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Bitch Magazine Series: Girls of Color in Dystopian YA Fantasy Literature

This current guest series by Victoria Law includes book reviews, analysis of race and tends in YA literature, questions about race and gender in Dystopic narratives, interviews with authors and more.

Do Girls of Color Survive Dystopia?

A Short List of Great Resources for Racial Diversity in Young Adult Sci-Fi

Black Girls Hunger for Heroes, Too: A Black Feminist Conversation on Fantasy Fiction for Teens (Zeta Elliott and Ibi Aanu Zoboi)

Two YA Authors Explore Life After the Bomb (Ellen Oh and Julianna Baggott)

Race & Body Issues in Nalo Hopkinson’s “The Chaos”

Send in the Clones: Two YA Novels’ Treatment of Race, Gender, and Cloning

YA Book “What’s Left of Me” is a Dystopian Take on Nationalist Fervor

Can a Society Run by Women Still Be a Dystopia?

Reading “Tankborn"— A YA Book About Race, Class, and Caste

Dystopian Book “Partials” Imagines a Society of Forced Pregnancy

New Book “Orleans” Imagines a World Where Blood Type Matters More than Race

Dystopian Book “Shadows Cast By Stars” Revolves Around Aboriginal Race and Identity

Finally! In “Immortal Rules,” One Girl of Color Survives Dystopia

A 15-Year-Old’s Vision of Public School Dystopia

Reading Race in Marie Lu’s Dystopian YA Hit “Legend”

What if Cinderella Wasn’t Straight and White?

Young Adult Books Too Often Present a World Without People of Color

#good shit

pokemon-personalities

Charmander c:

#cutie pie

ornerine

A dream I had the other night.

#i love this #this is the kind of dream i have

gotinstarblog-deactivated201512

half-black-phillip

I’m so mad because this worked

#Only doing this because I just submitted important things #and he looks like a champ #thanks roger for being there

grizzlyhills

Oddly specific things my D&D players are no longer allowed to do

Play in the sewers

Build a bridge out of birds

Buy 5200 thrushes, or any number of thrushes for that matter

Mention sea cats in any context, but especially a playable one

Waifu the same NPCs on subsequent playthroughs (The Don and Bryan Waifu Rule)

Make the DM ship even more goddamn ships involving the time traveling sad lesbian

Argue with the DM on how much damage a thrown frying pan can do

Debate with the DM about the merits of an ear trumpet or a tennis kit in combat

Buy ear trumpets or tennis kits to use them in combat

Look for genocidal, murderous spiders in castles, or anywhere else, really, unless they’re the small dragon cleric

Bring horses to space stations

Ask gods of immense power for horses

Be a local lord in areas where they don’t speak local languages

Be a local lord at all

Ask why humans are called “humans”

Name their character after another player but with two letters rearranged, be it by accident or not, especially if it’s at 3am when the DM checks new character sheets and doesn’t realize the ramifications of the name

Have +3 Natural AC for no adequately explored reason

Pester the DM to roll for divine intervention

Ask about the genitalia of fictional species

Make reference to Bad Dragon during games or in the group’s Skype chats

grizzlyhills

21. Buy any amount of centipedes exceeding 0.

#I feel like we're probably now discouraged from creating ladders from dead bodies #but other than that i think our dm likes it when we do weird shit

corasharper

Oblivion cities + provincial influences

#the reason why oblivion is the greatest #so much more interesting than its compadres

I just came up with two solid reasons for living that really improved my outlook on life.

1) My spirit animal and I started and finished eating at the same time because the circle of life moves us all through despair and hope (and some other stuff). 2) As much as everything seems pointless right now, when I’m a hot shot (hahahaha, riiiight) people I dislike will have to put up with seeing me more often than I would have to put up with them, and that is weirdly comforting.

#now i just need to do well at life #why would anyone want to grow up #it sucks balls

pr1nceshawn

Ways Real Life Should be More like Video Games

effyoutrav

i approve of all of this

#yup

glegrumbles

A trove of 2,000 delicate gold spirals that date back to the Bronze Age was recently discovered in Denmark -- and archaeologists are trying to figure out what the ancient coils were used for. The 3,000

stitch-n-time

…evidently these people have never done goldwork embroidery.

