Sara: “Ollie, what would you like for Christmas?”
Ollie: “A pan. A real pan, for cooking.”
Sara: “Well, what kind of pan?”
Ollie: “A bubble gum pan.”
Sara: “What’s a bubble gum pan?”
Ollie: “So I could make bubble gum for Evie when she wants some.”
Sara: “Okay. Well, what else do you want?”
Ollie: “A popcorn popper, so I can teach my kids how to make popcorn.”
Sara: “Anything else?”
Ollie: “Leaves. So I can save them and they don’t all die.”
Sara: “Anything else?”
Ollie: “A piano.”
Is that not the CUTEST CHRISTMAS LIST of all time? So his priorities, in order, are 1) his sister, 2) passing on traditions to his future kids, 3) mother nature, and 4) himself.
Evie: “Momma said to remind you that you can talk and make dinner at the same time.”
I mentioned playing a game called The Resistance. You can buy The Resistance, but there’s really no point; it’s kind of like buying Uno when you can just as easily play Crazy 8s with a deck of cards. This is a great game; tons of fun and easy to play. The only downside is that you need at least 5 people to play.
So without further ado, here are the rules (slightly adapted from wikipedia).
Setup
Split a regular deck of playing cards into red and black cards.
Shuffle an appropriate number of black (Resistance) and red (Spy) cards as per the table below and deal them out at random.
Number of Spies & Resistance Members
Number of players:
5
6
7
8
9
10
Resistance
3
4
4
5
6
6
Imperial Spy
2
2
3
3
3
4
After each player looks at his card to know his role, discard the cards.
The first mission leader instructs the group to close their eyes, for the spies to open their eyes and see each other, for the spies to close their eyes again, and then for everyone to open their eyes and begin the game (with long pauses at each stage).
Missions
During each round of the game, the player to the left of the previous Leader becomes the new Leader. The Leader selects a certain number of players to send out on a mission (the Leader may choose to go out on the mission themselves), starting with Mission 1. The table below shows the required number of players to go out on each mission. All of the players then discuss the Leader’s choice and, simultaneous and in public, vote on whether to accept the team make-up or not. If a majority of players vote no to the proposal, leadership passes on to the next player to the left, who proposes his own mission. (I take this to mean that ties mean the mission continues.) This continues until a majority of players agree with the current Leader’s mission assignment. After five rejected mission proposals in a row, the Imperial Spies automatically win the game, therefore it is a common house rule to not vote on the fifth mission proposal and simply send whatever the Leader proposes.
Number of players required be sent on each mission
Number of players:
5
6
7
8
9
10
Mission 1
2
2
2
3
3
3
Mission 2
3
3
3
4
4
4
Mission 3
2
4
3
4
4
4
Mission 4
3
3
4*
5*
5*
5*
Mission 5
3
4
4
5
5
5
(*) Two Mission Fail cards are required for the mission to fail
Once a mission team is agreed on, the players then “go” on the mission. To “go” on a mission, each selected player is given a black (Success) card and a red (Failure) card. Players will turn in either their black card or their red card. Resistance members MUST turn in, face down, a Mission Success card, while the Imperial Spies may either secretly turn in a Mission Success or Mission Fail card. The cards are shuffled and then revealed. If all cards show Success, the Resistance earns one point. If even one card shows Fail, the Spy team has sabotaged the mission and earns one point (except for the above-noted exceptions on Mission 4, where it may be necessary for 2 Fail cards to be played in order for the mission to fail).
The game continues until one team accumulates 3 points.
That’s the boring details, but not the fun part of the game. The game is not really about the cards that are played, the game is about trying to guess who the spies are (or, conversely, trying to throw suspicion away from yourself and onto other people). It’s about bluffing, and reading body language, and misunderstandings.
It is so frustrating when you are accused of being a spy, when you are clearly not. I have never been the spy, not a single time, but there’s obviously something very suspicious about me, because nobody ever believes me. I am never the spy! Spoiler alert, Sara is ALWAYS the spy. I think the universe is trying to tell her something.
