Hah.

[silveradept]

I buried the stuff underneath the good news, and nobody noticed at all. Tonight's umpiring shift was a real work-friendly session, with two forfeits and one game of two that needed to be played (the lightning was moving in. No rain, though, and it's died down while I was watching the basketball game with some of the neighbors and their friends. What looked like a good storm fizzled out... either that or just hasn't got here yet. Either way, more work tomorrow - apparently when I ask for money from the memeplexes, they give it to me - by giving me more hours of work than I've ever had.

Although, if I'm supposed to Question Authority, does that mean I have to be skeptical of the existence of the Divine? Maybe, but when she shows off stuff like the Cumming First Methodist Church (worksafe, and real, too!), it's really hard not to believe Goddess has a sense of humor.

greyweirdo's been in a foul mood lately. There's the rage about comic book women which led to a more general rage. And that rage probably wasn't helped any by this cute and fuzzy story of what Marine recruiters will do to meet their goals. The few, most certainly, but this is definitely not the proud. Maybe the foul mood is because I haven't sent him the CD yet? Well, if I have time and can get to the post over the weekend, I'll toss it out, okay?

Living here in Ann Arbor isn't cheap. So while there's no way such a thing would be installed in our house, my eyes did scan the waste oil furnace with some interest. If all of that works as planned, and it really does produce a goodly amount of heat, that would be quite the efficient and cool thing to have. At least until all the waste oil runs out. Then we'll have to switch to something renewable again.

Anyway. Time for bed. And don't go looking at the drawings page, okay?

Comments

[starkruzr.livejournal.com]

That waste oil furnace is fascinating. Do you think there would be some way to use that thing as an energy source for a generator? Then you could use it to power your air conditioner in the summer as well as for heat in the winter.

[silveradept]

I would think so, but you'd have to add an apparatus that translates the heat energy into mechanical or electric energy and use that to power the generator. So some steam, steam pipes and turbines and a generator that can handle however much or little energy it puts out at any given time could probably work. You might want to poke around that site and see if there aren't plans for that sort of thing.

[blacktigr.livejournal.com]

Look, honey. Being a curvy bi girl, I disagree with the objections to objectification in that rant. If I *had* the body to wear spandex like that...and I will by the end of this year if I stick to my workout plan...

You bet your ass I would. And with a big grin. I see nothing wrong with women in sexy clothes. It's a power thing. When I was young, I had the typical perky teenaged body. Which I used to mercilessly tease any guy who would gaze my direction. I would have men speechless.

Would I like that power back? Ohgodyes. Would I use it for evil this time around? Not really.

But yeah, they are impossible images of impossible women...and I find nothing wrong with that.

[silveradept]

I think he wasn't objecting quite so much to the proportions of the women (although there may have been that) as he was to the uses that female characters were being put to in service to the plot.

If more people who had the body for that kind of spandex wore it, a lot of things wouldn't get done because the guys would be too busy looking.

[blacktigr.livejournal.com]

I disagree. His first two paragraphs maybe were talking about how subservient the women in comics were...and then there were about 6 more about the outfits. I clicked on every single link. This guy is apparently scandalized that people want to draw curvy women in short skirts and tight tights.

I think that his point would have been better made if he had left the links out, and gone for content that included storylines that included brutality toward women.

His attitude toward my favorite strong heroine, Catwoman, made me upset. Selina Kyle lives her own way in all things, including her sexuality.

I'm all for decreasing the pointless violence in fantasy toward women--the old rape and revenge storyline gets really old, really fast. But that's not where most of his argument was. It makes me angry when an author uses sexual assault as a lazy way to create drama.

...I had a point here somewhere. I think I will have to read the article again to regain it.

[silveradept]

I think a considerble part of his argument that women were being put in demeaning roles has to do with the way they're dressed and the visual cues that sends out. In the same way that certain articles of clothing have a "looser" sexual morality associated with them, the dress of a character may predispose the reader towards a particular attitude.

I think he'd be okay with curvy women in short skirts and tight tights if the writing in the story gave the character sufficient depth and reason to believe that they would wear them on their own. That's the part he sees lacking, as my best guess. It's as much an indictment of lazy writers as it is artists aiming for the prepubescent boy as their demographic.

Or maybe I'm reading a bit much into this. I don't read comic books, so I don't know the stories of the various characters and why they choose to dress the way they do (might be an advantage - if the male thugs are distracted by the body long enough for you to get the upper hand, then by all means dress that way, although the armor factor might be a bit lacking).

I never thought of Selina as one or even two-dimensional. Perhaps it was that she had an evolving relationship with Batman, rather than a more standard Hero-Villain relationship.