Tag Archives | Art as mirror of soceity

A thing to ponder… The future of computers.

Posted on January 11, 2012 in Thoughts & Musings

Every one of them will arrive at the same place: “Can’t you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

 

Go check out the full article “Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing” , it’s a pretty important read. If you agree or not, at least this is something we should think about.

In my case, it made me think about the fact that the future could look VERY different from what I expected as student. I always assumed people would end up having at least one, if not multiple general purpose computer in every home, which they can use freely how ever they intend.

But you know, it could be just happen in 10, 20 years that general purpose devices are actually either prohibited, severly regulated or just plain not accessible for Joe Schmoe and email, chat and stuff would happen about the government-approved (or, even more likely, COMPANY-approved – it’s not the governments that runs our world these days) applications/devices against which facebook  or the iPhone is the very model of free, unregulated, unfettered and individual information distribution.

And the majority of people (including me?) would be happy with this state, because, well, as long as it’s convient and doesn’t get into the future-angry-birds, why complain? I know I usually don’t give a flying fuck about consequences of gating, at least as long as my toy does what I bought it for and I can look at my cat pictures.

You know, I never thought about how fragile the internet actually is.

A book needs to be found to be burned; but in order to get rid of the internet you just need gain control the phonelines (including wlan), as the unrests in England and the arab spring have shown. The whole freely accessible internet thing might just be a bubble about to burst, something that will die and wither, just like the hippie movement.

Welp.

At least this gives me some nice ideas how the people in my science fiction stories handle things like this.

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Boobplate, no boobplate and Skyrim got it right.

Posted on December 16, 2011 in Thoughts & Musings

This is an armourer’s take on it -  good article, plus, it gave you that wonderful equation above.

 

If you need some good example for realistic female armour (in case you feel the need to differ armour between the sexes) go, check out Skyrim. That’s something it did really, really well.

 

All the ladys 1, look definitivly female but still badass and, most importantly, their armour looks as if it indeed does protect their important bits. Frankly, it’s a good thing Skyrim this right. The game is going for utmost realismn on the armour and graphic front, and boobplate woulda pulled people out.

Incidientially, another thing Skyrim does well is maintainging fair and interesting relationship between the sexes despite being set in a classic, high fantasy mediavial/greek/nordic society. Skyrim basically is the poster child for Rated M for manly, where proud vikings wrestle polar bears, and yet it manages to have heaps of respectful treated women, who are genuily complex characters2 and actually do something.

I can’t help but feel that those two things are related.

Footnotes:

  1. Including my thieves guild armour wearing, firebreathing, dragon-slaying kitty lady, although, now that I play on maximal difficulty, the dragons tend to slay HER ↩
  2. I am particular fond of Legate Rikke (General Tullius Second in Command) and Igrod Ravencrone (the jarl of Morthal) ↩
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character design & portrayal, a regret

Posted on September 3, 2011 in On Traces of Chaos, Thoughts & Musings

If I were to design Chalcara today, she’d look quite different. More regal. More powerful. She’d definitivly have more  … outfit on her.

But If I were to redesign Chalcara to bring it in line with what I know about character design these days, she wouldn’t be my Chalcara anymore.  She, for all intents and purposes, is a legacy character from a time long gone; she’d been concived years before Siendes came around; back then when Mirrough still was supposed to be a whiny, powerless teenager kidnapped from an interstellar highschool. Her outfit irks me, but well, it’s hers. When her made her, I really didn’t know better.

Now, I made a lot incremental improvments during the last year year. Without her armour, her design’s bland enough not to look tittilating, even though I still need to reduce her most common super power a bit1. The-without-armour blandness serves both character and plot purposes, so it’s actually intended.

And when she does wear her armour, the focus is on her broad shoulders instead her boobs, especially now that I try to pull her gem out of her cleavage and closer to her neck. She’s got a very shoulder-heavy design these days and I am still looking for ways how to stress that even more2.

But no, her outfit’s not really what I do regret creating. I can work with that. Even if it means that now I have to design Pridelord Humar to look regal in a loincloth, not an easy feat, but, well…  What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If the ladies dress skimpy, my gentlemen will too. Fair’s fair.

 

No, what I regret is this panel and it’s less obvious bretheren.

Granted, I felt a bit iffy about it when I drew it, but thought, what the hell. I expected jokes. I got them.

It’s preservence of them, that took me by surprise. And how they coloured perceptions of Chalcara for the last of the chapter.

I shouldn’t have been that fucking naive.

…

It’s hard to make readers respect a character that’s presented as titellating. Fanservice might be pretty, but as a characterization tool it’s more  that problematic. Because unfortionally the fuckability of a person is inverse proportional to their respectability3. Oh, I wish it weren’t that way, but hey, the ‘good’ ol’ virgin whore dychotomy is still alive and kicking – and whores are to be used, not to be respected.

In the end it’s hard enough to make readers respect a female character even without putting her comprimising positions.  While people in general find it easier to grow emotionally invested in a female character than to a male one, those investment do not necessarly command respect. They can. More often than not they don’t. All those numerous “she’s such a slut/frigid bitch and deserves pain” rants usually come from a place of emotional investment, too.

Anyway, I disgress.

Between Chalcara design and those poses, I’m afraid I did quite a bit of damage to how I actually want people to see her. I might be able to fix it, at least for some readers. Right now the best thing I can do is to stop putting her into compromising positions.  But after how I portrayed her in the first chapter,  I will have a tough time to build her up to the respect commanding, fear inducing powerhorse she’s supposed to be.

Let’s hope I’ll manage it.

In the end it’s just sad that despite all my rants about objectification of women in media, I fell into the trap of doing it myself. *sigh* But maybe it just goes to show how persuavive that shit actually is.

Footnotes:

  1. More for my own sanity than anything else, though. Chally’s girls have too much volume for the particular form she has. ↩
  2. Gogogogogo, Shoulders of Doooooom! ↩
  3. Female managers and politicians basically have to kill all possible sex-appeal in order to be taken seriously – which is quite a hard feat sometimes, there’s no (tasteful) way to make big boobs NOT sexually charged – and even then they’re still getting raked over the coals for being too pretty, or not being pretty enough, for being to stuck up, for being to assertive, for not being woman enough, for not being the right kind of woman, for being incapable, because a woman must’ve slept her way up.
    Even if there ARE respectable reasons to make fun out of them like when they are genuily dumb, the fact that they happen to be female is usually the most obvious target. ↩
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