Why I am not wearing a safety pin.

Yesterday, I got out a safety pin and put it on my coat. Friends have been changing their profile pics, talking up the idea of showing that you are an ally and advocate, pleading to apply a pin to your coat as a way to build a circle of safety in public spaces. My pin was well sized, properly shiny, and fit nicely over the Eddie Bauer logo.

#safetypin

I took off the pin and put it away.

Hopefully, the safety pin campaign is massively successful. At best, for me, it was untrue. At worst, it was selfish. The spectrum between is a fertile ground for misunderstanding. I'm not going to spend my energy on correcting that misunderstanding when there's a lot of other work to be done.

Election 2028 and Generation O

The girls laugh at me that I ask them to send pictures to my old phone. Six years and it still trudges on. Brightest and biggest screen that I ever had, and I replace the cover every few months when I drop the thing. They think I should get the display in my glasses. But they grew up with that technology, so it’s second nature to them.

Today, they sent pictures. I’m glad I could take my glasses off and still look at my phone and see the pictures through big ugly happy tears.

My oldest girl was born days before Barack Obama was elected. My youngest daughter was born almost exactly two years later. Today is November 7, 2028. They sent me pictures of their ballots. Today, Generation O voted in its first presidential election.

Daily Personality

I am trying to decide on the personality of my day. For the last three years, my day has been dictated by school drop-offs, potty breaks, and naps. We had dual schedules. One, the older child moving from pre-K to elementary school. The second, the younger child moving from all-day with me to pre-K. Never were they in the same places at the same time, or starting at the same time, or ending at the same time.

Not any more. There is only one drop-off and one pick-up for both kids. We are in the era of all day school. From 9:10am until 4:00pm, my calendar is mostly open. And I don’t know what to do with myself.

Never trust a monkey

This video has showed up in my feed a few times. Some thoughts. TL;DR, the video says more about your selective vision than it does about society's brainwashing.

We can wait while you watch the video:

The video outlines an experiment of five caged monkeys where one monkey's attempt to reach bananas resulted in punishment for the other four. Eventually, the punished monkeys began stopping any monkey going for the bananas. Then each monkey was progressively replaced, and the community of monkeys used gleeful beatings to prevent the new guy from reaching for bananas even in the absence of punishments. When all five monkeys had been replaced, they still delivered beatings.

It doesn't take much psychic twisting (or giant block letters) to get the point. The abused masses will beat aspiration out of you.

As you should have learned from the internet by now, generalizations are lies. Most of them anyway. There's no record of this experiment. Most articles about this experiment point to a guy named Stephenson in the 1960's who blasted monkeys with air when they played with a fork. Eventually, when one of the conditioned monkeys was put in a cage with another monkey, they kept the new guy from playing with a fork. Sometimes, that is. Like 40% of the time in six of the eight experiments.

The summary of Stephenson's article is "Observational learning and admonition are distinguished as two types of information transfer between subjects which mediate the acquisition of culture in monkeys." In short, monkeys learn from each other or try help each other out.

So, if the original experiment wasn't about the damage of group dynamics or about society keeping the climber down, where did those ideas come from? They were already in your head, ready to be confirmed by a silly little internet video.

In that way, it's kind of funny that the original experiment was about ways to avoid the mistakes of others.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain

One of the great joys of parenthood is that you get to return to your own youth. Specifically, to those days when you could listen to a song on repeat. Endlessly.

We're pretty lucky that the girls are young at a time when there are some really fantastic kid albums around. Musicians we love are making music for young'uns. There is the occasional tune that wears thin. Usually that happens when we watch something old with a song that was terrible to begin with. On the whole, the girls have some good music.

The album we've had on repeat recently is a bunch of traditional songs and nursery rhymes from Lisa Loeb. The opening track gets the most play. It's a familiar one.

It's only after one turns a song over in their mind for the fiftieth or hundredth time that you can appreciate when a new insight pops out. I had one of those insights to this song. Unfortunately, it's not been a good one. Now the Big Rock Candy Mountain makes me incredibly sad every time I hear it.

The Many Faces of Facebook

Today, Facebook made its "biggest change since 2010" by adding a host of reaction emoji instead of the simple like thumb.

Why would it do this? Well, a more expressive list of reactions has been demanded by users since the service started oh those many years ago. Mostly, though, people just wanted a "dislike" button.

