Sunday night, for the first time in far too long, I ran a game of Paranoia.

Paranoia, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, is an RPG originally published in the 1980s. It was an unholy union of Brave New World, 1984, and the Three Stooges. Players took on the role of Troubleshooters, hapless people in a futuristic underground complex run by the Computer, who is helpful yet insane, and who is entirely obsessed with rooting out traitors. As you might imagine, it finds a whole lot of traitors, especially since the players are given every reason to mistrust each other.

How’d it go? Towards the end of the night, a player managed to catch his one-ton power armor on fire. The fire broke through to the power unit, at which point the player managed to hit the explosive bolts, turning one giant exploding exoskeleton into a smaller exploding exoskeleton and many deadly flaming pieces of metal. Another player fired an experimental tangle gun to try to stop the metal, only to discover that the gun didn’t so much shoot sticky strands away from the user as drape those strands about the user. A third had little choice but to activate his experimental rocket boots, which consisted of two boots with twelve rockets each and a belt with twenty-four adjustable sliders, one for each of the rockets, making the whole get-up incredibly fiddly and near-impossible to use.

I don’t run Paranoia games because it gives me the chance to kill players. I run them because it gives me the chance to put tools in the players’ hands and let them kill themselves.

My mom saved a couple of boxes of my children’s books for me to give my kids. They’ve sat in the bottom of Eli’s closet since before there was an Eli. He’s looked through the books off and on a couple of times and has come up with a few gems that he likes to read. Curiously, the ones he’s picked out are some of the ones that were my favorites. In fact, I think he’s come up with three out of about my top five favorites.

Gus was a friendly ghost is one of them. It’s a kitschy 60s book with decent line drawings. Gus has a dashed outline that I’ve always itched to cut out. (I’ll have to ask Eli if he feels the same way.) My mom always groaned when I pulled Gus off the shelf. It’s amazingly long for a picture book. It takes 15-20 minutes to read and that’s why my mom hated it. It’s why I hate to see it come off the shelf as well. Often, if it’s late and we’ve had a long day I veto it because of its length.

Saturday night though, we read it and it was fabulous. When we opened it, Eli had to examine my five-year-old signature in the front of the book. Eli laughed at all the things in the story I thought was funny when I was a kid: “…on account of mice.” I cracked up the both of us reading it. We had a long discussion of what Tapioca is and why Mouse liked it so well. And when Gus gets mad at Mouse both of us were in the dumps as well.

The 20 minutes I spent reading that book was one of those times I live for as a parent. So thanks go to my mom for making me save those books all these years.

You know how the other day I mentioned that I was working on a cross-stitch piece someone hired me to do? Well, that generated a fair number of questions I thought I’d answer in a post.

How did the person find me?
A long time ago, like around the time Eli was born, I was talking with the wonderful women at my local cross-stitch store and the topic came around to people looking for people to stitch for them. I mentioned that I’d be interested in that kind of work. I left my name and number and about a month ago I got my very first inquiry.

How did I decide what to charge?
Everybody told me to charge hourly. I thought about it quite a lot. Hourly is certainly the way to go in most endeavors like this. I looked at some of the work I’d done previously and did some calculations. I came to the conclusion that no one in their right mind would pay me an hourly rate to cross-stitch, there’s just too much time involved.

I decided to do a per job charge, depending on the complexity of the work and what materials were or were not provided. I love stitching and as long as the pattern is something that I would most likely do without getting paid, the money is just fodder for my ever increasing stash.

It just so happened that the dollar amount that I came up with in my head exactly matched the dollar amount that my client came up with as well. I considered that an excellent sign and took it as an indication that I should take the job.

Am I going to be able to get it done in time?
We set a date of the end of September. My client wants to give it as a gift so I am working very hard to make that September date. I’m actually doing better time-wise on this project than I do on my own stuff. I know I need to spend a certain number of hours per day working and I haven’t been skipping very often. There are five lighthouses and a compass rose in the pattern and I have one lighthouse done and have more than half of the compass done as well. If I work as I’ve been working the past few days, I’ll be able to finish the compass today.

Does having a set deadline take the joy out of the work?
I haven’t found that to be true yet. Ask me again at the end of August.

I think I’ve covered all the questions people have asked. If you have others, post them below and I’ll answer them.

Look what I got!

That’s right, thanks to Misty’s gift, I’ve leapt into the future of 2005. Finally I can play Bioshock on my TV, like God intended.

What’s that, Xbox 360? What do you mean, an interloper?

Oh, him? First-generation Xbox? He’s harmless. I mean, it’s not like he’s really any threat to someone like you, with your —

Kill it? No! That’s crazy talk! That Xbox has served us faithfully. I’m going to send him to a farm in upstate New York, where he can frolic in the fields and —

I won’t do it! I won’t!

