Jurassic World: A Summary

shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows

Jurassic World is a film that attempts to highlight the dangers of crassly commercialising dinosaurs by… well, crassly commercialising dinosaurs.

The irony of this was apparently lost on the writers.

Look: I get it. You wanted an excuse to make a dinosaur that was bigger than a t-rex, but you couldn’t be bothered looking up giganotosaurus or spinosaurus and anyway, that whole Meddling Mad Science angle is so appealing, why not go there instead? So you wrote an excuse for it into the script about how Kids These Days with their internets and their rap music are just so jaded that only bigger, better, newer dinosaurs can hold their attention, and then you spent the whole film explaining why building bigger, better, newer dinosaurs with Meddling Mad Science is, in fact, a terrible idea. But before all the carnage and death, when you were showing us the excited younger brother dragging his…

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The History of Philosophy as a giant poster, but without women (again).

Once again, women are literally erased from history. Sometimes it’s hard to believe this still happens in the 21st Century.

And then I remember just with what we’re dealing here (men and their frail egos) and stop being surprised.

Una vez más las mujeres son, literalmente, borradas de la historia. A veces me cuesta trabajo creer que en pleno siglo 21 esto siga ocurriendo.
Y luego recuerdo con quién estamos tratando (los hombres y su frágil ego) y dejo de soprenderme.

Feminist Philosophers

The History of Philosophy as a giant poster, but without women (again)..

It just oughtn’t to be acceptable anymore for members of the profession to react to this depiction of the history of our discipline without protest.

Significant or interesting philosophers of the past were NOT all men, and even if women were a minority, it is not such a small minority that it couldn’t show in a pictorial representation.

I am not saying that the creator of the poster is to blame, but that we, as professional philosophers, should probably not consider using this as a teaching resource.

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The Truth Of Wolves, Or: The Alpha Problem

A very interesting blog post regarding “Alpha wolves” and why biology just-doesn’t-work-that-way. As someone who majored in biology (although I’m specialized in molecular biology and genetics), I find myself cringing every time I read the same paranormal tropes about this now subverted ideas about wolves. Please authors, go and read an updated paper on the subjects before you start writing about “hierarchy” in the animal kingdom. Science may try to be objective, but scientists are still human beings, full of biases and prejudices.

shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows

Regardless of what historical epoch their populations and culture are either based on or situated in, epic fantasy landscapes tend to be populated by a very specific subset of animals: big cats, horses, wolves, bears, deer, birds of prey, European livestock (cattle, sheep, chickens), domestic pets, rabbits, and dragons. Though you might occasionally find some ferrets, snakes or crocodiles to spice things up, generally speaking, there’s a profound Eurocentrism to the kind of animals you’ll encounter in fantasy novels, partly because the default fantasy environment is itself Eurocentric; and partly because, once you’re using less common animals, there’s the joint question of how to describe and reference them if their English names are either very clearly colonial or derive their meaning from a clearly real-world scientific canon (Thompson’s gazelle, the red panda, the Pallas cat, for instance); but mostly, I suspect, because we view such creatures as being universally generic…

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Thanks (but no thanks…)

Thanks (but no thanks…).

Zoe Smith, you are awesome and I love you. *Ahem* This comes from someone who refuses to buy into the “inherent female weakness” paradigm.

[Zoe Smith eres genal y the amo. *Ahem* Esto viene de alguien quien se rehusa a creer en el paradigma de la “debilidad femenina inherente”.]

Mujeres científicas

Estoy segura de que no soy la única que piensa esto: La representación de mujeres científicas, tanto en libros o como en otros medios, es pésima. Es frustrante. Es indignante. 

Recientemente, comencé a leer y escribir sobre una joven adolescente que, en su canon, es realmente talentosa con las matemáticas y la física. Me purga el hígado que sus fans siempre la conviertan en un médico, y no un médico especialista o un investigador, no, solo un médico. Obviamente, no tengo problemas con los médicos, pero se vuelve algo cansado cuando los únicos personajes femeninos, interesados en la ciencia, son estos.

