Rachel Lynn Brody's Blog, page 9

#SignalBoost #ForScience Awesome new Lego set announced!

From the Mashable Twitter account.

That scream you just heard? That scream of every nerdy, sci-fi loving lady on your Friends list? You can thank Lego for that.

Because they’re introducing a line of sets made up entirely of female scientists, and WE ARE EXCITED. (Though, it’s worth noting that the set was the winner of their winter 2014 design context, and were proposed by a women.)

When I first saw the Mashable Article that announced Lego: Research Institute, I got excited. When I realized they meant generic staff at a Lego Research Institute, I flipped my freaking lid and started sharing the news.

…an astronomer with a telescope, a chemist with a lab and a paleontologist with a dinosaur skeleton.

An entire toy set full of women, and it isn’t called “Lego: Women In Science,” or “Lego: Grrls Can Do Teh Sciences, Too”. It’s called Lego: Research Institute. And you open the doors of that institute and you’ve got an astronomer, a chemist and a paleontologist. (Obviously, this is the research institute responsible for something to do with space dinosaurs…who are really good at chemistry*.) Oh — and they all just happen to be women.

Seeing women in STEM roles make their way into kids’ toys is rare. Doing it this way – constructing a setting for the use of imagination, choosing a setting where one gender is not always welcome, and then populating it exclusively with representatives of that gender? I definitely can’t think of another company that’s produced this kind of line, even if it came from a crowd-sourced ideas process and wasn’t generated internally. I would, however, absolutely welcome corrections to this in the comments.

From the moment a child picks up one of the employees at Lego: Research Institute, they’ll be using their imagination to create lives and goals for women in STEM roles. They will, by default, see women in STEM roles. How can that help but create space in their minds for seeing this as normal, and not the exception?

Women are still woefully underrepresented in STEM careers, and correcting that underrepresentation is going to take effort. Giving all children the tools to start imagining women as common members of STEM professions will, I’m willing to guess, eventually help start to change the cultures of those fields, making historically exclusive spaces more friendly to the women working in them both today and in the future.

I leave you with three questions:

Parents: think maybe you’ll snag a couple of these sets for your kids?
Who wants to create the computer programming and comic book equivalents of this set?
Okay, this one isn’t a question, but there is a donate button on the righthand side of my blog and Lego sets do not come cheap.

 

*I was not really good at chemistry, which probably explains why I can’t think of a good way to blend it with astronomy or paleontology.

 

Thai Protesters Adopting the Hunger Games Salute: Valid Expression, or Intellectual Bankruptcy?

Protesters raise three fingers during an anti-coup demonstration in Bangkok on Sunday. Photograph: Sakchai Lalit/AP. Taken from The Guardian website.

A few years ago, the Occupy movement appropriated Guy Fawkes masks as a symbol of resistance against an all-seeing state. The masks served two purposes – to anonymize participants in protests that were being filmed and shared around the internet, and to create an image of solidarity. While Guy Fawkes has been a symbol of resisting authority for hundreds of years (ever since his attempt to blow up the houses of Parliament), the mask that was used had been popularized by Alan Moore’s graphic novel, “V for Vendetta,” which was later made into a film of the same name.

Now, it looks like Thai protesters against the military coup have taken on a symbol from another film: the three-fingered salute from The Hunger Games franchise. While the exact meaning of the salute (in the context of Thai political protesters) isn’t precisely clear, its use as a symbol of resistance to authority is. So much so that the military has made statements saying they will arrest any group of more than five people using the sign if those people refuse to disperse and desist.

The Guardian published an article deriding the appropriation of mass-culture symbols as displays of political protest, finding the gestures “intellectually bankrupt” as compared to the gestures of the past, and this seems unfair. Isn’t the point of a political hand gesture that it requires no outside resources and can be performed by anyone wishing to take part in resisting authority? That it’s widely recognizable by members of society, while perhaps escaping the notice of authorities? Reading from the Canadian Globe & Mail, it would seem that the junta isn’t even sure of what the protesters are symbolizing when they use The Hunger Games’ three-fingered salute.

