Jar-Jar opened his mouth.

I’m undecided: is the movie worse than the two Matrix sequels? The Matrix sequels take longer, but they didn’t squander two decades of goodwill in fifteen seconds flat.

Kids and Cages Go Together Like Apples and Razor Blades

2009-06-04T17:57:27Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Several years ago, Eli climbed into a dog cage, so of course we took a picture. Ten months later we got hate mail about it.

A few months ago, comic book writer Matt Fraction took a picture of his kid in a dog crate.

Because my mind works lighting fast, yesterday I thought, “I wonder how many pictures of kids in dog crates I can find.”

The answer? Lots and lots and lots and even more lots. Enough lots for thousands of pillars of salt.

One kid in a dog cage!

TWO kids in a dog cage!

THREE kids in a dog cage!

FOUR KIDS IN A CAGE!

Sometimes the kids are dangerous.

Sometimes they are cloned.

I feel like I have stumbled into a subculture I never knew existed, like finding out that people write WOPR/KITT slashfic. I think I’m going to declare this a new movement, write a book, and get on Oprah. Clearly it’s time parents stopped claiming that their kids aren’t like pets at all.

Make Your PowerPoint Presentation Suck Less in Many Easy Steps

2009-06-02T20:32:08Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Hands up if you’ve been in this situation: you have to give a presentation using PowerPoint, and you’re pretty sure it’s going to suck. Maybe you don’t know how to put an effective one together. Maybe you do, but you don’t have enough time to put a good presentation together. Maybe your boss has handed you the presentation and said, “Show this,” or you’re collaborating with someone who’s not down with anything other than slide after slide of bullet points.

Sure, there’s some info out there. Duarte Design’s blog is good, as is Presentation Zen. Both Michael Lopp and Seth Godin have great advice. But there’s no time left it’s got to be fixed right now.

Take a deep breath. It’s not actually too late. There are things you can do to make your presentation suck less, from slide tweaks to changes in how you present. Some of my advice will take you longer to implement; I’ll save those bits of advice for the end.

Use a sans serif font. Do your letters have little feets on them? Then it’s a serif font, like the one I’m using now. Use a sans serif font, like this one. It’d be keen if you could use something other than Arial or Helvetica, but don’t go too crazy.

Make your fonts bigger. That 10-point type on your slide? Unless everyone’s at the front of the room, not everyone will be able to read it. Guy Kawasaki claims nothing smaller than 30-point type.

Make your slides’ titles give the key conclusion. While the title-and-bulleted-list approach isn’t great, chances are you’ll still use it. When you do, don’t use generic titles. The title should summarize the slide’s conclusion — the point you want people to take away from the slide. Don’t say “Reducing Drag”, say “Fins Reduce Drag”.

Don’t apologize for your slides. When you present, don’t say, “If anyone can tell me what this picture means…” or “I don’t know why I included this slide”. If it’s a bad slide, fix it or take it out.

Don’t don’t don’t say, “I know this is an eye chart, but…”. I run into this a lot in government presentations. If your slide is so dense and crammed full of stuff that no one will read it, take it out. Take a look at this slide from the U.S. Central Command, via The New York Times via Edward Tufte’s site:

Yes, this is a subset of “don’t apologize for your presentation,” but it’s so common that I wanted to call it out separately.

Use a remote. Instead of hovering behind your computer or returning to it for each slide transition, get a wireless remote that’ll keep you from fumbling at a keyboard every minute or so.

Now let’s move into more time-intensive suggestions.

Don’t read from your slides. Memorize your presentation. A related bit of advice:

Don’t put all of the information on your slides. Admit it: you’ve used bullet lists as a crutch. You put everything on your slides so you don’t have to work as hard memorizing what you’re going to say. That’s fine. I’ve done it as well. But if people can read your presentation and learn everything they need to know, why are you there? Why even present it? Is your audience there to read a document or hear you?

Minimize your presentation’s # of concepts and concepts per slide. People can only absorb so much information before they become full. What’s your talk’s main theme? What three points do you want your audience to take away from your presentation? Alexei Kapterev suggests structuring your presentation with three key points, and possibly three key sub-points beneath those depending on how long your presentation is.

Ignore rules that tell you how many slides to have. One slide a minute? One slide every half minute? It depends on how much information you cram onto your slides (hopefully not too much), how fast you talk, and what your audience is. I’ve seen great hour-long presentations that use twenty slides, and I’ve seen wonderful ten minute ones that have a hundred.

Don’t make your slides look like your presentation’s outline. Bullet lists are fine for outlining and figuring out your presentation’s story, but ditch them when you make your final presentation.

Make your slides augment what you’re saying. When you get right down to it, your slides are a second avenue of communication. If they just parrot the words that you’re saying, you’re wasting that communication channel. You can use pictures that add emphasis instead of words. You can use a single phrase that summarizes your point. Your slides can be jokes that riff on what you’re saying, like what Stephen Colbert does with The Wørd.

