fashion clothes

About two years ago, I was cleaning out the toys in the basement with the hopes of donating some that weren't played with anymore.

Pinkie Pie Freckles

Twilight Sparkle Mini-me

Last spring, my husband signed up to volunteer at Comic Con. You should have seen the look on the girls' faces when he told them both that there would be a MLP panel at the Con.

Welcome to Thursday Nerdsday, where I share all things in the land of geeks, dorks and nerds that I love.


Up today, the most recent addition to our already sizable and growing table game collection, Smallworld.

It seems like every game we buy gets more complicated than the last, and this one came with the added bonus of having like a thousand pieces. Fortunately, the box insert is made pretty well and does a fairly good job at containing them all. Plan on it taking you a good while to set up the game though, because you have to punch out all the pieces.


The game comes with two game boards, a smaller one for when only 2 people are playing, a larger one for when more people are playing. Both are reversible, with different land combinations on each side.

The entire goal of the game is to conquer lands, which earns you coins with each round.  At the end of the game, the person with the most coins wins, which may not necessarily be the person who has the most lands conquered at that time.

With the first turn, you choose a race and special power combination. There are 14 races and 20 special powers. They are each shuffled and stacked next to the board and drawn randomly in pairs facing upright. You can choose the first pairing or buy one of the other pairings, in exchange for placing one coin on each combination skipped.

The combinations are different with each game, obviously.

Each race has different abilities, different strengths and weaknesses, and different criteria for conquering lands and earning coins. Some get extra coins for lands with mines, others for hills and farms, and so on. Some can conquer lands with only one token, others need two.

Each special power is different as well. Some allow you to move other players, some allow you to earn extra coins, some allow you to fly or take to the water.

My personal favorite combination, and one that happens to come up occasionally when we play are the Berserk Amazons, which we affectionately call the crazy bitches. Seriously...if you have the chance to pick up that combination, do it. They can dominate a board easily. The sorcerers are pretty good at kicking ass too.

One of the funnier combinations I have had was the Mounted Giants. All I could think of was oh, those poor horses.

With your combinations, you will get a specific number of tokens to take over the lands on the board with. It can get complicated once multiple tokens are floating around the board, and it's confusing the first time you play, but you'll get the hang of it, I promise.

If a land is occupied by someone else, you need to match the number of tokens they have there, plus two to take it over. You have to keep track of times and lands that may earn you extra coins, which are tallied and awarded each round.

When you have exhausted the abilities of your race/power combination, you can put them into decline on one turn and choose another combination the next turn. This allows you to find ways to utilize the most tokens with each turn, but is a strategy thing, and can take a bit to get the hang of.

It is easier to take over lands occupied by other races once they are in decline because they forfeit all but one token for each land usually, though some races have exceptions.

In the later rounds, as more and more tokens are on the board, you need to employ both defensive and offensive strategies to protect your lands, but you'll learn that you are often at the mercy of the other players. It's the kind of game that, when played well, means you are planning moves a few turns in advance.

There are, obviously, a lot of things to learn about this game to master it, but it can be done fairly easily after playing it a few times. All of my kids, even the five year old, have figured out how to tally coins and conquer occupied lands.

This is a fabulous game for developing critical thinking skills and for teaching kids to adapt quickly to different strengths and weaknesses. It takes about an hour to play, though the first time will likely take longer.

Have fun!

I've been threatening all week to write about sharks and the time has finally come. I look forward to Shark Week on the Discovery Channel every year, and it seems like every year I'm a little bit less in love with it.

You see, I am a shark freak. Obsessed with them. Have been for as long as I can remember.


From the time I was a little girl, I felt a magnetic pull to the ocean. I grew up in a world where people were often terrified of going in the water because of the Jaws franchise, but I was never afraid of it. I knew that the shark in the movie wasn't real, I knew that sharks didn't hunt humans and carry grudges, and I knew that the odds of ever being bit by a shark were minute.

As I grew older, my love of these strange animals grew and grew as well. When I was in junior high, I was selected to work at the school's science museum, which incidentally was one of the coolest experiences of my life. I wish that schools could see the value of programs like that one in today's world.

Anyhow, the year that I was a curator, we selected the theme of oceans. Groups of elementary kids would come to see the museum and our assortment of animals. We had several snakes, an iguana, a freshwater aquarium and a salt water aquarium. We had tarantulas and scorpions too. We gave a presentation to each group on the topic we had selected, and it shouldn't come as a surprise at this point that my area of specialty was sharks. I had to dig up an old article on the museum for you all. 

I learned everything I could about them, I read every book I could get my hands on. I dreamed of someday being a marine biologist, more specifically an icthyologist - which is a scientist that focuses on fish. That dream was interrupted by no one other than me, when I decided to go a different direction with my major. I was in public policy and management with a minor in biothics. Not exactly where you go to learn about sharks.

Even still, I managed to convince my advisor to let me write my thesis about sharks. I chose the topic of overfishing of sharks in international waters, and the difficulty in enforcing treaties in a part of the world where no one nation's laws govern.

To this day, I am still amused that I pulled off writing about sharks in a public policy major.

