Underwear

Well, adoring fans, you have probably realized by now that my blog is going to be full of pictures of my baby, complaints about Harry Potter (many, many more of those to come), and other such unimportant things.  But once in a while, I like to talk about more serious things.  Long ago, I had a separate blog for those things, but not anymore.  Now it's just all in one big pile here at Stuffed With Science.

I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  That's a mouthful, so I usually just say I'm a Mormon.  Much easier.  A couple weeks ago, the Church released a video that really surprised me.  It was a video about something that I hold very near and dear: garments.  You may know them as "the weird underwear that Mormons wear all the time."  The intent of the video was to explain garments to everyone who has ever asked themselves "why do they do that?"  And I think it was fantastic.

Last year, a friend of mine asked me about my garments.  Since it is not something I generally talk about, I really bungled the response.  So, if you are reading, I'd like a mulligan.  The question was "why underwear?"

It is a good question that I honestly had not thought a lot about.  Why choose that article of clothing in particular to be the symbol of my devotion to God?  Well, the nice thing about symbols is that there doesn't have to be one right answer.  It can mean different things to different people.  I've had a year to think about it, and this is what it means to me.

Underwear could be fairly described as the dirtiest article of clothing.  It is the one against your skin that gets all the sweat and oils and whatnot.  It touches all the parts of your body that you have to keep covered in public.  And God takes that most profane, filthy thing and makes it sacred.  In the same way, God can take the dirtiest parts of my life and make them clean, as described by the prophet Isaiah:

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

He can make me, the vilest of sinners, pure and holy.

And that is a beautiful thing.  That, to me, is why the garment is underwear.

Extra Life roundup

Extra Life was really, really fun.  And exhausting.  And now it's over, which is sad.  And a relief.

If you somehow don't know what I am talking about, congratulations on your recent awakening from your month-long coma!  If (and this is much more likely) you are sick of me talking about it all the time and filling your Facebook timeline with it, know that I'm almost done.  I just wanted to record some thoughts and memories so I don't lose them, and I thought people might be interested in knowing about the experience.

First, the facts.  Over the course of about a month, Kate and I solicited donations in anticipation of the game marathon.  Our goal was to raise $154 to give to the Children's Miracle Network.  That's one dollar for every day we've been blessed with a healthy, happy baby.  Thanks to our very generous friends and family, we obliterated that goal, and ended up raising $230.  Which was a small but important part of the five million dollars that Extra Life raised this year.

On game day, we tag-teamed games for 24 hours (actually 27, because we had to stop a few times to be parents).  We worked together on a puzzle that we received as a gift a few Christmases ago.  I generally don't like puzzles that much, but it was a really nice break when we were sick of looking at screens.

Kate played Super Mario World for SNES.  It is way harder than we expected.

I played two different FPSs: F.E.A.R (which I've heard good things about, but didn't really get into) and Modern Warfare (which was super fun).

Hakon played peek-a-boo for about an hour and a half, which he really enjoyed.

We played a very simple tabletop RPG with John and JaNae over Google Hangouts (since they live in Texas).  John was GM, JaNae was a doctor-turned-sniper/medic/mercinary (full disclosure: I zoned out when she told her backstory and was too embarrassed to ask her to repeat it), Kate was a telepathic circus bear, and I was a former Boy Scout leader who hated bears.  It was exactly as nerdy as it sounds, and it was perfect.  

We wanted to play more games with our other donors, but by the time we thought of it, it was just a little late to get our act together.  But that's something we'd like to do more of next year.  We are also trying to think of other ways to make the experience more rewarding and interactive for donors for next year.  Maybe a raffle for something game-related or something like that.  We are very open to ideas, so leave them in the comments or drop us an email.

To wrap things up, I just want to express my gratitude again to the people who donated to make this happen.  We are so happy to have contributed to such a good cause, and we are thankful to those of you who supported us.

Sticky Post: Extra Life

Just a brief post that will stay on the top of my blog for a couple weeks.  Kate and I are participating in Extra Life, a charity that befits several children's hospitals through the Children's Miracle Network.  There is more detail on our page (click through!), but the basics are here:

• Kate and I will be playing a 24 hour game marathon to benefit Extra Life on October 24th-Oct 25th
• All donations will go to benefit University of Iowa Children's Hospital
• Donations go to research and toward treatment for families that can't afford treatment for their kids

We would appreciate any donations, big or small.  Our goal is to raise $154, which is one dollar for every day we have been out of the hospital with Sam Hakon.  