Make a separate leave-behind document. One reason people make bullet-list slides that have the entire presentation’s content is because they want to leave the presentation behind for those who couldn’t be there, or for people to refer to later. Don’t do that. Make a separate handout or document for that purpose.

Read more blogs and books. I mentioned several blogs and articles above. To them add Advanced Presentations By Design, slide:ology, and Beyond Bullet Points.

We Have PhDs in Nerdiness

2009-05-31T02:03:11Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I admit it: I am in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today. And occasionally we have very geeky conversations there.

Me: Five kids in the house = combinatoric explosion. No wonder interactive fiction authors avoid NPCs.

Glen: I just recently did that problem. Complexity scales as the number of pair interactions, plus a linear term in the number of children. Therefore two kids is three times as complicated as one; three is six times; four is ten times. I think the general formula is 1 + 2 + … + N for N kids.

Oh, and good luck. Having that many rugrats running around is pretty complicated!

Jeff: But aren’t some kids more complicated than others?

Glen: In a word, no. The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.

For bonus points, should this series have higher-order terms? Why or why not?

Gender in “Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!”

2009-05-29T00:51:37Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Eli and Liza are addicted to Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!, a kid’s show on Nickelodeon — and with reason. The art direction’s fabulous and the stories are fun. One of the characters, Widget, is always making the something-or-other 3000, a habit that Eli has picked up. “Look, dad!” he says, brandishing a tinkertoy creation. “My Robot Walker 3000!”

It’s possible I’ve become addicted to it, too, because I’ve found myself thinking about it far more than I probably should. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how the show handles gender.

Take a look at the first season’s theme.

As shown in this picture, there are three main characters: Walden, Wubbzy, and Widget. Walden reads as male, with his deeper semi-Australian voice and his ties and all. Widget is clearly female, which is awesome — she’s a tinkerer and a builder, and plays against the male engineer stereotype.

Wubbzy is more ambiguous. He’s identified in the theme song as a he, and he does like kickety-kick ball, but he’s not overtly color-coded like Walden and Widget. He mainly reads as a young kid, though everyone undoubtedly defaults to thinking of him as male.

Now here’s the theme for Season 2.

You may have noticed Daizy has been shoehorned into the theme.

Daizy likes to grow flowers. She’s often en pointe. She enjoys dressing up and sewing. Her favorite phrase is “lavender lollipops!” In one episode she finds a uni-horn whom she names Princess.

She could not be more of a stereotypical little girl if she spent every episode playing with dolls.

I couldn’t find any information about why Daizy was added to the lineup, so what follows is rampant speculation. But I imagine the creators or the network wanted to add a character that they thought young girls would identify more strongly with. Widget, despite being super-awesome, comes across as more of an adult than Wubbzy, and Wubbzy, by virtue of our society’s defaults, is male. So they added a character “for girls”.

So why is she a girl turned up to 11? Wubbzy doesn’t embody every boy stereotype; why must Daizy be a super girly girl? This strikes me as being along the same lines as Marvel’s attempts to pitch comic books to women. “Chicks like dress-up, right? And ponies? We’ve got to have a pony in there.”

Liza and Eli won’t notice any of this, not overtly. But they’ll absorb it, and it’ll got woven into their default view of the world. How excited should Liza be that Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! has created a character for her to identify with, only to barely squeeze her into the opening theme and to make her Wubbzy’s sidekick who, oh yes, happens to really like him?

Advanta Screws 1 Million People Over

2009-05-26T23:42:11Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Misty’s had an Advanta small business credit card for her graphic design business when she first opened it. She’s been happy with it, though of late Advanta has taken to doing things like raising interest rates on balances from 8% to, oh, say, 30%.

I guess that should have warned us not only that Advanta is in trouble, but also that customer service isn’t its first priority. And indeed, it turns out Advanta’s shutting down its 1 million small business credit card accounts.

They quietly announced back around May 11 they’d shut down the accounts on June 10th. Not that they told us! We didn’t find out until they sent an email yesterday telling us they were closing accounts on May 30th.

Look, I understand you’re in trouble. Your customers defaulted at a rate of over 20 percent last month. But you only now officially told cardholders! You didn’t put up an announcement on your website until today! That is, as they say at Harvard Business School, a dick move. You’ve left a lot of small businesses scrambling to replace your credit cards in fewer than five days. What if Misty had employees who were using the card and were traveling, as happened to one of the Consumerist commenters?

This is a minor inconvenience for us, but it underscores just why a lot of people would be happy to see banks like Advanta dissolve like a Toon in Dip.

In Memoriam

2009-05-25T14:04:10Z

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Both of my grandfathers were in the military.

Both of Misty’s grandfathers were.

Both of our fathers served.

All lived.

Today, pause and remember those who did not.