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Don’t be a Bully

In this age of the Internet, like many parents, I’m concerned about what my children get exposed to online. But I’m also concerned about what my children may do and say online. Whether it’s in a text message, on a discussion forum, in YouTube comments, or over the microphone while playing Xbox, I don’t want my children to become bullies, jerks, assholes, or douche bags. Being a regular consumer of various Internet sites, I’ve seen many, many, many bullies, jerks, assholes, and douche bags. There is something about anonymity plus an audience that makes people become horrible, terrible monsters. It actually saddens me.

A while back, while surfing YouTube, I saw the thumbnail of a video with the title, “World’s Ugliest Woman.” I didn’t click the link or view the video because that whole concept — labeling and showing someone like that — just isn’t something that interests me. I’ve seen enough of the Internet to know how cruel people can be to anyone.

A couple weeks ago, I saw a photo of some famous soccer player with a very, (abnormally), skinny woman. The title of the photo just had the athlete’s name and the woman’s name. I didn’t know either of them, so I checked the comments to see if someone explained who they were. Of course there were many cruel comments about the woman, but fortunately there were also some explanations of who she was. She was the woman from the YouTube video I mentioned above. Her name is Lizzie Velasquez, and she’s a motivational speaker.

This intrigued me, so I went back to YouTube and looked her up. She has her own channel, with many videos — both personal vlogs and her motivational speeches in front of large crowds. She is amazing. I’m a big fan of TED Talks, and I found she has a couple of her own. Watch this 12 minute speech:

After seeing this, I watched some of her other videos including her personal vlogs and some TV appearances, like on The View.

Her attitude is wonderful. “You can choose to be happy, or you can choose to give up.” Even listening to her chat off the top of her head in her vlogs is inspirational and motivational. She is so full of happiness to the point of even being a bit silly, rambling, and playing with her hair, that it makes me smile. She is a joy to watch.

Last night I introduced my family to Lizzie Velasquez. I brought up her TED talk on our TV and showed it to Wifegrit and our boys. Both my boys are pretty normal for 10 and 13 year olds. They could use a little inspiration/motivation, (especially the teenager), but my main goal with showing them this video was more to teach them against bullying.

I wanted them to hear about, and see and understand, how bullying, (both online as well as in person), affected a real person. I wanted them to hear, in a victim’s own words and voice, how much it hurts. You can hear Lizzie’s voice tremble a bit when she talks about it. You can tell it still bothers her. But she has risen above it, and she is a champion now.

I told my boys that I know them well enough that I don’t think either of them would ever be cruel to another person. But I explained how sometimes their friends may say something mean to someone else. And sometimes communicating on the Internet, with its disconnection and anonymity, lures good people into doing and saying terrible things. I explained that I want them to understand how being mean can really hurt someone, even online. Real people are at the other end of our words, whether we speak them or write them, and whether we can see the other person or not.

Also I want them to understand that sometimes they may meet or see someone who looks very different than they expect, but those persons are still human beings with feelings and hopes and dreams and hearts just like their own. I want my boys to have empathy for others. I think Wifegrit and I have taught them this already, and I think both boys do understand, but Ms. Velasquez’s speech really shows and explains this eloquently and personally.

I am so impressed with this woman. She is a beautiful person. I am so glad I found her videos.

Bullgrit

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BULLGRIT is offensive?

So I got a letter from the North Carolina DMV telling me there had been complaints, (plural), about my personalized license plate, BULLGRIT.

DMV letter

Someone — more than one person — thinks that my plate, and therefore, my online and business name, is “offensive and in poor taste.” Wha?

So, I wrote back to the Special License Plate Unit Supervisor and explained:

This letter is the response you’ve requested regarding my license plate BULLGRIT. You asked me to explain what this personalized plate represents or means.

BULLGRIT® is my online/Internet name, under which I maintain a blog and t-shirt design business. It is also registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office.

www.totalbullgrit.com

www.totalbullgrit.com/blog

www.totalbullgrit.com/tshirts

www.facebook.com/bullgrit

My blog and my t-shirts are specifically family friendly — themed around fatherhood and life in the South. I’ve used Bullgrit as an online name for around 20 years, and as a business name for over 7 years. I’ve had the personalized license plate for at least 5 years.

I’m including a couple of my business cards with this letter. If you have any questions, or if I need to explain further, please let me know. Thank you.

Now, although I’m surprised that someone could or would take offense at my name, I refrained from being snarky in my reply. This supervisor probably gets complaints on license plates all the time, so she definitely didn’t need extra grief from me. Heck, I bet she doesn’t even really review the complaints, but rather, probably just generates a form letter to the plate owner. I’m assuming this because a quick Google search would have revealed what my license plate refers to.

A couple weeks later, I get the reply to my explanation:

So I get to keep my license plate. Not that losing it would cause me any harm or trouble, I’ve just come to really like it after these several years of having it.

But what in the world did the complainers think BULLGRIT meant? Since there isn’t any other meaning than my name — it’s a completely made up word — how could they take offense? It just goes to show that some people go through life trying to be offended. They look for any and every opportunity to clutch their pearls and gasp in righteous indignation. Just because they don’t recognize something, or don’t know what something is doesn’t mean it’s in any way offensive or poor taste. Sometimes a complaint says more about the ridiculousness of the complainer than of the object of their offense.

