Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Idiot Savant,
The idea that immigration, science, and labour rights policy will now all be driven by economic development fills me with confidence.
That does depend somewhat on the way one defines economic development, but unlimited economic growth as a driving force is definitely not confidence-inspiring.
It can also depend on how well you understand economics, period. The NIH in the US generates something like $7 of GDP for every $1 of government funding, a pretty worthwhile rate of return and extremely easy to understand given the network of industries it interacts with, but it's generally lucky to survive with no cuts to its funding, let alone increases.
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Hard News: Unwarranted risk, in reply to James W,
I think we should have Economics classes at school, it’s just as important as Home Economics.
Both are equally present and equally optional, at least in college.
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Hard News: Unwarranted risk, in reply to Euan Mason,
Tony Ryall claimed that “all successful companies” make commitments to social responsibility. So we'll see these oligarchic power companies holding prices down for kiwi Mum & Dad non-investors at the expense of their private owners. Yeah, right.
Better question: what and who forces them to meet all these lovely socially responsible commitments? (I say "forces" because while individuals may have strong senses of social responsibility, history demonstrates that corporate bodies are all but incapable of it.)
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Up Front: One, Redux, in reply to Lilith __,
One thing that’s weird about the anniversary is seeing and hearing news footage for the first time. Most of us had no electricity initially, and even when it was restored I avoided the coverage as much as I could because it was so overwhelming.
We managed to get the initial TV3 coverage via a series of internet work-arounds maybe twenty minutes after it hit - when the Campbell Live people were just getting to the PGC building - I remember being in IM/email contact with friends in Sockburn, who got power back pretty quickly, and it was crazy knowing that we'd seen footage of the inner city that they hadn't, that in some ways we knew more than they did.
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The SMBC cartoon leaves out the pertinent fact that there are quite a few people who hack as in panel A. They just mostly work for states and security companies. For any given individual's email account, panel B will probably do nicely.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Richard Aston,
I have been make a part time study of curses - they can be more poetic that cussing and it surprises me as a English speaker how mild some seem
The variety of euphemisms Americans have developed for well-known phrases that usually use swearwords is both impressive and vaguely annoying - okay, technically you're saying "Shut the front door" or "Kicks and giggles", but let's stop pretending that's what everyone is hearing...
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Russell Brown,
Actors, writers, and the show translator talking about Firefly's "Chinese". (Espenson calls it Mandarin.)
I rather hope someone involved knew which language they were translating.
Makes me nostalgic for Avatar: the Last Airbender, in which, as I understand it, every piece of written language that appears, usually Mandarin, is as legible and correct as if it were written in English. They turned artwork down for using made-up "Asian-inspired" symbols instead of real ideographs. (The series, not the movie. The movie committed every possible sin against the source material it could and then a couple extra just for fun.)
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Bart Janssen,
me confused. Gina is in firefly (cuban), Morena is brazilian
Craig pretty much nailed it: Whedon DID cast biracial actors for Firefly. (Brazil, in particular, is an excellent example of how in the future we will not all be mid-brown and many people will still hew to identifiable racial appearances despite having mixed ancestry.) He just didn't manage to cast any who were part-East Asian. And then made a big deal about people speaking Mandarin and having Chinese surnames and so forth.
It does raise questions about how hard is it for asian actors to get agents or auditions even when the story doesn’t immediately exclude them.
Racebending.com, which does advocacy work for underrepresented minorities in film (largely but not exclusively focusing on East Asians) likes to point out when descriptions sent out to casting agencies implicitly exclude minorities, which is basically all the time. Unless there is really good reason for a part to be cast as a minority, the usual description is "Caucasian or other", which gets translated as "White".
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to BenWilson,
I’ve slowly given up on it – she was much more interesting in the first season as a person of logic with the strangely powerful and penetrating insights into human nature that sometimes come from the adult autistic.
Apart from all the very salient points everyone else has made - the show really jumped the shark for me about the time it became evident Booth and Bones were never going to get together as long as they could milk it some more, and Booth was never going to stop being the Voice of Conservatism Masked As Common Sense - the move away from the original premise was what made me sad.
As a scientist, what I really miss from the first season was the way the show was about working scientists (including multiple working *female* scientists) who helped out the FBI. Every episode, or nearly, had an A plot (the crime) and a B plot (the scientific work they did for the museum, or something about their roles as scientists in a scientific institution.) That was awesome. And then they mysteriously morphed into crime lab techs who just happened to be located in a museum for no particular reason (hiring a coroner, the hell?). Non-medical-or-crime-related science is almost never shown on TV. And then they stopped doing it.
The characters are meant to be a blend of all races that we have now – unfortunately modern day actors don’t come in that flavour – it’s the point at which you are meant to be able to suspend disbelief.
...by mostly casting people who, as far as I can tell from Wikipedia, are 100% white? Because there are no bi-racial actors in modern Hollywood? (Like, say.....Gina Torres. I'm just saying.)
I'm willing to suspend a lot of disbelief for sci-fi, but you know what? A future where everyone's allegedly racially mixed but almost every speaking role is still played by a visibly European-descent person? That's still a fail on follow-through. Don't get me wrong: I love Firefly, I'm willing to suspend plenty of disbelief for it. I just can't to give a pass on something Hollywood routinely does so wrong.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Lilith __,
Surely River is at least bi-racial.
Maybe I'm being harsh, but I don't really call slapping a Chinese name on characters played by solidly white actors who very occasionally swear in Mandarin "bi-racial". As with many Whedon things, good in concept, poor in follow-through.