Women in the arts

Another thing in the paper from Equity pointing out acting roles are 2 male to 1 female.
Another long comment thread where trolls stomp all over the conversation, and what little conversation there is centers around how you can't just force the arts to do things, won't people think of the artistic excellence!

I have thought. And my thought is simple.

If there aren't enough women, it's a load of rubbish.

Women are 50% of the world. Women have thoughts and feelings and agendas and actions and relationships and independence and all kinds of everything. Women are, to the surprise of many apparently, fully human.

Any art that does not depict women as full and equal parts of the world is just wrong.

Why does this even need saying?

Tell stories with women, because without women there are no stories.
You can't achieve excellence without the basics.

Thanks, subconscious. Thanks a lot.

I dreamed my mutant superpower was to be kind of like the Silence, memory proof, but also unnoticeable. People could be looking right at me and not know it. Like a blind spot in the brain.
The internet was a lifeline, because the power did not work via type. People could read my blog just like anyone else. It was only in person that they couldn't know I was there.
I ended up haunting Avengers tower on the off chance someone there would have a super memory. JARVIS could see me, but he couldn't get anyone with a brain to remember that, so eventually he had to give up on trying to alert people just so Tony would stop trying to fix the 'code error' that kept setting alarms off.
Then someone offered me a wish and I wished the obvious with insufficient caveats and I had a stroke so my mutant power stopped working but I was also paralysed and reduced to communicating in blinks. I was trying to blink SOS and remember any other morse code at all. Eventually, after lots of therapy and people building assistive technology, I could move my arm well enough to type with one finger at a rate of one letter every five or ten seconds.

So, that sucked on all the levels.




I think I'm going to get the GURPS books out and invent some superheroes.


... my insomnia marysue keeps acquiring powers, so now as well as touch telepathy and distance empathy she has absolute memory, empathic navigation in 4 dimensions, the ability to timewalk, and shapeshifting. She used to have limited shapeshifting that just swapped genders, but now she's learned how to do full on emulations. Having had sufficient telepathic contact with someone she can not only change shapes but run a copy of their minds, perfectly stored in her long term memory. It's like multiple personality disorder but they all started out as separate people. And she never loses anyone she's had that level of contact with, so all her husbands are going to live on in memory and emulation, but she can't ever meet them again, because of only having the one body to run the personas on.
A lot of that is like a TARDIS, the really advanced sorts anyway, psychic connection to her passengers and changing shapes though only the really swish ones could do humanoid.
So lately I have been dreaming of being a TARDIS. Only letting people in to the control room means both that they are completely protected from the outside universe and that they can just take over my life with button pressing.

... we're pretty much back to 'thanks, subconscious'.


Other versions of the insomnia epic have clones of me being made so we can be many places at once, all the place that have access to time travel, so we can try to make sure nobody uses it.
That includes one of me going to Atlantis and another living in Cardiff, because clearly Stargate and Torchwood are so easy to fit together :eyeroll:
The epic detour where some kind of transporter accident made me be a voice in Daniel Jackson's head but we couldn't reverse it and knew the US military would not take kindly to it so we were just hiding it for years and I had to be Daniel... yeah, I could just write stories where Daniel does things, that's almost as much like being him, but there's times I want to yell at him and take over and get him to look after himself or whatever, and it would be creepy to daydream being a goa'uld.
... okay, so I sometimes daydream being a goa'uld. They're doing it wrong though. It could be so interesting...



My daydreams are never small scale. I'm always arguing ethics with the Captain or taking over the universe with my awesome diplomatic skillz. Which frankly are a bigger suspension of disbelief problem than secretly being a TARDIS. I would be a very undiplomatic TARDIS. Yet I dream of being a Chaplain who turns a Sanctuary district into the foundation for a peaceful society.

The dreams where I just armour up and hit things a lot are kind of more manageable.


I need to just start writing fiction again. Anything. I haven't since last year, except for The Short Story assignments, which were not terribly helpful. If the only thing I can think of is How Mary Sue Saves The Universe By Telling Everyone Else They're Wrong then, whatever, I should just write it down and get a word count going.



I think fanfic trains us to write ourselves out of stories. Like, our actual Mary Sues, but also the vaguely like us characters we know, and the ordinary people. No more of that, nobody reads that, lalala, lets just write about angsty white boys, you know that works.

I'm kind of getting fed up of it, that I can't think of stories that match the awesome epic adventures I tell myself all the time and that anyone else would actually read. I mean, doesn't everyone else have awesome epic brain adventures too? Why do we turn them into boy stories before releasing?

Or is it just my reading habits that do that?

I've been reading stories about Darcy, who gets written a lot of ways but who is always some variety of pop culture aware college student, and feeling kind of embarrassed about liking those stories. I mean, she's just like an actual person, kind of like me only with more awesome and a taser, and then she dates all the avengers, and it's like I'm not supposed to like this stuff.
Yet there's a bunch of it so clearly people do like it.

I never just get fanfic ideas any more because the TV and comics I watch and read need so much fixing that by the time it's somewhere I want to hang out I've just rewired the whole place and would have to call it OOC and AU and all sorts. But I don't feel like my actual ideas are any good at all.

Dear Brain: Screw that, just write.