Shannon Phillips

The other night the boys fell asleep watching TV on the couch—Sam snapped a couple pics of them all cuddled up.

Me: Good night, Robin. You’re a good little boy.

Robin: Thanks, mama. You’re a good lady too.

The boys got haircuts yesterday, and while Robin pretty much just looks like Robin with a haircut, Davy is like a whole new child. Who is this adorable little gnome running around in my house?

I snapped a few pictures this morning, although he was eating breakfast, so his face isn’t clean and also he dribbled orange juice down the front of his pajama top. Gritty realism, yo!

My Dad went though a period where he played a lot of FreeCell, an interest which eventually gave way to Sudoku, and probably something else by now. Anyway, Dad, I thought this was a really neat article:

http://gameological.com/2012/04/unbeatable/

Dave Ring is a hard man to find. Given that he launched one of the earliest crowdsourced internet projects—if not the first—one would expect Ring to be something of an online superstar. He was using group power before Huffington had a Post, back when Amazon was just a river.

But when you Google his name—the smell test of millennial relevancy—our Dave is buried beneath Dave Ring the stand-up comedian, Dave Ring the editorial consultant, and Dave Ring the mentally disabled televangelist. Perhaps the web has obscured Dave Ring the internet revolutionary because his project was, from the most straightforward perspective, a bust. In the summer of ’94, Ring led 110 online comrades to beat a video game called FreeCell. They lost.

It kind of goes into the math of FreeCell, and how Dave Ring organized an effort to determine whether each and every hand of FreeCell was theoretically winnable.

So when that final push on No. 11,982—an effort aided by humans and even a handful of game-solving programs—met with failure, Ring celebrated. Is every hand in FreeCell winnable? No. Thirty-one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine hands are winnable. And one isn’t. He proved that. He had solved one mystery of the universe.

Just a fun little piece.

Hope everyone had a nice Easter Sunday—and/or a very happy Passover! We dyed eggs, hunted for eggs, ate eggs, ate Easter candy, ate some lamb and dandelion salad, ate some more Easter candy, and generally had a very nice springtime celebration.

I wish I’d gotten a picture of the boys in their cute dressy outfits, but for most of the day we had them in old, stained and/or dark clothes, so as not to ruin their good clothes with dye and chocolate. Here they are working together on coloring the eggs:

It was a gorgeous day, too. Couldn’t have asked for nicer. Welcome, spring!

A) Davy likes to rummage in the kitchen cabinets for toys. He really likes the baking-implements drawer, which has the cookie-cutter shapes and other interesting things.

B) When he gets sleepy in the late morning, Davy crawls into my lap—often still clutching the last thing he was playing with—puts his head on my shoulder, and cuddles himself to sleep.

C) The two facts above explain why the sleeping toddler I just laid down in bed is still loosely cradling a pie slicer to his chest. I would surreptitiously exchange it for a nice stuffed teddy or something, but hey, who doesn’t like pie?

In other news, Robin is on his feet again, we’ve all still got a lingering cough, the weather is beautiful, and I really need to get my garden planted. I’m also hoping that we’ll have chicks soon: the chicken lady has been kind of flaky. We might have to order some chicks from the Internet (because you can totally do that!) if I can’t find a local breeder to buy from.

Robin sprained his ankle over the weekend—we took him to the doctor and it’s definitely not broken, but the poor little guy is pretty laid up. He won’t walk, but crawls around the house instead. Obviously he’s going to stay home from school until he’s walking again.

Meanwhile, I am pondering (and not for the first time) the following springtime conundrum:

Men in rolled-up shirtsleeves—totally sexy.
Men’s button-down short sleeve shirts—never sexy.

Why is that?

Although I haven’t been getting anything productive done lately, I have been playing a lot of video games. Specifically, I just finished Mass Effect 3.

I really enjoy the Mass Effect series (it’s my second favorite after the Dragon Age series), for a lot of reasons, but I think maybe one of the most interesting is that this is a man’s story that can be played as a woman.

What I mean by that is: Mass Effect is a science-fiction story about the square-jawed, hard-boiled space trooper, Commander Shepard. You know, this guy:

Right? Generic White Guy Sci-Fi Hero.

Only—you’re actually allowed to make Commander John Shepard whoever you want him to be. He doesn’t have to be white, and he doesn’t even have to be a guy. In my games it’s Commander Jane Shepard, wiry, tough-talking redhead, who the crew of the SSV Normandy would follow to the gates of frackin’ hell and back.

Because most of the video-game-playing audience is male, the story is designed with the guy pictured above in mind. I think BioWare has said that 82% percent of players choose a male Commander Shepard. So if you decide to make Jane your heroine, you get to play through a game where you are really, truly treated just as a man would be in the same kind of story. You get to try on that swagger, you get that deference and privilege and assumption of leadership. Your competence and bad-assery are never questioned. Women of all species throw themselves at you. Men of all species give you the bro-fist. You get really big guns.

There’s something…subversive, and liberating, and just enormously fun about this. Our cultural assumptions around masculinity and femininity are so deeply embedded that I don’t know if it’s even possible to create a story so free from gendered weight unless it was done exactly this way: a story that was developed for a hero, in which a heroine is unexpectedly substituted. I mean, let me put it this way. Over the course of three games, though she’s variously: captured, beaten, stripped of command, and just frackin’ shot to hell (at one point she’s literally clawing her way forward as her own blood pools around her), Jane Shepard never endures any kind of sexual threat. I could be forgetting some throwaway line somewhere, but I really don’t think there’s anything, and there’s definitely not anything major or serious. Rape just isn’t a problem that exists in Shepard’s storyverse. Can you imagine an epic story told about a female soldier that never even glances at the possibility of rape? It’s weirdly refreshing.

I mean, it’s a cliche that when people sit down to tell a story about a “strong female character,” one of the first, laziest signifiers they’ll reach for is to make her a rape survivor. We have plenty of Red Sonja-style “strong female characters” for whom sexual vulnerability is combined-and-contrasted with some kind of superficial martial strength. And clearly the real point is titillation for the (presumably male) audience. Obviously rape exists, and stories, including fantasy and sci-fi stories, about women dealing with rape do and should exist also. But damn, is it nice to have one epic action tale where Our Heroine spends exactly as much time worrying about rape as Captain Kirk does.

Being Jane Shepard lets me try on a specifically male fantasy of power and derring-do, but I get to experience it as a woman. I dunno, I mean ultimately I don’t want to stress this too hard. I just feel like it’s something video games can do that other forms of storytelling, like books or movies, usually can’t. It’s horizon-broadening. And it’s fun.

Sorry I haven’t updated recently. I’ve been really introverted over the past couple weeks, for a few reasons, I think. One is that we’re finally getting proper weather for the season: rainy and chill. This is great (although we’re still almost certainly looking at a drought this summer) but it does make me want to curl up and not move a lot.

My urge to hibernate was helped along by the fact that our car broke down (stranding Sam on the freeway!) and was in the shop for several days. There goes our tax refund. So, obviously, we weren’t getting out a lot.

We’ve also had two waves of colds—just when I thought everybody was getting better, we all came down with round 2. It’s not an awful cold, just a runny nose and a cough, but it keeps Davy up at night, so both Sam and myself are back to a pretty strung-out level of sleep deprivation.

Anyway, we’re all fine, just dealing with multiple annoyances and (at least on my part) a general desire to hide under the blankets.

“Woo woo da-da!” Said while toddling over to where his father was lying in bed, and while clutching two toy engines to his chest.

So I’m pretty sure the correct translation is, “Daddy, I’m going to run these trains across your sleeping face now.”