Update (Sept, 30th, 2007):

The 2007 Youth Rights Essay Contest submission deadline has finally come and gone. Judges will be reviewing all of the entries and deciding on a winner over the next few weeks. An official announcement and info on the next contest will be coming soon.

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Topic: Any youth rights issue you choose to write about.
Deadline: September 24th, 2007
Prize: $500 (if and only if your entry is selected for 1st place).
Cost to enter: None. If you want to pay us anyway, donate or buy a button.
Age to enter: None. Anyone can enter, except contest judges.

Haven’t heard about it yet? First, take a look at the contest page, then check out the flyer for it.

If you want to help spread the word then print up a bunch of copies and pass them out at school, in public, to your friendly neighborhood stray cat, whatever. You can also go around the interwebs talking about the contest and posting the link to the pdf wherever appropriate.

Update: We are extending the contest submission deadline to Sept. 24th, 2007 to give students dealing directly with many youth rights issues at the start of the school year a chance to enter.

Thanks to the make-your-own-social-network service, Ning, Oblivion now has it’s own social network for youth rights writers and supporters. Oblivion old timers: take special notice of the nostalgic orange and black decor! It’s a labor of love, just for you.

Gamepolitics.com is a blog written by the wonderful folks at the Entertainment Consumers Association. Their tagline is “Where Politics and Video Games Collide”. Fitting for the Youth Rights Feed ‘Gator here on Oblivion, so they have now been added to it. Enjoy!

The site hasn’t been accessible to many of us the last few days. Bare with us while any problems plaguing the server are solved.

Update: Problems seem to be solved. Since the site won’t work if anything server related goes down again, send us word by way of smoke signals or something if it happens again.

Just finished working on two very much needed pages for Oblivion. About damn time, too.

The first is a youth rights blog feed aggregator. What this does is it collects RSS feeds from a list of youth rights blogs we decided are good enough that everyone imaginable should be reading them on the regular. Any new feeds we come across that are just as good or better will be added right away. Suggestions are welcome, of course.

The second addition to our quickly growing site is something that should have been in place a long, long, very, very long time ago. It’s a ‘Get Involved’ page. This… yep, you guessed it… gives visitors a quick answer to the constant question of “Ok, so what can I do to help?”. It’s just a basic list right now, but we will add to it and edit it as time goes on. If anyone wants to join in on that, head over to the forums and just start a thread talking about what you would change or add.

Next up: Getting clean url’s to actually work on our box. Grrr….

A Review of:Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes, and Make-Believe Violence By Gerard Jones

ANGER AND AGGRESSION

Oftentimes, parents and caretakers are inclined to reward the kids who tattle on the troublemakers. “The boys are fighting again!” is a partial quote often used in this book to illustrate how much the indoctrination of the idea that all violence is bad has become a part of our society.

In the not-so-distant past, kids running around with slingshots or bows and arrows pretending to hurt each other was a necessary part of childhood. It was training for the role the child would be called upon to fulfill one day. Later, it was guns. Then, in the 1960’s, laser pistols.

This is a natural part of play. Having a gun, or a laser pistol, or a phaser, shooting a moving target, and seeing the target fall down is lots of fun. I should know. I’ve been on both sides of the fight many times.

And this book says “it’s good for you”. The author even illustrates this point with anecdotes about his son and the various games the two of them play. One of the games involves Nicky (the child) becoming a “Tubby-Zord”, sort of a mix between TeleTubbies, Power Rangers, and that MegaZord thing the Rangers become when they combine. The author’s point is that even though this is a kid who loves TeleTubbies and Barney, he also needs that outlet of the heroes kicking the bad guys’ butts.

Killing Monsters is something every parent should read. It talks about how anger is normal. A two year old may be able to reach a doorknob, but probably won’t be able to get the damned thing to work. That is going to be frustrating, and the kid is going to get angry. It happens. And fantasy is the perfect outlet. Whether in video games, TV, made-up stories, play war, or Legos, it gives the child a safe outlet for the anger and aggression that is natural to all of us. And as we’ve all heard, releasing that bottled up anger and aggression is exactly what we need to do to be healthy.

Fantasy games, shows, and stories allow us to do that. But, it seems, more so for kids. They need the violent stories.
Read the rest of this entry »

Forum is suddenly very slow to response on some requests. I think it might be an add-on we just installed. We will be keeping an eye on it and trying to fix it if the problem continues.

Update: Seems to be working fine now. Not really sure how we fixed that…

We are in the process of upgrading Wordpress. If anything flakes out don’t panic, just let us know.

5:55pm EST: Done. Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?

The fundraising part of our design contest has ended. We are short of our goal, but will be going ahead with it anyway. It will just involve smaller prizes. Details and official contest page coming soon.

Annual meeting was held last night. Only agenda item was election of BoD members and officers. Ben Livingston, Jason Kende, Ana Hevesi, and Gella Solomon were re-elected to the BoD and retain their officer positions. Minutes and transcript will be up on the Board page soon.