Shiny Shiny Bits

a place for my head

[icomefromlaos-blog]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32uc3tmw8-4)

Busta Rhymes vs Jungle Book by DJ Smija.  All I got say is...  damn son. 

[theverynearfuture]

Tech Trends 2016

[icomefromlaos-blog]

I expecting some of these at #CES2016

[kohenari]

The photos and information coming out of Ferguson, MO this evening are shocking.

SWAT teams clearing out fast food restaurants, journalists arrested, full-scale police-as-military response to non-violent protest.

And yet perhaps the most amazing thing is that there seem not to be any elected officials willing to tell this police force to stand down.

[icomefromlaos-blog]

To the world you may be one person but to one person you may be the world.

[jimbenton]

[ilovecharts]

The Problem With Email

[purplebuddhaproject]

I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men.

Lao Tzu (via purplebuddhaproject)

[thlnkdifferent]

Your value doesn’t decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth.

(via thlnkdifferent)

[fuckyeahscifiwomenofcolour]

[zankoku-zen]

The bolded sections represent quotes from the criticism he received. All the z-snaps are in order.

Your characters are unrealistic stereotpyes of political correctness. Is it really necessary for the sake of popular sensibilities to have in a fantasy what we have in the real world? I read fantasy to get away from politically correct cliches. 

God, yes! If there’s one thing fantasy is just crawling with these days it’s widowed black middle-aged pirate moms.  Real sea pirates could not be controlled by women, they were vicous rapits and murderers and I am sorry to say it was a man’s world. It is unrealistic wish fulfilment for you and your readers to have so many female pirates, especially if you want to be politically correct about it! First, I will pretend that your last sentence makes sense because it will save us all time. Second, now you’re pissing me off.  You know what? Yeah, Zamira Drakasha, middle-aged pirate mother of two, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy. I realized this as she was evolving on the page, and you know what? I fucking embrace it.  Why shouldn’t middle-aged mothers get a wish-fulfillment character, you sad little bigot? Everyone else does. H.L. Mencken once wrote that “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” I can’t think of anyone to whom that applies more than my own mom, and the mothers on my friends list, with the incredible demands on time and spirit they face in their efforts to raise their kids, preserve their families, and save their own identity/sanity into the bargain.  Shit yes, Zamira Drakasha, leaping across the gap between burning ships with twin sabers in hand to kick in some fucking heads and sail off into the sunset with her toddlers in her arms and a hold full of plundered goods, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy from hell. I offer her up on a silver platter with a fucking bow on top; I hope she amuses and delights. In my fictional world, opportunities for butt-kicking do not cease merely because one isn’t a beautiful teenager or a muscle-wrapped font of testosterone. In my fictional universe, the main characters are a fat ugly guy and a skinny forgettable guy, with a supporting cast that includes “SBF, 41, nonsmoker, 2 children, buccaneer of no fixed abode, seeks unescorted merchant for light boarding, heavy plunder.” You don’t like it? Don’t buy my books. Get your own fictional universe. Your cabbage-water vision of worldbuilding bores me to tears.  As for the “man’s world” thing, religious sentiments and gender prejudices flow differently in this fictional world. Women are regarded as luckier, better sailors than men. It’s regarded as folly for a ship to put to sea without at least one female officer; there are several all-female naval military traditions dating back centuries, and Drakasha comes from one of them. As for claims to “realism,” your complaint is of a kind with those from bigoted hand-wringers who whine that women can’t possibly fly combat aircraft, command naval vessels, serve in infantry actions, work as firefighters, police officers, etc. despite the fact that they do all of those things— and are, for a certainty, doing them all somewhere at this very minute. Tell me that a fit fortyish woman with 25+ years of experience at sea and several decades of live bladefighting practice under her belt isn’t a threat when she runs across the deck toward you, and I’ll tell you something in return— you’re gonna die of stab wounds. What you’re really complaining about isn’t the fact that my fiction violates some objective “reality,” but rather that it impinges upon your sad, dull little conception of how the world works. I’m not beholden to the confirmation of your prejudices; to be perfectly frank, the prospect of confining the female characters in my story to placid, helpless secondary places in the narrative is so goddamn boring that I would rather not write at all. I’m not writing history, I’m writing speculative fiction. Nobody’s going to force you to buy it. Conversely, you’re cracked if you think you can persuade me not to write about what amuses and excites me in deference to your vision, because your vision fucking sucks. I do not expect to change your mind but i hope that you will at least consider that I and others will not be buying your work because of these issues. I have been reading science fiction and fantasy for years and i know that I speak for a great many people. I hope you might stop to think about the sales you will lose because you want to bring your political corectness and foul language into fantasy. if we wanted those things we could go to the movies. Think about this!  Thank you for your sentiments. I offer you in exchange this engraved invitation to go piss up a hill, suitable for framing.

[icomefromlaos-blog]

To add to this, the most bad ass pirate in the world was female (and Chinese, stop the presses!) and her name was Ching Shih.  So not historically accurate to have female pirates my ass.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Shih

[gendry-the-bull-deactivated2015]

[deukaesomnia]

[commence gross and heartbreaking sobbing]

[strawberrywhinee-deactivated201]

Falling in love with yourself first doesn’t make you vain or selfish, it makes you indestructible.

