via newspaper_rock, ( New Moon Wolf Pack Auditions )

this is probably not safe for work.

Interview with Vandana Singh

Sherman Alexie on The Colbert Report

If Movie Reviews came with Warnings for Fans of Color...

(xposted around)

This is mostly a rundown of the bits and pieces I thought folks would like to know in deciding to see the movie for themselves. I divided it up so you can read what interests you and skim/skip the rest. Mild spoilers if you've never seen a princess film and two major spoiler that have to be highlighted.

Section regarding the characters:
-Tiana
-Naveen
-Ray
-Louis
-Mama Odie
-Dr. Facilier
-Charlotte

Section regarding PoC/Gender/representation/religious issues:
-Black Men
-Romance
-Segregation
-Froggyness
-Voodoo

Kia's Quick Summation

( Read more )

is it just me, or has the quilieute tribe just set phasers to maximum snark?

xposted.

via aichildlit.

So racebending is now seriously in the big time. OK well I mean they always were but now they are getting even more well deserved notice for their work. Here's a write up of a recent speaking engagementby one of the founders at the MIT Futures of Entertainment conference.

Overall, the conference provided a valuable opportunity for racebending.com to further impress both researchers and industry within media and entertainment with our strength and clarity of purpose as a grassroots activist group. This is one step closer to attaining a world where all movies — not only culturally-focused ones like The Last Airbender — will be cast responsibly and with fair representation.

Right on!

http://www.nesfa.org/boskone/b47/program.html#programparticipants

• recessional: Plagues in your Postapocalypse: - Disease is a huge part of any landscape except maybe our own. Disease in a landscape that used to look like our own should be even more shocking. -
  
  (tags: writing)


• thelana: The Genius Wranglers: A Rant - Personally, I think the appeal of those relationships has very little to do with people yearning for an old fashioned woman supporting superior (genius!) man dynamic or people getting stuck on some Oedipal trope. I think it comes more from the side effects of the trope. The typical Wrangler personality, especially of this chiding mother sorts means that they are being cast with motivations other than just looking for hotness. -
  
  (tags: trope media)

Apparently Japanese (/Navajo?, anyone know more?) actor Tadanobu Asano has been cast as Thor's pal Hogun, one of the "Warriors Three." Alongside Stuart Townsend.

Wait, was he the lead of Mongol? Ahem.

so there's lots of talk about race and imagery in the twilight series and movies; i just wanted to repost the link to maerhys's post about this from last year, which seems to be making the rounds again. heavy spoilers if you havent yet read the books.

An article about the bars I visited in Montreal has been published in Nottingham Drinker. You can download a copy here:

http://www.nottinghamcamra.org/notDrinker.htm

It is issue 95 (Dec 09/Jan 10) and is on pages 32 and 33. There is also an article about Halifax in Canada on pages 30 and 31.

An article about the bars I visited in Montreal has been published in Nottingham Drinker. You can download a copy here:

http://www.nottinghamcamra.org/notDrinker.htm

It is issue 95 (Dec 09/Jan 10) and is on pages 32 and 33. There is also an article about Halifax in Canada on pages 30 and 31.

• irana: On BDSM, Part II - Today we're going to look at some other terms - negotiation, limits, contracts - break those down, and hopefully provide those reading with a better understanding of what those terms mean. -
  
  (tags: kink)


• irana: On BDSM, Part I - Consent is a vital element in all psychological play, and consent can be granted in many ways. -
  
  (tags: kink)


• the_minx_17: Hi! My name is Minxie...¦ - [...] if a piece of fiction disregards the basic principles of safe, sane, and consensual they really are more trouble than they're worth. -
  
  (tags: kink fanfic)

(Mashing together two posts for X-post here)

Part 1

Glockgal had an excellent realization: we're just fiction to these people, and Willow added a lot to that thought.

Newspaper Rock comments on the fact that when several Quileute youth are invited to take part of the opening night of New Moon- most of the stars and people are shocked to find out it's not a made-up tribe:

Comment: Let's think about this a minute. Millions of people have read the Twilight books and seen the Twilight movie. The media has written tens of thousands of articles on the Twilight phenomenon. Yet after all that scrutiny, half the media don't realize there's a real Quileute tribe?!

This is what happens when you turn real Indians into fictional warriors, shamans, and werewolves. You place them in some alternate reality of mystery and magic where they never fought European invaders, signed peace treaties, or established modern governments. By equating Indians with ferocious beast-men, you deny that they have the accouterments of a civilized people: history, culture, language, religion, philosophy, and art.

