So you all know that I am a devoted Whovian. It’s also no surprise to anyone who follows my twitter or my tumblr that I am just a wee bit (only a tiny bit, just slightly) obsessed with David Tennant.

I was looking for an inspiring fitness challenge for the new year, and here it is:

 
In honor of Doctor Who and David Tennant (and, of course, the Proclaimers and the Sue from Catering, and Dancing Ood Sigma, who is epic), in 2012, I will walk 500 miles, and then when I’m done, I will walk 500 more – and I won’t stop there. If it goes to 1500 miles, or 2000, so much the better. Plus, I’ll be walking it on my elliptical while re-watching the last 6 seasons of Doctor Who.

Of course, I’m not the only person who has turned this video into fitness inspiration, there is a tumblog devoted to it already. Go join in there if you want to take the challenge too!

There’s been a lot of discussion on costumes and armor of female characters lately, mostly relating to comics.  It’s a problem that has always been rampant in science fiction/action movies, comic books, video games, and pretty much anything that is marketed primarily toward a male audience. There seems to be a lot of confusion over what is a sexist costume and what is not, and a lot of getting down on just presenting characters as sexy as being sexist.

The thing is, as a feminist, I have no problem with a female (or male) character being presented as sexy. Hell, I’m bi, I like looking at the sexy ladies as much as any man does. I do love a badass fighting female who charges in with a sword and takes no prisoners.

I am so well protected by my tiny little scraps of metal!

However, when it comes to armor or costumes, form should follow function.  The purpose of a suit of armor is to protect the wearer in a combat situation where the person wearing it is going to be on the front lines, in the melee. In such a situation, a chainmail bikini, for instance, which protects the fighter’s breasts and maybe, just maybe, about a third of her butt while leaving her vital and most vulnerable areas exposed for a mortal blow is just, well, impractical.

I mean, would you go into a swordfight with your belly uncovered just waiting for disembowelment?  Honestly, a slice to the butt? Not the biggest thing to worry about when someone’s trying to kill you, really.

Hell, no, if I ever get caught in a fight I hope I’ve got my vitals covered, thanks. I could care less about my boobs except for the fact that they’re in the same general area of my heart and that’s a pretty important thing to protect… and say I want to be agile, to fight with speed instead of brute force – well, I want my leathers flexible, but I still want the same things covered.

Functional armor can still be sexy as hell, without leaving the fighter dangerously exposed or turning her into a ridiculous objectification.

If the woman doesn’t fight on the front lines, but is instead a caster or support class character? She’s much less likely to be in such danger from melee attacks and can pretty much wear whatever (as little or as much of it) as she wants without making the feminist in me sit up and go “grr.”  This would be the reason why I had no problem with Morrigan, for instance, in Dragon Age.  She was no fighter, so if she wanted to go about with a strategically draped scarf over her torso and not much else, well, that’s fine by me. The fighting characters that got up close in that game were very well armored, male or female, in armor that suited the function for which it was intended, be it full-on protection from heavy blows or a balance of protection and ease of movement.

Another problem tends to have to do with the way women are posed, in comics in particular.  I mean, how many of you out there, male or female, have ever posed for a photograph with your butts facing the camera, your head turned to glance coquettishly over your shoulder?  Or maybe with your back arched, boobs raised to point at the ceiling?  Now, how many of you out there have posed that way while in the middle of a fight?

This is what happens when the men pose like the ladies... (Picture by Kevin Bolk)

While turning around and showing your ass to the bad guy may be a valid distraction technique, it really doesn’t make sense in many contexts outside the bedroom. To stand with your butt poked so far out and pointed directly at whoever’s looking at you while climbing ladders, talking with your best girlfriend and walking down the street, dropping out of helicopters, fighting your archnemesis, or generally being a hero . . . well, it’s ridiculous.  I mean, could you see Tony Stark doing it? * Superman?  These women look like they’re posing and ready for action, but the action they’re ready for doesn’t involve taking down criminals. Going down on, maybe.

Again, it’s a matter of form following function, or in this case the form being made ridiculous based on the context of what the character is doing.  Because unless I were shooting bullets from my boobs and a torpedo from my ass, I really would have no reason to go out of my way to point (and absurdly push out, or arch my back, or do any of those usually sex-related contortions) those body parts toward anyone. Especially if I’m fighting them.

It might make sense to pose like that in the bedroom to tease a lover, or for a pinup picture.  In which case, if the artists want to draw these characters there, doing that, maybe these poses would make at least a little bit of sense.

* Maybe Tony Stark was a bad choice of example here….**
** Ironman avows that the whole mooning incident was entirely falsified.***
*** Captain America says it absolutely was not and he really wishes he could find some brain bleach because, damn….

Geek Unity!

So I’m scheduling this post for the last day of Speak Out With Your Geek Out Week, which I heard about from the fabulously profane Chuck Wendig.

I’ve always been a geek. From my  first Commodore 64 to my first webpage, from Donkey Kong and Ms. Pacman to World of Warcraft, I’ve never not been a geek, even before I knew what the word was, and even while I tried to deny it with every breath while attempting to be cool in high school. (Lessee, I went through a goth phase, a hippie phase, a preppy phase . . . if there was a label to try on, I tried it.)  I know it seems extremely hipsterish of me to say that I was a geek before it was cool, but the thing is, I was. And I am still the most remarkably uncool geek you’ll ever find.

While I always loved sci-fi, comic books, rpg games, video games, or fantasy novels, I never really embraced or welcomed the thought that I was a geek, and for the most part these were things I did when I was Away From Other People and Never Brought Up In Company. (Except, of course, with the exception of my D&D group.)

Then, in college, I began to come out of the closet, so to speak (and not just about being a geek). This occurred in part because I met a guy who didn’t blink at me like I was some sort of unfeminine freak when I walked into his room and went “Ooooh! You’re playing Final Fantasy VII!” and partly because when I got to college I met other girls who were also into those things, so I didn’t have to hide that I liked them.  I stopped trying to be cool and different and just started being myself.  And somewhere in there I realized that my self is kind of awesome, no matter how not-unique and not-cool I might be.

I have to admit that I am in that rare position where I am geekier than my boyfriend, though we are both gamers. At Cons, girls tend to get asked “Oh, so you came here for your boyfriend?”.  When we go to a Con, I have to admit that he goes there for me. Which is usually readily apparent, as I’m the one in the ridiculous costume. He geeks out about the minutiae of video games and music. I geek out . . . about almost everything that I love.

And in some cases, I have been known to turn into a rabid fangirl. Complete with squeeing nonsensical jabbering and drool.

OMG, David Tennant’s freckles omg asdfghjkl!!!

Ahem. The BF would never do that. It would be undignified.

Except, possibly, upon meeting a certain Vulcan.

But see, that’s what a geek is. Geeks don’t love anything by halves, we go in whole haul. When you criticize someone for being a geek, you’re criticizing them for loving something too much. And yes, much of what geeks love may seem trivial and inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things, but is it really such a bad thing to love things so much?

And sure, we nitpick and criticize and over-analyze our fandoms, whatever they are, but that’s all part of the fun. It’s part of loving what we love, really studying it and what makes it great.

There’s a lot of drama out there in the various geek communities too, where fandoms go up against members of other fandoms, where there are fandom wars going on sometimes decades long, but that’s something I’ve never understood about the community. Geeks need to unite and stick together, no matter what they geek out about.  If being a geek is about loving something passionately, why can’t we love each other too?

So I’m standing up in Geek Solidarity! I might even be convinced to hug a Twilight Geek!

Can I still stand with them in solidarity while pointing out weak writing and poor character development?