How I met your terrible final season

Kate and I have enjoyed How I Met Your Mother for the last few years.  If you haven't seen it, it's a fun sitcom about a group of young people living in New York.  It was never exactly high art, but it was a fun TV show.  Then, on the homestretch, everyone involved with the show apparently forgot what they had been doing for 8 years.  The final season was just awful, and I need to dissect it to figure out why.  It's who I am; it's what I do.

This post will be full of spoilers.  I would normally say "don't read this if you haven't watched it," but to be honest, my recommendation is that no one watch the final season.  This season should be buried beneath Yucca Mountain so that no human accidentally stumbles into it.  So I don't mind spoiling it.

First, some background and some speculation.  Jason Segel, one of the five main actors on the show, decided to quit after season 8 so that he could focus on his film career.  All the other actors wanted to stay on for a 9th season, and eventually convinced Jason Segel to stay along as well.  I'm guessing that convincing him looked something like this:

This conflict and its resolution lead to one of the major problems with the 9th season (and this is where I am speculating): lack of funds.  The production value of the season is just absurdly low.  Distractingly bad greenscreens are omnipresent, even for settings where previous seasons used sets.  Did they lose those sets over summer break or something?  The entire season is shot like a bottle episode, with probably 80% of the non-greenscreened screentime taking place at one location. What little money they had was apparently thrown at guest stars.  Pretty much anyone who had ever appeared in the series made a guest appearance in the final season.  Big, expensive names like Bryan Cranston popped in for cameos that didn't add much.  Even people with no connection to the show, like a random song by Boyz II Men.  It just looks like they had no idea how to allocate their money wisely.

The show was contracted to end with season 8, but then halfway through that season, they negotiated to make a 9th.  This lead to some major problems with pacing in the 9th season.  We learned earlier in the show that Ted met The Mother at Barney and Robin's wedding.  The entire 8th season built up to the wedding, and ended with all the main characters on their way to a bed and breakfast for a 3 day weekend leading up to the wedding itself.  There were two choices of how to handle season 9 with that setup:

1. Have the wedding take up the first episode (or even the first few, since a lot is going on).  Ted meets The Mother, and the rest of the season is them falling in love, courting, etc.
2. Stretch the wedding over 22 excruciating episodes, culminating in Ted meeting The Mother

They, sadly, opted for the latter.  They changed the format of the show by making the entire season a single serialized story, rather than a mostly episodic array of stories with longer arcs buried in subplots, as in previous seasons.  I'm not opposed to serial story telling, but this team was not used to telling stories that way, and their inexperience shows.  The episodes are padded to the point where they feel about 20 minutes too long.

Not only does the pacing problem mean we spend too much time being bored at the wedding (which, granted, adds some realism), but it necessarily means that we don't spend that time elsewhere.  So we drag through that awful wedding and then gloss over some really interesting things in the last two or three episodes.  I said this before, but now I mean it.  Major spoilers lie ahead.

Robin and Barney end up getting divorced (after we invested literally hours of our lives watching them get married).  I don't mind that they did, but I hate the way the writers made it happen.  They got in one fight (over the availability of WiFi, no less) and the next scene they're telling everyone they got divorced.  

The same happens when The Mother dies.  We see a 3 second shot of her in a hospital bed and I must have missed the narrator telling us she died, because I wasn't sure of it until a few minutes later.  Again, I don't mind that she died.  This show handles serious topics like death semi-regularly, but it's the glossing over it that I mind.  We wasted hours learning that the room that Marshall and Lilly stayed in was haunted, but we can't spare a few moments when The Mother - one of two characters named in the title of the show - dies?

Related to that last point, I have one more gripe about pacing and time allocation.  They did a huge disservice to the character of The Mother with all of this.  She was in the show so little that we didn't care about her.  I know that this was intentional (because Ted was really in love with Robin).  But the fact that it was intentional doesn't make it good story telling.  When Marshall's Dad died, it was poignant and heartbreaking.  When The Mother died, I was only sad that she didn't take Ted out with her.  They didn't give us a chance to care about that character, and that is really a shame.

