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My preschool-age daughter adores Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th grade. As I’ve been hunting for more age-appropriate titles with female superheroes for her, I’ve been disappointed with how little I’m finding.

What I have found is four pitched stories that my daughter would have loved, that have not been realized. We’re ready for Cosmic Adventures in the 9th Grade! Lois Lane, Girl Reporter! Wonder Woman: The Last Amazon! Barbara Gordon, Junior Detective! She’s already noted that the Super Friends comics have way more Batman and nowhere near enough Wonder Woman for her tastes.

Thanks to Comic-Con’s Batgirl and her pointed question we’re all hearing about women at DC. How about the girls? Or are you letting the next generation of comic-book-reading girls go read Marvel Her-oes instead?

(in retrospect, that last bit of snark was probably uncalled-for.)

Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple is a slapstick fantasy storytelling game. Players each control a "pilgrim" with a particular talent for getting in trouble. The pilgrims travel across a silly universe, helping people who'd been desperate enough to write to the Flying Temple to ask for help. The gameplay results in an actual written story (though rather shorn of detail, as we played it), which I've transcribed here with varying degrees of fidelity.

Cast of Characters:

• Pilgrim Dreamy Thumb (Laura), who gets into trouble by daydreaming, and helps people by causing plants to grow or follow her around.
• Pilgrim Enthusiastic Spike (Cheryl), who gets into trouble by overdoing things, and helps people by speaking sharply.
• Pilgrim Tender Breeze (Martin), who gets into trouble with her need to please everybody, and helps people by moving quite rapidly.
• Pilgrim Warm Python (Dave), who gets into trouble by forming fast friendships with bad people, and helps people by holding tightly & never letting go.

The Pilgrims set out from the Temple to answer a plea for help sent by one Hazel Harrington, chief mechanic of an amusement park who's just contracted to become the universe's first "Cabbage-Friendly" park ... only to have the Coleslaw Front threaten retaliatory mayhem.
( transcript follows. )

Note: I've not seen any of the current season of Doctor Who. No spoilers, please! And, this post is minorly-spoilery for the whole of Tennant's run.

So, Tennant's Doctor. I know, I know, he's been old hat for awhile now and everybody's squeeing over Matt Smith, who's adorable and all, but since I don't have cable and do require captions I'm not *watching* MS's second season yet, so instead I'm chewing on how I feel about Tennant's Doctor. Again. Through the lens of the only Doctors I've watched in any quantity: Baker, Eccleston, Tennant, and Smith. This post is, as I said, 'chewing' -- no actual conclusions here. Nor organization, or for that matter much proofreading. ( Reader beware. )

I'm looking for examples in the urban fantasy genre in which multiculturalism is done well -- neither appropriation nor whitewashing. Any recommendations?

omg. I have a board game in me. But I don't want to design a board game. That sounds like work!

Originally posted by afro_dyte at what's going on with "tulpa" right now

Ghost Stories is a cooperative boardgame. My copy arrived yesterday. Players work cooperatively as Taoist monks exorcising ghosts, spending and collecting Qi, collecting materials (bowl of sticky rice, silver bell, coins, stuff) and eventually facing Wu-Feng, Lord of the Nine Hells.

Unboxing: Pretty, pretty artwork! Solid tokens & boards. I love games with lots of tokens. Nine "village tiles," each with a glowing sense of place and a cartoon villager.

Manual: This manual is awfully short for me to be having this many "I can't find what I'm looking for!" moments. Also, players are always referred-to as "he," which I find very distracting. :( On the upside, good examples & calls out edge-cases when necessary.

Gameplay: I've played one solitaire game so far. It's like Arkham Horror crossed with whack-a-mole. Okay, sometimes Arkham is a lot like whack-a-mole, too. Another haunting, go exorcise it! And over there! Over there! I think that'll be less of an issue in the multiplayer game. Also, a little weird that the strong sense-of-place on the village tiles isn't matched by the player-boards, which are all game-mechanic and light on story (though they are also pretty).

I can see why this is so highly rated on boardgamegeek.com.

I was a New Mutants fan in the late eighties, and I dipped my toes into the X-Men here and there. And then the franchise started to multiply and I got totally lost, and then I went off to college and read my way through other people's collections of other titles, and finally stopped trying to keep track of any of it and the New Mutants were over by then anyway, which made it harder for me to care.

Twenty years later, after the third time somebody gave me the hairy eyeball when I said my favorite Phoenix was named Rachel, I thought perhaps I should fill in the gaping holes in my experience. I've been reading the nine volumes of Essential X-Men reprints, which the seattle public library has. They're black-and-white reprints of X-Men & a couple of crossovers originally published 1975-1990 (the last one includes Uncanny X-Men #244-264 & Annual #13.)

( snipped: long plea for help regarding untangling what's reprinted where, and in what order. )

Once upon a time, there was a little school. This school was a place of learning, play, and love for many little people. Even though the little people were there for only a few hours a week, the little school loved them and wished to keep them happy and safe.

This is a fable, though it has more basis in fact than I'd like. As a fable, however, it is traditional to have a protagonist. Therefore, we meet a little girl -- let's call her Rachel -- who came to this school. Rachel is an imaginary little girl, because this is a fable. But being imaginary does not make her any less important. Later in the story, we'll talk a little about Rachel's friend Fred, but that comes later, after they've become friends.

( Upon entering the school... )

But now the little school had to ask itself: are there a finite number of tokens one can use, to ask for tolerance or respect? Once a person is Different and once other people have agreed to respect or tolerate those differences, what happens when the Different person continues to need things?

At this point, Rachel was feeling too rejected to want to name things. Fred, however, felt it was important to give a name to what was happening, and he named it: "unfair." It is unfair, he said, to expect that just because someone has a Difference that they must somehow give up the right to be treated with respect and tolerance just like everybody else. Respect and tolerance are not things that are finite; there's plenty to go around.

(in case anyone wonders, Rachel is not Lila -- Lila is happy, respected, & thriving in her school. This is, as previously stated, a fable.)

I'm amused that I can get so much pleasure out of a completely contrived accomplishment in a video game.

My real-life task right now, decommissioning my mailserver, feels a little like a video game except I have to generate my own periodic accomplishments. For those with accounts on my mailserver: I'm migrating all its services very slowly to a hosting service. I'm working on the mailing lists right now; I'll be moving people's personal email and shell accounts later. I have to admit that "Hey, I migrated a mailing list today!" does give me a little thrill.