All posts in Geek Chic

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• • Body Politics
  • Geek Chic

  Airbrushing anatomy away

  March 19, 2008 • Catherine Hayday

  …or putting in a little extra.

  We all know now that just about any image of a woman on a poster, ad, billboard, or album cover has been (heavily) manipulated. Smoothed and cloned and lifted and trimmed.

  But it’s refreshing to know it in a tangible “look at that right there” way as opposed to a more hand-wavy ephemeral way.

  To that end, I give you Photoshop Disasters.

  It’s a site dedicated to posting and mocking any and all public Photoshop screw-ups. But there are so many reworked images of women to choose from that they currently make up the bulk of the posts. Women remade in the texture of rubber, moded to look like anime, or, more comically, given extra hands:

  

  “Sir Lancelot gazed fondly into the soft blue pools of Lady Guinevere’s eyes and gently held her mutant third hand. Wait, what?”
  

• • Film Fridays
  • Geek Chic

  Putting together the puzzle of Tracey Berkowitz

  March 14, 2008 • Wesley Fok

  Yes, this is my third post regarding a movie starring Ellen Page, but stay with me on this.

  The Tracey Fragments has a fairly simple premise: take a fifteen-year-old girl who’s tormented at school, shackled with an ineffectual psychiatrist, and living with a family barely held together with emotional duct tape. Then rip the tape off and see what happens. One day, Tracey’s kid brother goes missing, and like all teenagers teetering on the brink of emotional collapse, she takes the one action that makes sense: she runs away from home and towards Winnipeg in the hopes that she’ll find her brother. From that basic foundation, McDonald spins a complex multi-tracked narrative, told largely through an almost-literal kaleidoscope of images that serves as the film’s calling card. Nearly every scene in the film consists of multiple video images, arranged and re-arranged in often-hasty compositions designed to put the viewer inside Tracey’s cluttered, mile-a-minute mind.

  

  (more inside…)

• • Geek Chic
  • Wired Wednesdays

  Another one bites the dust

  March 12, 2008 • Catherine Hayday

  Hey team — inaugural Wired Wednesday post. w00t!

  And I’m kicking it off with the hugely sexy topic of… hi-def optical disc formats!

  No, come on, it’s gonna be good. I know, I should do all the shiny this week — when robots fall and Rock Band and Google 411 in Canada. And we’ll get there, I promise.

  For this week though, we’re going practical. Because there’s nothing more Shameless than walking into a tech store and knowing your stuff.

  I figured that if someone reasonably geeky, like myself, used to wonder WTF was the difference between Blu-ray and DVD and HD DVD, someone else was probably wondering too (though possibly with less profanity). And in the interests of spreading tech-savvyness amongst teh ladehs, I’ve written up below the cliffs notes to hi-def discs. What they are. What battle Blu-ray just “won”. And what to do with all your DVDs (<-keep them). Etc.

  But first something from xkcd that has absolutely nothing to do with that:
  

  

  Ahem, so, without further distractions: WTF is Blu-ray

  (more inside…)

• • All About Shameless
  • Geek Chic

  Beauty and The Blogs

  March 4, 2008 • Stacey May Fowles

  Our very own Nicole Cohen is quoted over at Utne in a Science and Technology blog piece titled “Beauty and The Blogs:”

  “Access to information and tech knowledge carries with it great political, economic and social weight,” Cohen writes. “If women are left out of the discourse about information technology and new media, you can bet we’re left out of the production and sharing of social and economic power, too.”

  Read the whole article here.
  

• • Geek Chic
  • Media Savvy

  Women’s Voices Making History

  February 29, 2008 • Stacey May Fowles

  During Women’s History Month, help make women’s voices heard.

  WVWV is honoring those women that have utilized the internet to amplify their voices. Nominate your favorite blogger by March 21, then check back to vote for your favorite among our top 10 women bloggers.

  Remember to visit WVWV.org later in the month to vote for your favorite in the first round.

  

• • Geek Chic
  • Wired Wednesdays

  Teh Future

  February 27, 2008 • Catherine Hayday

  The other day I noticed that Shameless’ “Geek Chic” category is sadly underrepresented. Tech is important to me. I <3 tech. Poor little tech, not getting the love.

  Sometimes the line is blurry between the personal interests of one young feminist (<-me), and what might be interesting to young feminists everywhere.

  But when you get a great lead on some new (or overlooked) tech hawtness, one of the first things you do is share it with all your geeky buddies. So that's what I'm going to start doing here, extended circle of geeky buddies: expect some more regular excited blathering from me about videogames, operating systems, gizmos, hacks, all the things a growing tech-savvy girl needs.

  Playing catch-up, here are few bits and pieces I owe you, Shameless ladies:

  Nokia’s Morph nanotechnology concept ad

  
  

  PicLens

  PicLens is a swishy new picture viewing plug-in for Windows or Mac (and for just about any browser, though you’re all using Firefox right?)

  Check out the preview. Shiny.