In the end, my big problem with this season was that they tried for a mix of touching and funny (again, like when Marshall's dad died) but ended up just being depressing.  Barney gets married but loses his wife and ends up grasping for meaning in his bastard child.  Ted and The Mother look bored and depressed any time they're on screen.  I'm not sure if that's because the life choices Ted has made have left him in a miserable marriage or because the actors are sick of the bad writing.  After years of pretending to love his wife, Ted hooks up with his best friend's ex wife and thinks that will make him happy.  What a great end to such a fun romp!

Blech.  After we watched it, Kate and I were so depressed that we had to chase with the Venture Brothers.  I recommend you do the same.

 

How I used my smart phone to get into running

Technology is kind of amazing.  Everybody carries a computer in their pocket that is orders of magnitude more powerful than the computers that put men on the moon.  And we use that technology to play stupid timewaster games.  I've tried to use my phone to get into shape, and I feel like it's been tremendously helpful.  I started writing a post about all the different apps I used to do this, and it was getting way too long.  I decided to cut it down to just two apps, and if people are interested, I can write more posts about the others.  These two apps that I am talking about today are both for running.

The first is Runkeeper.  Runkeeper is a GPS enabled app for running or walking.  It tracks your runs and tells you distance, time, speed, etc.  While you run, it can play music from your phone to keep you entertained.  It also gives you a pretty good web interface to look at old runs to track progress.  There is a way to have it post automatically to Facebook, but I am too dumb.  So, whenever I go on a run I am proud of, I screencap it and post it to let everyone know how great I am.

Not that you would be proud of this, but I was.

The big problem with Runkeeper is that running is boring.  I know that's not really a problem with the app, but Runkeeper doesn't help much.  Playing music just doesn't cut it for me.  A better app for making running fun is Zombies, Run!  It's kind of hard to describe, but the takehome is that it is awesome.

Zombies, Run! is like runkeeper, in that it is a GPS enabled running app that keeps track of your runs for you.  But what sets it apart is the story.  Rather than just listening to music while you run, it plays a story.  So, over your headphones comes what is essentially an audiobook about the zombie apocalypse.  You take the role of Runner 5, a runner for a small group of survivors.  Every run is a "mission" for the town, where you have to run for supplies, rescue other survivors, or do other important things to keep the town alive.  It's really fun.



And if you're not much of a runner (as I am not), you can start with the Zombies, Run! 5k trainer, which is an 8 week training course that takes you from "can't run at all" to "can run more than not at all."  I just finished that (which is what made me want to write this post), and it was a very good, gentle teacher to get me started.  In the 5k trainer, you have a completely self-encapsulated story about (shock!) a new person coming to town and being trained as a runner.  You have 3 workouts a week for 8 weeks, starting with very easy ones (run for 15 seconds, walk for a minute) and ending with much more intense ones.

If you think you might want to try getting into running, go drop $1.99 on the 5k trainer.  It is great, and it really helped me make running enjoyable.

I don't have a good way to end this post.  Go try these apps!

The post where I am in Iowa now

Moving sucks.

There's really no two ways about it.  Moving is a huge pain.  And it's not just the "putting everything you own in boxes, lifting those boxes into a truck, driving that truck, lifting the boxes out of the truck and then taking everything you own out of boxes" part of moving that is hard.  You spend a day changing your mailing address at all the places that have your mailing address.  You spend a day driving around trying to figure out where to buy milk.  You're crazy poor because everything about moving costs money.  It's just a headache.

But, now that Kate and I are settling in Coralville, I thought I would gather some of my thoughts of things I learned about moving.  My more charitable readers will think that this is for their benefit: so that they can learn from my experience and not repeat my mistakes.  My less charitable readers will think I am doing this for my own benefit, so that I can easily find this later since I don't keep a journal.  You're all right.

First, boxes.  Every move I've made in the past has involved scrounging boxes from wherever I could find them, usually work, and packing my stuff in them.  I save boxes from Amazon and anywhere else I can think of.  I did some of that this time, but I also just bought boxes.



Those boxes were awesome.  They were about $20 for a 10-pack at Sam's club (or $40 for a 12 pack anywhere else - not hard to do that math).  What I like about buying boxes instead of scavenging boxes is that they are all exactly the same size, which makes stacking them super-easy and efficient.  No problems trying to tetris these guys around when I am putting them in the truck or unloading them in the new apartment.  A- to buying boxes.  I can't give it a higher score because it was pretty expensive, which makes me sad.