Oh, well. It had to be done.

The list is long but boils down to this: trying to acclimate to Eli’s last summer before school starts.

In an effort to keep things light this summer, I didn’t schedule any camps or lessons of any kind for the kids. Ironic, since this is the first summer Eli’s been old enough to be eligible for most activities that run in the summer. Instead I opted for just hanging out with our friends, especially the ones with pools, and getting Eli extra time with Josh before they go to separate schools in the fall.

We’ve gone and developed quite the schedule anyway. Mondays we play at church. Tuesdays are my morning off. A girl from church is coming over to keep the kids so I can run errands or grocery shop alone, which is a mother’s nirvana. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays haven’t quite settled out yet but will be some order or combination of going to the Botanical Gardens, spending time with Josh and his family or having Hallie over so the two of us can experiment in the kitchen.

This summer is already more bittersweet than I expected it to be. Eli is so ready for school, I’ve been saying it for a year now. And yet. And yet. It seems a giant corner to turn. A street he will go down mostly without me. I thought I would have NO problem with that. I’m looking at the couple of months until school starts and I’m wondering what else we can pack in before he goes.

The big news around here is another dishwasher leak. The first one, Stephen and his dad repaired in a day and cost less than $20. This time, the part wasn’t in stock so today marks a week of me washing dishes. It’s still not going to cost very much to repair the dishwasher and Stephen can do it. The bad news of the story is the slow leak ruined the kitchen floor. I had the folks who installed the hardwoods send someone to look at it and he gave us an $800 estimate. We’re thinking about replacing the hardwood with tile since this is the third time in seven years we’ve had water damage somewhere in the kitchen.

In crafting news, I’ve been working on a cross-stitch for hire job. It’s a lovely set of lighthouses that I need to get done before October.

And making notebooks for folks. I’ve made and given away a few and made a few more. I especially like making them now that I have an actual paper guillotine instead the 1-sheet cutter I used when I first started the process.

(Yes, I know Narwhal is misspelled. They’ve sent me a new card to replace that one.)

So all in all, shaping up to be a really busy summer. I’ll make sure to take my camera to the gardens this week so I can post some new photos.

Pres Obama while u sightseeing in Paris u said ‘time to delivr on healthcare’ When you are a ‘hammer’ u think evrything is NAIL I’m no NAIL
—Senator Chuck Grassley’s Twitter feed

You know, a lot of political speech would have been much better on Twitter.

Heres truth: NO FEAR! Now everybody back to work. (@fdr)

Hey peeps, lurkers support me and Vietnam in email. 😛 (@trickydick)

@meinfuehrer We’ll fight on beaches, fight on landing grounds, fight on fields & streets, fight on hills. Never surrender! (@frmr1stlrdadmiralty)

Ask what cntry can do 4 you? FAIL. Ask what you can do 4 cntry. (@hatlessjfk)

@baldandblotchy U liek peace? U like librlzation? Open this gate! Tear down wall! (@gipper)

4 score + 7 yrs ago = America. Now we fight so gov’t of ppl & by ppl & for ppl won’t perish. (@honestabe)

I actually like that Grassley’s tweeting, even if he does sound like he belongs on Xbox Live. I’m interested in there being more information from our elected officials, especially less-filtered information. Grassley’s messages are directly from him, typed on his Blackberry when the mood strikes him. Good for him.

I only hope he won’t profess an undying love for Edward Cullen.

Saturday, to celebrate its decade anniversary, we watched Star Wars Episode I with the accomanying Rifftrax.

I hadn’t watched it all the way through in ten years. Holy cow, I’d forgotten how bad it was. It’s like those Anita Blake comics where nothing happens. Even with part of the old MST3k crew making jokes I could barely sit through it, and even Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy were reduced to shouting, “Will you just shut the hell up?” every time Jar-Jar opened his mouth.

I’m undecided: is the movie worse than the two Matrix sequels? The Matrix sequels take longer, but they didn’t squander two decades of goodwill in fifteen seconds flat.

Several years ago, Eli climbed into a dog cage, so of course we took a picture. Ten months later we got hate mail about it.

A few months ago, comic book writer Matt Fraction took a picture of his kid in a dog crate.

Because my mind works lighting fast, yesterday I thought, “I wonder how many pictures of kids in dog crates I can find.”

The answer? Lots and lots and lots and even more lots. Enough lots for thousands of pillars of salt.

One kid in a dog cage!

TWO kids in a dog cage!

THREE kids in a dog cage!

FOUR KIDS IN A CAGE!

Sometimes the kids are dangerous.

Sometimes they are cloned.

I feel like I have stumbled into a subculture I never knew existed, like finding out that people write WOPR/KITT slashfic. I think I’m going to declare this a new movement, write a book, and get on Oprah. Clearly it’s time parents stopped claiming that their kids aren’t like pets at all.