And, here’s the obligatory (partial) list of the Things I Geek About:

• Books (The physical kind. Of any sort. And bookshelves, because, well…)
• Writing
• Classic Literature
• Science Fiction and Fantasy TV, Movies, and Books, including, but not limited to: Doctor Who, Anything Jossverse, Star Trek (all of them, but most particularly TOS and XI – the Kirk/Spock Era), Harry Potter, anything written by Neil Gaiman, Cheesy 80′s Action TV Shows, and Almost Anything Involving Robots.
• Video Games, particularly RTS and TBS type games. I’m good at strategy, not so good at shooters (mostly because they make me carsick)
• Roleplaying (whether in digital form or pen-and-paper)
• Comic Books (I’m a Marvel girl.)
• Cooking
• Crafts (particularly geeky sorts of crafts, or incorporating fandom love into old fashioned crafts)
• Costuming

There are more, I don’t even think I could list them all if I wanted to, but those are the major Things That Make Me Go Squee. What are yours?

Elisabeth Sladen

Dear Elisabeth Sladen,

You are missed.

As Sarah Jane Smith, you were partnered with the most magnificent man in the universe, and instead of standing in his shadow you stood beside him, an equal. You were not a damsel in distress. You were strong and independent and smart. You taught me the importance of that. You taught me the importance of asking questions and seeking proof and thinking critically about the world.

You were a hero and a role model to a young girl who loved sci-fi in an era when sci-fi and action TV shows tended to push women to the side as unimportant – the love interest of the week.

I wanted to be like Sarah Jane. Sarah Jane couldn’t have been who she was without you, Elisabeth Sladen.

Thank you, Lis.  I am sorry I never got to tell you that in person.

You will not be forgotten.

Elisabeth Sladen’s last scene with Tom Baker

Image by Mike_Cooke via Flickr

I’ve fallen in love.

I’m late to the bandwagon. It took my gaming computer going to the great binary cloud in the sky to convince me to give it a try. For the last two months I’ve had only my wee, weak little netbook to keep me clinging to cyberspace. I had no games, unless one wanted to count solitaire. I barely have television on some nights, as my netbook’s ethernet connection is spotty, at best (and I had foregone cable in favor of porting my computer through the TV a long time ago).

I have discovered Minecraft.

I’ve always had a bit of a thing for sandboxy games, where I could let my creativity go wild. Minecraft is like virtual legos. At least until night falls.

Get caught in the dark and, even worse, let the creepers follow you home, and that massive dwarf castle you spent hours building is just so much rubble.  Dig dangerously (overhead or underfoot) and you could find yourself falling into boiling lava or having a mountain of gravel land on your head.  Getting lost in underground caverns has proven to be the worst danger for me – forcing me to suicide just to get back above ground, often leaving valuable supplies behind.

It’s repetitive. It’s completely without direction. It has no real point. It is absolutely awesome.

So far I’ve built a hexagonal castle out of glass, with waterfalls flowing down five of its six sides. I’ve built the massive library as I imagined it from my novel, Remnants. I built a dirigible, just because I could. (And left it dangling in midair, dismantling blocks and ladders as I moved down them.)

And every game-night I lock myself into my little mine and I dig down.  I have plans for a TARDIS (complete with an “inside” that is in another “dimension”.)

I’m having fun with it, and with a few open source, low-resource games I’ve picked up that I can run with my netbook.  I haven’t tried Minecraft multiplayer, or joined any of the servers I’m aware of, as I think that multiplayer (at least, multiplayer with a lot of people and a particularly large world) would likely be too resource intensive for my little workhorse.

As far as other games go, it’ll still be a little while before I can buy a new computer, but I’m stashing as much money as I can afford to stash out of my paycheck each week.   I’m not out of gaming right now, just kicking it 8-bit style for a while.

Related articles

• Mammoth Minecraft Cave (bwochinski.wordpress.com)
• Minecraft News of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at)
• Interview: Notch On The Future Of Minecraft (rockpapershotgun.com)