Next, something that I did not believe in despite the suggestion of my lovely wife and my handsome brother (You know which one you are): Packing wrap.  It's basically seran wrap, but for packing.



This stuff was AWESOME.  And, more importantly, super cheap.  For $5, I got 1000 feet of it at the Uhaul place.  I'm guessing you could find it cheaper on Amazon or somewhere if you look.  I used this to wrap lots of awkwardly shaped things into bundles.  All our curtain rods, bundled and wrapped so they stick together.  Shelves from a big storage unit thingy, wrapped so that they are all in one place and easier to carry.  Seriously, if you learn nothing else from this post, buy some dang wrap for your next move.  A+ to this stuff.

Another thing we thought would make our lives easier was space bags.  These are supposed to be magical, and they kind of are, but they're also pretty unreliable.  The idea is that you have a big bag that you put stuff in (clothes, blankets, etc), then vacuum out the air, making the bag way smaller.



The problem is, if they are not 100% air tight, you might as well be using garbage bags.  Once the air leaks out, they plump back up to their original size.  In our experience, about 30% had leaks when they were brand new, and another 30% sprung leaks between the time they got packed and the time they got unpacked.  So, not a super-great batting average (though, I guess 400 is actually a super-great batting average, but baseball is another question entirely).  We paired these with big plastic storage bins, which helped a bit.  Vacuum out the air from a space bag, throw it in a storage bin, pack stuff around it, and tape it shut.  That way, when it starts to leak, the clothes have no room to expand into.  But between the price and the not-as-magical-as-advertised problem, I have to give space bags a D.  We threw them all away when we got here and are not planning on ever buying them again.

The last couple things are not products, but rather things I would do differently.  When we were packing, we tried to label things as specifically as we could (rather than just labeling the box with the room it would go to).  We thought this would make it easier to find stuff when we unpacked.  The problem was that while we knew that yarn goes in the baby's bedroom, the people who helped us move didn't.  So all the boxes just got put down wherever, and it took about a day of me moving boxes around the apartment just to get everything in the right room so we could start unpacking.  If I were moving again, I would put a big, generic label on every box that fell into one of maybe 8 or 10 categories (Bathroom, kitchen, books, etc), and then a smaller, more specific label of what exactly is in that box.  The big label will help direct things to the right general area, and the small label will help you organize and unpack.

I would also pack a few boxes or suitcases or something as if we were going on a week's vacation.  Everything I need to live for a week: underwear, phone charger, toothbrush, pillow, all that good stuff.  These need to be clearly marked and kept separate from everything else.  We tried to do this, but didn't do very well, so the first night was a mess of "I've been in the car all day and I just want to brush my dang teeth."  The first few days will be like that, so pack accordingly.

Before you move (far enough before that you are not a crazy stress-ball), plan a few days of easy meals with a few simple ingredients.  We ended up eating out a whole lot that first week because we were too tired and stressed to think about how adults feed themselves.  Make a meal plan (in advance), make a shopping list (in advance), and you'll be able to go for a quick run to the store the first day.

All in all, a successful move, in that my family is now successfully in a new place, all our stuff is here, and we are happy.  And, importantly, now that we're settling in, I'll get back to the Blog.  Harry Potter, beware.  I'm coming for you, boy...

Welcome, Cyborg Overlords!

Now they just need to make a robot that does my old job from McDonald's: stand in the drive through window and get yelled at for the order being wrong.  I guess they could have just replaced me with a cardboard cutout of a pimply faced teenager with a voice bubble that said "I'm very sorry, sir"

Review: The Long Halloween

Batman: The Long Halloween is a followup to the Haunted Knight stories I reviewed a couple weeks ago.  Where Haunted Knight was a collection of unrelated short stories, The Long Halloween was a monthly special that ran for one year, from October 1996 to October 1997.  It follows the same continuity as Haunted Knight, but it stands mostly alone as its own story.  The main story is that Batman, Gordon, and Dent are all working to find a serial killer in Gotham who kills on holidays.