Though I live over a thousand miles from the ocean these days, it still calls me. When we go back to California now, I could just sit on the beach indefinitely. I know that I shortchanged myself when I let my head overrule my heart, when I decided to focus on law instead of the water.

But I digress.

We're here to talk about sharks. Since Shark Week is concerned more with making sharks fly and scaring people about gigantic prehistoric sharks that might still exist, I thought I would tell you some cool facts about these amazing creatures that I have loved for all my life.

There are roughly 400 species of sharks , though an exact number is as elusive as the sharks themselves. This number has risen fairly significantly in the last few decades as more and more species are discovered. The ocean is one of the most unexplored areas of the world, and it's highly likely that there are many more in there we still don't know about.

One of the biggest draws this year on Shark Week has been the special about whether Megalodon is still alive. The evidence was presented in a slanted way, and one of the experts on the show said immediately after it aired that he thinks it is extinct, which didn't lend a whole lot of credibility to the show. The ocean is deep and vast. I suppose it's possible that Megalodon is still around, though I tend to doubt it. It's more likely that there are other large species of sharks that humans haven't encountered and named yet. What they did with the show, though, has stirred much controversy because all it has effectively done is made people afraid to go back in the water again over a documentary that many are outright calling a mockumentary.

Making more people afraid of the ocean for no legitimate reason is not a good thing. Instead of helping conservation efforts, there's an argument to be made that they are making the situation worse.

Shark populations around the world are in decline, and quite often their only predator is us - humans. Some species facing extinction, which derives from the fact that over 100 million sharks are killed each year. They are sought after primarily for shark fin soup, a delicacy in some parts of the world. As the fins are the only part used, they are cut off at sea and the rest of the animal is tossed overboard, left to die. It's one of the most violent hunting or fishing practices that occurs in the world, akin to hunting elephants for their tusks or tigers for their pelts.

Why should we care? Easy. They are the apex predator. Without them around, there is nothing to keep the rest of the food chain in check. Larger mammals that would normally be hunted and eaten decay in the ocean, disrupting the carbon cycle. Some animals on the food chain can rapidly overpopulate without their predator, and it happens quickly because the lower food chain animals have shorter life spans and reproduce faster.

We should also care because sharks may hold the key to the treatment of many diseases that we suffer from here on land. Like the rainforests, they hold precious pieces of information within them, and if we destroy them, we're only hurting ourselves.

How about some random shark facts?

- Bull sharks can swim upstream and survive in freshwater.

- All shark eggs are fertilized internally, which is different than bony fish.

- Some species lay those fertilized eggs, others give live birth.

- Some species that give live birth experience cannibalism in utero.

- Sharks babies are on their own from the moment of birth.

- If great white sharks stop swimming, they drown.

- Sharks don't sleep like we do, they can't. They go into less-aware states, shutting off parts of their brain at a time.

- Some species can live as long as 100 years.

- Shark skeletons are made entirely of cartilage, which is why we only have Megalodon's teeth - even the jaws have to be reconstructed based on size estimates.

- Some sharks grow to less than a foot, the whale shark averages over 30 feet long.

- Before manufactured sandpaper existed, shark skin was used.

- Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, spent the rest of his career trying to undo the damage that was done from the book and movie, becoming a shark conservationist. He said that if he had understood more about them, he never would have portrayed them as the vicious killers he did.

- Since Jaws, over 50 movies have been released portraying sharks as villains. The only popular movie where they aren't depicted as ruthless killers is Finding Nemo - where sharks go to support groups to avoid eating other fish.

- These movies have fed into an irrational fear that people have of sharks. In the entire world, there are an average of 100 attacks a year, and of those 5-10 will die. You are far more likely to drown in the ocean or be killed by a bee than be killed by a shark.

- I love the statistics like this one: In 2006, 43,000 people in the United States were hurt by toilets. 13 were hurt by sharks. 

Instead of being afraid of these creatures, we should be fighting for them. These misunderstood, demonized animals need our help, and we're the only ones that can save them.

I spend a decent amount of time perusing the internet for news and interesting stories. Sometimes I find things that disturb me, sometimes I find things that inspire me, sometimes I find things that just rub me completely the wrong way and piss me right off.

Monday was one of those days.

I came across a review of a show on SyFy called Heroes of Cosplay that ran in the New York Post.

Of course it immediately grabbed my attention. I've professed before to my love of cosplay and the extremes that my family has gone to in order to put together themed costumes.

This one, again, because I love this shot of me as Wonder Woman and Freckles as Supergirl.

I'm on the hunt for a corset that can do double duty for my Halloween costume this year and next year's Con, if anyone is wondering....

Anyhow, I read the article with interest. As a first time Con attendee this year, I was floored by some of the cosplay I saw. Some of the outfits were ornate and detailed, some had clearly taken a long time to assemble, some were as good as anything the special effects people in Hollywood could come up with.

I've spent many days, nights, weeks and months assembling costumes. I've probably spent more money than I should on some of the pieces. I've made others from scrap stuff lying around the house. My oldest recently took to disassembling all the Nerf guns in the house, transforming them to steampunk ray guns and reassembling them so well that they remain fully functional.

We take this stuff pretty seriously.

So, when I read the brief review of the show, written by Linda Stasi, I was a little bit horrified. Not that the author was critical of the show, but that she was critical of anyone who enjoys cosplay.

