Sock it to me

My vintage sock puppets.

Prepare to work your socks off at Socks Inc., the factory where we make believe. Socks Inc. is the largest employer of sock puppets in the world and if you play your cards right, you too could be hired, today! All you have to do is make your own sock puppet (you can find a tutorial here), go the website and get started. Socks Inc. will send you on countless storytelling missions that will keep you on your toes.

To begin, you log in to the website using either the Facebook login button, or an off-Facebook login for younger players, and enter the factory. This game is not played in real time, which means you can play whenever you like, for as long as you like, and even replay your favourite missions. The main storyline is explored in the boss’, Mr. Barnsworth’s, office, with other themes, stories and missions available in

Cloud Girlfriend - less cloudy more real

Cloud Girlfriend has gone live. It didn't quite turn out to be the kind of game I had envisioned at first. Instead of interacting with a fully fictional character, the aim is now for both men and women to join and create fictional versions of themselves. These super-avatars will then have 'dates' with each other, and may eventually decide to meet each other in real life.

The initial pitch presented romance as an alternate reality game with a written or scripted non-player antagonist, played entirely online. The version that has now emerged takes cloud romance out of the virtual and connects it to real life. But it's not quite a dating service and it's still definitely not about tricking people. Unlike online dating sites

Alternate reality game Chore Wars

My family and I have recently started playing Chore Wars, an alternate reality game that allows you to gain experience points for doing household work. It's an incredibly versatile game as you can design your own quests, so you can in principle use it for anything. For example, I've set up an alternate account for playing Superbetter, with quests and points for such things as filling the monthly pill box or talking to a friend.

But back to its intended purpose. When you log in to Chorewars, you pick an avatar and fill in some questions by which the program decides what class you are and gives you initial stats for strength, constitution, dexterity, charisma, intelligence and wisdom. It then prompts you to set up a group and invite new members. You can play privately, or share your achievements with other players online, getting competitive between teams. But first, it's time to set up your adventures. You can use a pre-made list of adventures that are taken from the most popular ones on the site, or create your own. Each adventure is fully customizable.

Discipline, time-outs and privilege removal

After all those serious academicky blog posts about robots and gaming, I thought it was high time to do another one on useful practical things I could share about parenting. I'll try, similarly to the breastfeeding post, not to just re-tread familiar ground and restate the (generic) advice we all absorb from parenting books, websites, and forums, but fill in some more practical experience and my own views. Being me, I'm still going to wax philosophical as well though.

Discipline is hard to get right. On the one hand, we don't want to be overly controlling and turn our kids into suppressed frightened little drones. On the other hand, leaving them too free or being their 'friend' too much does not do them any favours. Apparently, according to research done by Nancy Darling on lying, children of very strict parents who enforce a lot of rules very strictly, are less likely to lie and misbehave, but they are quietly depressed. But children of lackadaisical parents with few rules and even less enforcement, lie loads, disrespect their parents, and get into trouble. They feel their parents don't really care, so why should they?

Children need boundaries and rules that are enforced. Most parents will agree on that. But opinions will vary wildly on which boundaries, which rules, and how to enforce them. So this is what I do.

How PEGI isn't helping children game safely

A lot of parents think that as long as they adhere to the PEGI guidelines for games, their children will be 'safe'. This gives a false sense of security as they are handing over their responsibilities as a parent and making a simple yes/no decision based on a arbitrary number. They choose to remain completely ignorant about something that is a big part of their children's lives, and base their judgement entirely on a simple scoring system devised by a large institution. In my opionion, by not engaging with what their children are doing, they are effectively leaving them unattended in a potentially harmful situation.

Monopoly money

The last few days, we've been playing Monopoly Crazy Cash every evening. Bambam begs us to play it (might have something to do with his lucky dice throws). Unlike some other kids games this is one I really enjoyed playing and I'd certainly recommend it.

It says from 5 y/o on the box, but even Eeyore joined in and he's only 2,5 y/o. He loves having a pile of money and streets. Obviously, an adult has to help him collect his rent and count out the amounts, but he is keeping track of turns and shouting either 'one!' or 'two!' no matter what the dice show. Our 5 y/o airhead Pebbles keeps her attention firmly on the board to check for rent, and loves it when she owns 'Princess Gardens' and can put a hotel on it. And 7 y/o Bambam is proud to count out the money in as few as possible notes, as he's learned in school. He thinks carefully about the options on the Chance cards, and about whether he should invest in a hotel or keep his money. Of course, everybody loves the 'cash machine' that spits out notes when you put the bank card in!

We got this game as a birthday present, and I must admit, at first I didn't think it would be much fun.
I've been underwhelmed by kids' board games before. They often seem too simple (boring!), or quite contrived and surprisingly counter-intuitive. By which I mean you find yourself constantly checking the rule book because the board and the piece-movements just don't make sense on their own.