The Long Halloween is often praised as one of the greatest Batman comics of all time, and with good reason.  The themes of the story (though not much of the plot itself) are very strongly felt in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight movies.  I wanted to link somebody else describing all the similarities, but shockingly, I can't find anyone who has gone through and done that.  Come on, internet, get your act together.  I may come back and do that one of these days.   But not today.  Today I'm just going to talk about what I liked, what I didn't like, and how the book fares overall.  I will avoid major spoilers for this story, but I will mention plot points that are common in the Batman universe (ie, Harvey Dent becomes Two-Face, etc)

I feel like the art is even better than in Haunted Knight, even though it is the same artist.  I guess a few years of practice makes a difference.  The uses of shadow and blocks of solid color that I liked so much in Haunted Knight are more pronounced here.

I love beleaguered, haggard Gordon in his dark office

And they are used well for foreshadowing.  For example, Harvey Dent's face is often shown in half-shadow, hinting at his later transformation into Two-Face.

The book has some very interesting themes, both for the good guys and the bad guys.  On the bad-guy side, it talks about the transformation of Gotham from a mob-run town to a super-villain-run town.  The old mobsters are shown trying to deal with the influx of "freaks" into Gotham, and trying to hold on to their power and influence in a changing world.

On the good-guy side, we see the unsteady alliance between Gotham's police force (Captain Jim Gordon), prosecutor (District Attorney Harvey Dent) and Batman (Batman).  Each of them suspects the other two of being the villain (for reasons that are believable and well written, I might add), but has to rely on them anyway.  This theme of unsteady, forced trust makes for a surprisingly thought provoking read.

Now, for some of the bad.  One problem stems from the way this story was told (13 "chapters" released as 13 separate comic books over the course of a year).  There is a single story running through the whole thing (an unknown serial killer in Gotham), but each chapter has its own story as well.  And each chapter's individual story is about a different villain from Batman's Rogues' Gallery.  The first time I read this, it didn't bother me, but this time through it felt a bit forced.  In January, Batman investigates the Holiday Killer and faces off with Joker.  In March, Batman investigates the Holiday Killer and faces off with Poison Ivy.  Every month could be summed up that way.

Though this does lead to some pretty cool cover art for the different months

This could be explained away as "Batman is crazy busy, and even when he is in a long, drawn-out investigation there are always other fires to put out," but it just didn't feel that way to me.  Like I said, not bad, but a little forced.  I don't like when I can see what's going on backstage in the author's head.

Another problem is with the story itself.  I enjoyed it right up to the end, when it felt like Jeph Loeb traveled 15 years into the future, watched the LOST finale, and said "man, what a great way to end things!"

What if the whole thing was just a dream the polar bear had?

The big surprise ending was kind of dumb.  Like the villain-of-the-month problem, it just felt forced, like the publisher really really wanted a surprise, but the writers hadn't planned on one.

The last criticism I have will be a bigger problem for some than others.  That is that this book is not as accessible as it might me.  There were a few times reading it when I thought "if I didn't know a lot of Batman mythos, I'd be lost here."  So, not a bad book by any means, but probably not the one I'd recommend as someone's first book to read.

All in all, a very satisfying read (even if the ending was marred with a dumb, dumb twist), with beautiful art and a good story.

I'll miss the Arb

*above the post note: I wrote this post last week before the move and just didn't get it posted. So it refers to the move in the future tense instead of the past. Going through and changing that was a hassle, so I left it. *   

I am pretty out of shape.  Not as bad as I could be, but I'm not where I'd like to be.  So, in the last year or two, I have taken up running.  There was a big break in the middle where it was too cold to run outside, or when Kate was super-pregnant, so I guess I haven't been terribly consistent.  But I have enjoyed it.

One thing that has made running less of a chore and more something I can enjoy is the Arb.  Nichols Arboretum.

Meh.  Close enough

The Arb is one thing I will really miss when we leave Ann Arbor.  It's just a few minutes' walk from my lab, so I try to go running there a couple times a week.  Some weeks are more successful than others, but I always try.  Last week, while I was on a run, I stopped for some pictures so I can remember how beautiful this place is.

I usually enter the Arb here, where I get to walk through cultivated gardens.

Once I'm in the Arb proper, there is a paved path that runs along the Huron River.

Right along that path there are a couple of places to stop and stretch or catch my breath

I love the Arb because there are big, paved paths...