I also always make the first mission leader specify what exactly we are resisting against, and each individual mission leader specify what exactly the mission is. I think this adds a lot of fun to the game, and gives you something to talk about if you’re not chosen to go on the mission. I just like to imagine what kind of secret missions my friends and family are going on in order to disrupt the Evil School Administrator Overlords, or the 4 Year Olds in Strollers status quo.
Anyway, enjoy. Let me know in the comments if you give it a try.
Ollie has been potty trained for well over a year now, with no problems whatsoever. He’s been dry at naps for ages, and he goes at school by himself, no problem. So for awhile now I’ve been meaning to try to get him through the final hump, no diaper overnight, but I just kept putting it off. It seemed like it was always a bad time. We kept saying, “Oh, we’ll do it after we get back from vacation” or “well, this weekend is busy, maybe next weekend”.
We had tried awhile ago, but he just wasn’t ready for it at that time. However, with school and everything, he’s just seemed so grown up lately, and it didn’t seem fair that he had to wear a diaper at night just because his parents weren’t getting off their butts and doing it. Finally, he had two dry diapers in a row and I thought, “Okay, its time to get this done.”
I went into it with my eyes open. This isn’t my first time at the rodeo. I think it took Evie at least 2 nights before she had a dry one, so I was expecting Ollie to take at least that, but probably more. We gave him a lot of talks about what a big boy he was to pump him up, offered a reward, and I prepared the area ahead of time. I put 5 sets of sheets and mattress pads on the bed, one on top of the other, and made a stack of spare blankets and pjs. If he was wet, we could just strip off the top layer and toss him back in bed, easy peasy.
After the first few nights, I decided that he needed a little help to get a successful night. I was hoping this would give him the confidence to really do it. It seemed like he was waking up and going first thing in the morning, probably because he forgot he wasn’t wearing a diaper. The problem was, if I woke him up a little early to go to the potty, he wouldn’t go back to sleep. So I started taking him to the bathroom when I went to bed, hoping that would buy him some extra time.
This wasn’t working, so next I decided to start setting my alarm in the night. I hoped that if I took him around 4, I would catch him before he went and then he would be able to go back to sleep. When he was wet at 4, I moved it back to 2, and then 1. I was trying so hard to make him successful, but eventually I had to throw in the towel and admit he couldn’t do it. Despite my efforts, he’s just not ready yet.
It was pretty disheartening. It was just so much work, making the bed 5 times every night, washing load after load of sheets to get ready for the next night, getting up every night and cleaning him up, trying to maintain a positive attitude through the whole thing keep encouraging him. I was so exhausted and it was just all for nothing. I have to admit that on the last night, when I was cleaning him up at 1 a.m. and changing the sheets for the umpteenth time, I cried a little. Hey, I was tired.
At the end of the day, he’s got to be ready, and no amount of preparation or sheet changing can change that. He’s only 3, so it’s not like he’s behind or anything. Like everything with parenting, sometimes you’ve just got to take it as it comes.
We live up against the train tracks, and unfortunately it’s pretty common for kids to climb up there and cause mischief (real mischief, like throwing rocks through people’s windows). Whenever we see kids up there, we always call the police immediately, but I think there’ not a lot they can really do.
However, it always causes quite a commotion, and all of this transfers down to the kids. They get VERY upset when they see “teenagers” up on the tracks. Oliver in particular seems particularly obsessed with teenagers, and how naughty they are. I’m not even sure if he knows exactly what a teenager is, since he seems to use the word to mean some sort of malicious gremlin.
Ollie: “Does the clock have glass over it so the teenagers don’t change what time it is?”
…which I guess isn’t so far from the truth. On the other hand, it’s possible that he’s not upset enough about these terrible teenagers. They do carry a certain mystique:
Ollie: “Teenager know how to do that.”
