the-milk-eyed-mender:
Tweenbots by Kacie Kinzer:
Given their extreme vulnerability, the vastness of city space, the dangers posed by traffic, suspicion of terrorism, and the possibility that no one would be interested in helping a lost little robot, I initially conceived the Tweenbots as disposable creatures which were more likely to struggle and die in the city than to reach their destination. Because I built them with minimal technology, I had no way of tracking the Tweenbot’s progress, and so I set out on the first test with a video camera hidden in my purse. I placed the Tweenbot down on the sidewalk, and walked far enough away that I would not be observed as the Tweenbot––a smiling 10-inch tall cardboard missionary––bumped along towards his inevitable fate.
The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”
The Tweenbot’s unexpected presence in the city created an unfolding narrative that spoke not simply to the vastness of city space and to the journey of a human-assisted robot, but also to the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions. But of more interest to me, was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people’s willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone. As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining it’s destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot.
I AM A TWEENBOT
It’s OK by me if a homeless person spends my money on drink or drugs. When I was homeless I found it very hard to beg, but people who did give me money were preventing a crime, because the money meant I didn’t have to steal in order to eat or to feed my addiction. And, frankly, it’s none of your business where an addict is on his journey. If your money funds the final hit, accept that the person would rather be dead. If your act of kindness makes him wake up the next morning and decide to change his life, that’s nice but not your business either.
Your business is to know that money desperately needed by someone went directly into his hand. Pause before you give your earnings over to those smiling, healthy, legal street beggars: charity chuggers. I know from experience that a high proportion of donations is wasted on administration and on the public relations machine that persuades us what a good job the charity is doing. The employment opportunities the charities create are not among the people they claim to help. No, the money goes to employees far removed from poverty, further excluding the target group.
In order for Bruce Wayne to fund his high-tech covert military campaign against the criminals of Gotham, he must secretly siphon off vast sums of money from Wayne Industries…one must wonder whether it might not be much more effective if he took that money and spent it on developing a strong educational system within the city, setting up training programs for the unemployed, and helping small businesses develop… A city without the infrastructure to provide good education and work opportunities simply feeds Joker’s evil schemes by sustaining the conditions that lead to a large underclass unable to find representation in the city. Batman’s archvillains would have a difficult time carrying out their crimes if they did not have an unlimited number of poor and desperate people to prey upon, people who turn to crime in order to survive and find identity. If Batman spent his time and money supporting a life-giving infrastructure, the crime wave in Gotham might be broken.
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Peter Rollins (via azspot)
This is what I’m SAYING. Ok you rounded up a few criminals with your batarang. What are you doing about institutional inequality that fosters crime, BRUCE.
(via urbanafrofuturism)
Wow, I never thought about that.
(via janedoe225)
Why I Hate Batman Openly Stated Reason #80million
*kanyeshrug*
(via poopeatoe)
reminds me of what my crime narratives professor said about Sherlock Holmes/the specific detective story genre Doyle spawned — how it presents crime as an individual phenomenon, one where the blame always rests solely on the criminal, instead of taking a wider view (some later detective/crime stories/novels resist or complicate this — for example dashell hammett’s red harvest, in which everyone refers to “personville” as poisonville — subtle, right? that’s a detective story but also a gangster story and a lot of gangster stories implicated broader society for setting the rules that gangsters [often immigrants or from relatively recent immigrant families of origins looked down upon at the time, like say Italians] had to break because they weren’t allowed into the more law-abiding avenues to success. one interesting example of this we talked about was the great gatsby read as a gangster novel — gatsby is after all a criminal, a bootlegger, an american but through no initial fault of his own the wrong kind of American to be granted access to the things he wanted which those around him took as their birthright.)
uh. anyway. I love batman but this is totes true.
(via isabelthespy)
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dangertits:
skiptripfall:
rainbowfairyprincess:
I am incredibly grateful to my parents for giving me both kinds of toys. I preferred the dolls, but at least I know that was my own honest choice.
