It’s almost always Muscle Man and Buxom Chick, isn’t it?

Here’s a kickstarter project to look at sexism in video games.

This is a project by a woman, Anita Sarkeesian, who likes video games and wants to see them improve, but as she says, “many games tend to reinforce sexist and downright misogynist ideas about women.”

Some of you will say that is an outrageous claim! Cite evidence! No, it can’t be true!

OK, evidence: she’s made a screen cap of youtube comments on her video. CASE CLOSED. It’s not just raging misogyny, it’s also screaming racism and stark raving idiocy.

I think we all better contribute to her kickstarter. The problem is worse than she made it out to be, and I think she needs a few million dollars. (Oh, and her blog is very good, you ought to read it.)

(via Lousy Canuck)

P.S. The definitive reply to asshole commenters has been created.

I don’t even know what this movie is about anymore, but I still want to see it

They keep teasing me with these little trailers that are all completely different in tone from one to the other…and you can’t even tell that they’re from the same movie.

So far, what I’m seeing is something about aliens, space travel, scientific hubris, the nature of self, fear and danger, some tenuous connection to the Aliens franchise, and stupid alien astronauts crapola. Whoever came up with their viral marketing campaign really knows how to tantalize.

The Pirates! With Charles Darwin!

In the UK, they released an exciting new movie a while back, The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists. I have the book. It’s marvelous: it prominently features pirates, beards, scientists, and Charles Darwin, and is exactly the kind of story I like.

The good news! It’s just been released in the US. The peculiar news: it’s gotten a name change, to The Pirates! Band of Misfits, and they’re not mentioning Charles Darwin in the trailers. If you’ve read the book, though, you know that Darwin is rather central to the whole story.

Apparently, “science” and “Darwin” are box office penalties in the US. I’m going anyway, as soon as I can, because the content is presumably unchanged and I like science, beards, Darwin, pirates, and the funny, even if the marketing idiots are frightened.

“IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!”

There isn’t that much difference between a trained archaeologist and a professional wrestler, is there? Look at the new depradations encouraged by reality TV:

There’s nothing more exciting than digging for treasure, and that’s just what SPIKE TV’s new unscripted original series, American Digger is going to do when it premiers on March 20 at 10/9c. Former professional wrestler Ric Savage and the American Savage team have the tools, knowhow, and instincts, and are ready to show everyone what could just be hidden beneath your backyard if you give them the chance.

American Digger will showcase Ric Savage and his crew trekking across the country each week, from Chicago, IL to Jamestown, VA and everywhere in between. Once the team identifies an area they think is ripe with high-value artifacts and relics, they’ll have to convince the current homeowner to give them permission to dig up their backyard. If American Savage is persuasive enough, they’ll get a chance to dig up the tenant’s backyard using their state-of-the-art equipment, and divide the cash they get from selling the artifacts they find there with the tenant.

Savage and his crew definitely have an eye for artifact-rich areas, and will seek out historic sites as a result. These areas are home to great finds, as the team uncovers old relics in the show such as a 5 million year old Megalodon shark’s tooth. American Savage is the top artifact recovery company in the United States and is made up of Ric Savage’s wife Rita, who manages the business, battlefield historian Bob Buttafuso, recovery expert Rue Shumate, and Giuseppe, his 25-year old son.

Shark’s teeth aren’t a big deal, but having a team of hacks charge into a historical site to dig up and sell everything they find sounds like a horror story.

The Grammy Awards will be televised tonight

Do not watch them. Do something else. The Walking Dead season premieres tonight, and that stuff is going to be showing all day. You could read a good book. You could put on some good music and dance in your living room.

However, the Grammy Award organizers are apologizers for abuse. In fact, it sounds like the whole entertainment industry will look the other way when a thug like Chris Brown will batter a woman.

So I’m sure you could find something better to do.

Posin’

The latest edition of Randy Milholland’s Super Stupor mocks the ridiculous poses comic book artists contort their heroines into — you know the ones I’m talking about, the strange postures in which they simultanously thrust their breasts upwards and forwards, while thrusting their buttocks backwards and upwards, with their impossibly slender waists slung spinelessly between them (he also summarizes Liefeld Syndrome, a very scary disease).

But I questioned his accuracy. Panel 8 is freakishly bizarre; no one could possibly actually draw a woman in that pose, could they? And then, coincidentally, I was also sent a link to The 5 Most Ridiculously Sexist Superhero Costumes, and there, in the very first illustration for the article, is a super-heroine doing precisely the same weird spinal twist to face the reader and swivel her ass to face him, too, with one one leg splayed wildly in the air.

I’m sorry, Mr Milholland. I will never doubt you again. I guess there’s a reason I haven’t read any mainstream comics in 30 years, too.

(Jhonen Vasquez also has a marvelous send-up of the balloon-breasted, soda-straw waisted comic book stereotype, but I cannot show it here because it is totally obscene. Oh, all right, if you insist, I found a poor copy here.)

Why, Charlie Brown, Why?

Mondays are my long, long days — this is the day I get to spend 3 hours talking to students in small groups about cancer (they’re young and invincible, so so far it hasn’t been as depressing as I feared.) And they teach me stuff! Among the things I learned today is that there was a Peanuts special from the 1990s about cancer, titled “Why, Charlie Brown, Why“. I was incredulous — it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I’d expect on Peanuts — but I looked it up, and there it was on YouTube. So I’ll share. It’s not bad.



The class is operating on a much higher level than this special — it doesn’t mention oncogenes even once! — but the session today was a conversation about everyone’s personal experiences with cancer, and yes, we did talk about television and movies and how they deal with the disease.

(Also on Sb)

Feminist nerd rage

Oh, this was good for a laugh. In fantasy role playing games, there are certain standard roles that have to be filled: the tank, the big heavily armored brute who can take lots of damage; the damage dealers, who may be more fragile, but can pew-pew lots of hurt at the bad guys; and the healers, who can keep everyone healthy and alive during the battles. There are also different kinds of games: ones where you fight monsters set up by the creators of the game, or PvP, player-vs-player, where you fight each other. As you might guess, there are gender-stereotypes associated with each role as well — so lots of people assume that the tanks are all guys and the healers are mostly women (what few women who play these games, anyway), and that women all shy away from PvP.

So I was sent this thread where a woman questions the stereotypes in World of Warcraft. One clueless fellow early on suggests that “women are better at supportive roles and males are (sometimes) better at leading the troops” uses pseudo-evolutionary rationalizations to defend himself…and then the ladies all drop-kick his punk ass. It’s hilarious. I especially liked the woman who talked about playing the tank while breast-feeding.

Also, check out the three year old who spots the patriarchy in a toy store.