Writing about Sunshine prompted some unfortunate thoughts about a certain vampire series:
I Want My Time Back

No Comments »

Over on the reading journal, Robin McKinley isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t mean she’s not damned good:
Sunshine

No Comments »

Over on the reading journal, not all writing from the early twentieth century has aged well:
The Diamond Master

And I totally forgot to plug a link for this entry a few days ago:
The Dark is Rising Sequence

No Comments »

Over on the reading journal, I’m at least nominally reviewing Anansi Boys, although in reality the post doesn’t say that much about it except in comparison to American Gods:

Anansi Boys

No Comments »

Why “Mad Men” is Bad For Women
(Spoilers for those who have not seen the series at all, but not for the current season.)

I’m also increasingly disturbed by the striking difference in how men and women are portrayed — all the more curious and distressing since, although it was created by a man (Matthew Weiner), “Mad Men” is notable for the number of women on its creative staff. Even as it depicts rampant sexism, the show sides with the men. The men get off scot-free (if not scotch-free) while the women are subjected to repeated humiliation and misfortune, which is invariably attributed to their own flaws and poor choices.

This article has been sitting in my to-blog list for a while, as I try to figure out exactly what to say about it. Also relevant: Women in Movies: The Bechdel Test.

The Bechdel test — named for the cartoonist Alison Bechdel who wrote a long-running comic strip called Dykes To Watch Out For and the critically acclaimed graphic novel Fun Home — is a test to assess whether women have a meaningful presence in a movie. … Once you start thinking about it, you’ll be surprised by how many films don’t pass this test. In fact, there are entire genres (action-adventure, for example) that seem to fail the Bechdel test, by and large.

And, last but not least, a blog entry of my own from a while back.

I’ve got it pretty good as a woman living in America in the year 2010, and I’m well aware of that. But at the same time, it’s not over, and it’s important to remember that.

I had some trouble reconciling my reactions to the first two items with my stated position in the third at first. When someone starts going on about the way women are portrayed in the media these days, my standard response is to roll my eyes and think they’re getting too worked up about it. In doing that, though, am I not being dismissive of the problem? Am I not acting like there isn’t a problem and there’s no need to address it? I mean, it’s just a TV show. It’s just a movie. What does it matter? Except it does, because the culture that supports more serious abuses is shaped and supported by things like TV and movies. If women are portrayed as vapid helpless victims always waiting in their tower rooms for a knight in shining armor to rescue them, that might not be causing a culture of discrimination as such, but it’s certainly enabling it. And am I not in turn enabling the enabling if I act like it doesn’t matter?

No.

In thinking about it more, I’ve decided that it isn’t that I don’t think the problem is a problem. I recognize the influence the media carries, and I recognize that it’s important to be aware of it. I simply disagree with the specific ways in which that problem is called out in many cases, and the solutions which are implicitly or explicitly suggested.

I’m a woman who wants to be equal; I’m also a consumer of media who wants a quality product, and a sometime-writer who wants to watch and read well-written media. And frankly, most of the suggestions the Salon article gives for “fixing” Mad Men don’t strike me as good writing. Good writing does not mean sacrificing character depth and nuance in the interest of “empowerment”. Likewise, what worries me about the Bechdel test as described in the linked-to article is that it seems to push the inclusion of a strong female presence just for the sake of giving women a prominent part in the movie, without taking into consideration whether it makes sense in context or not.

I want women to be well-represented in the media, sure. I just don’t want to sacrifice quality for the sake of political correctness. Not as a writer, and not as a viewer. There must be more stories out there to be written that simply happen to be about strong women (women, plural). I want those to be written, and written well. I want women to have an equal chance at being well-represented, not for women’s role in the media to be artificially inflated because someone feels like we’re not equal enough yet. I feel like that’s almost as much of a disservice to women as the lack of media presence is. It sends the message that women require a feminist agenda in order to be interesting enough to write stories about, which is just flat-out not true.

It’s not over, and this is part of the problem. It does matter. Just writing women into stories for the sake of setting an example, however, is not the way to address it.

No Comments »

We’d been talking about taking Natalie to the Zoo, or to Holiday World, or to the Children’s Museum, all summer. Her birthday seemed like a good time to do that, and since the Children’s Museum was indoors and air-conditioned and Natalie’s birthday falls at a time notorious for its heat and humidity, we thought it was probably the best choice. We rounded up the crew (both of my parents, Tim’s mom, Andrew and Tina, and of course Natalie and Tim and myself) and headed up on Sunday morning.

It had been a very long time since I’d been. Mom and Dad used to take us to the museum quite a bit; it used to be free admission, so it was something very affordable besides being fun and educational. I have fond (if fuzzy) memories of hours spent running from exhibit to exhibit, playing and learning. As far as I can tell, it’s only gotten better over the years.