You read that right.

Rather than giving any sort of information about the show itself, she spent her few paragraphs musing about how she doesn't understand anyone who would spend that much time, energy or money making a costume to wear to a convention. She can't see how it is a purposeful outlay of resources, and she just doesn't understand it.

She can't comprehend why renting a costume isn't good enough, or why adults would ever bother wanting to pretend to be someone else. She even wonders what all those who enjoy cosplay must do for a living to support this strange habit.

It's weird, she says, to want to be the fictional characters we dress as.

Her only relevant comment about the show itself, which is what she is supposed to be writing about, is really the last sentence, where she says something to the effect that you'll like the show if you like cosplay.

Here's the thing, Linda...you're a bully.

Just because you're some big shot reporter doesn't mean that you can say whatever you want about an entire group of people in a demeaning way.

So what if you don't understand cosplay? No one cares. You weren't supposed to be writing an article about the appropriateness of cosplay in society, you were supposed to be writing a review of a television program.

So what if you don't "get" dressing up? No one cares. I'm sorry if you don't have an imagination anymore, if you've outgrown it, if you can't identify in any way with some of the most awesome fictional characters ever created. I feel sad for you a little bit, actually. You don't know what you're missing.

What do you enjoy, Linda?  Are you a sports fan?

Here's the thing about sports fans - everything you said about us in the cosplay universe could as easily apply to sports fans if you so chose to make that connection, except that it's widely accepted in society to adore a football player, but it's not as accepted to love a character from Lord of the Rings.

Sports fans spend a ridiculous amount of time watching sporting events, attending games, waiting in line to get tickets. They blow huge amounts of money buying the jerseys of their favorite players, buying autographs, getting season tickets. They might even decorate parts of their homes with the colors of their team, hang memorabilia on their walls. They isolate themselves from anyone who doesn't love their designated sport during the season. They forgo other things in life for sports. They yell and scream and get fired up. They join fantasy leagues online where they can pretend to be coaches of dream teams.

They do all the same things we do, for one reason and one reason alone...because they love it.

Yet, no one chastises them for the love of their game, of their player. No one tells them that they are weird or obsessive. No one questions how they can afford tickets to the game or why they spend so damn much time watching it on TV. No one blinks an eye when they join a fantasy league online. No one tells them they are strange for wearing a jersey with someone else's name on it.

No one does because being a sports fan is socially accepted, but being a nerd isn't.

Linda, you are picking on cosplayers because you can. You are picking on us because in your view it's not okay to love what you love unless enough other people love it to mainstream it. You are picking on us because we're one of the groups that it's still okay to tease.

For the record, Linda, those cosplayers you are picking on...they are lawyers and doctors and teachers and accountants and bloggers. They are sports fans too, many of them, myself included. I've not once been harassed because of my love of college football or major league baseball, but I've been picked on plenty for using big words, for loving science and for dressing up.

Think about what you are writing before you write it. Imagine what other things in society could be made to seem silly and wasteful if you turned it around that way. See that what you are doing is really nothing more than just picking on the nerds.

Stop it. Leave us alone.

We love what we love because we love it.

We won't judge you if you don't judge us. Hell, even if you do judge us, chances are we'd still accept you. 

That's the coolest thing about cosplayers, if you didn't know, by the way. We accept everyone, whoever they are, and whatever they want to be.

I happen to think that's pretty goddamn amazing.

If you get a chance, write an actual review of the show, because there are people out there who might want to watch it, regardless of whether you happen to think we are freaks or not.

A while back now, a friend of mine sent me a message on Facebook about Comic Con. A fellow nerd (he even has the tattoos to prove his adoration of the comics), he was passing along information about volunteering at the Con.

A signed copy of this has been displayed in my living room ever since. Well played, Sheldon.

Who else needs to watch this movie right now?

Oh, that movie.

Infinite Wheaton. Husband may need this shirt too. I think this was taken at a Con.

All his shirts are dork shirts.

Since Comic Con was last week in San Diego, and we dressed up for the one here in Denver, I thought I would write a little about our family cosplay.

Also, I need to write this so that I will get on costume planning for the year because it takes months to assemble it all. MONTHS.

We start planning a year in advance.

And no, I'm not kidding.

I have had children for 12 years, and for half that time, I have done themed group costumes with the kids. It started out innocent enough, dressing just the girls alike for a few years, first as dueling Tinkerbelles, then witches, then bees. I laughed when people finally got the play on our last name, which is pronounced "da-bee".

The boys were forced to play along in 2008 for the first time, as cowboys and cowgirls.

Then I got serious.

2009 will go down as the year the crazy began. The Wizard of Oz is one of my all time favorite movies, and the kids love it too. I mentioned something about how it might be fun to dress like the characters for Halloween one night, and our fate was sealed.

The Scarecrow, Dorothy and Toto, The Tin Man, The Cowardly Lion and a Flying Monkey. The Wicked Witch took the picture.

Buzz, Barbie, LGM, Little Bo Peep

2011 was another movie themed year, this time with Alice in Wonderland. It got interesting when Freckles broke her foot, but we just worked the cast into the theme.