My mom wouldn’t let me have toys.
I still find most commentary on the sexist division of girl toys and boy toys to be rather lacking. Of course if is terrible that girls and boys are given toys that encourage them to enact stereotypical gender roles so young; this type of socialization might prime them to fill specific roles later on in life. But people are still undervaluing “girls toys,” equating them with passive frivolousness. And how sexist is that? The sentiment is that “gender neutral” toys, always verging towards “boys toys,” are constructive, educational, and worthwhile. Dolls aren’t. This is the kind of sentiment that dismisses the value of “women’s work” of care-giving later on in life.
“Boys toys” tend to be physically complex. “Girls toys” tend to be socially complex. The complexity of the imaginary play that children often engage in with dolls is intangible and made invisible early on—because you aren’t looking. It is so much easier for a child to say “look what I made” and get a pat on the back than to say “watch me engage.”
I played with lots of different types of toys. Sure, I liked to build things with legos. But I much preferred my dolls. And guess what? All forty or so of my beanie babies had individual personalities. They had roles, romances, they interacted with each other in complex ways. There were smaller subgroups of birds or bears. I used them to create a complete micro-society. But an adult passerby would see that pile of critters as a rather useless and excessive collection.
Understanding social complexities, the kind of play which “girls toys” encourage, is undervalued from an early age.
Let’s please stop with the “dolls are dumb” rhetoric. It isn’t helpful. It’s still sexist. The problem of gendered children’s toys won’t be fixed by allowing free access to “boys toys” for all, but by seeing the value in diverse types of play, and encouraging all children to engage in them.
fyeahafrica:
The Ghana ThinkTank
Founded in 2006, the Ghana ThinkTank is a worldwide network of think tanks creating strategies to resolve local problems in the “developed” world. The network began with think tanks from Ghana, Cuba and El Salvador, and has since expanded to include Serbia, Mexico and Ethiopia. In a recent project, we sent problems collected in Wales to think tanks in Ghana, Mexico, Serbia, Iran, and a group of incarcerated girls in the U.S. Prison system.
These think tanks analyze the problems and propose solutions, which we put into action back in the community where the problems originated – whether those solutions seem impractical or brilliant.
Some of these actions have produced workable solutions, but others have created intensely awkward situations, as we play out different cultures’ assumptions about each other.
It’s become a way to explore the friction caused by solutions that are generated in one context and applied elsewhere, while revealing the hidden assumptions that govern crosscultural interactions.
To all the men (and women) complaining about women wearing “slutty” Halloween costumes: tell me what YOU PERSONALLY are doing to dismantle the patriarchy before you insult people for doing what’s expected of them, marketed to them, and encouraged by almost everyone who isn’t a sanctimonious ass like yourself.
noblealice:
delladilly:
One of the hardest parts of feminism for me is the NOT JUDGING part.
I had a post in my head about the slut-shaming that goes on around Halloween and how despicable it is, but this is much more succinct and says basically all that I had in mind. I mean, let’s shame the costume companies who make it so hard to find decent costumes, meaning that anyone who’s a little bit busy and picks up a ready-made costume is kinda stuck with the company’s idea of what female professionals dress like. Let’s shame the society that creates the screwed up beauty standards that demand more skin to be deemed attractive and then turns on anyone who embraces their sexuality. Let’s shame the people who are dressing up as insulting caricatures of ethnic minorities. And let’s leave the women who make their own choices of what clothes they are comfortable in, alone.
I do not have a library card because I grew up poor—very, very, After-School Special poor, cockroaches in my bedroom and scavenging from trashcans poor—and I was badly bullied by the kids in my school, leading, eventually, to a group of girls stealing and destroying my library books. I couldn’t pay the fines. I couldn’t even tell anyone what had happened, because when the scruffy little poor girl complained about the sweet, well-groomed rich kids who had each others’ backs, well…I had been down that road. The only people who would believe me were my mother and my teachers, and all I could do by telling them was upset them. I couldn’t change anything.
