Interesting Links for 25-11-2012

[andrewducker]

• Hermeneutics: The Game
  (tags: game meaning )
• More evidence that Prometheus was all about Space Jesus.
  (tags: movies writing prometheus jesus )
• Blade Runner's Original Ending: Yes, Deckard's A Replicant
  (tags: bladerunner movies )
• Most people have no idea if the content they're downloading is legal or not.
  (tags: uk copyright internet )
• Dave Sim's

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Given the comment thread on the Blade Runner item there is a huge bit of irony in you including the Hermeneutics game on the same list of links.

[andrewducker]

:->

And, to be fair, there are versions of the movie where there's no hint at all, and in _those_ movies he's probably not one!

[bart_calendar]

That's essential true, but most of those commentators are proving the game's point by coming from an already established baseline biased interpretation.

(I say essentially because in ALL versions Rachel asks him if he's taken the test.)

[andrewducker]

Oh yes - people find a position that makes them feel good, and then defend it to the death. It's how debate works!

[clevermynnie]

The study about what male and female scientists think re: women in science has depressed me since I read about it. I guess I just didn't expect so many men in science to be unaware of the research showing that the math gender gap correlates directly with overall gender gap in a country, and is thus a cultural thing rather than something innate. At a personal level it's like finding out all your coworkers are secretly prejudiced against you, though on a larger level it obviously shows there's more education to be done.

[andrewducker]

It doesn't really surprise me at all. Up until 4-ish years ago I wasn't bumping into it as a topic at all, and there certainly wasn't the same level of discussion around it as there is now. It's taken (IMHO) the internet to allow the conversation to spread from a few die-hards to become "mass market".

Note, even, that feminist issues weren't really touched upon in the 2008 US election, and this time around they were everywhere. There's been a massive increase in this, because suddenly things that were only ever talked about between the odd person who was comfortable sharing it, are now projected to everywhere.

(Same with race as well - there was some very explosive stuff with that about three years ago that brought brooding "hidden in plain sight" issues out into the open.)

I get some fascinating stuff from http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/ - it's got a philosophy bias, obviously, but there's a fair bit of stuff across academia as a whole.

[clevermynnie]

Before starting my current position, I spent 5 years in a physics department with an unusually high number of women, and before that I was working/studying in Berkeley which is a very progressive place, so I guess my perception of how much scientists have thought critically about gender representation was skewed.

I am so thankful for feminist blogs.

[anef]

I actually like the original version of Bladerunner (except for the bit tacked on at the end). I think the ambiguity about whether Deckard is a replicant does make it a stronger film, because it makes you ask the important questions (ie, what is the difference between a human and a replicant? What makes a person a human being?). I even like the voiceover.

[andrewducker]

Yup, I'm all in favour of vagueness (up to a point).

I don't like it when the audience is told "there will be answers" and there are not, but if no promises are made, then leaving things open strikes me as a perfectly good ending.

[momentsmusicaux]

> You don’t need to put breasts or curves or pink on a character in order to make her female.

I've been playing Half Life 2 again lately, and I've been struck by how the female NPCs look pretty ordinary and un-pink, for want of a better word.

[fub]

I once saw a documentary about a volunteer who went into the suicide forest to look for corpses and their IDs -- to give their families some closure (and to clean up the forest). It was very depressing.

When we visited Nikko, we saw the Keigon waterfall. Our guide for the daytrip there told us that it was a popular suicide spot up to the 60's because of a popular novel where the main character commited suicide by jumping off the waterfall. We asked her what happened in the 60's to decrease the popularity of suicide-by-Keigon. She smiled and said that that's when the first skyscrapers started to appear in Tokyo.

I love Japan, but their suicide rates really depress me.