We started at the bottom and worked our way up, only leaving when Natalie started showing signs of being overtired (not that she napped in the car on the way home). There’s so much to do that we didn’t get to see everything we would’ve liked, but we still managed to pack a lot in. Natalie wasn’t fond of the loud noises in the Dinosphere and All Aboard! on the lower level, but I’m sure she could’ve stayed in the Barbie exhibit or in the preschooler-focused Playscape all day if we’d been able to. I think we all could’ve spent a long time with Fireworks of Glass, the permanent Dale Chihuly installation. Especially those of us with cameras. (Interestingly enough, as art I’m sort of so-so on it — I’m not big on abstract sculpture — but I could’ve photographed it all day. BTW, you should totally go here and watch the time-lapse video of it being installed.)

And yes, cameras. Of course there are photos. I will someday blog something else again, now that photoblogging month is over. (The image of Natalie in the Barbie exhibit also got added to her public gallery.)

No Comments »

Here are the final few photos from my month-long photoblogging project. I don’t have much to say about the last three days, being as it was only three days.

Except for the last one, of Tim in the dark. The light is coming from his iPad (out of frame). This was not the photo I intended, but that’s not my point here; see the rejected photo from this session for more on that. As the month has progressed, I’ve noticed more and more that I dislike relying on the automatic shutter speed and f/stop settings (which seem never to be quite right), but this little portrait session really emphasized that for me. I let the camera do its own thing for the first attempt at the shot, and it decided I needed a ten-second exposure. Which was hugely overexposed, when I previewed it. Tim waited very patiently while I stepped the exposure down manually, eventually landing on only two seconds as the ideal.

That experience also made me really, really glad that I was using a digital camera. I couldn’t have done this with film. No preview. I probably would’ve run up quite a bill with film bracketing exposures to ensure that I got the shot I wanted, at the very least, and in this particular case I might still not have gotten the effect I was looking for.

The final three photos: Libby, fair ribbons, and Tim.

OK, so, wrapping up. I think the month-long project was useful in very much the same way NaNoWriMo is useful. It pushes me to actually do something and not just sit around dithering about a lack of inspiration or whatever… And then go with the results, even if they’re not terribly inspiring, and figure I can worry about cleaning up my mess later. (In the case of NaNo, that means writing; in the case of this project, it means learning from my mistakes.)

It’s also, as I mentioned above, gotten more much more comfortable with my equipment. I have a better feel for the controls on the EOS and the Powershot, and a better feel for what I can do with them technically within those limits. The latter goes for my iPhone as well. (There just aren’t many controls, with that one; it’s all about “OK, now what can I do with what I’ve got?”)

As the artistic merit portion of the program goes, I don’t know. I still took a lot of photos of my usual subjects, especially Natalie and food. (Sometimes even Natalie with food.) The limits I placed on myself did force me to look at more things outside my usual comfort zone, but it didn’t stop me from still constantly turning to those subjects. (Although I didn’t do as much with flowers as I’d thought I would. Which is good, because there are only so many “it’s a flower!” photos that can exist in this world before they get boring, anyway.) I just had to reject photos of those subjects in favor of others. Maybe the lesson here is as much editing as anything, though, because I don’t think it was a bad thing to have taken the photos in the first place…

You can view the rejects, with reasons for rejection listed, here.

A few of the rejects also made it into Natalie’s public gallery:

No Comments »

This has not been the best week for photoblogging. Oh, I got my shot every day, but the shots themselves suffer from all sorts of problems. In Saturday’s, the light was too strong. On Sunday, I forgot to bring a “real” camera with me when we celebrated Andrew’s birthday and the iPhone just didn’t quite cut it for a lot of shots. Tuesday I had an idea at the last second and pulled it off with no time to spare for coming up with something else… and it didn’t turn out all that well. Wednesday, I just sort of lost the motivation again and once again wound up with a simple snapshot — better than nothing, but not anything special either. (This one particularly frustrates me, this morning. I’d been holding off on using photos of Natalie, even though I’ve gotten some good ones this month, because I’d set a max of two and wanted to save one for her birthday. Then I realized that I won’t probably actually see her on her birthday; I’ll be gone to work before she gets up and then she’s going to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. So I finally decided to use another one of her, and… it’s not as good as some of the others that I didn’t use earlier.)

The Tuesday photo (in the dark garage) wound up being my first major correction of the month. Other than giving a few shots the monochrome treatment or adjusting exposure a little bit here or there, I’ve tried to leave the photos alone and just let them show what they show. In that one, though, there was an LED or something near the center of the photo creating a horrible green corona that I didn’t notice until I started processing. The best solution seemed to be to “heal” it out.

Friday’s self-portrait also had a problem, the usual noise that creeps into iPhone photos in low light, but I did not correct it (though I have in other photos this month) and… D’ya know, I kind of like how it came out. It gives the photo a little bit of a grainy texture that I think looks good with the stark black and white. I’m not going to start modeling all my pictures after that (it’s sort of a little artsy and pretentious, really), but for a one-off I think it’s one of the better ones this week. Best of week for me is tied between that one and the Thursday shot from the doctor’s office, which I like the composition of.

Photos: A doctor’s visit, me, shopping, bowling, tomatoes, a bright monitor in a dark garage, and Natalie.

Just a few more days to go, and then I’ll post a wrap-up and the rejects gallery.