...and little paths that branch off and go interesting places.

There are fields of wildflowers and scrub with paths just mowed through.

As you run, you see flowers and trees and hear the sound of the Huron.

And it's secluded enough that you often run into wildlife.

Most of all, I just love being outside, enjoying the view while I run.  It's so much better than running through a neighborhood or on a treadmill.  

I love the Arb.  I'll miss the Arb.  The only thing I don't like: since it's down in a river basin, you have to go down a big hill right at the beginning.  Which means going up a big hill at the end.

Bedtime songs

Every night around 7, we put little Hakon to bed.  While he eats, Kate and I sing a couple songs to him as part of the "now you seriously need to sleep for 12 hours" routine.  Here are a couple of our favorite songs to sing for him.








Any suggestions?  Must be easy to play on the guitar and easy to remember all the words.  Also fun.

3 things I would change about Divergent

In our effort to figure out how to tell good stories, Kate and I spend a fair amount of time pulling apart popular stories to see what makes them tick.  It's kind of how serial killers do with animals, but less likely to get us arrested.  We do this a lot to Harry Potter, but in the interest of fairness, I thought I should post some thoughts on another book that's gotten a lot of attention lately: Divergent.

Divergent has some major problems, but I think they can all be fixed by changing three small things.

1. The setting
2. The story
3. All of the characters

OK, so maybe those things aren't that small.  But the story is so fundamentally broken that this is the bare minimum set of things that has to change to make it work.  Before I jump into my criticism, I should disclose that I did not finish the series, which is rare for me.



But it was just too bad to keep reading.  I read the first book and maybe half of the second before I gave up.

In the interest of writing a post that has a reasonable chance of getting read, I'm going to limit myself to writing only about problems with the setting (by which I mean the world in which Divergent is set).  I'll tear apart the characters and story another day.

Divergent is set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future.  Following some un-stated cataclysm, society began again in Chicago.  Lake Michigan has dried up, presumably as a result of whatever happened to break the world.  So, without the lake there, what makes this an attractive place to settle?  To feed a population the size of the one described in Divergent, you would have to have a pretty big farming operation, but Chicago is a huge city.  In order to farm there, they would have had to demolish streets and buildings, haul away all the concrete and rebar, and irrigate the land (assuming that they found themselves a source of water).  Or, they would have to build the farms outside the city and haul all their food 20 miles. But if they're farming outside the city, and the city itself has no water, it would make more sense to settle out nearer the farms.

So, why found your society in a place with no source of fresh water and no farmable land?  There is actually a good reason.

Turns out Veronica Roth wrote this book while attending Northwestern University on the outskirts of Chicago.  This is really the only good reason to set it in Chicago: because it was the big city she saw right in front of her, and she couldn't be bothered to think up a different setting.  I might have overstated how good of a reason there was.

So, for whatever reason, the society was founded in Chicago.  But the founders of this new society disagreed about what principles this society should be built upon.  This lead to population being split into five "factions," each based on a different character trait (honestly, bravery, selflessness, love, and intelligence).

This one got left out for some reason

The Faction system is extremely silly.  It is the way a 13 year old would view splitting up the world.  For one thing, the five traits are all objectively "good."  There is no faction founded on "bad" principles like "ruthless self interest" or "we are stronger, so we take whatever we need from the weak."  There is not even a faction based on the neutralish principles like "whatever has to be done to survive" or "practicality."  All of them are bumper-sticker soundbytes of a classic utopia.  Were other ideas ever presented?  Were other ideas ever tried?  We never find that out.

When kids turn 16 in this world, they get to pick whether to stay in the faction where they grew up or switch to a different one.  Part of this ritual is a test where the kid is told which faction they belong in.

Think "Sorting Hat Ripoff," only more sciency

But that test is not binding, and the results are kept secret.  What, then, is the point of the test?  Everybody in the story freaks out about how this test will decide their future, but then they can (and in many cases do) choose to completely ignore the results.  All the test does, according to the story, is look into your mind/soul/personality and tell you where you would be the best fit.  It seems to me like Veronica Roth wrote the original draft more like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, then in later revisions, she decided that this didn't work.  So she decided to make the test results just a friendly suggestion, but didn't bother to change anybody's feelings and anxieties about the test.  The only purpose I can see to the test is for the story.  Our heroine has an unusual, surprising result, which makes her all angsty.  This makes it seem more like a plot device and less like an element of an organic, real world.