Now maybe it's because I've always loved Monopoly and I'm already familiar with the rules and game-play, but I am so loving this one. We've owned 'grown-up' Monopoly for years and I've just been waiting for the kids to be old enough to play it! This one is an almost perfect alternative. It is simplified just enough and the game play is speeded up, but all the fun and excitement is still there. If you're looking to buy a board game that's fun for young kids and grown-ups too, this is definitely one I'd recommend.

Haven - the plot thickens...

Being a sci-fi fan, I watch Haven.
I'm watching it pretty much as it airs on Syfy, although it tends to get recorded on the Sky+ box and we watch it if and when the kids have gone to sleep.

I enjoy Haven as a monster-of-the-week series but I really expect more of good tv. We've all gotten used to larger casts and convoluted plots, even involving travel through dimensions of time and space. We can follow long plot arcs with mysterious hints scattered throughout every episode.

Haven just didn't deliver that. Audrey fairly easily drops into her role of local cop / x-files investigator. She's an FBI agent, isn't she? She could find out about the mysterious photo in the 27 year old paper without quitting her day job. She could at the very least use her powers as a federal agent to find out who her birth mother is, and track her down. Instead she chooses to stay in a rural backwater solving local mysteries in the hopes it will shed some light on her own past. Why? I don't quite believe in her motivations. Be that as it may, I'm willing to go along with it. She stays in Haven so we can witness some nice mysterious little horror stories. Fair enough. But why is she so ready to believe in supernatural explanations for the things that happen around her? Even the locals, most notably Nathan, aren't as easily convinced the 'troubles' are real, and they've witnessed them for years.

If we are meant to simply accept that Audrey just easily believes in the supernatural, and stays in Haven (and is she still on FBI payroll or what?) to find out about her past, then I'm still often left wondering why she doesn't get on with it. Every episode contains a tiny little - and badly embedded in the story at that - hint about the elusive 'Lucy' from the photograph, but how many times has Audrey let the subject drop in a conversation, and even allowed the person with the information to just walk away? Not really dogged pursuit of her stated goal, is it? If I was her, I'd be seriously interrogating some people, not least Duke, and the two newspaper men. And apparently, there are extensive police and forensic files on the Colorado Kid after all. Did she not even think to check the archives?

For a town full of people, the main cast is actually pretty small, and very few of those are presented with any depth. Compared to other recent tv-series, it seems to underestimate the capability of the audience to keep track of multiple deeply complex characters and their individual story lines and development. Give us more. We can handle it. There is some attempt to present the characters' emotional and social development in the form of several stilted romances and Audrey's attempts at making friends, but these are very episodical as well. Duke nearly died of supernatural old age, but this has brought about no lasting change to his outlook on life. Nathan can feel Audrey's touch, but it doesn't make him much more or less broody than he was before. Generally, the most shocking things happen to a lot of people, and they barely flinch. If they do, they're certainly completely over it by next week. After the doctor's death, her daughter just slots into her job as if she is an understudy in a play. I find I start to care less about the characters because they're just not real.

The monster-of-the-week format also contributes to this feeling of shallowness. Audrey and Nathan have locked up several monsters, killed some, driven some off... but they never mention them again, or visit them. It would be nice to see all the monsters continue to be part of Audrey's daily life. They could be present in the background as a duty, for example to check on whether they're still safely locked up. Or they could come back as the solution to a new problem. Instead, they're like the monsters in a children's cartoon where nothing that happens really matters and everything is reset to default by the start of the next episode. There are so few consequences for most of what anyone does in this series.

However, we have just reached an episode where Audrey finally does undertake some investigation of the elusive Lucy. She tries to get more information out of Duke and his former babysitter, to no avail. Conveniently, all involved in that incident seem to have either no memory of it, or have gone mad to the point of dancing about in their underpants. Still no resolution, but at least she tries harder than usual. There are some interesting arc-shaped hints like the tattooed arm. Currently, my theory involves time travel. The girl in the picture is in fact Audrey herself, but she has instructed everyone no to tell her future/past self about her, or possibly even done something to wipe their memories. Both the Colorado kid and Duke get killed by a tattooed arm, the one known owner of which is dead in this timeline, but possibly was alive to kill 27 years ago. Or are Duke and the Colorado Kid one and the same somehow?

I can but hope that the real resolution of the series will be at least that interesting or even better. Surprise me, Haven!

Avatar vs. Dragon

I was reading SFX magazine today and apparently, James Cameron is going to future-proof the next two instalments of Avatar so they will still be ahead of all the rest technically.

Now it may be because I only watched Avatar last week, in 2D at home on the telly, but what impressed me wasn't the technical part. Yes, the visuals were pretty and the world was big and shiny, but I wasn't bowled over. Like most reviewers, I was incredibly underwhelmed by the 'dances with smurfs' plot line. A nice enough flick, but hardly the future of film.