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum

The Queen's cast

The White Rabbit, Alice, Mad Hatter, Queen of Hearts

Last year, tired of me dressing him like a flying monkey and Tweedle Dum, my husband took over planning. (and she rubbed her hands together laughing manically). He wanted superheroes, specifically DC superheroes. So this happened.

Superman, Wonder Woman, Robin, Catwoman, Batman and Batgirl

It's to the point now where we have a reputation to uphold. No one is told of our costume plans before we reveal them at the school party the Friday night before Halloween. It seems like every year we step up our game even more, and every year I think we'll never top this theme.

At Comic Con this year, most of our family dressed up again.

My Clark Kent and tiny Batman

He made this one himself.

Wonder Woman and Supergirl

You'll just have to wait to see what we dress as this year. It's going to be good....and super geeky, that much I can promise you.

There may even be some steampunk crossover, possibly even a corset. ;)

So, someone asked you to play an RPG game, eh?

First, let me commend you for being willing to entertain the idea. For the vast majority of my life, I dismissed all gaming of this style for being too nerdy, too geeky, too dorky.

If you aren't sure what a RPG is, watch this. Just be warned that they swear a lot and you might suddenly want to go get some Funyons.


And it is nerdy and geeky and dorky, don't get me wrong...but that doesn't mean it's not also fun.

Get on in here. Dim the lights and draw the curtains shut. You don't want people to know this is happening.

In preparation for my first adventure, I quickly realized that you have to learn a lot of stuff in a hurry if the game is going to make any sense at all. Study your character well, know your abilities and your weaknesses. Know when you have modifiers to your abilities and attacks. This is important stuff, and there's a lot of it, all specific to your character.

If you want to dress like your character, go for it. I'm going to laugh a little, though, for sure.

If you want to talk in some bizarre Lord of the Rings-esque accent, more power to you. Make sure you use the word thwart as much as possible.

Your first, and maybe biggest decision, will happen before you ever begin play. You must choose a character. We play Pathfinder in this house, which is really D&D, they just call it something else these days. So yes, I play Dungeons and Dragons. Get that giggle out of your system because I'm about to drop some knowledge on you.



Pathfinder, as with most RPGs I know of, are collaborative games, which means that you are journeying together as a team. You do not play against one another, but with each other, working towards a common goal. This becomes important when situations arise where you don't have an ability but someone else does, and it's essential to your survival.

When choosing a character, you have two primary options. You can go with a pre-generated character, or you can start from scratch. Being that I have no idea what I am doing, I chose the pre-generated wizard dude because wizards are rad. His name is Ezren.

Ezren is pretty badass, or at least the picture looked good. And I wanted powers and shit. Of course, Ezren would have been more kickass if he was a chick, but whatever. I had no idea what I was doing.


I didn't realize that before we could actually play anything, my husband (aka the dungeon master...no not that way, get your mind out of the gutter...geeks don't have sex, wink, wink) had to set up the game. As in, he had to decide what the journey would be, where the enemies would hide, what treasure we would find, everything. The beginner sets have a few adventures, but once you get past those, it's up to the creativity of the dungeon master.

Every good dungeon master should have a wide repertoire of voices and sound effects at his or her (really, who am I kidding with the her?) disposal.


My oldest was determined to build a brand new character from scratch, which took a long time. By the time we were ready to actually sit down down and play, I was already tired of my kitchen table being covered in the stuff. It had been two days.

I caught on pretty quickly that any time anyone wants to use an ability or fight a bad guy they have to roll for initiative or do a skill check. The 20 sided die will become your best friend. Most starter games only come with one set of dice, and if you're sharing, this game will take you f.o.r.e.v.e.r.  So get extra sets of dice for however many players you have. Yes, they sell these separately and you have to go to game stores to find them. I may have my eye on a pretty green set, if anyone wants gift ideas for me. Hint, hint.


Also, one of the best ways to turn this into a drinking game involves requiring people to take a drink anytime you face an enemy and everyone has to roll for initiative to determine the battle order. Not that I attempted to turn this into a drinking game or anything.

Of course not. That would be wrong.

Any time you roll for initiative or a skill check, you want big numbers. Always check to see if your number rolled is modified by your ability or on attack. Anything under about an 8 basically means you failed. Between that and high teens means it's up to the discretion of the dungeon master (and their rolls at times) to decide if you can use your abilities or if you hit your opponent or not. 19 or 20 generally is a slam dunk. Your abilities are good or you hit your target well enough that you might be able to kill them, depending on your damage roll...which is another die and will vary depending on which weapon you are using.

I prefer the quarterstaff, by the way. No idea why. It just sounds cool.

If you use a pre-generated character, the damage will be on the sheet already. If you generate your own character, you've got to figure all this out before you start playing or the dungeon master will whip you publicly.

Much of the game rests on the dice, obviously. Sometimes you roll well, other times you roll terribly. Once it took us over 30 minutes to kill a dragon because no one could hit anything and the dragon was a dud.

You aren't just trying to kill your enemies, they try to kill you too, and sometimes they succeed. You lose hit points every time you are injured, unless you have a high enough armor class to protect yourself. Wizards don't have armor by the way...so that wasn't a great call on my part. I've already been killed off and brought back from the dead twice.

So now I'm a zombie wizard. Like a boss.