While I’m no fan of The Hunger Games novels, finding fault with a mode of expression available to those under military rule seems petty and unnecessary. If The Guardian finds the Thai protesters’ use of Suzanne Collins’ fictional gesture, like that of Occupy’s use of the Fawkes mask, to be intellectually bankrupt, their insistence is intellectual naval-gazing:

Images have meaning. The clenched fist of Marxist revolutionaries was not just a gesture. Behind it lay a history of revolution going back to 1789 and a huge body of serious political thought from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte to the writings of Antonio Gramsci. But what does it actually mean to claim allegiance to The Hunger Games?

Whatever its literary quality, The Hunger Games enjoys widespread recognition thanks to its blockbuster success as a film, and the gesture adopted by these protesters is instantly recognizable to teens and young adults bound up in the franchise, around the world. If the writer of this article thinks the Thai protesters are “claim[ing] allegiance” to the franchise, they’re either being deliberately derogatory or else unprofessionally obtuse. With limited resources and few opportunities for group gatherings, what better way to get a message out about how the protesters feel their rights are being trampled on than to use a pop-culture gesture that’s loaded with weight and meaning?

The hand-gesture symbols of the 20th century were just as manufactured and have gained widespread respect over time. From Wikipedia, regarding the “V-for-victory” sign that gained popularity during WWII:

On January 14, 1941, Victor de Laveleye, former Belgian Minister of Justice and director of the Belgian French-speaking broadcasts on the BBC (1940–1944), suggested in a broadcast that Belgians use a V for victoire (French: “victory”) and vrijheid (Dutch: “freedom”) as a rallying emblem during World War II. In the BBC broadcast, de Laveleye said that “the occupier, by seeing this sign, always the same, infinitely repeated, [would] understand that he is surrounded, encircled by an immense crowd of citizens eagerly awaiting his first moment of weakness, watching for his first failure.” Within weeks chalked up Vs began appearing on walls throughout Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern France.[24]

Buoyed by this success, the BBC started the “V for Victory” campaign, for which they put in charge the assistant news editor Douglas Ritchie posing as “Colonel Britton”. Ritchie suggested an audible V using its Morse code rhythm (three dots and a dash). As the rousing opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony had the same rhythm, the BBC used this as its call-sign in its foreign language programmes to occupied Europe for the rest of the war. The more musically educated also understood that it was the Fate motif “knocking on the door” of the Third Reich. ( Listen to this call-sign. (help·info)).[24][25] The BBC also encouraged the use of the V gesture introduced by de Laveleye.[26]

By July 1941, the emblematic use of the letter V had spread through occupied Europe…since 1942, Charles de Gaulle used the V sign in every speech until 1969.[31]

Using pop culture, art and the will of the people to manufacture ways to express dissatisfaction with political leadership is a technique that’s been used through the ages, around the world.

By criticizing Thai protesters for using the methods of protest readily available to them and insisting they adopt an intellectually-sanctioned (Western) gesture of political protest instead, the Guardian article only demonstrates its own ethnocentrism and ivory-tower intellectualism, showing its own irrelevance when it comes to commenting on the right of oppressed people to choose their own method of showing dissatisfaction with their ruling over-class.

Green Tea Pop (Soda)

By The original uploader was Deathtiny42 at French Wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...)], via Wikimedia Commons

Green Tea is super healthy for you, which is great if you’re someone who likes green tea. I am not. Hot, cold, as a flavor in ice cream – so far, I haven’t been able to find a delivery method for green tea that I like. I’ve been more or less at peace with that, though erring slightly on the side of less.

However.

The other day I was passing an overpriced yuppie tea store where they serve samples outside, and one of the samples was something the saleswoman said they called “tea pop.” Just like the name suggests, they took tea and steeped it in seltzer, then served it up for consumption. They had used some super-fancy, flowery fruit infusion: hibiscus, rose petals, guava, etc. – you know the type – but when I got home, I thought…I should try this with green tea.

