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Sumiki

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Blog Entries posted by Sumiki

  1. Sumiki

    Inception Sequel

    By Sumiki,

    Details are sketchy, but there are two things we know:
     
    One: they're going to go to a wedding and make everyone dream about weddings while they're getting married.
     
    Two: the movie will be called ... Reception.
     
    I am a terrible person for making this joke please forgive me ._._._.
  2. Sumiki
    (Disclaimer: This blog entry is facetious and in no way intended to be factual whatsoever.)

    It's Christmastime once again, and with it come a wave of songs. This year, I took the time to consider the the implications of the lyrics of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
     
    (I really do have too much time on my hands.)
     
    Let's just start off with the first couple of lines, the introduction:
     
    You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen,
    Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen,
    But do you recall?
    The most famous reindeer of all?
     
    This bothers me. First off, there's the implication that I know those eight other reindeer. Heck, I can't remember their names, except that whenever I hear Blitzen's name I think of Wolf Blitzer's stubbly white beard.
     

     
    This is, as one can imagine, an utterly horrifying thought - but hey, at least I can remember Blitzen's name.
     
    But this also implies that the other eight are so famous that everyone has heard of them, when in reality, the only reindeer that anyone can name is Rudolph. And this intro is implying that we've never heard of him right before launching into a full-fledged biographical song.
     
    Okay, minor gripe over. What I'm really concerned about is the reindeer culture, which isn't much of a culture at all. In fact, it seems to be run by bullies - very animalistic. We do know, from the context of the song, that there are more reindeer than just the nine we know of. At the very least, we can assume that there are backups in case something should befall one of the reindeer, rendering him unable to complete the annual journey. Maybe Blitzen got an ingrown hair one year and Santa wanted to take precautions.
     
    All of the other reindeer
    Used to laugh and call him names;
    They never let poor Rudolph
    Join in any reindeer games.
     
    Reindeer seem to be mean. The song states that all of the reindeer - not just the immature, small ones (which we don't know for sure even exist at the North Pole), but all of them - made fun of Rudolph just because his nose glowed. Logic would dictate that this includes the eight main reindeer, and it seems more and more likely that the reindeer deserve their own places on the naughty list. Meanwhile, Santa's just sitting there watching the spectacle of a young reindeer with an unfortunately bright nose get picked on constantly for something he couldn't help.
     
    Unless, of course, Rudolph just has very bad allergies all of the time.
     

     
    We know from the song that Santa knew of Rudolph's nose and chose to do nothing about it ... until the night before Christmas:
     
    Then one foggy Christmas Eve,
    Santa came to say,
    "Rudolph, with your nose so bright,
    Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?"
     
    Hold on a second. There are a lot of implications in just one little stanza, so let's go through them. The first is the implication that there is fog everywhere, referring to the entire planet, an unprecedented weather phenomenon that no one has ever seen before, but nonetheless it wasn't going to stop the present delivery from happening.
     
    We also now know that Santa lacks headlights on his sleigh. To make toys, Santa must not only employ a massive workforce but also use advanced technology in the present-making process. Since his elves must work year-round to make enough presents for everyone, they must work when there is no natural light outside. At the North Pole, the winter is by and large sunless. Continuing from this logic, Santa must have some sort of artificial light. If you fly around the earth at night and sneak into people's houses, it's kind of necessary to have a few flashlights. If he had magical night-vision, he wouldn't need Rudolph to light the way in the first place.
     
    Any way you look at it, Rudolph should not have been an addition to the eight-reindeer team for the reasons provided in the song.
     
    Here's the kicker: after it's over, the reindeer now like Rudolph:
     
    Then how the reindeer loved him
    As they shouted out with glee
    "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,
    You'll go down in history!"
     
    ... and you're sure that they were shouting that with glee?
     
    We now have the first indication that reindeer can talk. Reindeer intelligence is great enough to understand spoken words, as Rudolph understood Santa, but with this stanza we know that reindeer can talk. With speech comes advanced society. Second, telling someone that they're going down in history sounds like a one-liner a bad guy would say in a James Bond movie before they kill someone.
     

     
    Thusly, I submit to you, the populace of BZPower, absolute incontrovertible proof that the implications contained within the song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, when paired with simple logic, provide evidence that reindeer are mean and Santa Claus is an imbecilic, lazy troll.
     
    Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.
     
    NEXT TIME: SUMIKI WAKES UP IN THE HOSPITAL AFTER BEING AMBUSHED BY A GANG OF EIGHT REINDEER.
  5. Sumiki

    My grandmother

    By Sumiki,

    My grandmother died this morning at the age of 77.
     
    Words can’t even begin to describe the misery she went through in the past several years of her life. Her immense medical record was just about as long as the list of doctors who were mortified at the prospect of having to navigate the murky medical waters of a woman who, by all rights, should have been dead five times over. Between her assisted living facility, the various wards of the hospital, and rehab facilities spanning across several counties, she was a threat to sap the combined medical resources of the greater Charlotte area. 77 is not an old age, but aside from her thinning, yet stubbornly black hair, her body might as well have been 97.
     
    I don’t know, at this point, what finally did her in, but I can venture a guess that it’s something to do with the all-too-uncommon perils of someone with her comorbidities: her stage 2 kidney failure prevented her from taking the full dose of diuretics necessary to get the inevitable fluid buildup away from her heart and lungs, while her stage 3/borderline stage 4 heart failure had a hard time keeping up with the volume overload. People in her condition walk a thinner and thinner tightrope until they (or their loved ones) are forced into choosing death by kidney failure or death by heart failure.
     
    It was getting to a point where we would have been forced into making a difficult decision on her behalf. While she never suffered from any sort of neurological conditions (other than lifelong anxiety and depression), she was so tired—especially in the final months—that she could barely lift up her head, and her generally high creatinine levels (a byproduct of kidney failure) led to many a moment when the vivid imagination of her dreams got to her in her few remaining waking hours. She would have been in no condition to weigh the awful choice which was coming her way; a nursing home would have been the next step, and that process would have been an unimaginable emotional anguish for everyone involved.
     
    Her passing, while undeniably sad, is a weight lifted. Her condition would have killed a lesser person, and her life is a testament to a strength of willpower so strong that the rest of us would do well for ourselves in life if we had the tiniest fraction of hers.
     
    You often hear about deaths like this being sad, but not too sad, because they’re “expected.” As cliché as that might be, I can attest to its accuracy, having seen her on her deathbed on multiple occasions within the past several years. It was hard on those occasions because we grieved her passing and got through the emotions associated with such a loss, only for her to pull out and get through another two years.
     
    Even towards the end, she had good days, good weeks, and even good months. She found as much joy as possible in the little pleasures and comforts still available to her—watching the livestream of my graduation, hosting her bridge club for the final time—up through May. When it became clear that her body wouldn’t get back to the quality of life she once enjoyed, it shut down for good; that fight to get to the next goal, the next thing-she-was-looking-forward-to, just wasn’t there this time.
     
    If there’s anyone who taught me perseverance in the face of adversity, it’s her, and I hope that I can follow her example for the rest of my life.
  6. Sumiki
    This tablescrap has a bit of a backstory.
     
    In 2007, I created a series of terrible noobish Doctor Who-based stopmotion films. To film these, I built the TARDIS exterior and interior. The exterior, which I still have around someplace, is terrible. But the interior, which accrued dust over the years, was sort of okay. This week, I rebuilt the portions of it that had fallen into disarray, mostly by patching up places where I'd cannibalized pieces.
     

     
    | | | | |

  8. Sumiki

    Erm ... so, BrickFair

    By Sumiki,

    So I've been getting back to my hotel room usually somewhere near midnight. Of course, everyone else had gotten a head start and thus I had nothing original to blog about.
     
    Not tonight, however.
     
    In no particular order:
     
    - I apparently talk in Palatino
    - Papyrus is worse than Comic Sans
    - Hat towers are cool
    - Zatth's GIFs will be hilarious when I download/convert them
    - He is the human GIF
    - Ballom came back during the dreaded PUBLIC HOURS from the vendors and showed us a bag full of cool parts and rare '01 masks. I immediately asked him where he got it and he told me - apparently one of the vendors had refilled their gigantic BIONICLE tub. So Daiker, Cholie, and I sliced through the crowd and got more delicious loot
    - Meiko gave me some teal parts
    - Meiko is pretty cool, though he's quite literally the human troll. He kept trying to steal my BZP Staff brick off my badge
    - I kept trying to think of classical music jokes when I was around Windrider, but whenever I got near him my mind suddenly went blank
    - We sang "Happy Birthday" to Black Six, who then threatened to ban everyone who sung
    - Black Six slapped Takuma's hat off of his head, sending the light clip that was on it shattering into its constituent parts. While we were able to piece it back together, I'm not sure if anyone ever got it to work
    - After public hours, we planned a last-minute vendor raid, but Architect and I didn't run into anything interesting on sale
    - Kothra and Waffles both made their appearance known via laggy and blurry videocalls
    - Malignus showed up again today and showed everyone his technique for attaching Kopaka Mata's shield to his feet
    - Xaeraz cobbled together a Toxic Waste Bunny and walked the Dinosaur
    - Cholie and I barked at each other
    - InnerRayg remarked that our dancing should supply the front page for at least five days
    - We looked at pictures on Zatth's iPad, watched videos from last year's 'Fair, and made dumb jokes and puns
    - Takuma's cousin won a door prize at the closing ceremonies
    - Afterwards, Brickeens, Takuma, his cousin, Avohkah Tamer, Bionicle Raptor, Zatth, Disky, Spink, Sisen, and I went out to eat dinner, where much hilarity ensued - specifically, pun zingers in the conversation between Zatth and me.
    - My mom took a group shot of us all, but half of Spink's head was behind Sisen, so another picture was taken. Everyone looked strange, so a third attempt was made ... but everyone turned out blurry. After Sisen messed with the camera, we finally got a good group picture and all was right with the world again
    - Zatth, after having a lunch of Skittles and a second lunch of nachos, was out of money because his parents didn't want him to squander it at BrickFair. He ended up eating a side of macaroni and cheese from someone else's plate
    - A few set designers who did a BrickFair seminar were eating at the same place we were, so they came over and said hi
    - Unfortunately I had to go so I missed whatever hilarity is going on in Takuma's hotel room as I type this, but I have to get up early tomorrow morning so Brickeens, Zatth, and I can tour Washington
     
    I miss BrickFair already - but hey, it's only 361 more days until it all happens again.
  9. Sumiki

    Why I Don't Like Mozart

    By Sumiki,

    Let's get this out of the way: I really love classical music, and I kind of know a lot about it. I'm willing to bet that I know more things about music history than anyone else on BZP ... save for perhaps -Windrider-. Dude's a beast when it comes to this sort of stuff.
     
    Most people don't really hold opinions on classical music one way or another, and those that do generally see it as monotonous and boring. I've never really held this opinion, but my favorite music has always come later in music history - not with the dissonance and atonality so revered by the composers of the 20th century, but with the Romantic era.
     
    I'm using "classical" in a broad sense because I'm really not the world's biggest fan of music from the Classical period. Those who aren't as familiar with this history may be a bit lost at this point, so I'll see if I can't briefly recap some of the details.
     
    The Middle Ages and the Renaissance are more or less grouped together in one era of music history. This was a very long era, but there were crucial innovations in harmony, melody, and musical notation. By the high Renaissance, polyphony - multiple melodies at once - was extremely common, and the best composers were able to write motets that used up to 40 distinct voices. Polyphony was music.
     
    Around 1600, as musical instruments increased in quality and secular music became a more popular genre, the Baroque era started. Baroque music is often characterized as architecture, and Baroque composers were, as a general rule, ridiculously prolific. (Telemann is still the single most prolific composer in history, and Vivaldi nearly got thrown in an asylum when he interrupted himself at his day job - as a priest - to write down some notes that had occurred to him.)
     
    Baroque music still drew on the polyphony of the high Renaissance to a certain extent, but by and large this kind of writing wasn't very common. Most Baroque composers used one or two melodies, with the notable exception of Johann Sebastian Bach. His keyboard music - especially his complex fugues with their finger-breaking polyphony - was considered antiquated, and his sons (he had a whopping 20 kids overall) were considered better composers than he was when he died. His reputation was revived when his works were rediscovered in the mid-1800s, and now, he's the only Baroque composer most people are familiar with.
     
