It's Tuesday night and the weekend's here.
“I got a fan letter from a young lady. It was a suicide note.So I called her, and I said, “Hey, this is Jimmy Doohan. Scotty, from Star Trek.” I said, “I’m doing a convention in Indianapolis. I wanna see you there.”
I saw her — boy, I’m telling you, I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was definitely suicide. Somebody had to help her, somehow. And obviously she wasn’t going to the right people.
I said to her, “I’m doing a convention two weeks from now in St. Louis.” And two weeks from then, in somewhere else, you know? She also came to New York - she was able to afford to got to these places. That went on for two or three years, maybe eighteen times. And all I did was talk positive things to her.
And then all of the sudden — nothing. I didn’t hear anything. I had no idea what had happened to her because I never really saved her address.
Eight years later, I get a letter saying, “I do want to thank you so much for what you did for me, because I just got my Master’s degree in electronic engineering.”
That’s…to me, the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
Playthings
The other day I saw the new character model for Cortana and I was thinking it seemed pretty alright - she looked older, stronger, far less caricatured. If Cortana was always going to be titillating, at least she seemed a more appropriate object of desire: more 25 than 15, more flesh than real doll.
So I got a bit nervous when I saw a lot of negative reactions to Cortana’s new larger boobs. Not because that reaction wasn’t coming from a good place - these were people I respected, reacting against objectification of women and the presentation of unrealistic ideals to young women. But just a couple of weeks earlier I heard they’ve got plans to make the new Lara Croft incarnation deeper, and part of that will be making her boobs smaller. The implication that larger boobs are a liability to well-presented, deep characters makes me nervous because, well, how many stacked women get to have complex stories in popular media? I can think of Joan Holloway and…?
Boob sizes have been neatly separating the mistresses from wives, the sexy/trashy good-times-girls from the arty/pretentious hipsters, the ciphers from the plotlines. Video games have certainly fed the first part of the stereotype, that ‘e-cup women are playthings’, but wouldn’t only giving empathetic roles to C-cup-or-less women just reinforce that? (It’s also implying small-boobed women can’t be objectified because they’re insufficiently sexy. The beauty of this system is no-one wins!) Where are the ‘twist’ video games for this gaming trope, promoted as indulging the players’ desire to objectify women, but surprise! actually gives you that character’s perspective about what it’s like to live with all that objectification? Lara Croft isn’t running towards her goal, she’s running away from you, thousands upon thousands of leering players.
But there’s another point I want to make, because the logic that suggests “Sex is fun, fun is trivial, certain bodies are more sex than others, therefore certain bodies are more trivial than others.”, comes from the same place as that attitude towards media: “Play is fun, fun is trivial, certain media forms are more about play than others, therefore certain media forms are more trivial than others.”
About my last post:
I have no idea, nor any desire to have any idea, what a “22” is.
Hey America, this is you right now:
“The Boston bombers are white? Misunderstood, lonely losers!”
“Everyone shoulda had guns for some reason, then we’d get `em! 9000 cops? No way, my brother’s a mean shot with a 22!”
“Wait, the Boston bombers aren’t white? Let’s find a country spelled kind of like the country their great grandparents might have lived in once AND KILL EVERYONE THERE!!!”
“At least they shut up about that whore who ruined those Steubenville football players’ lives.”
“The Boston bombers are Russian!!! Fucking communist Obama’s trying to reignite the cold war!”
Alright, fuck you people, I’m going on a picnic.
*drops the mic*
DISNEY HAVE STOLEN MY ARTWORK
I don’t know what to do. I am so upset. Can anyone help me?
My painting was created back in 2010, (see it HERE) and since then so many people have expressed their love for it, not just on tumblr, but in many places. At least 9 people had it tattooed on their bodies. It’s one of my favourite images I created at University and I was proud of it in many ways.
Disney have used it on a cosmetics bag HERE (look at the back)
and they have produced a Tshirt HERE with a really similar design clearly modeled from my paintingI’m so mad because I have no chance at getting Disney to do anything about it. I had so much respect for the company and now I am just SO upset and disappointed.
Any help, advice or signal boosting would be amazing. And thank you so much to the kind person who messaged me about this.
Here is just a sample of some of my recent photo project, CONsent, which you can read about here.
Please read and spread the word around. I got to work with some great cosplayers, photographers and fans and I really hope to continue this project if it gains enough support.
Thank you for looking!I just want to say that as a cosplayer at cons, this is a real issue. The amount of things that get said (and mostly REQUESTED) to us is ridiculous. This deserves a signal boost.
On Facebook a couple days ago BelleChere posted basically asking people to not proposition her. Throughout the comments she noted she was married and neither one of them appreciated creepy comments made toward her. A number of people proceeded to argue with her saying that because she dressed up, it was okay.
I know a ton of people who have dealt with harassment at cons and they feel like they can’t say anything because it’s a convention. WRONG. You deserve to feel safe no matter where you are. Dressing up is not giving someone permission to say something to you or do anything to you.
This is a great project and it gets a boost from me.
Generally, when people play older games, they remember, with great fondness, the difficulty. I remember something else. I remember mastery. In the late 90s and early 2000s, my parents didn’t let me play games all that much. Where most people were playing whole game experiences, with every game’s…
And an update Monday, as promised. I got made fun of for this in the studio today, so I hope you people appreciate what I go through for you! XD
When I left off, my serger knives had dulled out so I had to put things aside for a few days, but now we’re back in business. By…
AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME!!!!
“We’re all a little racist, stop lying to yourself and get over it.”
I’m so motherfucking sick of this excuse.
First of all, yes. None of us are perfect, and we all possess some sort of prejudice on some level. YOU GOT ME!! But goddammit, how in the fuck does that somehow make it okay to say dumb racist (or homophobic, for that matter) shit?
Being honest with yourself about the negative social conditioning you’ve fallen for growing up is supposed to be the first step toward overcoming it. It’s not a ticket to the big racist amusement park, where you get to claim “there’s a difference between black people and niggers” out loud in public and expect nobody to call you an asshole. It’s nobody’s fault but your own when people are offended that you laughed at a dude for eating watermelon in the park.
Oh, yea, and that reminds me. Stereotypes!!! Fuck you if you think stereotypes “exist for a reason” and that reason isn’t scapegoating your own dumb prejudices. Sure, different cultures do tend to enjoy certain things, but what fucking business is that of yours? But there’s more to it than that. Many stereotypes are the product of just a few experiences, and caught on simply because of who mentioned them, through whatever means. But whether a stereotype holds any truth or not isn’t really the issue. The problem is that they’re used against groups and individuals unfairly, by assholes, and if you’re doing it, you should stop.
I’m certain that I’m not perfect. I know I’ve, at times, said things that could make me a hypocrite. The point is I’m saying it’s wrong, and I’m trying not to be that way. Are you?