Well today folks got what they wanted, which was a bright new way for Facebook to screw up your interaction with your friends, loved ones, and asshole ultra-conservative relatives.

Much like the plot of Inside Out, Facebook chose five pretty simple reactions to include beside it's classic Like button. Instead of Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, and Fear, they doubled down on the happy and combined Fear and Disgust into Wow.

Facebook's new icons: Angry, Love, Wow, Haha, and Sad.

So, who should they have added? It would be obvious to add the middle finger or the high-five, but what we're searching for here is nuance in the discourse. We want to elevate the way people communicate over their chosen social media platform. Here are a couple of ideas:

In Defense of New Lego

Legos are a battleground. Not just figuratively in the world of our imagination, but literally. Conservatives hate their populist message. Liberals are disgruntled that the girlification takes away from the engineering. Some of the argument is understandable, since Lego did drift away from a gender neutral start, and is now very heavily invested into quite segregated product lines.

Now that the children have attained the ages of 5 and 7, we have moved into the thick of Lego building. As they are girls, we have focused on two sets: Lego Friends and Lego Elves. Oh, and a third set, Disney’s Frozen, but that feels like an extension or combination of the other two. The girls have a smattering of other sets, including Batman, Spiderman, and Lego Movie vehicles. There are also a couple of our large older sets that have hung around, including the USS Constellation and the Space Shuttle/Hubble set.

But the Elves and the Friends are here in force. To be honest, I was apprehensive. These sets were not the ones I grew up with. But I shouldn’t have feared for a couple of reasons. New Legos are awesome, and here’s why:

The Bathroom Wars

There are individuals fighting for something as fundamental as a safe place to relieve themselves. A place without threat or harassment to do something as human as stopping to pee. These folks are being labeled extremists and threatened and attacked simply for pointing out an inequality in our society.

Unisex bathrooms and the accommodation of transgender individuals has been in the news a lot. Regulations in Washington now require universal access to bathrooms, allowing transgender individuals to use bathrooms consistent to their gender identity. The legislature has attempted to block that. Other states have gone further in their anti-equality agenda.

People are concerned with privacy and safety, and are confused about line drawing. If a line is not drawn here, then where can it be drawn? But the questions of reasonable people get drowned out by the misguided or opportunistic whose only goal is to segregate and embarrass based on gender identity. It is deeply disturbing the kind of hate and fear mongering that has surrounded this issue.

I am on the edges of the Bathroom Wars. As a stay-at-home father raising two young daughters, every day that we go out in public, I have to make a conscious decision on which bathroom is appropriate to use. It’s unusual to see a guy standing out in front of the women’s room in the middle of the day. I get to be that guy.

In many ways, we are lucky. We get to make the decision on which bathroom to visit based on cleanliness and access, but generally we make it from a position of complete safety. No one is going to mess with the crazy dad guarding his daughters’ bathroom stall. That is not afforded to many transgender as they are threatened or harassed for choosing “wrong.” This experience has given me a deep empathy for what transgender individuals experience.

Obligatory Mr. Mom poster.

I've also gotten a different perspective than many families may have. That perspective boils down to two things: First, unisex bathrooms and universal access improve life for everyone. Second, the problem is not people, it’s the facilities themselves.

The Weird Emasculation of Giving Away Tools

Lucky for me, I’ve never had need to fully rebuild the engine of a car. While cars are not a hobby for me, I’m confident in my ability to repair pretty much anything on a car, given time. It would need to be a lot of time, probably. But the need has never been there. Any big car repair happened when a car was so vital that I spent the money to get it fixed fast. And now our car is not driven enough to rack up enough charges that would put me in a position to do any myself.

However, I had a complete toolbox ready for the job. And if it wasn’t an engine, I could build a wall or dismantle a lawnmower or fell a tree. I inherited, bought, traded, and accumulated a this massive pool of steel. The box was red of course. It included a full set of ratchets in metric and standard for three sizes of handle. Various wire cutters, pliers, wrenches, and screw drivers were in there. A jigsaw. A cordless drill. Chisels, stud finder, and a particular kind of wedge used to crack paving blocks. Wire bristle drill bits, Dremel bits, and a few random drill chucks.

So many tools.