  (more inside…)

• • Geek Chic
  • Media Savvy

  “Jade Smells Pretty At London Games Fest”

  November 17, 2007 • Wesley Fok

  I’m not sure how many of you own or play on an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, but if you’re a rabid console gamer you’ve probably heard of Assassin’s Creed. For everyone else, here’s the scoop: Assassin’s Creed is a video game that has you playing a medieval assassin tasked with eliminating nine people associated with the Crusades. Assassin’s Creed is one of the biggest games this holiday season, with a big marketing push from publisher Ubisoft following months of hype. The game is projected to sell over a million copies in the next two months, an amazing feat considering only eleven Xbox 360 games have ever sold more than a million copies.

  So why should you care if you’re not into video games? Well, if you’re a Shameless reader, you probably care about how women are faring in traditionally male-dominated industries, and guess what? The producer of Assassin’s Creed is Jade Raymond, a woman. Female game developers are nothing new; a lot of classics were conceived and designed by women. But Raymond’s profile is far higher than any woman before her, mainly because she’s been the public face of the game at a time when the video game audience is larger than ever before. This is both a blessing and a curse; while Raymond is easily the most visible woman in game development today, there’s a suspicion that Raymond’s been asked to promote the game so much because, well, look:

  

  Jade Raymond, producer of <em>Assassin's Creed</em>.

  Which brings me to the utterly bizarre way video game audiences—especially younger male gamers—handle attractive women playing and developing video games. Everyone knows the stereotype of the nerd gamer with no social skills who quakes in fear of women. The truth, however, is just a bit creepier. Something about the intersection of “hot women” and “plays video games” creates in some gamers a strange emotional supernova that produces equal parts nerdish adoration, wanton sexual desire, and hateful bile.

  (more inside…)

• • Body Politics
  • Geek Chic

  my hips do lie?

  November 9, 2007 • Thea Lim

  

  Do Shakira's hips lie? I'm confused.

  A Friday Funny (though this could also fall under the category of a Friday Cry-y): Women sway their hips the most when they’re least fertile, according to Queen’s University study.

  Scientists at Queen’s are apparently blowing the minds of current zoology, claiming that women, contrary to a popular belief, make themselves less, not more, attractive when they’re “fertile.”

  The study got 40 women (my goodness! 40 whole women!!) to wear clothes with special markers on them so that computers could track their movements, and then asked the women to walk up and down in a 6-metre area.

  I keep on trying to come up with a clever critique of this study, but honestly I’m speechless. How and who came up with the idea for this study? Why is the degree of swayiness of my hips considered important? What is humanity supposed to do with this breakthrough information? And when are they gonna do a study on the boys, so I know when my man is most virile? Vomit!!

• • Geek Chic

  Well played, Natalie Portman

  November 1, 2007 • Zoe Cormier

  I didn’t really want to like Natalie Portman - her image is a bit too cutesy for me, I think her acting is overrated, and the stain of the last three Star Wars movies is awful hard to wash off. What can I say, I’m human, and all humans have some bias in their soul.

  But after putting in the effort to learn a thing or two about her, she has earned my respect. She once said “I’d rather be smart than be a movie star,” and she apparently meant it. She speaks five languages (and is learning more), and has taken time out of acting for her education - first a BA at Harvard, then graduate studies at Hebrew University. She has also done some work to promote micro-lending for women-owned businesses in poor countries.

  I particularly respect her latest dabbling: acting as guest editor for Scholastic MATH, a mag that helps teens appreciate the fun and relevance of mathematics.

  

  This is what she has to say:

  “Math was one of my favorite subjects in school. It always gets a bad rap and I’m not sure why. I always found math to be such an exciting avenue to think about the world in new and different ways.

  Sure, you need to use math daily for knowing how much tip to leave at a restaurant or how much flour you need to make double the amount of cookies in a recipe, but it is the less obviously practical parts of math that are most fun for me—like considering the principles of infinity. It made me excited about life to consider the limitlessness of the mind and what we can do with it.”

  Nicely put. It’s always wonderful to see women promoting math and busting up the “girls are no good at math” stereotype.

• • Geek Chic
  • Media Savvy

  Exposed

  May 29, 2007 • Wesley Fok

  Do you know Allison Stokke? Hundreds of thousands of internet users do. Up until recently, if you did know Stokke, it was probably because of her athletic accomplishments; she’s a high school senior with an outstanding track and field record and an athletic scholarship to a state university. But now those accomplishments have arguably been overshadowed by a picture of her from a year ago that was posted to the internet. It’s not even a particularly notable photo; it’s just Stokke fixing her hair at a track meet. But because Stokke is a fit and attractive girl, the photo got the attention of bloggers and forum posters, and within days Stokke’s picture was everywhere. Now she’s hounded by attention from photographers and media outlets all because of the photo:
  

  “Even if none of it is illegal, it just all feels really demeaning,” Allison Stokke said. “I worked so hard for pole vaulting and all this other stuff, and it’s almost like that doesn’t matter. Nobody sees that. Nobody really sees me.”

  
  We’ve gone over this territory before. It’s easier than ever for an embarrassing photo or a private video to be plastered across the web in a matter of days, and sometimes the side effects of that aren’t pretty. The issue is widespread enough that the Ad Council, an advertiser-supported non-profit advocacy group in the United States, created a public service ad campaign warning teens of the potential downsides to posting photos, videos and other personal information online. But the particular case of Allison Stokke seems slightly different.

  (more inside…)

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