    All of which brings us to Classicism, where musical form became a bigger deal. Instrumental sonatas, symphonies, concertos, and string quartets became standard forms, and methods of writing for those ensembles were also standardized to a certain extent. Essentially, if you have a theme or two, you could plug those into sonata form, add a few basic harmonies, and boom, you've got a sonata movement. Simplicity and clarity became the name of the game in the Classical era.
     
    The three major composers of this period were Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. While many like to group their music together as the "First Viennese School," the music of these three were different. Haydn, speed-writing symphonies for the court orchestra under the Esterházy family, was, as he said "forced to be original," although many of his 100+ symphonies are not particularly innovative, as he had to conform to the musical tastes of both the Esterházys and their guests. His contributions to form have long since outlived him, and due to his productivity and his standardization of forms, he is known as the "Father of the Symphony" and the "Father of the String Quartet." Haydn's contributions to form and the language of Classicism cannot be understated.
     
    Beethoven was widely different - while he started out fixed to Classical molds, he experimented with pushing the limits of what said forms could handle even before he realized that he was going deaf. When he came to terms with this, his experimentation led to more innovative and trail-blazing music, dispensing with convention after convention. He replaced the minuet with the scherzo in his later symphonies, looked towards Romanticism with his Sixth Symphony and a great number of his piano sonatas, didn't stick to traditional movement numbers in his late piano sonatas and string quartets, and famously introduced a chorus in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony.
     
    Now for Mozart.
     
    Mozart was hailed as a child prodigy, composed prolifically, and died at the young age of 35. In that time, he stuck to the already well-defined Classical forms, choosing to do as much within those constraints as he could. However, there really wasn't much more that any composer, no matter how great, could do within those forms - forms that were already well established by Haydn by the time Mozart began composing.
     
    Haydn, though his music contains an aesthetic similarity, was creative as a musical troll. His Symphony No. 94 - nicknamed the "Surprise" - was designed to wake up sleepy members of the court with a massive chord following a very soft passage. His Symphony No. 45 - nicknamed the "Farewell" - sent a message to his patrons to let the musicians return home by letting players leave as the last movement progresses. Haydn chose the unusual F# minor as the symphony's home key, and had to get special crooks for his orchestra's horns to play.
     
    But Haydn's formal unoriginality is explicable, as we know that he had to compose musically conservative pieces in order to get paid and did quite a bit under those kinds of restrictions. Mozart was, for most of his time as a composer, not hindered by a particular court. He was, more or less, freelance. Financially insecure, Mozart had the opportunity to be an innovator such as Beethoven came to be later, but did not.
     
    Mozart, for his part, did write a few brilliant pieces in his later years - his unfinished Requiem, his Clarinet Concerto, and his late symphonies among them - but in his entire oeuvre these masterpieces are relatively few. If you took all of Mozart's works, put them into a list, and then randomized it, chances are you're not going to come out with one of his great works. Most of his pieces have a similar mood, and as mentioned, they nearly always stick to a predetermined form. In this sense, a great many are interchangeable.
     
    In the end, this all comes down to my personal preferences and musical tastes. I know that Mozart holds a special place in many people's hearts, but as someone who has listened to a wide swath of his pieces, I really don't see what all of the fuss was - and still is - about.
  10. Sumiki
    BrickFair is coming up and I currently have this beard. I can either keep growing it or get rid of it.
     
    It'll get bigger before the 'Fair but D.C. is freaking hot that time of year and I don't know what kind of slap insulation it'd provide. (Also it's kind of strange how I don't really get any on my cheeks.)
     
    This isn't a poll ... unless almost everyone wants me to keep the thing for one reason or another, in which case I'd bow to the collective wish.
  12. Sumiki
    As one of the final steps in my quest for reorganization and restructuring of this blog, I have reformed the old "Bring Back Teal Club" into a new club: The Unused Colors Society. The mission of the UCS is to promote the use of underutilized and/or discontinued LEGO colors, such as teal, old purple, or metallic blue.
     
    All of the 130 members of the old BBTC are automatically members of the UCS - and anyone who wishes to join can do so in this entry!
  13. Sumiki
    I know I said that last week was probably the last tablescrap for a while, but that turned out not to be the case. I can say with 100% certainty, however, that this one will be the last edition for at least three weeks.
     