Several months ago my dad bought me a huge box of green tea (still not sure why, but it’s been in my cupboard and I hate to let things go to waste), and I also have the remnants of blueberry-acai flavored green tea from a discount store up there. Here’s what I did:

1. Grabbed a bottle of seltzer.

2. Took the cap off.

3. Jammed 3 tea bags – 2 regular green tea, one blueberry-acai green tea – down the neck of the bottle.

4. Dumped some honey into the bottle and turned it over a few times (didn’t shake it, because, well, seltzer).

5. Stuck it in the fridge.

The tea actually steeped pretty quickly in the cold seltzer, which surprised me a little, but maybe it’s something to do with the bubbles. All I know is that within an hour or so I had a really lovely refreshing drink that carried all the benefits of green tea, and for some reason having it as a fizzy drink totally made the difference!

The cost was less than the cost of a bottle of diet coke, too – $.79 for the seltzer and the cost of three cut-rate teabags.  The only problem I’ve discovered is that now I have to buy three times as much seltzer as usual; a small price to pay, in my opinion.

So if you’re not a fan, but looking for a way to make green tea palatable, try this out and let me know what you think!

 

Plague, The Videogame

You even get to name your own plagues.

It’s been a rough few days. Emotionally, physically, financially…

So when one of my Twitter friends mentioned she’d just started playing a super-addictive Android game called PLAGUE, INC., and she’d destroyed the entire world population twice in fifteen minutes, I asked where to get the game. I need something to take my mind off things. I downloaded it from the Google Play store (free!) and started playing.

This the most cathartic game I’ve played in ages.

The concept is simple. You create a disease – you start with bacteria, move on to a virus, then fungus, and so on – and you get points to help grow/evolve your disease over time. You can win the game if you kill every living person on the planet, or lose the game if either the humans find a cure, or you run out of hosts to infect. (For example, in one game, I infected everywhere but Greenland and they closed their ports, so my disease killed everyone it could infect but the world was still left with humans.)

Additional complexity comes from how you score points – random DNA bubbles that you have to pop when they appear on the map, or else biohazard bubbles whenever a new infection site begins – and then “spend” them on your disease’s evolution. You can pick ways to transmit the disease, features and abilities it has, and its symptoms.

It’s in the Google app store, takes up about 30MB of space, and is both addictive and compelling.

If you want, you can pay to “unlock” special features, but so far I haven’t felt the need.

 

I highly recommend it.

Plague

You even get to name your own plagues.

It’s been a rough few days. Emotionally, physically, financially…

So when one of my Twitter friends mentioned she’d just started playing a super-addictive Android game called PLAGUE, INC., and she’d destroyed the entire world population twice in fifteen minutes, I asked where to get the game. I need something to take my mind off things. I downloaded it from the Google Play store (free!) and started playing.

This the most cathartic game I’ve played in ages.

The concept is simple. You create a disease – you start with bacteria, move on to a virus, then fungus, and so on – and you get points to help grow/evolve your disease over time. You can win the game if you kill every living person on the planet, or lose the game if either the humans find a cure, or you run out of hosts to infect. (For example, in one game, I infected everywhere but Greenland and they closed their ports, so my disease killed everyone it could infect but the world was still left with humans.)

Additional complexity comes from how you score points – random DNA bubbles that you have to pop when they appear on the map, or else biohazard bubbles whenever a new infection site begins – and then “spend” them on your disease’s evolution. You can pick ways to transmit the disease, features and abilities it has, and its symptoms.

It’s in the Google app store, takes up about 30MB of space, and is both addictive and compelling.

If you want, you can pay to “unlock” special features, but so far I haven’t felt the need.

 

I highly recommend it.

Taking Turns

My mom and I were talking the other day, and she told me this story.

When I was little, I asked her why people died.

She said that we all get to come and have a turn on Earth,

and then after a while,

it’s somebody else’s turn.

I asked how I reacted to that, and she said that I said:

“Oh. Okay.

That makes sense.”

Tracking eBook Sales With Authorgraph

If you look off to the right of this blog, you’ll see a drop-down menu from Authorgraph, a service that lets authors sign digital books. I joined up after reading about it a couple months ago, but have been — shall we say — underwhelmed by the number of readers who want to take advantage of the service. As they say on Shark Tank, I’m not sure this is a problem that needed a solution. Whether this is because people are still being educated on what a “digital author signature” looks like or because my readers just aren’t interested, who knows, but I’ve definitely given some thought to taking the plug-in off my page in order to open up some valuable sidebar real estate.