Don't worry too much though, no one ever stays dead long. There are potions and spells and shit that can revive you. Unless you'd rather die than play more Pathfinder, that is.

Grab a beer, get your dice and roll baby, roll.

Don't worry. No one is watching. ;)

You know that you have a game hoarding problem when you find yourself cleaning out cabinets frequently to make room for more games.

We've somehow acquired more than a few games lately and I find myself rearranging other things all the time so that I have somewhere to put them when they aren't in use.

This is what happens when your husband meets Wil Wheaton at Comic Con and become obsessed with his show Table Top. If you are unfamiliar with the show, it's a web series about various table games.

I'm pretty sure most of the ones I will introduce you to were featured on that show at some point.

Up first, Forbidden Island. Aside from Pathfinder, this was our first true "nerd game" purchase.


Made by Gamewright, it retails for about $15-20, which is very reasonable in a world where table games can easily cost $50 and upwards. It's labeled for ages 10 and up, but our 8 year old has no trouble playing it at all, and in some ways is one of the best tactical players in the family.

It usually takes less than an hour to play, and trust me when I tell you it will take you almost that long just to understand the basic rules. To really understand the strategies, though, it takes playing it a few times.

The first thing that you need to get used to with this game is that it's a collaborative game, not a competitive one. You aren't playing against each other at all, in fact you will have to learn to work together quickly in order to survive.

The goal is a simple one, in theory at least. You have to retrieve four treasures before the entire island sinks. Where the game gets complicated, and does it ever, is in the fact that the tiles are arranged differently every time, the abilities of each player change every time, and you are at the mercy quite often of the cards.

To collect the treasures, a player must possess four cards corresponding to that treasure, and travel to a marked location. All this takes place on a board of floating tiles which are in danger of sinking with every turn.

Whether you win or lose this game often depends on where the waters rise cards end up in the deck. Every time one of those is drawn, an additional island card must be pulled at the end of the turn of each player. Islands start to sink faster and faster, and as that happens a sense of urgency begins. You have to juggle so many things at once to master this game- you need to figure out who will retrieve the treasures and how to ensure they have the cards to do so before the islands they need to visit sink, then once you have retrieved all the treasures you have to figure out how to fly everyone off the island entirely, which often becomes a questionable task as more and more pieces disappear beneath the water.

This game is an exciting one, and can frustrate you endlessly at times, especially when you can see that your team is going down this round. Up to four people can play, and there seems to be an advantage to having 3 or 4 players as opposed to just 2. The more players, the more skills you have among the group, and the more ways you can strategize.

This is a great game for developing critical thinking skills in kids, and also great for teaching the value of collaboration.

Good luck getting off the island alive!

Though I've known for most of my life that I was a geek, I tried to fight it for a good many years. It wasn't until fairly recently that I really began to embrace it, and the longer I've lived here on the other side, the more I can see that it's nothing at all like I was afraid it would be.

Are there people who still pick on me for some things I love? Sure. I've been called out for referring to myself as a superhero more than once.

That's never going away. I just don't let it bother me anymore.

Are there people who dwell in this new world that I have more in common with than the non-geeks? Absolutely.

I fought back certain pieces of my personality for most of my life. I was always the smart one, the dorky one, the one who used bigger words than I should have. My nose was always in a book. I wasn't athletic. I didn't really fit in with any one group of friends. I tried and tried to fight it, often pretending to be someone I wasn't just for the sake of belonging somewhere.

I don't ever want my kids to go through that. I don't want them to feel like they have to reject pieces of who they are and replace them with what society says they should just to have friends and be accepted.


I try my best to teach them this. Be who you are and don't pretend to be something you're not.

You want to spend all day drawing anime characters? Fine.

You want to cut apart nerf guns and make steampunk rayguns? Okay.

You want to generate a third RPG character? Go for it.

You want to make zombie movies? Cool.

You want to watch an entire season of Dr. Who today? Slow down and let me catch up!

We dressed up as DC superheroes last Halloween and have mostly decided what we are doing this year. It's pretty geeky, I'll give you that hint. At Comic Con, my husband and I dressed up as superheroes again and my oldest made a Star Trek costume himself.

We read. A lot. I'm trying to finish Jane Eyre at the same time I'm doing this 12 week/12 book challenge with my kids. The summer challenge with the kids isn't really anything new since we read most of the Harry Potter series a few years ago, with the requirement that we finish each book before we watched the movies. I made the older two read The Hunger Games before they could see the movie last year. The books I've chosen this year are all ones that have been made into movies as well, and dare I say it? My kids have become critics. They read and dissect the books and point out every single deviation in the movie versions.

It makes me proud. Not just that they are paying that much attention, but that they are all loving this process. That they are seeing that the books are better than the movies. That they usually get so into the stories about halfway through that we end up hunkering down and finishing it in one afternoon so they can watch the movies and rip them apart.

We're reading Jaws during Shark Week because I taught them many years ago to love sharks just like their crazy mother does.

I want to hurry up and finish Jane Eyre so I can start reading Game of Thrones. My husband is ahead of me in that series already.

We are going to the Renaissance Faire this year for the first time with the kids, and they are already planning what they will wear, asking if we can make fairy wings.