What I liked were the details of the environment. This movie, combined with my imagination full of a Peter Hamilton reading marathon I recently completed, makes for a fascinating world which I wish they'd explore in future films. The corporation exploiting Pandora for financial gain - including the military trappings, cool armoured suits and insidious plots to either ingratiate the natives or cow them into submission - reminded me of Fallen Dragon, a great early Hamilton. While in Avatar, the corporation is simply shoved into the 'baddy' slot of a simplistic nature=good, capitalism=bad setup, in Hamilton's book, they have another side to them. Hamilton's corporation uses a capitalist method to achieve the humanist goal of improving the human condition. Whether those goals justify the means is left open to interpretation.

How about showing us the more human side of the corporation in Avatar as well? Why are they mining unobtainium? Perhaps it is needed to provide resources to an overcrowded and miserable planet Earth. Perhaps they use it to build ftl engines to start an era of expansion and progress. Clearly, the world they are from is far from perfect. For example, the treatment Jake needs to repair his legs exists, but is not available to all. But perhaps the economic benefit of unobtainium would actually improve the living conditions for all humans. We don't know this, but there's two whole films in which we might find out.

In Fallen Dragon a completely alien being with huge reserves of intergalactic knowledge encounters people and adapts its own and human technology to fight off the threat posed by the returning invading corporation. In Avatar the scene is set for a similar development. A human element has been introduced to the mother tree on Pandora, and if that planet has any sense, it will prepare itself for the return of the corporation with even more impressive military force than those uber-cool armour suits.

I'm interested in seeing what Pandora is capable of. Is the planet as a whole sentient, or is it a network more like 'the internet' with no particular goals or will of it's own? Is all communication 'wired' through the connecting plugs found on most creatures and plants or is there some kind of wireless connection as well? How aware is Pandora of what goes on on the surface? Given the response of nature during the final battle, it would seem there is a form of sentience or direction to Pandora, but it was not something even the Na'vi had seen before. Perhaps human elements like free will, adaptability, a scientific mind, bravery, or a sense of discovery entered the fairly stable but stagnant planet 'mind' as a result of the downloading of Grace and Jake? How much more might it change? How powerful is it? What are it's weaknesses?

What's very important is that this all-natural environment is not portrayed simplistically as entirely good and filled with noble but misunderstood savages. Even the scary predators were only hated by the human invaders because they had no 'understanding' of the way of life on Pandora. What rubbish. Tribal societies are no nobler than any other. Nature isn't moral at all. Plenty of things are not good about life on Pandora. For example there seems to be a rigid inescapable social structure. Let's see some of the limitations and downsides as well. If this film is meant to be future-proof, it better become a lot more morally ambiguous and interesting, besides being visually stunning.

Strictly Anne!

I admit it. I'm watching this year's Strictly Come Dancing, and I'm loving it. I'm rooting for Anne Widdecombe to win. Unlike the judges, I'm seeing some real improvements in her dancing. She's actually getting a lot of steps right and she's really trying; she's not just acting silly. So what if it's not graceful!

Anne Widdecombe is one of several 'good' female role-models currently on that show this season. Some of the 'older' ladies are amazingly fit and limber for their age, some are admirably overcoming their insecurities, and all come across as independent and confident. And then there's those young pretty things. Nice to look at, but so little substance.

Anne is my favourite. She should be the ultimate feminist hero.

She is a single woman who independently reached an influential and powerful position in life, and in a sector traditionally dominated by men. She most certainly did not - no offence intended - use her looks to get where she is, nor did has she ever played any kind of minority card. She is there on merit alone and there's plenty of merit to go around. I admire her obvious intelligence, her perseverance, the way she's always right and can speak to the point. Few politicians can pull off media appearances the way she can. I've seen her on comedy shows like Have I got news for you and she does the best deadpan. She can be funny and she's always clever. I doubt she'd ever get caught expressing 'gaffes' into a forgotten microphone, as I strongly suspect she is always, even while remaining unfailingly polite and forbearing, honestly speaking her mind.

Safe to say, she's one of my favourite people to watch on Strictly and she's also my favourite politician. I didn't have the chance to vote for her in the national elections, so I'll settle for voting her onto my tv screen for as long as possible.

Now we can use the bookshelf as Kindle-ing

I got one for my birthday and now Kirk has got one of his own.
The Kindle.

I thought I might miss paper books, but I don't. I really love my Kindle. It's screen is really easy on the eyes and it even works in the sunshine. All my big heavy sci-fi trilogies fit into it, which saves loads on weight and handling. But the best part is, when I run out of book in the middle of the night, I just buy a new one by turning the wifi on and carry on reading without even getting out of bed.

I've read most of Peter F. Hamilton's books now, and for those of you who've read him, you'll see why weight and size would've been an issue. The Kindle is much safer to drop on a co-sleeping baby as you doze off ;-)

More new reads were on the theme of girls who go into alternate realities such as: Alice in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Coraline.
Am I missing any?