wiring – crypto•phora

psa thing, if you were added from this account and removed from synthearts (or just removed from synthearts), it’s because I’m attempting (again) to see if I can make tumblr work for me by consolidating this dash to people I know on some personal level and the other to just art stuff.

… I make no promises I’ll be any more active checking here than I was, as this is more for my own benefit of being able to check an art-inspo-only dash vs a friends dash, but in case you were like ‘why did you unfriend’ or ‘who is wiring’ if you weren’t on here before. I’ll still be posting to synthearts for art and syntheid for whatever. so you don’t need to add me here unless you want to for some reason.

godspoken:

I was on Wikipedia today when I noticed something pretty neat. Apparently, Haruki Murakami’s novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World inspired Yoshitoshi ABe’s Haibane Renmei doujinshi and anime. Both works feature “a city people aren’t allowed to leave, a wall, a river, a library and a clock tower”. I feel dumb for not noticing the similarities before!

So when I first read Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World for class. I got super excited that the town was so much like Guri. And asked a really silly question of my teacher if this was a common trope in Japanese fiction. And she just kind of stared at me and was like, “No.” Which made me super sad, because I was hoping there’d be a list of books I could read that were about similar towns.

hydrogeneportfolio:

Minimal Posters – Six Women Who Changed Science. And The World.

I really want these as actual posters to hang in my room. Or office. Or both.

old-chatterhand:

racebending:

The image above was created from gathering all of the significant named characters from released Marvel Studios movies as documented on the Marvel Movies wikia.

It’s pretty sad. As you can see, only 22% of the characters are women and half of them are love interests. There are over twice as many supporting characters who are men than women (and none of them function as love interests like the women do.) 84% of the characters are white.

60% of the characters are white men, including all the main characters

77%of the characters are men

76% of the men are white

81% of the characters (both genders) are white

All of the women are white

Allof the characters of color are men

None of the characters are women of color

Out of all the films, Thor probably does the best in introducing diverse side characters. Natalie Portman and Kat Denning’s characters pass the Bechdel test within the first five minutes, and some of the Asgardians are played by people of color including Idris Elba’s Heimdall and Tabano Asano’s Hogun. Four white women characters are introduced instead of the other films’ average of one or two. But even then, there’s no question that the main characters of the film are Thor and his brother Loki.

Marvel is working off of decades of existing properties that for years solely focused on white men and a the demographic market of white men. So it makes sense that many of the films would have an abundance of white male characters. Beyond ratios, what doesn’t make sense is that even in the comics there is also an abundance of characters of color, etc. that they are ignoring or underutilizing. There are already five completed films where the titular character is a white man, with more to come. There are no films in the works where the titular character is a person of color or a woman.

…

Women made up at least 40% of the audience of The Avengers, yet only one out of the six Avengers–Black Widow–was a woman. Women also made up 40% of attendees at this year’s ComicCon. Why, given the scarcity of female heroic leads in the existing Marvel films, did Marvel choose to announce the addition of several more male characters but only one new female character?

Read the full article at Racebending.com: On Marvel, Mandarin, and Marginalization

Can I ask a quastion? I just checked the racial composition of the american population for comparison and that can (if I’m reading the table correctly) be summed up as: 72% white, 16% hispanic, 12% black, 5% asian, 6% somethin else (klingon, I suppose 😛 ) -> I know this sums up to more than 100%, I don’t know why, I’m confused as it is.

So, I don’t entirely see the issue with mainly white characters as most of the population are white people. I am aware of the gender-problem, apart from the fact that as a kid I never ever cared about the gender of my heroes, and I am aware that it sucks that all people of colour are support characters.

And concerning Thor: In the traditional nordic mythology Heimdall has the name of being “the whitest/brightest of all the gods”, so following that description in terms of colour-scheme alone, idris Elba is not the obvious choice. Going with the “bright” in terms of wisdom and cleverness, he’s pretty cool 🙂 (luv’ him!)

apart from that: Explanation please? I’m interested in a discussion on the topic.

(Help, I’m opening a can of worms here XD)

I’m not going to touch the rest of it since I think feministdisney already eloquently explained why statistics shouldn’t matter, and I don’t know much about Norse mythology, but the reason the percentages don’t add up to 100% is because there are people like me who have to check multiple boxes either because they’re mixed or because they are white hispanics. Also the other 6% is probably Native Americans? Who rarely get their own box, olol. Or people like me when we’re not allowed to pick multiple options and there’s an other ticky.