Don't get me wrong, we don't reject all things pop culture to live in this nerdiverse. We love music too, and it's a huge part of our lives. There is always music on in our home. My oldest can already play 6 instruments.

We love sports. We plan our weekends around college football games. We've been a soccer family forever. The girls are probably both playing softball this year, and the oldest is looking forward to playing basketball and wrestling again. Little boy is literally already a parkour athlete.

We love all those things, and we embrace all the pieces of ourselves and our children. The mainstream ones that society deems acceptable and the quirky ones that aren't so widely accepted. We let them be who they are, and we celebrate it.

I was the black sheep as a kid, and I don't ever want them to feel like they stick out in this family. We'll all be weird together....someone will love us for it.

Some of the clearest memories of my childhood involve a pair of Wonder Woman underroos, running around in the backyard and protecting the world from evil. For a while there, I think I actually believed that some printed cotton and elastic bestowed superpowers on me.

Of course, back then, I was just a little girl with no understanding of the history of the character. I didn't know why there weren't more female superheroes, I just knew she was there and that I wanted to be her. Little boys had their choice of everyone else, but all the little girls wanted to be her, the Amazon princess turned crimefighter in heels.

For a great many years, I loved Wonder Woman quietly. The show ended when I was in preschool, and she mostly disappeared from pop culture. Unless you actively read comics, you didn't see or hear about her much for years and years. Occasionally she'd pop up on a cartoon or two, but that was about all.


In the last few years, though, my love for her has become fuller and more open. I've spent a lot of time learning about the development of this character and why we perceive her the way we do now. I don't just love her, I identify with her. When you understand the back story, it becomes easier and easier to see why she has yet to assume her full potential as a super among supers, why she hasn't been the lead character of a summer blockbuster film.

Wonder Woman was first developed in 1940 by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist by trade, after a suggestion by his wife that there should be a female hero that triumphed over evil using love rather than strength and power. The idea was submitted to DC, which was dominated by male-led hero comics at the time.

His goal was to take all the strengths of women and use them as her greatest attributes, while still making her appealing and beautiful. He wanted her not just to appeal to other women, but to men as well, and make her strong but not overly intimidating.


The comics have been in continuous printed series ever since then, except for a few brief breaks. The show, as anyone in my generation knows, aired during the 70's. A few attempts at television series have been mentioned since then, to no avail, and the blockbuster movie is still on hold.

At Comic Con earlier this month, I sat in on a panel about Wonder Woman, led by two of the current content creators, both men. They detailed how the character has evolved (or devolved as some would say) over the decades. Diana started as a warrior princess turned American superhero during the war in the 40's. When the war ended, our nation struggled with the identity of women who had run everything while the men were gone fighting, but were expected to return to the home upon the end of the war. Like many women in real life, Wonder Woman started to struggle with her identity as well.

The character was drawn in more domestic settings, the storylines started to revolve around finding love and wanting a relationship, less about fighting evil anywhere in the world. Though the character had always been depicted in bondage-like settings, she became more so. Women were supposed to relearn their place, and accordingly, she was reminded of that too.


Once the feminist movement started, Wonder Woman slowly began to change back, caring less about love and marriage, more about saving the world again, but there's an argument to be made that she still hasn't fully resumed her original role as warrior princess. Many fans, male and female alike, seem preoccupied more with what she's wearing than what she's doing.

When is the last time you heard someone discuss the practicality of Superman's costume? Or were taken aback by how much skin a male super is showing? While male superheroes have rarely been sexualized, she has been from the beginning. She has been, because in order to appeal to the male-dominated comic book market as a female superhero, she can't just kick ass, she has to be gorgeous and desirable too.

Wonder Woman isn't just about comics though, she is a cultural icon. There aren't many female heroes out there in general, and she is certainly the most well-known. In the decades since the TV series aired, there has been a movement towards more female hero leads, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena the Warrior Princess, Sarah Connor from Terminator, Ellen Ripley from Alien and Katniss from the Hunger Games.

When asked questions from the audience about why there isn't a movie yet, the panel didn't really have a clear answer, because the reasons are many. The main one is that Hollywood isn't willing to gamble on a movie about a female lead hero because they aren't sure they can sell her story enough to make it worth their while. She's a peace-seeking powerful princess who fights for justice in the name of love. She isn't about violence or revenge. She protects the women and children of the world...and they aren't sure that will put enough butts in theater seats to justify bothering. Imagine that....the male dominated film industry unsure if a female character, created and drawn by men is compelling enough to appeal to a fan base that they are already assuming is predominately male.

What's missing here?

It should be fairly obvious. The WOMEN.

You know, Wonder WOMAN.

The women are missing. The legions of little girls who ran around in underroos that grew up and taught their daughters to love superheroes - nowhere in this discussion.

What no one seems to understand is that there is an entire generation of women who grew up idolizing Lynda Carter. Who wanted an invisible plane and a truth lasso. Who made bracelets out of aluminum foil and begged their moms to make their hair curly just like Wonder Woman.

The women who've grown up with her, with the Buffys and the Xenas and Sarah Connors and the Ellen Ripleys and the Katniss Everdeens would love to embrace this character entirely.

