deerstalker

https://blacknerdproblems.com/we-are-the-caretakers-is-the-front-line-of-afrofuturism/

[This article is based on an Early Access build of the game, and may not reflect the final product.]

Into The Pridelands

One of the most integral concepts to Afrofuturism is community. Characters at the center of Afrofuturistic stories are part of other lives and lands whose fate is tied to their own. Living this connection between Afrofuturism and community is the core of Heart Shaped Games’ We Are The Caretakers. 

Style is another undeniable part of Afrofuturism, which WATC has from jump. The opening screen features rainfall glittering off the stylish armor of one of the titular Caretakers. Once the player chooses their Caretaker’s presentation (masculine or feminine), the game drops immediately into some on-the-job training. 

As stewards of the land of Shadra, the Caretakers’ most immediate concern is the rhinoceros-like Raun. Investigating a grisly poaching, the player discovers a baby Raun. Your newly-elected Conductor decides instead to name and enlist the foundling to help hunt their parents’ killers.

Trial By Combat

Players highlight and move their party across the Shadran plains in search of the criminals.  Scouting before crossing into new areas reveals points of interest, such as Raun poacher traps to disarm or towns to interact with. Catching up with the poachers drops you into the turn-based tactical combat portion of the game. 

The game has an auto-battle configuration that allows you to set attack patterns, but what’s here is classic turn-based strategy. Rather than the stats of traditional RPGs, Stamina and Will are the party’s basic resources. Stamina acts as health for your party members: both battle and travel across the map can deplete it, but restoration is as simple as visiting a town.

Will as a stat doesn’t have this problem, but your enemies’ reserves can be much harder to deplete. Reducing either stat to 0 with your party’s skills will make a combatant take a knee. This gives the player a number of choices for the defeated. ‘Shake Down’ makes the opponent run their pockets before they flee, while ‘Wound’ removes them from the game entirely. 

‘Detain’ is the option that leads to more interesting play. Between missions, your squad returns to Caretaker HQ. Here, players can customize the compositions of their teams by accepting new recruits and leveling their class types. Research points can be acquired for upgrades to make combat and exploration less difficult. 

Passing sentencing on those detained from battle is the most interesting mechanic by far. The Reputation stat takes into account the Caretakers’ standing with Shadra at large through each judgment. Will players release offenders with an appropriate penalty? Or perhaps accept a bribe on the offender’s behalf?

Beyond Wakanda

Players’ most likely course of action, though, is to retrain these poachers as new Caretaker units. As you build more squads of Caretakers, they can be dispatched across the map to help accomplish several mission objectives at once. Accomplishing these is further complicated by the fragility of the game’s current Early Access builds. 

Crashes occur frequently, and with saving only possible between missions this can lose significant progress. Combat at this stage could also use some work. Attacks feel weightless due to simple animations and missing audio cues. Between steady updates and a Discord for feedback about the game, the developers are addressing these concerns.

We are the Caretakers is not a Black Panther simulator, and it’s not trying to be. By using real-time strategy as a way of focusing on detail, they’ve managed to envision Afrofuturism as a process rather than a destination. WATC’s Shadra holds promising potential to let players see what it takes to build & maintain a community beyond colonization.

7 out of 10 Baby Raun

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The post ‘We Are The Caretakers’ is the Front Line of Afrofuturism appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.

http://nerdywithchildren.com/best-kids-tv-shows-for-10-year-olds-that-your-family-will-love/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=best-kids-tv-shows-for-10-year-olds-that-your-family-will-love

We binge-watched and uncovered the best kids’ TV shows for 10 year olds that will make the whole family happy.

It’s getting harder at our house to find TV shows that will hold all of our attention. My daughter isn’t a little kid anymore and has developed interests that are different from mine. A lot of the shows she’s developed a taste for don’t taste good to me. Given the choice between Maine Cabin Masters or Good Bones, both of which the rest of my family think are great, and watching my co-workers on Zoom, I’ll take the co-workers. 

I love it when we find a show that we can all enjoy (and discuss into the ground) together. This is a list of shows that have entertained us and given us scenes to re-live, characters to root for, and another world to live in for a little bit. This list is intended to include shows that might not be on your radar. I’m not going to discuss nerdy main courses like Star Trek or the Arrowverse or The Mandalorian. If you’re at a website called Nerdy With Children, you already know about those. (Besides Star Trek: Disco is too gory and the Arrowverse is too mediocre to expose impressionable 10-year-olds to. I haven’t seen the Mandalorian because I am too cheap for Disney Plus.) My goal here is to make you think, “I hadn’t thought of watching that one with the kids. Maybe I’ll check it out.” Feel free to add your favorites in the comments, especially shows with more diverse casts!