So, after the test that doesn't matter, the teenagers go to live with the factions that make no sense.  Whatever.  But some of the kids don't end up fitting in their new faction.  These kids are kicked to the curb and have to live the rest of their lives as "factionless" hobos.  We see these people a few times in the book looking like stereotypical homeless folk.

"Spare some change?"

These factionless are a huge sticking point for me.  We have a large portion of the population (I think it was even said that there were more of them than in any one faction) who live in refrigerator boxes on the street and no one wants to take them in?  There's even a faction dedicated to charity and taking care of their fellow man, and they don't do more than set up soup kitchens for the factionless.  But the future is a harsh world, so I get no one going out of their way to help these folks.  What surprises me is that nobody takes advantage of them either.  They don't conscript them into an army, or slave labor, or anything.

There are lots of creative uses for the factionless

They are just part of the scenery.  I know they play some role in the later books, but that's just not enough for me.  They've been there for decades, and nobody in the world seems to have noticed.

While we're on the subject of the factionless, why do they stick around?  I get that you will always get some small percentage of any population that just gives up and doesn't have any initiative, but are there no factionless who just leave Chicago?  They could go set up their own civilization somewhere else.  Or why don't they revolt?  There are enough of them that they could take over the farms that feed everybody else.  Just because this society has chosen to cast them out doesn't mean they have to accept it.  This is post-apocalyptic fiction, for goodness sake.  There should be plenty of de-populated places to go and settle, plenty of outcasts to join, and plenty of weaker parties to conquer.  What is keeping them there, living on the streets?  I'll give you a hint: the plot.  These people exist because Roth needs them for the future books.

OK, this post is getting long and there's so much more to say about why the world of Divergent doesn't work.  For now I'll leave it with this.  The world centers around a society that inexplicably started up in a concrete jungle with no water.  The people are divided into five factions that seem like they were founded by a group of 13 year olds.  At a certain age, people take a meaningless test that is more like a high school aptitude test than a life changing event, but it is treated like the biggest day in anyone's life.  And there is a whole group of homeless people who nobody (least of all the factionless themselves) seems to notice.

This world just doesn't work.  I would much rather read a story in which the factions were realistic.  Or where the factionless were a part of the story instead of a part of the scenery.  These things feel like the cheap cardboard sets in the old Star Trek series - they're just there so that the main characters can say "wow, what a strange alien world!"

Coping with no air conditioner

Our AC has been broken for a very, very long time.  Since we are moving soon, we finally gave up on getting it fixed and bought a very powerful fan.  Which our dumb dog just loves.  So, for your viewing pleasure, here is Majzy hogging our fan.

Review: Haunted Knight

It surprises no one that the Payne family is in to Batman.  It might surprise some people to see how much we are in to Batman.  We go for the apparel

Full disclosure: this is not his only Batman onesie.  Or his only Batman socks.

The video games

The World's Greatest Detective doing...detective stuff...I guess

We own all the movies

Well, all the good movies

And for Kate's birthday, I got her a couple of my favorite Batman books (I'll avoid the term "Graphic Novel" because it makes me feel like an even bigger dork).

It's important to teach him Batman's origin story very young in case something happens to me and Kate

The point is, we love us some Batman.  Knowing this, and knowing that Kate has spent a lot of time stuck in bed lately because of her blood clots, Lance loaned us a couple of his favorite Batman books.  I read one of them yesterday (it was pretty short and I had some time on the bus) and I thought I'd review it here for anybody looking to get a taste of Batman comics.  I'll try to do the others as I get to them, but no promises.  Turns out the next few weeks are going to be busy.

Haunted Knight is actually a collection of three short stories, published as Halloween specials in 1993-1995.  The stories are relatively simple, which makes them nice for a new Batman reader.  In the first, for example, Scarecrow is terrorizing Gotham on Halloween, so Batman finds him and punches him really hard.  Fin.

Although the surface stories are simple, these stories have lots of flashbacks to formative events in Bruce Wayne's life.  Because the stories are Halloween-themed, the flashbacks go back to Bruce's fears, nightmares, and traumas.  His character gains a surprising amount of depth.  The second story shows us one of my favorite characters, Police Captain Jim Gordon, trying to keep his family together while doing his job protecting Gotham.  The story is actually very touching and I almost cried on the bus reading it.