 No todas nosotras nos interesamos por la medicina (aunque admito que la biomecánica me encanta). Conozco a muchas científicas maravillosas que se dedican a la robótica, la física, las ciencias de la computación o la ingeniería. Existen y merecen ser escuchadas. Merecen ser representadas.

Y lo mismo sucede con las mujeres “geeky”, las frikis, las que gustan de jugar videojuegos, de ver anime y leer manga. Existen, existimos. Pero los autores parecen querer olvidarlo.

The Elder Scrolls Online costará 15 dólares al mes.

Mientras sigo esperando mi invitación para The Elder Scrolls Online me entero de que este va a costar alrededor de 15 dólares cada mes (aunque el primer mes es gratis). La noticia no me sorprende en lo absoluto, considerando la situación actual de muchos MMORPGs. Aún así, espero que suceda lo mismo que ocurrió con  Star Wars: The Old Republic (el cual continuó jugando hoy en día, y pagando) y el juego termine con un modelo híbrido de Free-to-play.

Vamos Microsoft, ¿qué no ves que soy una pobre estudiante de maestría ?

Juguemos: Fallout 3

Mientras preparaba una reseña de The elder scrolls: La ciudad Infernal (¡No pierdan su tiempo con esa basura!), decidí comenzar nuevamente mi partida de Fallout 3.

Esta es Alice, o mejor conocida como “El trotamundos solitario” (que debería ser “La…” pero estos juegos siguen siendo pensados principalmente para hombres). Cada vez que creo un personaje, intento hacerlo diferente a otros personajes con los que he jugado, además de meterme en su piel tanto como sea posible, en esta caso, decidí alejarme lo más posible de estereotipos femeninos y de los roles de género. Alice es una joven mujer si, pero primero es una persona. Si hay algo que detesto al escribir un personaje mujer, es forzosamente tener que darle características “femeninas” antes de desarrollar su personalidad.

Behaving Like A Man

Basically why I cringe every time someones accuses a woman (or a female character) of being too “manly”, “too much like a man” or “one of the boys”.

Dusk Is Falling

For thousands of years any time a woman did something a man thought inappropriate she was accused of wanting to be a man, of being too mannish, of being unwomanly. We are still fighting this same battle today, ironically backed up by liberal progressive pseudo-science that agrees there are ways of really behaving like a man or a woman.

When we examine the history of this struggle, we find it written about in curious ways. There will be innocuous sentences like, ‘in the past it was thought inappropriate for women to work outside the home, but gradually greater numbers of women became accepted into the workforce’. This is not an actual quote, you understand, but a stand-in for thousands that I’ve read just like it. Not only does it obscure the agent (just WHO thought it was inappropriate for women to work outside the home) but it also obscures the…

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This is a blog post that really spoke to me, in many ways, not just in relation to the Butch/Femme discussion, which I really don’t feel like addressing right now, because I don’t considerer myself with enough knowledge to do a proper commentary.

I’m someone who struggles with her identity everyday. While I do like some thing that are considered “feminine” (in a sort-of arbitrary way, why things have to be categorized?) I always refused the feminine gender role assigned to me, trying to foolishly be just “myself”. Some people think that any woman or girl who doesn’t conform is less of a woman, is trying to be “one of the boys”, is just a “man with boobs”, is a “misogynist” , they simply can’t fathom the idea. I have been called  names again and again by supposed “feminists” and “allies”.

This may not have to do much with the discussion at hand, but I’m sick and tired of people complaining about women who just don’t care to perform, I’m sick of having to excuse myself because I simply don’t want to have kids or get married or even have a partner (Bitch! Woman-hater! Marriage is a natural female occupation didn’t you know?*).

Just need to get that off my chest.

*Yes, I once got into an argument with someone that apparently thinks that any woman who doesn’t care about marriage is a misogynist. Good times.

Dear neckbeards:

Just because you are married to a woman (and I have my doubts about that) doesn’t mean that you know everything that is to know about women. We are persons, individuals. We aren’t aren’t a monolith. Claiming that you are “half a lady” because you have a mother doesn’t make you witty or smart, rather the opposite.

So, just shut the fuck up.

No Love.

A woman.