    Since, due to circumstances, I do not have any newer tablescraps to show, here's a little thing from memory lane: the first MOC I ever built, dating to mid-2004, found stuffed in the very back of a shelf. (I distinctly remember that another MOC named the "Toa of Sushi" went along with it, for some inane reason.) Anyway, I named this MOC "Sumiki" - and the rest, as they say, is history.
     
    And yes, I know. It sucks.
     

    (HQ Gallery [when public])

  14. Sumiki

    Oh, K

    By Sumiki,

    The K has taken over.
     
    [3:29:26 PM] 55555: Prekisely.
    [3:29:37 PM] Sumiki: Prekisely?
    [3:29:45 PM] 55555: Prekisely.
    [3:31:17 PM] Sumiki: oh great, now I'm going to have to spell everything that way ...
    [3:31:18 PM] Sumiki: krud
    [3:31:36 PM] 55555: Only for soft Cs.
    [3:31:50 PM] 55555: Such as espekially.
    [3:32:10 PM] Sumiki: skrew the obskure spelling-altering rules
    [3:32:40 PM] 55555: wut have i created
    [3:32:48 PM] Sumiki: kreated
    [3:32:56 PM] Sumiki: you have kreated a monster
    [3:33:07 PM] 55555: Oh no.
    [3:33:16 PM] 55555: aghk
    [3:33:26 PM] Sumiki: it has bekun
    [3:34:08 PM] 55555: You will kall youk evil orkanization the KKKKKKKKKKK
    [3:34:18 PM] Sumiki: kk
    [3:34:26 PM] 55555: kkk
    [3:34:28 PM] Sumiki: kkkk
    [3:34:36 PM] 55555: no
    [3:34:50 PM] Sumiki: the prolifikation of k
    [3:35:07 PM] 55555: Help
    [3:35:13 PM] 55555: Hklp
    [3:35:18 PM] 55555: Hklk
    [3:35:25 PM] 55555: Kklk
    [3:35:27 PM] 55555: Kkkk
    [3:35:41 PM] Sumiki: Yko wilk ket ko kelp
    [3:35:51 PM] 55555: Kkkk!
    [3:36:00 PM] Sumiki: Kuo wilk ke akkikikakek
    [3:36:23 PM] Sumiki: kkek kikk kkik kakkekk ekk
    [3:36:29 PM] 55555: Stop Locutus
    [3:36:40 PM] 55555: *Lokutus
    [3:37:06 PM] Sumiki: this is getting to the point of utter ridikulousness
    [3:37:25 PM] 55555: Mayke we skould stok whilk wk kan.
    [3:37:49 PM] Sumiki: I dok't thikk wk kan
    [3:38:03 PM] 55555: K'k kkkkkkk kok.
    [3:38:36 PM] Sumiki: kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
  17. Sumiki

    The IPB Admin Fan Club

    By Sumiki,

    This is a fan club in honor the most Glorious Admin, IPB Admin.
     
    There is not much here at the moment, but ... hey, it's the IPB Admin fan club.
     
    You can join up if you want.
     
    (You should.)
  18. Sumiki

    Thoughts on Grammar

    By Sumiki,

    Perhaps I've always been wrong.
     
    I've always been one to really notice when other people don't use proper grammar. I blame my mother for this. To us both, seeing something grammatically incorrect is like hearing fingernails being dragged across a blackboard.
     
    Yet over the years we've both been put into a great many positions where this has caused problems. It mortifies me when I look back at tracts of writing and find errors, and I'm one to extensively rewrite and proofread everything I write - blog posts, e-mails, even texts in the few instances where I've written them. Heck, I just rewrote the entire previous sentence out of a mix of habit and compulsion.
     
    Part of this stems from a kind of perfectionism that I've had to overcome in order to finish any creative endeavor I've ever undertaken. Part of it is as I've recounted - a lifelong obsession with proper grammar. But truth be told, I think a lot of it has come from not wanting to look like a fool on the Internet, which is a vast, wonderful, and occasionally scary place where first impressions mean a lot more and false information travels with the same speed as fact.
     
    Grammar is supposed to make language clear, concise, and intelligible. We may be able to understand simple language devoid of grammatical rules, but the ability to truly and deeply understand nuances in a society without grammar is tantamount to impossible. Even with the seemingly arbitrary rules which grammar provides for us, there is the possibility for misunderstanding. That's another slice of the equation for me - a fear of being misunderstood. All too often I fear as if this has worked against me, almost as if my compulsion to refine and rewrite actually decreases my overall clarity.
     