The other day, though, I got an interesting email from the service. It let me know how my books were faring on the Amazon sales ranking lists. One had gone up by several thousand places, another had fallen – and since I haven’t seen other places where this tracking-over-time has taken place, I thought it was interesting that this has now been added to the service.

Amazon Sales Ranking is calculated every hour or so and can fluctuate wildly. Since most self-published books don’t sell over 200 copies within their lifetime (I’m happy to say all but a couple of mine have exceeded that level) selling just a few copies a day is enough to drive a book up by thousands of “ranks,” and checking in on a sporadic basis doesn’t guarantee an accurate picture.

So while its primary use – as a tool for connecting with readers – still hasn’t proven itself to me, Authorgraph’s ability to provide authors with ebook tracking data has definitely become a significant reason for creating and maintaining an account with the service.

Yes, All Women

I wish I could be eloquent about this topic, because I’m a writer and eloquence is supposed to be my stock-in-trade.

But the fact is that for two days I have been following a Twitter conversation about how a woman-hating clot of wasted DNA thought he had the right to murder women because he felt rejected. This is not hyperbole – a friend read this individual’s entire 150-page manifesto (I don’t know how she stood doing so, the excerpts she posted made me feel sick) and that’s what it boiled down to.

Via Twitter, I have been watching woman after woman after woman relate story after story after story about sexual harassment, sexual assault, street harassment, discrimination, microaggression, rape, overt aggression, persecution, verbal assault and more and every single tweet I’ve seen applies directly either to me or to one of my friends.

I have been watching people – mostly men, but in a twist of internalized misogyny I can’t wrap my head around, some women, too – try to rip these women down for expressing the violence that has been perpetrated against them. I’ve watched my friends be condescended to, sworn at, insulted and threatened – and I’ve watched them refuse to back down.

I’ve been reading about allies, too – men who will boost the signal and commit to helping women fight back against systemic violence and oppression – and seen them called traitors and worse. I’ve seen women act as mouthpieces for those who cannot safely express themselves, passing on stories others don’t dare share in public. I’ve lost followers because I participated in the hashtag, but more importantly, I’ve gained new ones – and I know which side of that equation is more important to me.

Two days. For two days, this has been going on.

I’m struggling to find words to talk about how this conversation makes me feel. Angry isn’t enough. Frustrated isn’t enough. Maybe I’ll find the words, eventually, but right now all I can do is keep reading, retweeting and participating.

Here are some of what TIME magazine considered “The Most Powerful #YesAllWomen Tweets“. I saw others in my timeline that I consider even more upsetting and affecting. In among them, I also saw signs for hope: the mother who had just spent two hours reading through the tag with her 16-year-old son, or the father who vowed to raise his son as a woman-respecting feminist. (Of course, for every one of these, there were literally hundreds of people denigrating the tag and the women who chose to speak out on it.)

If you want to read this hashtag, which earlier today was clocking over sixty new tweets every thirty seconds, click here. Be advised that some tweets – particularly by those who feel the women having their say don’t have a right to speak their minds – are extremely graphic.

As of writing, the hashtag had already spread to Tumblr, and was trending on Facebook.

Edit: Original version of this post included a reference to the number of women murdered which was outdated by the time of posting. The number has been removed; it’s actually irrelevant.

Samsung Chromebook Update

It’s been a few weeks since I brought my Chromebook home from the store, and I’m not gonna lie – I am completely and utterly in love with this little machine. It’s light to carry, easy to use, offers comprehensive access to what I need my computer for, and (with about an hour of preparation) puts all my work at my fingertips. I’ve encountered one or two hiccups since booting the Chromebook up for the first time, but have found all of them supremely navigable.

This comes with a couple of caveats: I don’t play computer games, I have above-average knowledge (if we’re talking the average of the general population here) of how a computer works, I haven’t yet used the Chromebook for screenwriting, and I’ve maintained a primary desktop that runs on Windows 7, which I use when I need to save large files or print a document.

With those disclaimers out of the way, here are some of my favorite things about my Samsung Chromebook:

The Keyboard

99.9% of what I use my Chromebook for is typing. Whether I’m tweeting, Facebooking, blogging, novelling, emailing or a dozen other -ings, words are at the center of most of my computer usage. The Chromebook’s keyboard is close enough to full-size to be comfortable and easy to type on, unlike the Asus EEE netbook I bought four or five years ago. The keys are low to the surface of the laptop’s lower casing, and give a satisfyingly mechanical click when struck. I can’t stand silent keyboards. They make me feel like I’m fooling myself. One reason I picked the Samsung over the other models of Chromebook available at the Best Buy I visited was the tactile experience of testing its keyboard and mousepad before purchase. Given the importance of the tactile experience in my writing process, I think I made the right choice.

Living In The Cloud

Dropbox has become a more important part of my storage life for the last few years. I haven’t yet found a satisfactory way of mirroring files from Dropbox to Google Docs, and since Google Docs can’t open direct from Dropbox, I’ve had to use a roundabout process of downloading, converting and opening files to get my documents across, but I’ve now started saving my work directly to my Google Drive. Almost service with a web interface is accessible from Chrome, so I’ve been able to keep watching my shows on Hulu Plus and listening to music on Spotify. I’m also (as I’ll discuss next) really growing to enjoy — not just tolerate — the experience of using Google’s productivity suite.

The Software Experience

My biggest point of hesitation when it came to moving away from the Windows OS was my reliance on Microsoft products. All my writing (with the exception of screenplays) has been done in Microsoft Word since 1993, and being able to access those files is critical. I knew that moving to Google Docs was going to be a transition, but I didn’t give a lot of thought to the casual use of image editors. And even though my phone is an Android, the idea of my choice of OS having a substantial impact on my organization and planning hadn’t really occurred to me.

Where its office suite is concerned, the Chrome OS is a winner. Google Docs (the company’s replacement for Microsoft Word) and Sheets (for Excel) make it possible to import Microsoft files (though you have to be sure to use the “import” command rather than just “open,” or you won’t wind up with an editable file. On top of this, Google offers Forms, which may be the easiest way to set up a survey and collect simple data that I’ve ever used (and I’ve used Access, Surveymonkey, LJ Polls and more).

Managing Appointments

Thanks to a plethora of doctors’ appointments, my calendar isn’t as uncomplicated as you might think at the moemnt. Since getting my Chromebook, I’ve noticed a jump in the up-to-date nature of my calendar. Suddenly, putting new items on my agenda has become a seamless process, since I no longer have to navigate the default options put into place for me by Microsoft. Any time I get the option to “add to Google Calendar,” I click it, and presto – my calendar is updated the way it always should have been, but wasn’t, when using my Google Calendar from a Windows machine. It also carries over to my phone’s Google calendar – again, this should have been happening before, but there was some kind of hiccup taking place when I tried to do this from Windows, and I never took the time to fix it.

Photo Editing

Thanks to an article I read early in my research process, I had learned about Pixlr, touted as an online alternative to Photoshop. When I got caught needing to make a picture for my first blog post about Chromebook, I tried it out – and I am happy to say, it works exactly like a replacement for Photoshop – right down to the functions of different tools and where they’re placed. It may not be a twin to the most recent version of that software, but it’s certainly showing the level of functionality I need.

Battery Life

The Samsung Chromebook advertises as having a battery that holds a charge for over six hours. I haven’t timed it yet, but so far I haven’t been dissatisfied with the amount of continuous use I’m getting out of the machine. I can sit down and work and not worry too much about having to plug in again – plus, when that time comes, it only takes a couple hours before I’m back at 100% charge.

The Downsides

I don’t play video games, and that’s just as well, because the only ones I could play on the Chromebook would be browser-based games. The downside here is that I really want to play Actual Sunlight and I just haven’t had a chance to play it on the Windows computer I’m using as my base.
I can’t watch Netflix from the Samsung Chromebook. This is something to do with site compatibility and what the Chromebook won’t run (I want to say Java?).
Skype doesn’t work on the Chromebook (I hate skyping, so I don’t actually consider this a downside, but if there were a situation where I needed to discuss something face-to-face with a family member, friend or client who was geographically distant, it would be Google Hangouts or bust.
The keyboard is not a traditional QWERTY setup. There’s no “home” or “end,” no “page up” or “page down.” That row of familiar F-keys along the top of the keyboard has been replaced by a series of icons, the meaning of which isn’t always immediately clear. Right-click is non-existent. Caps Lock has been replaced with a “universal search” key that acts much as the start-menu search in Windows. That said, there are easily-searchable lists of keystroke commands. You can summon the right-click command menu by following instructions on trackpad use. There are alternatives, you just have to be ready to investigate them.
Inexplicable technical quirks. The first two times I turned on the Chromebook, my mouse pointer disappeared after a few minutes. Both times, it re-appeared once the computer was restarted. I suspect that I inadvertently triggered some kind of keypad command, but haven’t followed up to see what it was. More worrying was the sudden drop-out of any ability on the part of the computer to connect with my home WiFi network. My Android was still connecting just fine, but despite numerous refreshes and restarts, I couldn’t get the computer to connect to the home network (which it could still see). I went to a friend’s house intent on performing a complicate reboot — and if that didn’t work, mentally preparing to send the whole thing in to Samsung for a replacement under warranty — but when I got to my friend’s the computer connected to her home WiFi network without a hitch. Once I got back to my own place, it was as if the problem had never been there in the first place. These technical glitches are worrying, mostly because figuring them out wasn’t possible and now the problems have passed, and if I’d been under a deadline they would have been extremely distressing – particularly the one about the WiFi not working, since the Chromebook is designed to function at full capacity only when connected to a network.

Overall? I’d still recommend the Chromebook over a Windows laptop for anybody who doesn’t need to game or program with their system. The price is right, the capabilities seem more than adequate, and the experience of use has been more or less friction-free so far.

 

7 Facts About Me (Part 2: Versatile Blogger Awards)

Yesterday, I blogged about how Christina Zarrella awarded me a Versatile Blogger Award. Part one of receiving the award was to nominate 15 bloggers I think you should check out; part two is sharing 7 facts about me. Yesterday’s blog got a bit long, so today here are some more facts (facts, and nothing but the facts). Check out Christina’s blog, Turbulence in the Veins, if you haven’t already.

7 Facts About Me:

1. My first (paid) writing gig was as one of the inaugural writers for NeXt, the teen section of The Buffalo News. I mostly covered science fiction events, including movie reviews and even a Star Trek convention. During my 2-year stint as a correspondent, I got to interview people like George Takei (briefly, at a local Star Trek convention) and Michael DeLuise (who I knew and loved from NBC’s short-lived seaQuest DSV).

2. One of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced was swimming with turtles in St. Maarten last year. Even though I got the worst sunburn of my life, it was totally worth it. While I’d do it again in a heartbeat, I might choose to wear a long-sleeved shirt in the water, next time.

3. As of this year, New York City overtook Edinburgh as the place I’ve lived the longest, other than my childhood hometown.

4. Growing up, I studied ballet lessons, gymnastics, swim team, the French Horn, the flute and the piano. I no longer do any of those things.

5. I have only seen each of the original Star Wars movies once, only seen the first of the prequels, and have no intention of watching any more of them ever again.

Left: Kevin O’Donnell, chef at The Salty Pig, Boston. Right: Me, tearing fat out of a pig carcass.

6. Two years ago, I won a lesson in how to butcher a pig by claiming “it’s a skill I’ll need in order to survive after the zombie apocalypse.” I’m not sure they realized my main goal would not be to catch wild pigs with my bare hands after zombies took over the planet. (Too subtle? Or too tasteless? Either way, I joke.)

7. Beneath my cynical and direct exterior, I’m actually a total pushover, but I mostly try to keep that a secret.

Thus concludes my acceptance of my Versatile Blogger Award!

 

I’m currently seeking beta readers/advance reviewers for my upcoming collection of sci-fi and speculative fiction stories, SHORT FRICTIONS. If you’re interested, please click  here  to find out more.