The important part is that it was my toolbox. I gave it away. In the seven years that I have had daughters, and the three years that raising them has been my full time job, my sexuality and masculinity have been questioned. A lot. In ways great and small. But there has been nothing quite as emasculating as giving away a box of tools.

Once Again, the Rules for a Proper Hate Obituary

When a divisive figure dies, as is the case with today's passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, we find ourselves in a very familiar news cycle. Today's surprise is processed to become a retrospective of the person's life. In that retrospective, some warts become points of focus until someone pens a hate obituary. A couple years ago, I saw this happening after the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy. It occurred to me that something felt off about this last stage. Inevitably, with the notoriety of Scalia's positions on contentious issues and his willingness to mouth off about them, the hate obituary train is going to roll again.

Just as the cycle turns, it is time we once again review the three rules for drafting the proper hate obituary:

Laugh at me. Please.

I frequently lament the absence of a good nonsense movie in today's world. I once explained Monty Python to my brother as "do you find a sheep exploding to be funny? Then you laugh."  The end of their show and the beginning of the Monty Python movies pretty closely overlapped by the rise of the Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker movies and National Lampoons. The early 80s was probably the high water mark of the nonsense comedy film.

Airplane. 

Because the Catholic Schoolgirls In Trouble clip is just too damn funny for family consumption.

I would suggest that these are the best of the nonsense movies because the laughs come first. The jokes run the spectrum from high-brow word play to slapping each other with fish. But the jokes are never second to a plot point and they are never abandoned for a happy ending.  At the end of Airplane! or Animal House, the characters are victorious in landing the plane or destroying the parade, but they don't give up what made them funny.  The characters continue to be horrible people, and we are still laughing.

The Most Important Voter

Unfortunately, the age of 40 is quickly approaching, less than a year away. I've had to deal with certain aging pains. Sports stars my age have been hitting retirement. I'm almost half paid off on my student loans. Four-door sedans have a certain appeal.

Sexy. And with a heated steering wheel.

And certain possibilities are starting to fall by the wayside. Being on a "40 under 40" list is becoming a remote possibility. The untold millions I expect to make (or win) will be spent on responsible things, not youthful exuberance. If I'm not on a presidential ticket this election, it will be impossible to become the youngest president.

Of course, those elections are increasingly difficult. Mostly because I am not being pandered to properly.  I am, after all, the most important voter.

Idle games and the scale of money.

To explain an idle game is to have already lost the war.

Idle games are just that, your car is running. All the time. And you get points. But it’s not your car. It’s your computer. What you hook to that computer as it idles, the sequence you attach those things, and how much patience you have to wait, all determine your success at the game. Hit on the right combination, and the numbers go exponential. Initial clicks that counted by ones, then tens, then hundreds suddenly go into the sextillions and septillions.

Really, it was 10 million years of waiting on the next upgrade.

In short, the only thing worse than explaining an idle game is actually playing one.

A book review! This is the end of days.

At the end of 2015, I finished off a novel and realized it was the fourth book that I had read in the year. This represented both a success and a failure. I didn't get through four entire books in 2014, so go me! But I probably could have done better. My count for movies was close to 50, and I polished off eight multi-season television series, about twenty seasons in total.

2016 will be different. Two full weeks into the new year, I have finished a 1300 page book. It was an ebook, but it was by Neal Stephenson, so it's listed at 880 pages in the dead tree editions. Woot! It compares interestingly to a couple other movies, so spoilers ahead.

Where we're going, we don't need books.

At least dead tree ones. They're heavy. And flammable.

The Kickstarter - Postmortem

It’s been a little over a week (okay, maybe two) since the end of the Kickstarter campaign for Dad’s Giant Family Organizing, Household Planning, and Event Scheduling Calendar. So here we go with the postmortem analysis of What Happened.

 Not the same thing. But still a pretty fun book.

Buy it and read it because I want Magary to keep me entertained with his writing.

Before that, tho, there are deep thanks to everyone who pledged to the campaign. You are awesome for putting your money where my mouth is. I would also like to appreciate all the folks who campaigned for the campaign. From hitting the share button to passing the link along to interested friends, you all helped tremendously. And somewhat unexpectedly. More on that in a second.

That said, I have a few take-aways from this campaign that I hope helps others in the future. Any sort of situation that requires raising money, from selling scout cookies to first round venture financing, is a difficult and bracing experience. This Kickstarter was quite all of these things for me. So: