Imagination for LIfE

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gingerhaze:

alyssakorea:

Tumbling over the past year and a half has made me see the problems of gender roles that exist in media, but sometimes it gets to the point where I over analyze every single piece of television or film that I come across. (However this in no way means that I think feminist media criticism is wrong, or should be avoided!) Mostly I just over think everything.

I’ve thought about this a lot and I think the answer is MORE, and MORE DIVERSE female characters.

We’re used to having one or two female characters in a cast of mostly men, and hold them to a higher standard because of that. So all of feminism is resting on the shoulders of one female character - and that DOESN’T WORK. Because there isn’t one right way to be a woman.

If casts had more diversity of gender, we could have warrior women and non-warrior women, sexual women and non-sexual women, feminine and non-feminine, and mixtures of all of the above…all are completely legitimate ways to be a woman.

We’re used to seeing a lot of hypersexualized, scantily clad, one-dimensional stereotypes of women without stories or motives of their own. We respond by asking for characters that AREN’T THAT, but we may end up pushing too far in the opposite direction, and demonize traits like sexuality, conventional attractiveness, and traditional femininity as “sexist.” That’s why the most popular female characters are the ones that are most similar to male heroes - the Arya Starks - emotionally distant, unattached, solve their problems with violence, not remotely sexual. That’s fine too of course. I love Arya. It’s just not…the only way to be.

(via robinhook)

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Somebody’s watching you. As security technologist Bruce Schneier has written, “The Internet is a surveillance state.” The mere act of visiting websites means you’re being tracked whether you’re aware of it or not. “Click tracking is a huge source of personal data that most people aren’t aware is being collected,” says Stephen Wicker, a Cornell University professor and author of the forthcoming “Cellular Convergence and the Death of Privacy.” He adds that “sites that you would think are relatively benign are actually hosting third party click trackers that take this data and then resell it.” Indeed, earlier this year The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal dug into the world of Internet tracking and discovered 105 companies that had tracked him in a 36-hour period of normal Web surfing. “Every move you make on the Internet is worth some tiny amount to someone, and a panoply of companies want to make sure that no step along your Internet journey goes unmonetized,” he wrote. (Full – or at least partial – disclosure: I do not know whether and to what extent usnews.com employs click trackers.)
NSA PRISM, Phone Records Spying Are Built on Corporate Surveillance - Robert Schlesinger (usnews.com)

(via kenobi-wan-obi)

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letsbuildahome-fr:

Devil’s Bridge

Kromlauer Park is a gothic style, 200-acre country park in the municipality of Kromlau in the Görlitz Gablenzgasse district in Germany. An incredible attraction of the park is the Rakotzbrücke, more popularly known as Devil’s Bridge.

The impressive arch bridge was built around 1860. During its construction, other peculiar rock formations were built on the lake and in the park. Devil’s Bridge is no longer open to the public to ensure its preservation. A unique feature of the bridge is that its reflection on the water’s surface creates a flawless circle, regardless of which side is being viewed.