Bullgrit

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Sci-Fi Tech, Then and Now

Calfgrit13 has an Xbox. His favorite game, (the game he plays most often), is Halo — he has three games of that series. I tried playing Halo with him once just after he got it for Christmas last year, and I just couldn’t get the hang of the controls. Friday night I tried again, and still, using a console controller for a first-person shooter game leaves me flopping around dead, quickly and repeatedly. I’m hopeless trying to aim with a controller. (I’m great with a mouse and keyboard on a computer game. Game designers: make games that can be played multiplayer across platforms!)

But while playing with him, and listening to him regale me with his knowledge of the Halo universe history, technology, and aliens, I remembered that I have the movie Aliens in my DVD collection stored in the cabinet under the TV. He’s 13 years old now, so I wanted to show him this classic sci-fi movie of my generation. I explained that not only is it a classic flick to watch, it has some great one-liners he can quote while playing Halo.

Such as:

“They mostly come at night. Mostly.”

“Game over, man! Game over!”

“I like to keep this handy, for close encounters.”

“We got nukes, we got knives and sharp sticks.”

Saturday midday would be our best opportunity to watch the movie, as Calfgrit9 would be at a friend’s house for a birthday party. We dropped CG9 off at the party, and on the drive back home, I told CG13 the story of Alien, the predecessor of Aliens. I explained, in detail, how Alien is a horror movie based in space, in which one alien wipes out a whole crew of a space cargo ship. CG13 doesn’t like jump scares, and so I know he wouldn’t like watching Alien at all. But one needs to understand the story of the movie to really get the most enjoyment out of the sequel.

“And then Aliens starts out with Ripley’s escape pod being discovered 57 years later,” I finished. He saw similarities between the Alien story and the Halo story, and he told me more about it.

At home, we settled into the den to watch the DVD. Throughout the run, he wanted me to give him a heads-up about upcoming scares, and I gave him several seconds warning for each one I could remember, (which was probably 90% of them). I’ve watched this movie at least four or five times in my life, and I seem to pretty much have it memorized — I surprised myself with how well I remember every detail.

This movie really is very good. It well stands the test of time with regards to its story telling. The way it builds from the anti-climatic tension during the initial “assault” by the colonial space marines, to the action-satisfying battles later and the climatic end fight with the alien queen. Great stuff. Great writing, great directing, great setting. But two things stand out — one was noticeable as an error, or fault, from the first time I saw it, and the other is only noticeable now, after 30 years of technological advancement in the real world.

The error/fault that I noted way back as a teen in the mid-80s is: why is there no crew on the orbiting spacecraft? CG13 noted this problem when the plot came  to the point where the characters had to get the second drop-ship to come pick them up. It’s one of those plot errors that I often complain about in movies I find bad. Fortunately for Aliens, though, I can get over one plot problem hump and still enjoy the movie. It’s when there are numerous plot problems, throughout the film, that ends up making the whole thing really, really stupid and bad.

The other thing we both noted during the movie, and then discussed after the movie, was how sci-fi/futuristic equipment ideas have advanced so much over the years. In Aliens, the colonial space marines are wearing and using gear and weapons less “futuristic” than what our modern-day marines and soldiers are wearing on real world battlefields. A (non-Kevlar) helmet, a rigid and thin chest plate, and a 10-millimeter “pulse rifle” — the only thing even a little futuristic of these things is the digital ammo counter on the rifle.

Modern movies and games take a longer technological leap with imagining future military equipment. The armor in the Halo games not only covers the entire human body, but essentially gives the man inside super powers. This difference in how creative people thirty years ago and now think about and anticipate what the future will look like is so vast that it makes me wonder just how wildly short of reality our current sci-fi predictions will be.

Fortunately, regardless of how pathetically under-teched the future seems to be in the Aliens universe, Calfgrit13 still liked the movie. And he says he’s looking forward to using the cool quotes while gaming in Halo with his friends. I’m going to get such a buzz the first time I hear him say, “Let’s nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

Bullgrit

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Photos from Disney World

We spent last week in Walt Disney World. A WDW vacation in early-mid September has been our family tradition for about 8 years now, (although we’ve missed going a couple years). But this may have been our last such trip. Next year Calfgrit13 goes into high school on a traditional school year calendar, so he won’t be out of school, (tracked out of a year-round schedule), in September.

Below are some simple photos I snapped off-hand during our trip. These aren’t the “savers” we took for any photo album, or anything. These are just quick shots I took with my phone, not intending to keep or share them beyond days the were actually in WDW.

Let me show you an example of how great September is for visiting WDW — very low crowd level, and few neighbors in the resorts. This is a pic from the door of our rooms, looking out into the parking lot, (empty! — that’s our silver van on the left, first parking spot beside our rooms):

Another example of crowd levels — our boys with their nana at the bus stop:

Me sitting outside at the Caribbean Beach resort early one morning:

Calfgrit13 is very competitive, (like his father), when it comes to games, so we, of course, had to compete against each other on the shooting/scoring rides.

Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin — my score on the left, CG13’s on the right:

Toy Story Midway Mania — my score on the left, CG13’s on the right:

We really concentrate on our games:

This is an amazing Lego display at the Downtown Disney Lego store — it’s made of thousands of Lego pieces:

Bullgrit

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