Me: “Do what?”
Ollie: “Take their boots off [by stepping on the back and not sitting down]. They do it after they come down from the train tracks. There’s probably a teenager doing it right now, at his home.”
Alas, I guess their cool disregard for the law (and boot removal conventions) outweighs the badness of getting up on the train tracks:
Ollie: “Where do the teenagers climb up on the tracks?”
Sara: “Right there.”
Ollie: “When I’m a teenager, I might climb up on those tracks too.”
Me: “I hope not. I hope you’re a good teenager who wouldn’t do that.”
Ollie: “Yeah. But I’ll probably be the other kind of teenager.”
Recently, Sara and I saw the movie Gravity. It was a fantastic movie, and I definitely recommend it (and I think this post is spoiler free, so feel free to read if you haven’t seen it yet). I was saying to my co-worker that I always get excited when she wants to see a science fiction movie. “But Gravity is not science fiction,” he protested.
It never occurred to me that Gravity would not be considered science fiction. The entire movie takes place in outer space, which is traditionally a hallmark of science fiction. Many of the typical science fiction tropes and devices are in play. However, I subsequently had this argument with many other people, and everyone seems to agree that I’m wrong; this is not science fiction.
Now, as a writer of science fiction, I am probably a little more versed in the numerous sub-categories of science fiction than the average person. You’ve got “hard” science fiction, “soft” or “social” science fiction, Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Space Opera, Space Western, and contemporary or “near future”, to name a few. My point is that I am accustomed to viewing the label of Science Fiction as a rather broad umbrella, perhaps broader than some might consider. In other words, I believe you can have science fiction without aliens and laser guns.
The debate seems to center on the word “future”. Everyone I’ve talked to about this stands firm on the idea that science fiction must depict the future. However, to my mind this presents two problems: 1) you have to ignore alternate history stories that actually occur in the past, such as Steampunk, and 2) how do you define “future”? How far out does it has to be?
For example, if I write a legal thriller that takes place in 2014, that’s clearly not science fiction, even though it takes place in the “future”. So to me, it’s more about the feel of the story, rather than a time frame. And Gravity feels to me like science fiction.
But we’re certainly not going to be able to agree on a definition that includes “how Shane feels about it”, so I tried turning to the Internet. It turns out, the Internet is just as confused as I am about all of this. There’s really no clear consensus about what makes something science fiction.
Isaac Asimov. 1990. “‘[H]ard science fiction’ [is] stories that feature authentic scientific knowledge and depend upon it for plot development and plot resolution.”
Isaac Asimov. 1975. “Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.”
Arthur C. Clarke. 2000. “Science fiction is something that could happen – but you usually wouldn’t want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn’t happen – though you often only wish that it could.” (emphasis original)
So based on those definitions, I would argue that “Gravity” fits the bill. On the other hand, one of my co-workers counter-argued that essentially all stories depend on technology for plot advancement. Receiving a phone call on a cell phone? Driving in a car? Using a computer? All dependent on technology. It doesn’t become science fiction until the technology depicted is technology of the future. At that point we’re back to arguing timeframe again.
Finally we settled on the idea that the timeframe can be anything, but the technology has to be something that “most people don’t have access to”. Under that definition, I think “Gravity” qualifies because most people don’t go into space, and it would stop being science fiction when space travel became mundane (the way cell phones and computers have).
However, when one is forced to argue with essentially everybody on a point, whether or not one convinces them, one must consider the fact that he is, in fact, flat out wrong. So we will settle this the way we settle all important arguments around here; with a web poll.
What say you, Internet?
At the end of the day, the label “science fiction” is a marketing term. It’s a way for bookstores and movie rental stores to classify stories. It’s essentially meaningless, other than to help people find stories they would be interested in seeing.
Under that notion, I’m confident in saying that someone who enjoys science fiction would also enjoy seeing “Gravity”.
Shane Halbach 