Hands up if you’ve been in this situation: you have to give a presentation using PowerPoint, and you’re pretty sure it’s going to suck. Maybe you don’t know how to put an effective one together. Maybe you do, but you don’t have enough time to put a good presentation together. Maybe your boss has handed you the presentation and said, “Show this,” or you’re collaborating with someone who’s not down with anything other than slide after slide of bullet points.

Sure, there’s some info out there. Duarte Design’s blog is good, as is Presentation Zen. Both Michael Lopp and Seth Godin have great advice. But there’s no time left it’s got to be fixed right now.

Take a deep breath. It’s not actually too late. There are things you can do to make your presentation suck less, from slide tweaks to changes in how you present. Some of my advice will take you longer to implement; I’ll save those bits of advice for the end.

Use a sans serif font. Do your letters have little feets on them? Then it’s a serif font, like the one I’m using now. Use a sans serif font, like this one. It’d be keen if you could use something other than Arial or Helvetica, but don’t go too crazy.

Make your fonts bigger. That 10-point type on your slide? Unless everyone’s at the front of the room, not everyone will be able to read it. Guy Kawasaki claims nothing smaller than 30-point type.

Make your slides’ titles give the key conclusion. While the title-and-bulleted-list approach isn’t great, chances are you’ll still use it. When you do, don’t use generic titles. The title should summarize the slide’s conclusion — the point you want people to take away from the slide. Don’t say “Reducing Drag”, say “Fins Reduce Drag”.

Don’t apologize for your slides. When you present, don’t say, “If anyone can tell me what this picture means…” or “I don’t know why I included this slide”. If it’s a bad slide, fix it or take it out.

Don’t don’t don’t say, “I know this is an eye chart, but…”. I run into this a lot in government presentations. If your slide is so dense and crammed full of stuff that no one will read it, take it out. Take a look at this slide from the U.S. Central Command, via The New York Times via Edward Tufte’s site:

Yes, this is a subset of “don’t apologize for your presentation,” but it’s so common that I wanted to call it out separately.

Use a remote. Instead of hovering behind your computer or returning to it for each slide transition, get a wireless remote that’ll keep you from fumbling at a keyboard every minute or so.

Now let’s move into more time-intensive suggestions.

Don’t read from your slides. Memorize your presentation. A related bit of advice:

Don’t put all of the information on your slides. Admit it: you’ve used bullet lists as a crutch. You put everything on your slides so you don’t have to work as hard memorizing what you’re going to say. That’s fine. I’ve done it as well. But if people can read your presentation and learn everything they need to know, why are you there? Why even present it? Is your audience there to read a document or hear you?

Minimize your presentation’s # of concepts and concepts per slide. People can only absorb so much information before they become full. What’s your talk’s main theme? What three points do you want your audience to take away from your presentation? Alexei Kapterev suggests structuring your presentation with three key points, and possibly three key sub-points beneath those depending on how long your presentation is.

Ignore rules that tell you how many slides to have. One slide a minute? One slide every half minute? It depends on how much information you cram onto your slides (hopefully not too much), how fast you talk, and what your audience is. I’ve seen great hour-long presentations that use twenty slides, and I’ve seen wonderful ten minute ones that have a hundred.

Don’t make your slides look like your presentation’s outline. Bullet lists are fine for outlining and figuring out your presentation’s story, but ditch them when you make your final presentation.

Make your slides augment what you’re saying. When you get right down to it, your slides are a second avenue of communication. If they just parrot the words that you’re saying, you’re wasting that communication channel. You can use pictures that add emphasis instead of words. You can use a single phrase that summarizes your point. Your slides can be jokes that riff on what you’re saying, like what Stephen Colbert does with The Wørd.

Make a separate leave-behind document. One reason people make bullet-list slides that have the entire presentation’s content is because they want to leave the presentation behind for those who couldn’t be there, or for people to refer to later. Don’t do that. Make a separate handout or document for that purpose.

Read more blogs and books. I mentioned several blogs and articles above. To them add Advanced Presentations By Design, slide:ology, and Beyond Bullet Points.

I admit it: I am in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today. And occasionally we have very geeky conversations there.

Me: Five kids in the house = combinatoric explosion. No wonder interactive fiction authors avoid NPCs.

Glen: I just recently did that problem. Complexity scales as the number of pair interactions, plus a linear term in the number of children. Therefore two kids is three times as complicated as one; three is six times; four is ten times. I think the general formula is 1 + 2 + … + N for N kids.

Oh, and good luck. Having that many rugrats running around is pretty complicated!

Jeff: But aren’t some kids more complicated than others?

Glen: In a word, no. The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.

For bonus points, should this series have higher-order terms? Why or why not?