Expedition Unknown

“My name is Josh Gates, and I have seen Raiders of the Lost Ark fifty seven times.” That’s the voice over I like to do at the beginning of every episode of Expedition Unknown, while Josh Gates is doing the real one. Josh Gates is one of the tribe of nerds. He gets a little misty when he visits Indiana Jones’ bullwhip and fedora at the Smithsonian, just like I do. He says “Punch it, Chewie” when he gets into a vehicle that he is not driving, something that is possible that I do without knowing. I suspect that Mrs. Gates has not yet stopped hearing about the time a Japanese sword maker told Mr. Gates that he has “samurai DNA” during a scene where he learned how to use a katana. Expedition Unknown episodes are each structured around the search for some historical treasure, but the treasure is rarely the point. The point is that learning about history is endlessly interesting and nourishing. I like that Josh Gates shows curiosity about and respect for the past, along with being a giant colossal nerd. He’s a skillful horseman and SCUBA diver and never once makes a big deal out of it. There are a couple of Expedition Unknown spin-offs: Expedition X, in which Gates’ presumably more expendable B-Team of Phil Torres and Jessica Chobot search for monsters and ghosts, and Josh Gates Tonight, which is a talk show that I haven’t seen.

All Creatures Great and Small

Early on in the pandemic, my daughter and I read James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small books out loud, so we were excited to see the recent TV adaptation of it. (There is a previous TV version that ran for years.) All Creatures Great and Small is set in the vanished world of the Yorkshire Dales in the late 1930s. Veterinary surgeon James Herriot takes his first job out of school in the village of Darrowby, and over seven episodes practices medicine, integrates into his new community, and falls in love. The show believes that hard lives don’t have to make hard people. Life in the Depression-era Yorkshire Dales meant days full of grindingly hard work, and yet nearly everyone James meets is kind at their core, where it matters. The pace is gentle and the love story is sweet. When we visited Herriot’s world, pandemic despair couldn’t get its claws into my family and me. That is the highest praise I can think of for a TV show right now.

Lego Masters

The Lego Masters are our kind of people. Anyone like Lego Master Corey Samuels, who gave a demonstration on how to build the eight planets out of Lego at our library’s comic convention, is one of the tribe. Lego Masters features teams of builders displaying jaw-dropping levels of skill as they compete to build the best space station, the bridge that can support the most weight, and the project that is most satisfying to heave off a balcony. The judges on the show work for Lego and show that A) it’s possible to get a job designing Lego sets and B) designing Lego sets is challenging work that requires knowledge about a lot of different things, ranging from color theory to engineering to cost control in industrial processes. The show is a good entry into talking about how craft and artistry can take many forms, why you should be nice to your teammates and how to make a truly excellent Lego sphinx.

The Pack

In The Pack, teams of humans and their dogs compete in tests of athletic skill, scent work, and fashion savvy. My family and I had a blast making up dialogue for the dogs, and making TV friends with the humans. For the record, the best dog is Bozley the border collie mix. Bozley is kind of a screw-up, which means that I know how he feels a lot of the time. The best human is Kentucky, who has a lot to teach about being in the moment and staying out of his own way. The Pack is generally undemanding fun, but something happened when I watched the episode that’s set in Austria. The teams went to a beer garden, and as I watched them drink beer as friends, in comradeship, I got a lot more emotional than I usually do when I watch reality TV. It was during a grimmer period of the pandemic and I wanted to do what they were doing so, so badly. I’ll remember that for a long time.

Bizarre Foods With Andrew Zimmern

Andrew Zimmern is a Minnesota-based chef and food writer who travels the world eating strange things. On one level, his show is about traveling to places where not a lot of Americans go and eating things that don’t sound appetizing to us. On another level, it’s basically Star Trek, except with fermented walrus anus instead of dilithium crystals. It’s about exploring strange new worlds and learning how to find common ground with people with who you might not think you have any common ground with. Zimmern and his team show us that one eater’s “bizarre” is another eater’s “scrumptious”. My favorite exchange from the show comes from an episode where Andrew travels to an African country that I, unfortunately, don’t remember the name of. It goes along the lines of:

African Guy: What’s your favorite food?