    This is why there is nothing like talking to someone face to face. Writing is full of pitfalls of miscommunication and misunderstanding, regardless of grammar. Body language and tone of voice communicate far more than words can alone, and what would otherwise be an ambiguous sentence in text can be as clear as a midday sky with tone of voice and perhaps a few well-placed hand gestures.
     
    That said, much of grammar is an exclusively textual thing. It's technically not right to end sentences with prepositions as much as it's technically not right to split infinitives, but this is how we talk. I do it far more than I can even keep up with because, for all my inclination for noticing these kinds of errors, they are so deeply ingrained into the way we speak that they go past my ears without That Part of my brain catching them.
     
    I have gotten better at this, I think. Other's grammatical shortcomings don't bother me nearly as much as they used to, although I tend to squirm internally every time someone screws up the usage of "well" and "good." Grammar takes the role of guidelines rather than rules - important, to be sure, but not the be-all end-all by-the-book my-way-or-the-highway set of rigid rules that must be followed.
     
    Part of this was my realization that the world won't change, especially since I've never been one to point out another's grammatical mistakes unless a) I've turned into a jerk after a very bad day, or b) someone says something so incontrovertibly and unbelievably stupid that pointing out typos and grammar flaws becomes a mere bullet in a round of ammunition, which I proverbially load if I so choose. Otherwise, since I wasn't trying to fix what I saw as a relatively minor (but annoying) issue, it was an internal problem.
     

    [xkcd #1108]
     
    But back to my opening point: perhaps I'm wrong about all of this. Perhaps my view of grammar, though evolved from an admitted high horse, is still too high of an expectation. Perhaps I've spent too much time on the Internet where folks don't have qualms about not capitalizing their sentences or ending them with punctuation. If my position had never evolved at all, I'd be unable to enjoy half of the things I do - heck, I'd be incapable of making up any of my status updates (despite the recent claims of a quasi-anonymous member on a popular blogging platform, I maintain that they are hilarious).
     
    I'm not perfect and I've come to realize that many things I thought to be immutable facts all of five years ago are suddenly not. I attribute a lot to those who talk about social justice, and although I have my problems with its surrounding culture, I'd be a lot worse of a person overall if I were still in the dark about those kinds of issues.
     
    My sense of what people should and shouldn't do when it comes to this matter has eroded, as in the examples I mentioned above, but is it wrong of me to ever mention someone's error online if I am unaware of the poster's background? I occasionally provide helpful feedback to members in the Library about grammatical or spelling errors I find, if there is a repetition of the same error, but a) I keep it as helpful and non-confrontational as possible, and b) it is out of not wanting anyone else to be perceived poorly because of a simple mistake. If someone is consistently misspelling a certain word or typing in run-on paragraphs, I feel as if it's part of my duty - especially as a staff member - to help.
     
    There is only one time in recent memory where I chided someone for their grammatical inadequacy, and it was in response to the same quasi-anon I mentioned earlier. In a series of four messages, each less coherent than the last, their grammar deteriorated along with the logic behind their argument. In my responses to these messages, I dedicated scant few sentences - two or three out of veritable walls of text - to examining their lack of grammatical accuracy as a tangential point to my logical deconstruction of their argument. I was not going after them solely because of this, and in fact, I would say that the vast, vast majority of what I wrote pertained to breaking apart a really weird and problematic point of view.
     
    But even in that mere sliver which I devoted to the side-note of pointing out their lack of grammar, did I go too far? Is it a stain on my escutcheon caused by overzealousness in annihilating a harmful point of view?
     
    I don't know, but maybe I was wrong to do so.
     
    And if I was wrong then, perhaps I always have been.
  23. Sumiki

    On Representation

    By Sumiki,

    BZPower is the only place on the Internet where I feel as if I can truly state what I feel without fear of someone seeing half a sentence and assuming something terrible about what I'm trying to communicate. I take a middle-of-the-road approach and try to see the good in people, and I feel as if BZPower is the only site that won't blow up in my face when it comes to moderate viewpoints.
     
    - - - - -
     
    Well, the latest firestorm of drama hit BZP earlier - this time on representation in media. It's a change of pace from what these flare-ups are normally about, but that doesn't mean that it's not an important and hot-button issue.
     
