May 2013
103 posts
3 tags
5 tags
8 tags
7 tags
“I thought of Ashley, on the other side of that ocean, and wondered what she was...”
– Iain Banks, from The Crow Road (via the-final-sentence)
4 tags
3 tags
4 tags
5 tags
1 tag
2 tags
4 tags
2 tags
12 tags
5 tags
6 tags
1 tag
7 tags
“And here is what Leia does, when you force her into a scanty outfit and...”
– Olivia Waite - Ellora’s Cave author, inquisitive mind, and hedonist-about-town (via albinwonderland)
11 tags
Watchscifimusiciansofcolor:
Billy Ocean ~ “Lover Boy”
I think here is an example of an artist with a sci-fi video merely because sci-fi was trendy. It plays into a lot of tropes, and doesn’t subvert or surprise me. It references popular, iconic images from Star Wars and the fantasy genre. I think this one was more about the money than the message.
Tropes: intergalactic cantina, solitary hero,...
10 tags
7 tags
Project Reflection Convo
byrdiegrey: Alrighty, to start this conversation off, what's one or two things you learned while doing this project?
gelddragon: During this project, I learned a lot of pretty interesting stuff. I learned about how the words of a song mean something important ( in most cases), but a video can give a physical form to the artist's words. I think this was most prevalent in "Many Moons" by Janelle Monae, "Where Is The Love?" by the Black Eyed Peas, and in "That's Alright" by Laura Mvula. I learned more about common themes in science fiction and fantasy, for example like the white horse saving the maiden, black and white color scale, the use of mirrors to lead to different worlds, and androids. In each video I watched, I learned about different perceptions of race and gender, and how each artist viewed the society we lived in.
byrdiegrey: I agree with learning about new themes and tropes. The white horse trope was really fun for me to discover. It's an image I didn't consciously realize was so common in science fiction and fantasy, and yet we have the pervasive figure of the unicorn that is always white and a symbol of purity and unsullied power. The white stud is probably just an extension of that, fusing ideas of male power and strength with the quintessential whiteness=purity and good. This project and class has been a reality check for how pervasively whiteness as an ideal is embedded in our social consciousness and how if we aren't actively resisting and subverting these symbols and stereotypes, they easily slip into our artistic expression in ways that solidify racist social structures and rhetoric. For example, the way NK Jemisin highlights in "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms" how religious ideologies of light and darkness translate directly into our social constructions of race.
Wilhite: Well it was also interesting to see what other people picked up on in the videos. I personally was less aware of tropes and tended to be aware of race and gender. I think that using musicians of color also opened a certain dialog because science fiction is usually a very white dominated genre.
byrdiegrey: Or at least, much of the popular science fiction is dominated by white authors--or whitewashed, as we saw with the covers of Octavia Butler's Lilith trilogy.
gelddragon: So, did any of you enjoy working on this project? What were your favorite parts? What did you not enjoy about this project?
Wilhite: At first I was kinda worried about having a project that did not involve writing a paper (high school habit) but aside from opening the world of Tumblr to me, I found that making a learning archive opened up a new way of organizing thoughts, and it was kind of nice being able to kind of stream my consciousness onto a post then only have to organize it by that particular post. I think the dark side of this project is the fact that I am now addicted to Tumblr.
gelddragon: I enjoyed working on the project. One of my favorite parts was watching the different videos and analyzing them. That part was a lot of fun. I didn't enjoy having to write annotations of each video, though. I would have preferred to leave them all in bullet-points, but it was best that we didn't leave them as notes.
byrdiegrey: I loved a lot of aspects of this project, but especially watching music videos I'd never seen before and analyzing them as a group. It was so much fun bouncing ideas around. (I also got a lot of enjoyment out of teaching my group members the ways of the Tumblr and watching them get addicted. Heehee.). I feel like what we've actually written down and published on Tumblr is only half of what we covered in our discussions. It would have been great to maybe record a Skype session or just a video of us watching and analyzing a video together. Fleshing out our notes and bullet points into paragraphs and making sure we were analyzing all our observations in text was the hardest part, and definitely the least fun. I also wish we'd been able to start this project a lot sooner, so we could have had more community feedback. It's hard to know how good of a job we are doing without outside input.
Wilhite: I think going forward there has certainly been discussion of continuing to add to the blog. For more selfish reasons, it's a really great way to make myself think about things that I wouldn't normally bother too. I intend to keep coming back, if at a slower rate. The other sort of eye-opener with this project is that it really has opened a new continent of music in the vast landscape of genres. I look forward to exploring more of Monae's music and continuing to listen to Mvula's.
gelddragon: I agree that we should continue to add to the blog and hopefully it can eventually inform more people. This is the sort of project that I want to see grow and look back at some of the first posts and see how much we have changed.
byrdiegrey: Yes! I'm glad we will be continuing this project. I love how many musicians I've discovered and I really appreciate how well we all work together and how our individual insights build on each other. Hopefully we can start cultivating reader response as well. :)
2 tags
4 tags
9 tags
4 tags
Actors who COULD HAVE Played Khan
kirstinthereckless:
Oded Fahr
Naveen Andrews
Sendhil Ramamurthy
But no, this is the logical choice.
Outrage is totally understandable if this were true. But despite all the speculation, Benedict Cumberbatch is not playing Khan. He is playing a terrorist named John Harrison.
5 tags
“Racism is not in your intent. Your intent is immaterial in how racist your...”
– - moniquill (on red face & cultural appropriation)
I’m just going to reblog this again, since some people apparently need reminding.
(via darkjez)
3 tags