Oh look.

It took me like 2 seconds

to come up with a viable option.

gefdreamsofthesea

I’m willing to bet there will be a follow up article about how scholars have made a startling discovery that the gold was used for crafts and the craft people of the world will just be like “…..Really?”

I love how they just kind of leap to “A PRIEST KING MUST HAVE WORN THIS SHINY GOLD STUFF!”

glegrumbles

“Everything is mysterious! We have no idea! It, uh… it was for a ritual, yes.” “…don’t you say everything is for a ritual?” “Shhh, ancient peoples liked rituals.” “But there’s a giant painting on this wall showing how this was used, and modern crafters you could ask.” “SHHH. RITUALS.”

ash-of-the-loam

I have a very strong urge to email that researcher.

uristmcdorf

This keeps happening, you know. For decades we thought water or oil was poured onto the rocks being used to build Egyptian pyramids for “ritual purposes”. Turns out if you ask people who have worked on sand they can tell you that wet sand is A LOT EASIER TO DRAG ROCKS ACROSS. We spent centuries unable to figure out how the hair styles of ancient civilisations were constructed, typically going with “all the women wore wigs” (seriously. That was literally the solution) until a hairdresser with an interest in the hairstyles she saw in classical art turned her hand to them and BLEW THE RESEARCH COMMUNITY AWAY with her incredibly accurate recreations of hairstyles using tools available to the original peoples. Academia has this real, huge problem where you’ve got a whole bunch of insulated people who know a lot about history and research and academia but shit-all about anything else. And who, when presented with something they can’t figure out, they turn to other academics rather than to people who might have some practical experience with similar stuff. And it spreads into popular culture in a really unhealthy way. Because there is so much stuff that academia leaves as “ritual purposes” or “we don’t yet know how X was done”, which becomes “it’s a mystery!!!1!” in popular science shows and magazines. Which winds up fuelling the fires of people who would rather believe that ALIENS BUILD THE FUCKING PYRAMIDS than that the Egyptian people might actually have been competent at this thing they did.

glegrumbles

Yep. Interesting thing about the hairstylist: there was a word that kept being used in documents about hairstyles that could translate as two different things, one of which was something like “sewing needle”. Academics ruled out that translation of the word, because “lol, sewing hairstyles. That’s ridiculous.” The hairstylist who recreated them… looked at that word, at the available tools of the time, and tried a sewing technique with needles to keep hair in place. AND IT WORKED. The silo effect in academia is a major problem.

thelefthandedwife

Side note: IDK if this is the same lady or not (it probably is) but there’s an entire youtube channel devoted to not only period-correct hairstyles from ancient greece/rome and egypt all the way up to the napoleonic and civil war eras but also a few needle/fiber/cloth crafts like beading, dyeing, etc.

Channel is here, the lady’s name is Janet Stephens.

madgastronomer

Yep, they are talking about Janet Stephens.

I love her.

The ones that bug me are always the textiles stuff – naturally, as I do that myself. Like the vase paintings of ancient Greeks and Romans and their warp-weighted looms. Archeologists kept saying shit like, “No, that must be an artistic rendering, that couldn’t possibly work like that,” and meanwhile people in Scandinavia are still using nearly identical looms today. Because nobody ever thought to ask actual weavers. The nitwits looking at women preparing wool and spinning on vases, and coming up with completely ridiculous explanations for this shit, and any spinner could glance at it and go, “Um, no.” Just. Argh.

sev-wildfang

this why you shouldn’t let archeologists theorize.

medievalpoc

I bolded the portion above about the problem of insular academics, because I have been frustrated about this for quite some time.

Articles about the Egyptian engineers pouring water on sand to better support sledges with building materials seem to always use language like “clever trick” and “surprisingly simple” when they describe the science behind it:

Experiments revealed that the required pulling force decreased proportional to the stiffness of the sand. Capillary bridges arise when water is added to the sand. These are small water droplets that bind the sand grains together. In the presence of the correct quantity of water, wet desert sand is about twice as stiff as dry sand. A sledge glides far more easily over firm desert sand simply because the sand does not pile up in front of the sledge as it does in the case of dry sand.

