Posts by Kracklite
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You’re a high school teacher. One of your students persistently avoids making direct and sustained eye contact when you’re talking.
That’s solid proof the student is being evasive and dishonest, right?
Got the "socially immature" in primary school, despite the genius IQ score and held back a year.
Had the "reassure me of your good intent" and when I tried to explain, "don't bother me with your issues" fairly recently from a colleague at a university I won't name. That person does not have my personal or professional respect.
I guess that I shouldn't be surprised that university lecturers should be as prone to bigotry and wilful ignorance as any talkback caller.
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As resources:
The Bechdel Test and Ursula LeGuin's much-reprinted essay, Science Fiction and Mrs Brown.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Don't get me started... I've just put the BSG pilot in my DVD player and I don't want to have to get out the Moorcock as well. Ooh, Una Persson... and then there's the whole cast of The Dancers at the End of Time...
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3 descriptive terms for any of them?
That is what George Lucas thinks constitutes characterisation. I can imagine the ghost of Joseph Campbell visiting him every night and intoning, howling or whatever it is that ghosts do, “That’s not what I meant!”
At least I hope so.
…
It is rather interesting that people generally refer to television and film media for their sf tropes, not literature.
I’m not trying to be snide, just observing the dynamics of popular/shared culture. There’s lot of really interesting feminist sf, and not explicitly feminist sf today that features female characters who are strong but not uncomplicated and who aren’t simply there as ornaments or jerkoff fantasies for insecure adolescent boys.
However, what Hollywood determines to be acceptable to a mass market is telling.
I wonder what the upcoming John Carter will be like in its treatment of Dejah Thoris? Edgar Rice Burroughs was pretty progressive in his attitudes towards race and gender for 1912, but how is that going to be worked out in 2012?
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…actually, it’d be interesting to reconsider Joanna Russ’ The Female Man and the argument she makes there simultaneously in the context of the time it was written (late 60s) and today…
(Extra points for bringing Gwyneth Jones’ Aleutian cycle into the discussion… pop quiz on Friday)
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Bart Janssen,
That’s why slamming Padme for being a terrible female character is so pointless, none of Lucas’ characters have any depth so what make Padma any shallower.
Bart, Emma, let me refer you to an expert, Harry S. Plinkett
Specifically, in his review of The Phantom Menace, he tries an experiment, challenging friends to describe characters without referring to their appearance or role in the … what can loosely, for the sake of convenience or desperation, “plot.”
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In the case of the new BSG, Starbuck may not have been a male with breasts (she was far too well developed as the series went on), of course the embarrassing prototype did indeed have her has a man, and the change really brought out the misogyny in the fans of the “classic” series, not to mention the original actor, Dirk Benedict.
I rather liked the fact that a character who would have been in real life, a walking cliche who was in fact a sociopathic douchebag, was forced to face the consequences of her actions as a much more well-rounded individual… kinda karma, in a way.
Anyway, the less said of that the better.
For your amusement, I offer rule sixty-three
Regarding autism and its depiction, I really recommend the inestimable Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight(and don’t forget it’s exhaustive appendix), or his hilarious “Vampire Domestication” clip. His thesis is that we are undergoing a cognitive diversification comparable to the Cambrian Explosion, which will probably be, if anything, accelerated by posthuman technologies.
Personally I’m cool with non-neurotypical characters being presented as “aliens in human form” – it’s just the cliches that rankle. I like the provocation, as I did H.G. Wells’ suggestion throughout his scientific romances, particularly The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon that the Martians and Selenites might actually be right.
(And fuck you, C.S. Lewis)
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http://www.myremoteradio.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/dalek-blue-456.jpg
Daleks however are cyborgs, not robots, so here's a real fictitious robot:
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Sacha,
True, but only a part.
(As an engineer would say, the glass is not half full or half empty, but exceeds requirements by a factor of two. A larger capacity constitutes mission creep and the people at the Skunk Works would want a full renegotiation of the contract.)
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My, our, PhD supervisor, Brian, was like that...