Andrew: My favorite food is cheese. We let milk go bad and then cut it up into pieces and eat it. 

African Guy: Sounds disgusting. My favorite food is coagulated cow’s blood, which is delicious.

Andrew: Sounds awful. Friends?

The actual video shows it better than I do- two adults good-naturedly learning about each other. Maybe coagulated cow’s blood isn’t ever going to be Andrew’s favorite food, and probably cheese isn’t ever going to be this African guy’s favorite food, but they can both envision a world in which there’s room for the other and his bizarre opinions.

The post Best Kids TV Shows for 10 Year Olds That Your Family Will Love appeared first on Nerdy With Children.

http://geekbabyclothes.com/how-to-organize-baby-clothes-on-a-budget/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-organize-baby-clothes-on-a-budget

Good news, it’s not as hard as you think to organize all your baby clothes without spending hours folding and going into credit card debt.

Consider your own closet for a moment. Are you the Type-A, super organized individual whose clothing is hung seasonally and color-coordinated? Do your socks always end up in the sock drawer, shirts nicely pressed and hung, and shoes nicely lined up on the shoe rack?

Or are you more the type to pile your clean clothes on “The Chair” in the corner of the room and merely shrug at the wrinkles? Can’t ever find the shirt you’re looking for that you swore you washed on Friday? 

Maybe whichever type you are, your partner is the opposite? That can be lots of fun (said no one ever).

The point is, those Type A’s are onto something- getting dressed and ready for your day is a breeze when everything you own is neatly organized, hung, and folded, waiting for you to grab it and go. “The Chair” isn’t doing you any favors when you’re running late and you can’t find that one purple shirt that you swore you washed last week turns out to be at the bottom of your dirty hamper. 

When you have a newborn, those rushed mornings trying to find the exact articles of clothing you need, preferably clean and wrinkle-free, won’t be any easier if you don’t get serious about organization. That’s why this article exists- to help you figure out exactly how to organize your baby’s clothes to save you time and energy, without breaking the bank. Ready? Let’s get started!

(Not ready? Did that sudden call-to-action send you into a panic because you realized you don’t even have any baby clothes yet, let alone nursery furniture to put them in?! Don’t worry- we’ve got you covered. Check out our comprehensive guide to all of the essentials a newborn baby needs, and take a look at the preparing for a newborn checklist while you’re at it!)

Everything In Its Place

When it comes to organizing your baby’s clothing, there’s a lot more than just folding onesies or hanging tiny jackets. If you really want to create a nursery that works for you and is easily scalable as your little one grows, you’ll want to do some prep work to set everything up, before baby arrives and you turn into a sleep-deprived zombie. Kidding! (Not really).

What Clothes Will You Need Out?

If you’ve just found out you’re pregnant (congrats!), you might not have too many clothes to organize yet. But by the time your due date is approaching, you might feel like you’ve been inundated with a wave of little onesies and adorable outfits. 

The problem is, there are a lot of those clothes that you won’t need immediately. For example, that 6-9 month winter jacket you received at the baby shower- absolutely adorable, but you’re due in June and your little one won’t need it for months. No need to keep that out- you can store it (more on this later). 

But how many clothes should you keep out at a time? What kind of clothes? And where should you put them?

Regardless of your baby’s age or the season, there are a few essentials you’ll always need to have out and accessible. You can store extras if you have too many, but you will need at least 1-2 weeks worth of the following items out and accessible:

• Diapers (disposable, cloth, or a combination of both)
• Onesies (one-piece garment with snaps at the bottom for easy diaper changing; can be paired with leggings for cooler temps)
• Sleepers (pajamas for newborns! These can either be footies or gowns)

Once you’ve gathered the essentials, you can narrow down your needs and prioritize accordingly. This is somewhat unique to your situation and will be based on the amount of clothing and the amount of space you have available. Generally, you can rotate your baby’s wardrobe based on the normal sizing convention of 3-month increments. 

This means that when you bring your newborn home, you’ll want to have the 0-3 month clothing in the dresser and closet easily accessible. After a few months, you can gradually remove the items that are too small and start to replace them with seasonally appropriate, properly sized clothing.

How to Organize the Dresser

A dresser is an essential item for most baby nurseries. With so many tiny clothes, it doesn’t make sense to try and hang everything in the closet. Plus, baby clothes fold up very small so you can start out by using just a few of the dresser drawers, and have room to expand as your little one grows. 