    My three major points are bolded.
     
    There is no excuse for not having female characters in modern media.

    None whatsoever.
     
    First, though, let's look at what representation really is.
     
    Representation is, for the most part, determined from capitalistic tendencies. Once the media gets in its collective head that the men are the people they should be focusing their energies and spending their money on, the vicious cycle begins. This goes for race as well - I was watching an episode of the brilliant late '90s sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun the other day and the main characters - aliens in the show's narrative - said that they'd chosen to be white because that was the color of everyone on TV. While a throwaway gag in the context of the episode (one which poignantly highlighted the inherent absurdity of racism), it stuck with me.
     
    Women make up half of all the people on Earth, so it's much easier to explain a male-dominated media as an offshoot of a patriarchal society. But if we defocus the issue from one of representation of women and into representation as a whole, things get quite a bit dicier.
     
    People of all races, genders, and orientations exist. I mean, there are over seven billion of us now, so even the most minor of minority groups have significant numbers. One would think that what would follow would be representation for every group equal to their number.
     
    Unless you've been living under a rock, however, it's clear that it hasn't happened.
     
    So ... why?
     
    Some point to internalized prejudices. While this could account for some media behavior, I harbor serious reservations that it accounts for all media - and all media are affected by this. What, then, is the most logical explanation?
     
    Like I said - by following the money.
     
    If you're a member of a group, you're going to want to get a cut of the majority. In America and much of the West, this means white people. If you're the biggest ethnic group, people who want to market stuff to the mainstream will probably market it towards you, because that's where the money lies.
     
    If you're a member of a minority group, I think it's only fair to have media representation for you. The culture that led to the situation we're in has to change.
     
    When minorities appear, they are often in token form. I shouldn't have to explain why this perpetuates stereotypes, but if we look at this from the broad view that I keep trying to get at, then we see that the smaller the minority, the less of a chance that a character from that minority will appear in media. Why? Again, money. If you're a studio executive and you want to make a movie sell, would you include characters that the perceived "majority" would relate to?
     
    Most of them answer "yes," because it's the easy way out. Only now are we started to see the inklings of a fundamental change. The more bits of media that have minorities that are successful, the more that the people who are in charge of the media will see the fundamental error of their ways.
     
    Here's another thing to keep in mind here: Representation does not always mean positive representation.

    Let's take The Big Bang Theory. Among its quartet of protagonists, a trio represent some sort of minority: asexuals, Indians, and Jews. All of which are, at some point, played for laughs - or for whatever the writers think is funny. (It's not funny.)
     
    When the most prominent asexual character in modern media is Sheldon Cooper, you know something's gone off the rails somewhere along the line. While gay characters are on the rise, a lot of them are accompanied by harmful stereotypes. Don't even get me started on bisexual erasure and the dearth of pansexual characters.

    Hypothetically, every movie and book and TV show could change tomorrow to one where women outnumber men, but yet the women are always portrayed with harmful stereotypes. Let's imagine the same with sexual and ethnic minorities. You'd have more representation, but if it's with even more sexism, racism, and homophobia, how is that better? Mathematically speaking, it's actually worse.
     
    Let's not support mere representation. Let's support good, positive representation. Let's prove to the media that they don't have to follow where they think the money is, but rather, where the moral thing to do lies.
     
    I welcome discussion on these issues, but I am not afraid to defend myself if I see something I wrote taken out of context.
  24. Sumiki
    Two days until the first anniversary of the Tuesday Tablescraps.
     

     
    | | | |


     
    I have mixed feelings on this guy. The legs are decent and the arms are alright, but I nearly gave up on the torso. It has no shaping whatsoever, and I tinkered with it for a good while. I'll probably revisit this guy and the Gold Bot later on, especially since I've discovered a stash of gold KK armor that I can use on him.
  25. Sumiki
    One day late. So sue me.
     
    This tablescrap exists because of Daiker, due to his entry on the matter posted before the downtime. I think I'm the only person to remember it in the downtime, so I used the part - that I ordered - in Daiker.
     

    Alternate view
     
    (I had other pictures, but they ended up corrupted. Strange.)
     
    The buck teeth are held in place by a minifigure magnifying glass. No other solution held the part in place as well as that one did.


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