If it was so simple and obvious, why were artworks and text showing and explaining how to do this ignored for millennia? Because Egyptologists didn’t look outside their discipline for answers:

The answer had been staring us in the face for a long time. In a wall painting from the tomb of Djehutihotep (schematic above), you can see a worker pouring water on the sand in front of a sled that’s carrying a colossal statue. The sleds were little more than large wooden planks with upturned edges. “Egyptologists had been interpreting the water as part of a purification ritual,“ Bonn says, “and had never sought a scientific explanation.”

People of Color in European history are marginalized as exceptions and rarities within almost every discipline, but MPoC is about taking those margins and putting them all together in the center of our focus and scrutiny to see what they really have to tell us about the past. I’ve posted about Janet Stephens before, and I’ve watched the videos she’s posted. And a lot of these ancient hairstyles are amazingly practical:

I think we could all benefit from applying a little pragmatism to our perspectives on history, and keeping in mind that we aren’t set on a course of linear improvement from “worse” to “better”. The past has a lot to teach us, and “ancient” isn’t synonymous with “primitive”. Similarly, we can’t assume that the people in the past didn’t travel, were less tolerant of difference, or more insular in their worldviews. This construction of the past as ubiquitously “worse” is also harmful to our present and our future. After all, if human society must of necessity be better than it has ever been right now, how can we effectively question where we’re going? Analyzing the present in historical context can help us improve not only our lives right now, but our hopes for the future.

#good shit

zenpencils

James Rhodes - Is that not worth exploring?

#you know just pulling at my biggest hopes and fears #except with art n stuff

Despite being one of the most uneventful days of my life, today was one of the better days I’ve had in a while.

#Just had to appreciate it #life is okay today

okoenig

Jurassic World (2015), dir. Colin Trevorrow

parkchanwoohoo

Jurassic World is a story about 4 siblings experiencing the outside world for the very first time and struggling between loyalty to their loving but strict father and the Radical Cool Kid they meet who encourages them to do Bad things

bearvstheworld

typette-deactivated20150825

yo can I drop some advice all you kids trying to get entry level jobs need to learn? I learned it the hard way and now I shall impart that to you.

when you see this shit, that goes “you need like 10 years experience and all this other qualifications nobody with all that would ever apply for a job like this with”, that means one thing: they are weeding out people who don’t believe they can achieve that level. They go “sigh, I can’t even compete, fuck it.” and don’t apply, saving the company the trouble.

What you, as a fresh new student, need to do- is apply anyway with a Luffy-like optimism that you will get that fucking job!! You don’t have a million years experience BUT YOU’LL TRY AND NEVER GIVE UP ETC. You write an opener letter with that in it, submit your shit, and get that goddamn job because they just found somebody who’s willing to give it a try anyway, who has the confidence and the ability to play with the big boys and they will train you to become a master because fresh meat is vital to the industry.

tldr: APPLY ANYWAY, YOUNG GRASSHOPPER

writingfail

i really wish i’d read this three months ago

to those who are still looking for their first job: it wouldn’t hurt to try. the worst thing that can happen is that you get a “no”

masswisteria

So, really interesting statistic that just came up in hiring diversity training at work: women will typically only apply to a position if they feel they meet 100% of the requirements. Men will typically apply if they feel they meet just 60%.

And guess what? They still get hired, because a lot of job descriptions are total garbage. These aren’t crafted masterpieces handed down from the divine goddess of Human Resources. These are things that were thrown together at the last minute 3 years ago by some manager with too many more important things to do, and they’ve been used untouched ever since.

Think about this, and think about those numbers, ladies. Think long and hard about this statistic next time you are looking at a job description and telling yourself that you can’t cut it. You probably can, and applying is free.

(P.S.: I’m happy to give resume advice to people - especially new college grads in the tech industry. That’s the field I know and do interviews in; I’m not sure if my advice would be as applicable elsewhere.)