What I really love about this book, in addition to the surprisingly touching story, is the art.  Tim Sale uses shadow, silhouette, and big blocks of color in very interesting way.  It's hard to describe, so I'll just include a couple pictures.

I love the use of just black, grey, white and red

I also like the way he depicts the vast emptyness that is Wayne Manor.  Such an empty, lonely place for Bruce to live.

My biggest worry before I read any comic books was that I would get lost trying to keep up with 75 years of backstory.  The nice thing about this book (and most of the ones I will review in the near future if I get around to that) is that it is pretty self contained.  You don't really need to know anything going in other than that Batman is a guy who fights villains and criminals in Gotham.  I would recommend this book to anybody who wants to try out reading a comic book without a lot of time commitment.  Easy to read, satisfying ending, beautiful art.  

In honor of the HP

Over on Kate's blog, she wrote a post about Harry Potter, in honor of his birthday yesterday.  Don't worry, this post won't be as nerdy as you think it will.  It will be much, much nerdier.  Since Kate enjoys writing Young Adult fiction, we often read and dissect YA books so that we can see how they are put together and how we could make them better.  And since Harry Potter is one of the best known (and most flawed) YA series, that is frequently the target of our ire.

So, in honor of the HP's birthday, and since I am such a giver, I wanted to share with you all one of my many problems with the Harry Potter universe: the names.  So many of the names in this universe are ridiculous descriptors of the person.  Which is OK in the first book, where it is all a whimsical Roald Dahl knockoff, but as the series gets more grown up, these silly names feel more and more out of place.  

When Harry first goes shopping for textbooks, we see our first patently ridiculous names.  He buys a transfiguration textbook by Emeric Switch and a book about magic fungi by Phyllida Spore.  But those could be cutesy pen-names, so let's not dwell on those.

Harry's herbology teacher is named Professor Sprout.  His severe, evil potions teacher is named Severe-us.  The flaxen haired wizard who makes all the women swoon is named Gilderoy (like gilded or golden).  The mean teacher who hurts Harry is named Dolores Umbrage.  It just goes on and on.

Remember that weird chick Luna Lovegood?  Well, if you thought that name was a bit too on the nose for a moonbat-crazy lunatic, you probably forgot about her father, Xenophilius.  Literally the lover of the foreign or strange.  That guy runs a crazy conspiracy newspaper full of way-out-there theories.

Sirius is the name of a star that is also called the Dog Star.  Sirius Black is a guy who turns into a black dog.  You just can't make this stuff up.

Finally, we come to Remus Lupin.  This is where the world broke for me.  Book 3, Remus Lupin.  This is where it stops being whimsical and just becomes nonsensical.  For anyone unfamiliar with the character, Remus was bitten by a werewolf when he was a boy, and turned into a werewolf himself.  This might have been a surprise if his name weren't already "Wolfy Wolfson."  Remus is the name of one of the founders of Rome who was also raised by a wolf, making him a wolf's son.  Lupin is the same as Lupine, which is the adjective to describe something having the quality of wolves.  Wolf-like.  So, the kid who would later become a wolf was named "Wolfy McWolf" at birth?  And it's some big secret as an adult that this shabby guy named Wolfy O'Wolf is a werewolf?  Seriously?  

Anyway, I could keep going, but I won't.  My point is that these silly names fit into silly children's books, but not into serious stories.  I get why JK used these names: they're whimsical and fun.  But they just don't fit in the world that is portrayed after the first few books that fans demand be taken seriously as adult literature.  

Hello, world

Hey and howdy to everybody out there.  I was thinking about my old blog recently, and realized that it had that two-years-without-a-single-post funk to it.  I wanted to start blogging again, since I now have an adorable baby...

...but I just couldn't shake the shame of having a two-year gap in posts.  So, rather than face that, I started fresh.  New URL, new name, and everything.  For anybody trying to understand the title, fire up Netflix, search for "Better Off Ted," and watch episode 9 of season 2.  For anybody who just took me up on that tip, you're welcome.

Kate is back to blogging as well, and I'm guessing her blog will be way more fun than mine.  But I guess that's just the way things are.  She's more fun.  So, here we go