So, the interest is clearly there, I can promise you that, even if Hollywood isn't convinced. Maybe those execs need to watch the documentary PBS aired earlier this year about Wonder Woman.

Then you run into the second problem. Casting.

Lynda Carter is Wonder Woman in the eyes of pretty much everyone. She was gorgeous, her body was to die for. She was strong without being masculine. Who is going to follow in those footsteps??? Who could???

There are a great many websites devoted to arguing about who should be cast as Wonder Woman already, and no matter who is suggested, the masses will find a reason to disagree. Whoever plays Wonder Woman needs to be tall....really tall. She needs to have a ridiculous body. She needs to be able to act. She needs to be able to do stunt work. She can't bring along with her any baggage from her personal life or prior film history. She needs to be believable. She needs to be a goddess.

The biggest problem with that is that everyone seems to have a different idea of what that all looks like, women included.

Wonder Woman isn't just a character, she's an icon, a cultural ideal, one that we attach our own set of values and expectations to in a way that simply doesn't happen with male heroes. She's an imagined perfection that looks a little different to each one of us....so how do we take all those images and find someone who embodies them all?

This is one of my favorite WW drawings ever, and can be purchased in the etsy shop of the creators, the Satrun Twins, here.

Talk about setting the bar high.

Ramona Fradon was on the panel as well, a comic book artist from the Golden Age of comics. She brought a unique insight to the discussion, as a rare woman in this male world. In her eyes, the movie hasn't been made yet because it can't be. The world isn't ready for a woman as powerful and strong as Wonder Woman. We live in a world where women in positions of authority are often referred to as bitches for demonstrating the same personality traits and leadership qualities as men. Until we can accept the value and importance of women as equal leaders, Wonder Woman should wait, she thinks.

Women in general, and women in the fantasy world of superheroes, she argued, have much to bring to the table. Our concerns are different. Our motivations are different. We fight for those without voices. We protect the interests of children. We urge peace over war. Wonder Woman embodies all of that, and the world just isn't ready yet.

But it will be.

Soon.

Very soon.

And we'll all be waiting.

The world needs her.

My costume is always ready.

About a month ago, I wrote a piece on accepting the ones we're given. Meaning that we have to accept both the parents we were born to and the children we have, whether either of them is what we want them to be.

With our parents, we can make choices as adults to tailor our relationships if need be, to limit them and ourselves because we know that we have to take them for what they are. We have to accept that they won't change unless they want to, and that all the wishing and hoping in the world won't matter. We have to deal with where we came from and have awareness of it, changing what we must to do things differently.

With our children, we can make the choice to fully embrace whoever they are, even if it is a bit different that what we signed up for. At the time I wrote it, I was thinking about things like illness and disease, about health problems unanticipated, about mental health struggles. Now, though, I am thinking about all the other things that make our children what they are.

Their personalities.

Their passions.

Their loves.

Their interests.

Their skills.

This is something that has been driven home soundly in the past week, as I spent several hours crammed like sardines in a building full of people living out fantasies on Sunday. Comic Con.

For the first time in a long time, for the first time maybe ever, my husband feels like he belongs somewhere. He feels like he's not the only one in the world who loves this stuff. He met people who share the same interests. He has started to get back into gaming.

No one in this universe judges each other. No one calls him a dork or a geek or makes fun of what he likes. He can have actual conversations about episodes and issues and web series with other people who get it.

Could he have felt like that before this past weekend? Of course he could have.

He could have if he would have allowed himself to embrace this part of him, without regard for what other people thought.

He could have if people didn't make fun of him about it.

He could have if it was just an accepted part of who he was all along.

I include myself in the blame here, because I wasn't as encouraging as I should have been. Those days are over though, because for the first time in over twenty years, he is actually and genuinely excited about something he loves. 

And I love him, so I will love whatever he loves.

My youngest daughter has had a rough few months, and she's learning to navigate this world she lives in while occupying the body she occupies, which would be a difficult thing for anyone to do, let alone a child. Before Sunday, she rarely embraced the world of dress-up, but all of a sudden she has.

Yesterday, she spent the entire day like this.


I let her.

She's finally (or already, depending on how you look at it) figured out that she can process how she's feeling easier if she thinks about it in terms of these characters. She needed to be Darth Vader yesterday because there were some dark thoughts running around in her mind, because she feels like sometimes no one understands her, because she feels like she's constantly having an internal struggle of good versus evil.

If she can express herself this way, if she can know that we'll all understand things better if she tells us this way, maybe it will be easier for her to work through it.

I've had several conversations with people who have messaged me about this in the past few weeks. Mostly parents asking about their kids, concerned that they live in these fantasy worlds, worried about them not being realistic. Unsure how to connect with them.

I say so what? There is nothing wrong with having an imagination. As parents, we need to encourage that.

Besides, you don't have to understand what your kids like to accept them.

Figure out what your kids love, who they identify with, what they are passionate about, and embrace it, even if (and especially if) you don't understand it.

Some of the parents who have messaged me have children who struggle with chronic illnesses, adhd, aspergers, mental illnesses....for those children especially, it makes sense when you think about it.

They need this fantasy world.

They need to believe that they have the power to overcome whatever is going on with them. They need to believe that they can be better, faster, stronger. They need the encouragement of this imaginary world when the real world so often throws up obstacles for them. They need to be unquestioningly accepted.