It’s also very handy to use small baskets, bins, or other organizers within each dresser drawer to separate tiny items like socks and hats.  We love these Foldable Cloth Storage Boxes. They come in sets of 4 or 6, whichever one you’d like. If you’d prefer to save some space and hang your storage space, try this Closet Rod Hanging Storage Organizer.

Consider storing the following clothing and other items in dresser drawers:

• Diapers
• Onesies
• Sleepers
• Shirts
• Pants
• Diaper covers
• Burp cloths
• Bibs
• Thin blankets
• Crib sheets
• Mattress covers

You can organize these in whatever way you like to make things easier on yourself. Consider grouping like items, such as diapers and diaper covers in one drawer, burp cloths, bibs, and onesies in another, etc. 

If the clothing takes up too much space in the dresser drawer, try different folding techniques to condense the items. You can also roll the clothes and store them on their side to take up less space.

What Goes Into the Closet?

Once you have all of your daily use items stored away in the dresser, that just leaves…well, everything else! 

The closet is the perfect place to store a few different categories of items. Remember that adorable 6-9 month jacket that won’t fit your baby for several months? Into the closet it goes! 

The best way to do this (in our opinion!) is to sort the non-essential and/or too large clothing into piles according to size. Then, using either vacuum-seal bags or plastic totes, store the clothing, labeling it with the appropriate size range. This will make transitioning into larger clothing or changing clothing out for the seasons much simpler! 

Another category of clothing you can put in the closet is bulky items such as coats, jackets, fleece sleepers, dresses, or any other irregular garments that would be difficult to fit into a dresser drawer. Shoes would also be perfect to store in the closet. 

Finally, you might want to store extra bedding in the closet as well. Though storing one or two sets of crib sheets in the dresser can be helpful for middle-of-the-night changes, there probably won’t be room for several sheets, blankets, and mattress covers in the dresser. Store them in bins in the closet, or hang using pant hangers.

Stocking Your Diaper Bag

Stocking Your Diaper Bag

Your diaper bag will go everywhere you and your baby go- so you’ll need to stock it well, with everything you could need for a day outside of the house. Here’s a helpful list of diaper bag items to get you started:

• 1-2 changes of clothes 
• 1-2 diapers per hour you’ll be out of the house
• Seasonally appropriate accessories (hat, mittens, sunhat, etc.)
• Burp cloths
• Disposable wipes
• Plastic bags for soiled clothes
• Changing pad
• Diaper cream 
• Blanket
• Pacifier 
• Formula/bottles if bottle feeding

We recommend finding a diaper bag with several different pockets or compartments and using plastic zipper bags or other organizational items to keep everything separated and easy to locate.

Preparing for the Day

As a new parent, you probably feel like you barely have enough energy to drag yourself into bed at the end of the day. But even just two minutes spent each night preparing for the next day will be incredibly helpful. Try to get into the routine of completing the following tasks at the end of each day to make things smoother the next morning. 

• Lay out the outfits for the next day on the dresser. If you don’t want to lay out multiple outfits, even just laying out the first outfit you plan to dress baby in when they wake up is super helpful. This tip is also handy in case of emergency changes, so you can easily reach over and grab the clothes without having to dirty dresser drawer pulls or hangers while you’re in the middle of a diaper change. 
• Do a quick sweep of the nursery. Place all dry soiled clothing in a hamper, and if you have enough for a load, start the load of laundry. If you have any cloth diapers or stained clothing that needs to be treated, lay that out and treat it so the cleaner has time to soak in. 
• Restock the diaper bag for the next day. If you took the diaper bag anywhere, make sure you replenish it with diapers, wipes, cream, an extra change of clothes, and whatever else you may have used up. 

Now you’re ready for whatever tomorrow might have in store!

Time and Money Saving Tips

Some of the most common “helpful” tips for organizing baby clothes just fall short. “Hang a shelf for added storage space!”…really? Because we hadn’t thought of that already.

These tips are a little outside of the box- but that’s the point! We’re trying to save you time and money, not give you a laundry list (pun intended) of DIY projects to waste a weekend on. Try these on for size (another terrible pun, completely on purpose).

