Happy Mother’s Day!

Here is a video about the biological importance of mom. This video is dedicated to my moms and my sister-in-law.

Thanks Mom! “Slightly more than 1/2 of  everything I am is thanks to you!”

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Science is the Poetry of Reality

This is a great video I ran across via Fickle as the Breeze

The composer of the song is John Boswell and he has more songs (available for free download) and videos at The Symphony of Science Website. Boswell also has a YouTube page with songs from his various projects.

Boswell’s other project is called Colorpulse and on some tracks, he sets philosophy to music.

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Game Covers Women Want to See

One of my favorite blogs, The Border House, is renewing a meme about game covers that women want to see. The meme encourages women to write a post about the kinds of game covers that made us want to play a game. The Border House is compiling a list of these blog posts at the site. If we want stuff that is made for us and marketed toward us, then it makes sense to express our preferences around marketing. I agree.

Here’s how it goes…

Game Covers Women Want to See

Yudhishthira’s Dice asks:

Ladies, what RPG covers (or interiors) have you seen that involve a woman in the art that make you say, “I want to play that” or, just as good “I want to play her.” Or that make you feel like it is a game you could like, or be included in by a group of guys you’d never met and whose maturity you didn’t necessarily know?

Rules of the meme, by tekanji:

1. Copy the text of the original challenge from Yudhishthira’s Dice and give a proper link attribution.
2. Copy these rules exactly (including any links).
3. Find images of game covers (interiors are okay, too) that make you want to play the game. Any kind of game — video game, card game, tabletop RPG, etc — is fine. Post them and include a short (or long) explanation on why the image makes/made you want to play the game.
4. The original challenge is about finding out what women think about how game art is marketed and therefore it is targeted at women. I’d like to keep it that way, please.
5. You can tag as many or as few people as you want. You do not need to be tagged to participate in the meme.
6. When you make your post, please post the link on this thread so we can all see what others have said.

I dropped one of the conditions.  I dropped the condition that the cover should “involve a woman” because I also often find androgynous covers attract me, and I also like some covers that involve masculine figures, as long as they don’t seem anti-female humans. My additions are below the jump:

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Oops! I missed Blogging Against Disablism Day

I missed the “Blogging Against Disablism Day” on May 1, 2010, because I was still in the throws of technology failures. They are over now! Yippi! Thanks to patient partner for working on the problem for a whole two weeks.

Here is a great video of my favorite song from Portal in lieu of the post I would have written on Saturday.

More ASL videos are posted at Stephen Torrence’s YouTube page Captain Valor

There is more about the ASL video project at his blog Bad Philosophy

And here is a two-part Interview at How Stuff Works

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“What Counts as a Benefit?” Personal Choices in Political Contexts: Labiaplasty and FGC

About ten years ago I was at a meeting and we were discussing what the policy on female genital cutting (FGC, female genital mutilation (FGM), or female circumcision) should be in the hospitals of the Canadian city where I was living at the time. The woman who was giving the presentation about the facts of FGC said at one point in the presentation that there was “no benefit” to FGC that could be weighted against its harms. Now, I do not support FGC in any way, but I was also quite bothered by this statement because it is one that renders the women who engage in FGC unintelligible and irrational, which makes discussing FGC with women impossible. I have been thinking about this issue again because I recently saw this video about the increasing requests for labiaplasty in Australia (The video is NSFW):

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