My husband needed all those things. He didn't have them for too long. He has them now.

If your child has these interests and is having a hard time meeting kids who share them, find them new groups of people to meet. Go to comic book stores, go to gaming stores, go to Cons and meet people.

Everyone fits in somewhere.

Let them.

After all these years, my husband is finally going for it. Embracing this piece of him. He's teaching our kids to love what they love and that we will love them no matter what. Unconditionally.

Even if they need to wear the Vader mask today.

This past weekend has been eye opening in so many ways. My husband volunteered at Comic Con two days, then we all went together as a family yesterday.

While he was gone Friday night, the kids and I watched The Lord of the Flies after finishing the book. They were constantly picking out all the inconsistencies in the film, critiquing it with the eyes that can only belong to someone fresh from the pages themselves. I was pretty proud of them for being so observant, and for recognizing that the book was far better than the movie was.

They picked up on the tensions in the story, of good versus evil, of the dark side of humanity, of the danger of anonymity, of the awfulness of pack mentality, of the fact that the most reasonable person on the island was the one picked on and eventually murdered. They saw how quickly the society broke down, how many things could have been done differently, should have been done differently. They saw how easy it can be to control other people using fear, and how easily the loudest and scariest people can assume leadership positions.

It was with that backdrop, the movie still fresh in our heads, that we went to Comic Con yesterday.

In the days before, I saw very little of my husband. When he was home, he could hardly stop talking he was so excited. Though we lived in San Diego for many years, we never went to Comic Con there for whatever reason...probably because of me and my stubborn resistance, my refusal to accept what was really happening, my imagined superiority over the geeks.

In the last year or two, though, I've given up that fight. I know I'm a geek. A dork. A head case. I tried for almost all of my life to live in some illusioned world where I wasn't, but I knew all along that I was. Instead of fighting it, I embraced it.

Last year my husband practically begged me to give in and let him pick our Halloween theme. He was a few years overdue, and deserved it after the years prior, where I had him dress as Woody from Toy Story, A Flying Monkey from the Wizard of Oz and Tweedle Dum from Alice in Wonderland. He wanted to be superheroes, specifically DC superheroes.

Fine, I said.

As long as I get to be Wonder Woman.

I ran around in those underrroos as a kid, watched the TV show all the time, and have always loved the character. I found a kickass costume and then something happened.

I got it.

It wasn't ridiculous and silly. It was kind of awesome.

I knew I would wear it again when we went to Comic Con yesterday, and I did.


In this swelling mass of costumed humanity, I learned a lot. Not just about me, but about this entire subculture in general.

No one cares who you are dressed as, no one cares who your favorite character is, no one judges you for liking something they think you shouldn't. This is a building full of people who've spent at least a decent portion of their lives getting picked on for loving what they love, for being who they are. But here, in this world, there is no judgment.

I didn't see a single person get teased for their costume, no matter how far out there it may have been.

I saw complete strangers telling each other how awesome they looked, asking where they got it or how they made it.

Acceptance, as far as the eye could see.

The My Little Pony panel discussion was what drove that home for me more than anything else. The capacity crowd, filled with some kids and families, was filled more by adults without kids, most of which were men. Fans. Bronies.

In any other place, people would be afraid to admit loving a cartoon designed for six year old little girls, but here it's okay.  The writers and artists working on the series have a true passion for what they do, and the crowd was full of people who can't get enough of it.

Sitting in on the Wonder Woman panel discussion was fascinating. I could write an entire post about her, and I probably will, so I'll save you that here now. Suffice to say that I walked out of that room even more sure that she's the hero I identify with the most. She fights for truth, for peace, for equality.

One of the things that I found the most interesting about yesterday was the very heavy presence of props and weaponry. Most of the fantasy characters in the world have some piece of equipment that helps define them, and many of the people walking around yesterday carried giant hammers or ray guns or swords or tridents or staffs or bows.

They had to go through a weapons check at the door to make sure the guns weren't real and that everything else was made from wood or plastic. The only real rule is that metal wasn't allowed.

Weapons, weapons, weapons everywhere, but no threats of violence.

None.

There is tacit agreement, an unspoken code with these people. In any other setting I could imagine where you have thousands of people milling about, the presence of this many weapons would have been terrifying.

Here, though?

Eh. It's fine.

There is total acceptance of each other. No one poses a threat to anyone else. We are all awesome in our own way. Your likes and dislikes aren't a threat to me at all. We're good. We're all good with it.

It's the most peaceful bunch of mutants, aliens, heroes and villains.

Thor made his giant hammer at home. Katniss has a sweet bow, but we all accept that she only uses it when she needs to. Loki has to have the staff or he's just a dude in a helmet.

It dawned on me at some point, taking all this in, that we can only hope that the geeks will inherit the earth someday, like in the I Fight Dragons song.


We could only hope that acceptance and peace-seeking win out over fear and control. We could only hope that those who understand what it's like to be rejected for who they are eventually embrace that piece of themselves and own it with pride.

We could only hope that Piggy and his thoughts and reasoning defeat Jack on the island.

We can hope.

The lesson is this:


...dress up like it, and you'll get lots of people taking your picture too.