What I was doing yesterday…
Somewhere around the 8min mark, you can see my sleeve. Basically, it’s the best part of the video.
What’s bizarre? I kept getting asked questions like “what are you guys protesting”. I don’t know if people think we’re that serious in SF, or that people themselves are so serious they can’t imagine a large group of people getting together for a non-political reason. Anyway: had a great time. I recommend it to anyone…
Gamestop is trying to brand themselves as “girl friendly”. They’re doing this by helping women set up Wii parties, encouraging women to play a specific game.
Uh-oh.
This can’t end well, can it? What sort of pink, frilly barely functional game do you think they picked? Madden. I kid you not– John Madden football.
I’m not positive I understand the logic behind this exact choice, but who cares! Madden is fun, there’s a Wii in damned near every house, and bravo for not giving into gender stereotyping. Any Birdies wanna play?
Then what do we call 272,171? If you’re Rachel Lucas, you see 1 in every 464 American households as idiots.
If you’re a bit smarter, though, or at least a bit better educated, you start to wonder at the structural issues. What you might wonder what would cause so many hundreds of thousands of people to make the same mistake all at the same time? . And then you start digging into the history of the mortgage industry and find this picture:
(image stolen from Brad DeLong)
Oh. It seems we used to have regulations that prevented these loans. And then we didn’t. And then the loans got bad. And now we have foreclosures. Must just be 200,000 isolated cases of idiocy, then. It’s certainly not the fault of the bankers…
I first really must apologize for my long, unannounced hiatus, especially when we are so early in the game for this blogging group. Really, it is due to a few things. First, video games are always boring in the summer. Second, video games are even *more* boring this summer than they have been previously (did you read about E3? Yeah, snoozefest.) Third, I am so tired of first person shooters I could first-person-shoot my XBox 360.
Well, and then there is always the bottomless pit of World of Warcraft, which tends to happen during every school break and of which I am cured miraculously about two weeks before school starts. Regardless, if none of you have experienced the joy of making a gigantic dinner and inviting all of your guild mates over for a night in the kitchen of making fun of your picked up raid members and trying your darnedest to make it through Karazhan despite drinking too much Canadian beer, well, you should.
Regardless, the thing that snapped me out of my ongoing distaste for my 360 (we never really made up after that Red Ring of Death incident) was Braid. Well, and Tomb Raider, but mostly Braid. I finally dusted off the old white thing and bought an XBLA game! And it was fun! I cannot finish it because my boyfriend is out of town and I am sure he would never forgive me, but I can say that the first half, at least, is very satisfying.
The writing for the little storyline portion of it is overdone, trite, and silly, but regardless, they really hit the nail on the head with the entirety of the puzzles. There is a good combination of simple to complicated. Some can be solved in two minutes, but some took us at least 30 minutes to solve. They did a wonderful job of making each level an entirely different type of challenge, which made it incredibly enjoyable.
Anyway, now that the video game season is sluggishly pulling itself out of hibernation, I should have a heck of a lot more to say in the coming months.
If you’re a political junkie, you probably have this fantasy where you political of choice says exactly what you want them to, in exactly the manner you’d like, preferably hitting a political opponent while doing so.
Ladies and Gentlemen: Barack Obama:
I graduated college two months ago. Since my exit from forced women power and crazy scheduling, I’ve realized how much an asset my private women’s education is – and what I now miss from my ignorance.
I went to see Mamma Mia last night. I am a musical fanatic. I’ve seen all the movie musicals – old and new – and I’m happy to see that they are on the rise again.
While Mamma Mia is very entertaining, and I’m ecstatic to see older women having as much fun as younger ones, it has its problems. The story is about a white woman and her daughter, and their respective white friends. It could have been easy to put a woman of color among the four friends – they’re supposed to be in Greece anyway – but every woman was a variation of the American ideal. There was unnecessary race differentiation between the main (white) characters and the (Greek/one black man) chorus. The only black man in the movie was sexualized and said only a few lines throughout the movie. It reminded me a bit of how scantily-clad women are sexualized in music videos.
Second, even as this movie was about women (having fun), the director ignored that idea, and went straight to sexism. It began with the black man taking the bags for the white woman. The woman couldn’t get the bag herself – she was living up to her “helpless” role. It makes you wonder how the bag got in the car in the first place. Throughout the movie, women crawl to their men (literally), sit in the presence of their man, be blocked by men, be saved by men, and have men take over their tasks. Not once, did a woman did any of those actions (as far as I could tell) in the movie. Women had no power in the action, only in the song, it seemed.
Yet, after my criticism, I still encourage you to go see the movie. It is funny, cute, appeals to both old and young, campy, and – most importantly – a wonderful musical!