Mary Poppins remixed into awesome song called "What I Likes." It will make you happy.

Ever felt like a balloon animal in a cactus field? Then this charming video is for you!

Via Neatorama

I stayed in Mountain Home, ID last night. Right down the road from the rapping weathermen.

Here's the Cru city gates video #cru13.

Here's a video that explains a little bit about what Krista and I do in Cru now. I wrote the script for this, after several meetings with our leadership and a lot of help from a variety of people. Simple Bulldog and Chris DeGarmo spearheaded getting this thing made, but the real hero of the whole video is certainly Cheryl Boyd, who kept us all on track and put up with a lot of harassing from each of us.

Enjoy.

Cru City Gates from Cru City on Vimeo.

Man of Steel -- How it should have ended.

It's my birthday today, and I'll do whatever I want.

Like show you the "How it should have ended" for Man of Steel, which made me really happy, made me laugh and reminded me that Superman is still awesome.



Also, I'm not going to say "spoiler warning" because it's my birthday and I don't have to.

And I'm going to use dangling participles all day. If I want to.

You are invited to hang out with me for my birthday tomorrow #cru13

Also there might be elephants.

For MY BIRTHDAY tomorrow, we will host a POPSICLE party at our home RAMS VILLAGE EAST L121 from 3:30 to 5. All are welcome. If you are reading this you are not only invited, but it would be a great honor if you were able to join us.

Please RSVP on this blog post, on facebook, twitter or G+. This will allow us to purchase the vast number of popsicles that will be necessary for a celebration of this magnitude.

Another free short story from @mattmikalatos on the Dark Expanse game site

Last week you got to read my short fantasy story Portal Worlds and Your Child at Daily Science Fiction.

This week you get the science fiction story A Small and Secret Freedom on the Dark Expanse website. It's the story of a theocratic society that decides to do an intervention with the alien race that used to enslave them.

Dark Expanse is a real time, massive multiple-player online strategy game in which you try to rule the universe. I've been playing it for a while in preparation for writing for the game, and I've been enjoying it. I've colonized about 12 planets and all is going well, except this 20 year old named "Blood Bones and Gold" keeps sending terrorists and subversives to harass a few of my planets.

This week I'll be with Cru at CSU #cru13

Hi friends,

You may have noticed the absolute lack of Internet Activity from me the last few weeks. I've been huddled in meetings, helping plan the bi-annual Cru staff meeting in Fort Collins, Colorado. There will be about 5,000 of us together for the next week. A lot of my tweets and posts this week will likely be related to that conference.

Some of you may enjoy being a part of that. You can see our basic schedule here, and much of the time will be livecast at that same link. We have a lot of great speakers coming in, too. If there's a certain speaker you're excited about leave me a comment and I'll make sure to let you know when they're speaking.

Meetings start tomorrow morning at 9 Mountain time.

My friend Sunish shared this quote with me this morning. #cru13

“You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.”

― Mahatma Gandhi

If you're a blogger/author with Cru, be sure to come to this event on Monday. I'll be there. #Cru13

A free short story from Matt Mikalatos and @dailySF

Those who have read The Sword of Six Worlds already know that I love stories about children who stumble into other worlds and embark on amazing adventures.

But what about their parents? 

Here's a story for anyone who loves a child who occasionally disappears to distant, magical places.

Portal Worlds and Your Child: 

A Parent's Guide (With Examples).

If you enjoy the story, please share it!

And, as always, your comments are welcome here or at the Daily Science Fiction site.

Portlandia "Bicycle rights." It's funny because it's true.

I know I've been quiet. I'm working in Colorado all summer and by the time I get home from work I am exhausted. So I haven't been keeping you updated as much as I would like.

I'm missing Portland, though. So here's a little Portlandia clip to keep you happy.

Welcome Daily Science Fiction readers!

Hey there --

I'm guessing some of you are dropping in today because you received a copy of my story "Portal Worlds and Your Child: A Parent's Guide" from Daily Science Fiction last night.

Welcome!

I'm a huge fan of DSF and honored to have my story appear there.

If you enjoyed that story, you'll probably like my novel, The Sword of Six Worlds.

Sword is a traditional portal fantasy that I wrote for my three daughters. From the back of the book:

Validus Smith has three goals. Stay alive. Save the world. Finish her homework.

For centuries the paladins protected the Earth from a creeping darkness known as the Blight. That all changed when a new enemy destroyed the paladins, plunging the free worlds into danger. Validus Smith—an ordinary girl in an ordinary town—is next in line to become the paladin. Untrained, unsure of her destiny, and hunted by monstrous forces, she must recover the fabled Sword of Six Worlds, the only weapon capable of defeating the Blight. The Sword, however, is not on Earth, but in a strange fantasy world connected to her own. In an unfamiliar world of monsters, talking animals and living rocks, can an ordinary girl like Validus survive?

In any case, welcome to the site. Your comments on "Portal Worlds and Your Child" are welcome, along with any questions you may have or whatever. I'll be coming around to comment on the DSF Facebook page and so on eventually, as well.

Glad to have you here!

What if Shakespeare had written Star Wars?

Methinks thou wouldst hie thee to a theatre were this on the screen of silver.

The impossible "literacy tests" from the 1960s, designed to prevent black people from voting

I can't believe this. I mean, I believe it, but I'd prefer not to.

You can check out the entire test here.

They're taking the hobbits to Isengard

I'm not dead. Just busy.

In which I experience racism first hand from the people of Colorado.

Yesterday I was sitting at a bus stop in Fort Collins, Colorado, minding my own business, when a white SUV full of young white men slowed on the street in front of me and they all started shouting things like, "Hey, vato!" and various other barely-Spanish phrases in not-very-good accents.