Things I’ll teach my children (via infl4ted)

[ilovecharts]

[hvamulan]

honestly curious, why does it offend you?

i see lucy as a racist film that plays on negative stereotypes while hiding behind the cover of (white) feminism. 

all this film has done is switch out the white man for a white woman. it’s still a film about a white person getting violated by the evil poc, then gaining power and wiping them out. 

here’s 2 of my favourite scenes from the trailer: 

from top to left to right:

KEEP CLEAN 保持清潔，APPLE 蘋果，ONION 洋蔥，GRAPE 葡萄，CHAIR 椅子，TOMATO 番茄

traditional chinese is an actual written language used by millions of people, not symbols to be thrown around at the whim of set designers because they look cool and idk, serves to create a menacing asian atmosphere. this is so disrespectful, and made even worse by the fact that this film in set it taipei, taiwan where the official written language is traditional chinese.

it doesn’t matter that this film caters to a primarily “white” audience who won’t be able to read it, the language and culture of taiwan isn’t something for you to twist and use as you deem fit because it’s “exotic.” 

lucy shoots a guy for not being able to speak english. 

she l i t e r a l l y shoots this taiwanese taxi driver, in taiwan for not being able to speak english. she’s in taipei and she’s shooting people as they are of no use to her because they don’t speak english. 

just think about the sort of message that’s sending out. she’s not being “bad-ass strong female character who takes no shit,” she’s saying that english is useful and better. this is the type of harmful ideology that stretches all the way back from when western countries were colonising and forcing their language and customs on other countries. 

let me explain with a real life example. i was born in new zealand to two taiwanese parents. i am fluent in english, but mandarin is conversational at best. my friends in taiwan say that i am “so lucky” to speak fluent english, when they are fluent in mandarin and their english level is no worse than my mandarin. they tell me that they want to perfect their english but in the same breath tell me that mandarin isn’t worth perfecting because i have english and that’s “enough”. they also tell me how pretty my white friends are when they see pictures.

this is the type of neo imperialism ideology that they’ve grown up buying into. it honestly hurts and frustrates me that they belittle their own culture like this, honestly believing that the western world is superior. this is the type of neo imperialism ideology that this film (hopefully unintentionally) promotes: white people are better and will save the day. 

if they wanted to film a movie about a white women getting back at those who had violated her, why not film it in a western country? if they wanted to film it in taiwan, why not find an asian lead actress?

i do agree that we need more women protagonists in action/superhero movies, but not like this. its not okay that the female lead needs to be kidnapped and have her body cut open without her consent in order to gain her powers, and those said those powers do not make any of this racist bullshit okay. 

i am just so tired and angry of poc always being brushed off to the side as either props or villains in mainstream media. 

as a poc, it’s so frustrating to see that the of the standard of beauty still white women when we live in multi-cultural societies and a diverse world. 

feminism is about equality. a film in which poc are presented as evil and inferior before being killed off by a superior white woman does not promote equality. 

[icomefromlaos-blog]

as much as I was interested in this movie when the teaser came out, seeing the full trailers make me more and more reluctant and I couldn't figure out why exactly.  The above puts into words some of my unease.  

[community-channel-is-hectic]

[icomefromlaos-blog]

mmmmmm, cake

[aglionby]

[insanecorgi]

will always reblog

[shencomix]

We go forward.

image

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[sunandimension]

The ad was in a women’s magazine and if I remember correctly, was for a perfume. It featured a white woman lying in bed with a black man. The man’s shirtless back was to the viewer, making only his taut, muscular form and powerful-looking arms and shoulders visible. He was faceless, unidentified. The woman looked sultrily at us from over his mysterious form, satisfaction writ large over her features. She had partaken of whatever delights this man had to offer and was smugly, luxuriantly basking in the afterglow. The ad copy was, “Take a walk on the wild side.” My teacher used the ad as an example of how marketers can use certain words and images to convey large amounts of information subtly and effectively. A white woman having sex with a black man? How risqué. The implication: be a little like that woman. Spray on that perfume and feel like the kind of girl who has sex with faceless, muscular black men in ritzy hotel rooms because it’s an adventure, a thrill, a risk, something illicitly pleasurable. These are the semiotics of race. This is why columnists will trip over themselves not to call Lupita Nyong’o or Angela Basset “beautiful”, choosing instead to use terms that call to mind a kind of savage, animalistic magnetism: fierce, striking, edgy, eye-catching. Words like “pretty” and “beautiful” and “cute” are for white women whose bodies and sexualities are not seen as wild, animal, or untamed. Black men are hulking, threatening, thuggish; white men are charming, sexy heartthrobs with hearts of gold. Brown women are exotic, with their “honey-coloured” skin and their “mystical”, “enchanting” beauty, unlike their white counterparts, who are held up as not only ideal, but knowable and safe. White people are beautiful; non-white people are dangerous.

"The Semiotics of Race, or: Walks on the Wild Side"

by Aaminah Khan (via Black Girl Dangerous)

well....shit