Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Heather Gaye,
Even Homeland – rather than foisting a mental illness onto a character gratuitously to pep up the plot, it’s managed to convey that her major weakness is inextricably linked with her extraordinary skill.
Although that can run into a kind of dodgy place where having a mental illness is presented as only OK because it gives you Special Powers, as opposed to being part of a range of human existence. (And again - how many times do you see multiple characters with mental illnesses/conditions on a show?) I'm assuming Homeland doesn't go there, but.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Emma Hart,
Which is one of the things that really annoys me about the inclusion of River Tam in that 5 Worst list. Elizabeth Swann is The Girl. Padme is The Girl. River? Why is River in that list, and not Kaylee or Zoe or Inara?
Dude, WTF. I mean, are there problems with Joss Whedon’s portrayals of women? Fuck yes. But they emerge as patterns over multiple female characters, which at least means he has enough female characters to form patterns. River can be analysed problematically as part of Whedon’s Kickass Skinny Pretty White Teenage Girls Thing, but by herself – and as part of a show where half the main cast were women – she’s actually pretty cool.
This also applies to characters on the autism spectrum, who tend to be presented on screen as a grab-bag of symptoms. It’s welcome that they appear in fiction now, but it’d also be nice if they were allowed to be more different.
I'd argue there's basically two models for autistic characters in current media: the Mute Superpowered Kid, and the Quirky Adult One. One wonders how they think you get from one to the other.
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I'd actually argue that what's far more important to a work than whether it has "a strong female character" is whether it has a range of female characters - filling a variety of different plot and life roles. I'm not going to be impressed by your dedication to portraying women, no matter how much effort you put into the depth and interest of your one female character, if she's your one female character. Because then she's The Girl. And we need to move beyond Everyone And The Girl. (The upcoming Avengers movie makes me wary in that regard; it's not like there haven't been plenty of female Avengers in comics, but, hey, in the movies: the Black Widow is The Girl.)
Harry Potter is in some ways a good example of this; you can argue 'till the cows come home about whether one character or another was a "strong female character", but Rowling showed women being mothers, teachers, soldiers, villains, friends, girlfriends, teammates, and more. No-one was The Girl. No-one had to shoulder the burden of being everything a woman in fiction is supposed to be. We argue about whether it's okay for women in fiction to always be Superwoman because there aren't usually enough of them to argue about how they're portrayed as a class, fandom by fandom. And that's the real problem.
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to nzlemming,
Take John’s approach from the previous page and put them up to Google Docs to be OCRed. Doesn’t do too bad a job, actually.
I'm definitely going to try it out. Could save quite a lot of time - although you lose the amusement factor of seeing Mendeley list your document as being authored by Dioxide, C., and Coli, E..
And don’t start me on crimes committed in the name of powerpoint, let alone msword, and mspaint.
My PhD supervisor doesn't understand why I make incoherent angry noises every time he advises me to make (A0-size) posters in Powerpoint. Or do image manipulation in Powerpoint. Or - anyway, I die a little inside every time.
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to nzlemming,
How are you finding Mendeley? I tried it once and couldn't get my head around it at the time (probably because what I wanted was something that would parse a document and auto-create an abstract more than just do bib work).
I love it. My primary uses for that sort of PDF handler are 1) searching and sorting (folders, tags, multiple search avenues, etc.) 2) building bibliographies and 3) marking up papers for the key info I'll want to refer back to. It does all of those things very well, in my experience.
The one big hole is that it handles image-to-PDF PDFs dubiously, which is a problem for anything older than about 1995 and also the journal Archives of Microbiology, for some reason, but if you're largely working with papers from the past two decades - which is true enough most of the time - it's fine.
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Once that would have had me banging my head on the table, as PDFs have regularly been used as electronic versions of paper documents, rather than as containers of information. Don't get me wrong, I'd still prefer to see HTML/CSS documents, but at least the current crop is largely accessible, i.e. they can be read in a text-to-speech (TTS) reader.
The PDF is the main mode of communication for scientific publication these days, and my standard for acceptability is basically "will Mendeley Desktop read it into its database correctly and let me highlight stuff"? Because, sure, I can hand-type in the author and journal and so on, and I can print it out and highlight the interesting bits by hand. But it's the 21st century. I shouldn't have to.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to WH,
I’ve come to suspect that a lot of our problems come from the fact that we are so competitive – it’s not how much we have that counts, its where we stand in the hierarchy that matters.
"We're Better Than Those People" is the unofficial motto of 99% of human history.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
I find it impossible to believe that there is no solution by which people perfectly capable of work and willing to do it, can’t organize to do it, and prosper.
No solution? Of course not. But the system as it is (in America especially, but more generally as well) doesn't work if people aren't desperate for jobs. First you have to move to some economic form where unemployment and accompanying poverty are bugs, not features.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to WH,
The US/China story feeds into a broader narrative of economic insecurity and I think you should acknowledge that. Some Americans who have lost jobs to Chinese outsourcing will never work again.
But it also feeds into a strong American narrative that seeks to frame the current unemployment rates in the US as something done to the US by China - witness the frequent references to a "trade war" - without considering the internal decisions that have contributed to it. For instance, a very significant number of jobs lost in this latest recession have been lost in the name of government austerity. I believe it's about half a percentage point worth of unemployment. That's huge. Or witness the current situation in Alabama - such a shortage of agricultural workers, since the new laws regarding undocumented workers came into effect, that the economy is being affected.
Obviously the question of manufacturing practices in China is important - that's why it's getting attention. But it's not okay for it to get attention at the expense of internal American problems, and it's very easy for that to happen. Also, as long as it's framed as "those people getting our jobs" it's not going to be solved, because China's advantages in that regard (US-below-poverty-level wages, enormous working-age population, poor environmental regulation) can't - and indeed shouldn't - be overcome by trying to emulate them.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to BenWilson,
Wow, so customers quite literally line up in order of who gives a shit about ethics? Interesting concept, creating an actual physical segregation of customer political/ethical alignments. I can imagine them eyeballing each other.
Well, like I said, all the chicken is in the "worst" section, and all the pork in the second-worst, with a mix of beef and lamb through the other three - and it's a butchers' counter, not a packaged-meat fridge, so I don't think where you stand determines which end you're buying from necessarily. But it definitely encourages publicising your priorities. (I'd say "budget", but Whole Foods is pricey to start with, so that pretty much determines the whole clientele.)
This would be the same Whole Foods that drove its unions out, and fires people who try and organise right?
Not au fait with the details, but this would not surprise me in the least. That sort of practice is standard American big retail stuff, and they're a big American retailer. That said, I'm also becoming more convinced that American unionism has some problems of its own. In a lot of ways it's a very, very different set-up to the Kiwi type I've experienced - not that I'm old enough to remember a strongly unionised NZ.