No Comments »

So it’s a slow day at work, and one of my fallbacks for killing a little time is watching trailers. I’m halfheartedly browsing through the current selection at IMDb when I run across this. Reactions, in order, as follows.

Earthsea. As an anime. Who in all the world did that (click) and does it suck as much as the live-action… (Trailer begins, interrupting train of thought.)

Waitwaitwait. STUDIO GHIBLI did it? Why didn’t I know about that? Okay, I think I’m a little more on… (Trailer gets to director credit.)

Hang on, that’s a different Miyazaki. Son? (Looks at the credits on IMDb.) Yup. (Looks at the trivia.) Oh. And LeGuin wanted Ghibli to do this, although the elder Miyazaki was her choice for director — which I gather means she hasn’t disowned this production the way she did the live-action miniseries. Not that that means anything really, but it sounds hopeful.

…Okay, so I need to read the books now, right? (Because they’re not, like, sitting on my shelf waiting to be read anyway, right?)

1 Comment »

Right, so, I referenced our Hermann trip in my photoblogging entry and then realized that I hadn’t actually said anything about the trip here, so very few people probably had any idea what I was talking about. Or had seen the other photos, or even realized there were other photos. Oops. So here it is. I’m going to try to keep this short and sweet; it might get a little compressed and I may leave some stuff out.

Hermann, Missouri is a little town in Missouri wine country. (Didn’t know Missouri had a wine country? Well, they do, and it makes delicious wine.) Mom and Dad have visited there several times, and for our tenth wedding anniversary they gave Tim and me a rather generous gift certificate (thank you again!) to their favorite bed-and-breakfast: Hermann Hill.

We opted to stay in the cottages rather than the Inn, which meant that we had more privacy but less pampering. For the most part, we enjoyed having that privacy and didn’t mind not having the pampering. In fact, we preferred having greater freedom to set our own schedule; if we’d been staying at the Inn, we couldn’t have gotten a hot breakfast until 9-ish, whereas we ate both mornings around 6-7. Our evening cookies and ice cream would also have been delivered at 9:30pm, and we were falling asleep by that time on Saturday. The hot breakfasts (reheated out of the fridge) would have better served fresh, but that’s the price we pay for greater privacy and flexibility. The other major draw of the cottages, the private hot tub on the deck, was unfortunately of no use to us on this trip because it was just. Too. Hot. The jacuzzi tub built for two inside, on the other hand, was wonderful. As was the steam shower.

Our favorite dining experience by far while we were there was The Cottage just outside of town. It’s a humble little place set up in an old house tucked away in the woods that focuses on building a menu around what they can find at the Farmers Market and other local sources. There is obviously a little bit of supplementing going on (I don’t think shrimp are native to Missouri), but I don’t think it’s much. Because ingredient availability can change so quickly, the menu is always changing. In fact, the new one was still being printed up as we arrived. It’s local, it’s a bit on the fancy side but not so much so that they’re above serving fried chicken (“just like your grandma made…if she was a good cook”), and everything was very well prepared. So, in other words, tailor-made to attract us, really. Plus, the surroundings are just gorgeous.

We couldn’t very well visit Missouri wine country without visiting a couple of wineries. Two nights and only one full day meant we didn’t have a lot of time to try to go everywhere, but we did see a few. Our favorite overall experience was Adam Puchta, a sort of homey down-on-the-farm operation complete with wandering cats and dogs. We were served by a friendly, talkative older gentleman who expressed great surprise that we were celebrating our tenth anniversary and not our first or second. (Flatterer.) Many of the samples came with a bite of this or that to draw out the best flavors of the wine. Hermannhof was pretty, and the wines were decent and the staff at least cordial, but it didn’t impress us as much. At Stone Hill, our “official” tasting experience was fairly bad; the person pouring clearly did not want to be there, almost completely ignored us, and didn’t bother giving us any information on what we were tasting at all. However, that was balanced out by the tour.

Stone Hill offers tours of their winery multiple times daily, but once a month they also offer a “Grapes to Glass” tour. Mom and Dad had suggested that we take it if we could, and it happened to be the weekend we were there, so we thought we’d give it a go. The senior winemaker took us through the winemaking process, answering questions and pouring tastes (including some straight from the barrel, still aging) along the way. It was extremely informative. I’m familiar with the general process of winemaking and have done a winery tour once or twice before, but having the guy who actually makes the wine there allowed for a great deal more in-depth discussion of the topic. Even without the tastings (sufficient, even over the course of 2-2.5 hours, to get us a bit tipsy) and the souvenier glass, it was well worth the $25 each we paid for it.

Sunday we woke up wondering what to do and how quickly we should leave town to go back home. The weather made the decision for us. Just as we were packing up, the skies opened up and downpour ensued. We left in a bit of a hurry, and we were both soaked when we got into the car. The storm just sort of seemed to follow us home. At least it let up after a while, and it only hailed for a little bit… It was stormclouds all the way back to Bloomington, though. And it’s been raining ever since.

Photos, by both Tim and myself:
Private Gallery
Public Gallery

No Comments »