Part 2

The other day, I ended up re-watching The Debut, and being the geek that I am, looked up what Wikipedia had to say:

Right after Gene finished shooting the first 10 mins of his thesis project, he sent the movie script to potential financial backers and was turned down. Gene and John went around Hollywood, "shopping" the idea of The Debut to all the major Hollywood studios(Disney, Warner Bros., MGM, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Columbia, Universal). Most of the studio executives didn't know what a Filipino/Filipino American was and told him the film needed a white actor in a lead so the film can be marketable.

Um. Living in California (or anywhere on the West Coast) and you don't even know WHAT a filipino IS? Seriously?

Also:

The most difficult role to cast was finding the love interest of Ben. Most of the females that auditioned were, light skinned Filipinas or Half Filipino/European females or as Gene puts it, "Miss Saigon Girls." Actress Joy Bisco was chosen after she heard at a club they were looking for dark skin Filipino American actresses.

Colorism, roles for darker women, etc. Guh.

So, Hollywood. Take a power structure of people who are willfully ignorant and unwilling to deal with people as people, as well as making concentrated efforts to keep us from having access to venues to tell our stories.

The argument "it's only fiction" really can only apply if you have context to understand the difference between fiction and reality. And, it's also interesting that we're not allowed to tell EITHER our fictions OR our realities, but that others get the right to do that for us, and seem amazed as if we stepped out of a comic book or something when we demand the right to tell our stories.

And it's always interesting how one group profits in reality for making fantasy about another and that group is never us.

The Race and Steampunk Roundtable on Tor. I haven't looked at the comments but the guys leading it are cool.

• albumsontheside: I wasn't trying to get you to like me. I was trying to get you to love me. - what makes certain fics popular? - why are some fics so unbelievably popular in certain fandoms, and why do the fans often react so personally to any criticism levied against said fics? -
  
  (tags: fanfic fandom criticism)


• thefrogg: Muses and Fic Nicknames - Am I the only writer who happens to actually...give a personality/name/body/whatever to their muse? -
  
  (tags: writing)

Yes, okay--I should have known that TWoP was full of fail. But still.

Oh well. If they ban me permanently, I'll get a lot more useful stuff done.

Idris Elba (best known to US audiences as Stringer Bell from The Wire) is allegedly going to play Heimdall, guardian of the Bifrost Bridge in the new Thor movie. Article here.

Note: The link now goes to a Reuters page instead of whatever godawful blog I linked to the first time without reading the comments there. Sorry about that...

Hey guys! I'm doing a complete site overhaul, and that includes the Ormes Society website. If you know of any black women working in the comics industry, could you please direct them to this post? Thanks!

With the input of our GOHs, the Readercon concom has selected Olaf Stapledon as our Memorial Guest of Honor for Readercon 2010.

Forty years ago Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) was one of the authors that every sf fan had read, and he has been on Readercon’s short-short list for Memorial GoH from the beginning. Nine years ago he was named the very first winner of the The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, prompting a huge round of applause from the old-timers in the audience at Worldcon. "Stapledonian" remains a useful adjective to describe a certain type of sf: Last and First Men (1930) covers a time scale of two billion years and has a very good chance to be the most mind-boggling sf you'll ever read — until, that is, you read Starmaker (1937), where the entire plot of the earlier book is famously condensed to a single paragraph. These two novels contain almost nothing in the way of conventional plot and characterization and were long regarded as sf in its absolute purest form, and hence a sort of litmus test for sf readers; what they do contain is some of the earliest and soundest speculation on such classic sf tropes as terraforming, genetic engineering, and symbiotic and hive-mind alien races. Indeed, they are so jam-packed with sf ideas that it used to be a cliché to say that a writer could build an entire career stealing just from them. They have somewhat overshadowed his other two sf novels, but Odd John (1935) has been called the best superman story ever written and Sirius (1944) the best novel about a non-human (in this case, enhanced canine) intelligence. His influence on the field may be second only to H. G. Wells.

If there were nothing more to Stapledon than the astonishing fecundity of his scientific imagination he would still be worth remembering and reading. But his first book was not even fiction: it was A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929); other philosophical works include the comprehensive Philosophy and Living (1939) and introductory Beyond the "Isms" (1942). The pursuit of truth in the face of inadequate human cognition, the importance of community, and what Stapledon calls "the way of the spirit" — these are themes that permeate all of his fiction, and indeed The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes that all his work fits within a "highly original scheme of metaphysics." There have been few authors in the history of the field whose work is so thought-provoking. We are delighted to finally honor him as a Memorial Guest.

We welcome your suggestions for Stapledon-related program items.