• Try this tip for outfit planning: if you’re traveling or just adding an extra outfit to your diaper bag, toss all of the essentials (onesie, diaper, shirt, pants, socks, etc.) plus seasonal accessories (hat, mittens) into a gallon-size plastic zipper bag! This way, the outfit will be put together, easy to find, and you won’t have to dig around the diaper bag looking for a lone sock or mitten. The clothes will also be protected from spills. Win-win!
  
• When washing your baby’s clothing, wait until you have a full load before starting it. You’ll lower your utility bill and use less detergent, too. If the weather is nice, consider hanging the laundry outside to air-dry, saving even more money by avoiding the dryer. 
  
• Be willing to accept secondhand clothes from friends and family, and don’t be afraid to thrift-shop. Just make sure you thoroughly clean the clothing with a hypoallergenic or baby-safe detergent before using. Your baby won’t know the difference, you’ll save some money, and you’ll extend the life of the clothing, which is great for the planet! And you’d be surprised- you might even find some unworn items that still have the original tags on them!

Consider using cloth diapers to save money and prevent hundreds of diapers from ending up in landfills. Check out our listing of adorably nerdy cloth diapers to get started!

The post How to Organize Baby Clothes- On A Budget! appeared first on Geek Baby Clothes.

https://www.themarysue.com/jd-vance-childcare-class-warfare/

During last night’s joint address to Congress, Joe Biden unveiled his American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, both of which are designed to make it “easier for American families to break into the middle class, and easier to stay in the middle class.”

Much of these plans are centered on education. His proposal for free universal pre-school, as well as two free years of community college, would do so much to shrink the countries’ gaps in equity and accessibility.

Universal pre-school and free or affordable child care, along with access to family and medical leave, would also make it incalculably easier for women to enter and remain in the workforce—which is even more necessary than ever at a time when two million women have dropped out of the workforce thanks to the pandemic.

These seem like things no one should oppose. Or, for those Republicans we know are going to oppose them anyway, we can expect them to complain about the cost–even though as Biden’s plan lays out, it’s likely to “be fully paid for over 15 years, and will reduce deficits over the long term.” But we still know that accusations of overspending are to be expected.

What I wasn’t expecting were claims that free childcare is tantamount to “class warfare.”

Yet that’s what we got from J.D. Vance, the man best known for writing the memoir Hillbilly Elegy and second-best known for being absolutely insufferable at every turn. Every time I forget just how awful he is, he goes and posts something like this:

“Universal day care” is class war against normal people.

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) April 29, 2021

First of all, what the hell is a “normal” person, James? Based on the context of the rest of the thread (which is just pure garbage from start to finish), he seems to mean lower-income and middle-class people, but he also conflates “affluence” with “college-educated” based on the study he uses as “evidence.”

“Universal child care” is a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class. pic.twitter.com/SwzolxORFf

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) April 29, 2021

That study, by the way, is also total garbage. It was conducted by the conservative think tank American Compass and it claims to find that Americans believe the “ideal arrangement for raising young children” in a two-parent household is for one parent to work full time and the other to be a full-time at-home caregiver.

Except the question they asked participants wasn’t about the “ideal” arrangement.

Here’s what they actually asked: “Which arrangement for paid work and childcare do you think is best for your own family while you have children under the age of 5?” or, alternatively, “If you were to have children in the near future, which arrangement for paid work and childcare do you think would be best for your family while your children were under the age of 5?”

“What is best for your family” and “what is your ideal arrangement” are two very different questions! While for many, the answer would be the same, there are also a ton of people for whom a two-working-parent household isn’t realistic, even if it’s ideal, simply because childcare can be prohibitively expensive.

Why fight against leveling that playing field, then? Does Vance realize that “universal” does not mean “mandatory”?

As if his argument couldn’t get any worse, the childcare plan he actually supports comes from–wait for it–Josh Hawley.

So, I’m beginning to have suspicions that—despite his monumental cultural achievement with Hillbilly Elegy—that Mr. Badterminator doesn’t have the best ideas. pic.twitter.com/oSs6DnZZhw

— Brock Wilbur (@brockwilbur) April 29, 2021

Hawley’s plan isn’t actually about childcare; it’s a tax cut for employed parents. And if tax cuts are the way Vance thinks tax cuts for parents are the way to go, then he should be thrilled. Because guess what–Biden’s plan also includes those as well.

(image: Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

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The post Why Does the Hillbilly Elegy Guy Keep Reminding Us How Terrible He Is? first appeared on The Mary Sue.