I happened to be on the phone, and didn't want to interrupt my call by shouting obscenities in Spanish (obscenities being one of the few things I actually know how to shout in Spanish, in addition to MAS TACOS POR FAVOR). My Spanish is not very good.

Anyway, I didn't think anything of it, really, except that the boys actually returned, slowed down again and started shouting in Bad Spanish and yelling racial slurs. Again, I was on the phone, and it was probably good, because I have a long history of not keeping my mouth shut and it's likely that I would have shouted something that would have either shamed or enraged them, and then they would have had to stop the car to try to beat me up.

It really is a shame that this sort of casual racism still exists, and being caught up in it even for a minute made me think of my Hispanic and Latino friends who often catch this sort of thing. It saddens me (but doesn't surprise me) that college kids today are still working through this.

Notice the super hairy Greek arm delivering "Archimedes Screw"

Also, if they had started a fight with me they would have discovered that I'm actually Greek and I would have had to punch them in the head with my special punch I like to call "The Archimedes Screw Punch." That would have been too bad for them.

Superman and the Man of Steel

There's a recent film about Superman that's embarrassed to use the name. They're embarrassed, perhaps, because they want to make this new iteration of Superman "realistic" or "naturalistic" and let's be honest, in the 21st century the name "Superman" seems a little silly.

Maybe that's because two kids in their twenties invented him in the 1930's. For them, Superman represented the pinnacle of human possibility. He couldn't fly, but he could just jump over buildings. He didn't have heat ray vision, but he could outrun a train. And at first, he didn't fight space monsters and giant super-intelligent apes or robots or other Kryptonians. He protected the oppressed. He fought against real-world injustice: fat cats like Lex Luthor who took advantage of common citizens, or Borden Mosley (a corrupt financier) or Calvin Denby (a crook and sort of home-grown terrorist). He wasn't an ordinary man, he was the super man: the best human being possible.

Superman didn't kill people -- even the worst villains. He brought them to justice.

Frankly, there is a large dose of wish fulfillment involved in his stories. "What if I had the power to stop evil? What if I could make sure that no one ever died... not in an accident, not from a criminal, because I had the power to stop it?" And of course, Superman is rewarded for his goodness. He always gets the girl, even when he humbly tries not to be rewarded for just doing what he would do anyway.

First kiss!

Here's where the philosophical underpinnings of Man of Steel bothered and disappointed me. Superman should be the best possible human being, but in this movie he wasn't. Superman should always be able to find a way out: the higher ground, the best solution. But the Man of Steel couldn't. Because he is, after all, only a man, not a role model.

What's wrong with being a role model?

In the movie (vague, general spoilers in this paragraph only), he can't stop the villains from roughing up his mother. He lets entire skyscrapers full of people collapse, in a creepy 9-11 type catastrophic event caused by a fistfight with another Kryptonian. And eventually he uses his great power to pass judgment on the evil doers. Not to bring them to justice, not to give them due process, not to incarcerate or prevent them from doing evil. Superman abuses his power. He takes a moral path that doesn't reflect the best possibilities of humanity: it doesn't suggest hope, or forgiveness, or redemption or even justice. It represents vigilantism and pragmatism. It's Superman shrugging and saying, "I guess this is the best any of us can hope for."

That's why, although I enjoyed the movie, I walked out knowing it was not a movie about Superman. It was a movie about someone else, dressed up as Superman to make sure the movie made a profit. The "real" Superman -- the one who sets the world an example, the one we should aspire to be -- doesn't let entire buildings full of people die because he's in a fistfight. He's the sort of man who makes sure that kittens get rescued from trees. He stops purse thieves. He shows up at hospitals to talk to sick kids.

The fact is, the filmmakers wanted to make a "realistic" Superman, which they took to mean a world with no clear cut solutions, no easy way out. They made it gray and edgy and violent. That's fine. There are large parts of our world like that. But in the grey of this real world, the blue and red and yellow of Superman's costume should shine out that much brighter. He should use his power for good, to make the world a better place. Because even in this "real world" there are people who are working hard to bring peace and hope and light into the darkness. Superman should not only be one of those people, he should be a shining example of that fight, someone to look up to, someone to emulate.

If my kids grew up to make the moral choices of the "Man of Steel" version of Superman, I would be disappointed. That's a shame. He should be better than that. There's no such thing as a no-win situation for Superman, because Superman believes "there's always a way." I don't care if he has to break the laws of physics and zip around the earth until it goes backwards and turns time around, Superman always wins, always protects, always provides hope, always does the right thing.

I still love Superman. I'm used to people not understanding him, or not believing he could exist. Unfortunately, that's what happened in this movie... someone said, "There's no such thing as a person with that strong of a moral code." There's no such thing as Superman, in other words. You can believe in science fiction and life on other worlds and that a man can fly, but not that human beings have a chance of becoming something better than what we are, that the "pinnacle of humanity" might make better moral choices than we are right now.

But I do believe. We can do better, become better. I believe that, at least in part, because growing up someone introduced me to a guy in blue tights and a red cape who told me I should believe that. There's always a way. We can fight for truth, because truth matters. We can fight for justice, because the right thing to do with our power is to protect those who have less power than us. We can, without embarrassment, fight for the American way, if what we mean by that is that all human beings have been endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights: among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

At least, that's what Superman taught me. And, if these are my choices, then I prefer the "real" Superman to the "realistic" one.

I'm pretty sure this is the cutest turtle of all time

Ta-da!

This is so awesome: instant ice!

Maybe it's because I grew up in California instead of Minnesota, but I've never seen anything like this.



More Wonderful Wednesday.