Though even if statistics did matter, the breakdown for, oh say, California where a lot of TV/film media gets produced is (cited from Wikipedia):

According to 2010 US Census California’s population was 39.7% Non-Hispanic White, 6.6% Black or African American, 13.6% Asian, 1.0% American Indian, 0.4% Pacific Islander and 3.6% from two or more races. 38.1% of the total population are Hispanics or Latinos of any race.

So you’d really think they would have more Hispanics at the very least then, since they’re almost equal to the Non-Hispanic Whites in population for the area (and thus should be able to be at casting calls more often compared to where I live). But Hispanics and Latinos are even less often cast for major roles than Black or Asian from what I know, so that kind of throws that idea out.

shleechan:

hellmonks:

“Julie D’Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and bang a nun. If nothing in that sentence at least marginally interests you, I have no idea why you’re visiting this website.”

#where’s my miniseries

I need this to be made into a movie or miniseries because of reasons!

saveroman:

Match-tip tiny, Brookesia micra is the smallest of four new chameleon species found on the African island country of Madagascar. With an average adult length of just over an inch (2.9 centimeters) from snout to tail, B. micra is among the tiniest reptiles in the world.

The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about Basketball Diaries?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”
In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

Roger Ebert (via ibad)

furederiko:

8 years later…

♪ …The constellation that joined our hands together
Even if we’re apart, even if we’re apart,
It will keep on shining… ♪

(“Altair” by Yoko Kanno & Motohiro Hata)

Just.

bankuei:

theworldofchinese:

The Greatest Pirate Who Ever Lived

BY: JOE DORAN （杜乔）

In 1801, a pirate named Zheng Yi was busy raiding Canton. Aside from the prerequisite plundering and rum-drinking, he had given his men one specific order: to break into a local brothel and bring him the prostitute Zheng Yi Sao (郑一嫂), or “Zheng Yi’s wife”.

One might expect a sinister fate to have awaited Zheng Yi Sao upon her deliverance to the pirate captain (rape, swiftly followed by murder, being the most obvious). In actuality, Zheng Yi’s intentions were considerably more gentlemanly.

He intended to marry her. And recognizing that her current future prospects were rather limited, Zheng Yi Sao accepted.

But Zheng Yi Sao didn’t intend on spending the rest of her days as some plunder-hungry pirate’s eye candy. She wanted to become a pirate as well, and she did – one of the greatest pirates to have ever lived.

Read more

That first part doesn’t do justice, here read this:

Right from the get-go, Zheng Yi Sao displayed a staggering degree of cunning. She happily accepted Zheng Yi’s proposal, but only on the condition that he share his wealth and power with her, equally. Then, while her new husband went about his pirate duties – further plunder and rum-drinking, presumably – she focused on the business side of things. The result was that in six years, she had engineered an alliance between Zheng Yi and his former pirate rivals, amassed a force of some 1500 ships (called the Red Flag Fleet) and created a swashbuckling empire that extended all the way from Korea to Malaysia.

Zheng Yi certainly knew how to pick ‘em.

Unfortunately, Zheng Yi was killed in 1807 after a misunderstanding with a typhoon. Unfortunate for him, but extremely fortunate for Zheng Yi Sao. Refusing to step aside like a good, diligent widow, Zheng Yi Sao took charge of the Red Flag Fleet, convinced her late husband’s First Mate to support her and swiftly set about making herself the most respected and/or feared individual in all the East.

If films/books/video games have taught us anything, it’s that pirates were a rowdy bunch at the best of times, and their attitudes towards women were…less than progressive. Zheng Yi Sao, of course, was having none of that and quickly established a new pirate code to keep her peg-legged men in line. Anyone who looted a town that had already paid tribute had their head cut off and was dumped in the ocean. Anyone caught, or even suspected, of stealing from the treasury had their head cut off and was dumped in the ocean. Anyone who raped a female prisoner had their head cut off and was dumped in the ocean (there’s a pattern there somewhere).

Needless to say, Zheng Yi Sao was not messing around. Not all her laws were quite so decapitation-happy, though. Ugly female prisoners were to be set free, and when a crewmember purchased one of the prettier captives, he had no choice but to marry her.

But if he was unfaithful…head cut off, dumped in the ocean.

After just one year leading her pirate hegemony, Zheng Yi Sao had formed one of the largest navies on the planet, with some 17,000 men under her command. Extorted tributes from merchants across the Chinese seas and from the coastal towns between Macau and Canton swelled her treasury to staggering levels, and her power was so great that she became the de facto government of the region. No longer was she merely a pirate; she was an entire political entity.