Apparently, I’m not done with deciding my favourite stories are sexist yet. (But I am done with sharing this link to the first episode Cracked.com’s new series starring Swaim and DOB, because I for some reason find it to be unadulterated hilarity. Suggestive content, sexual themes, and bad language.) My…
Writing not-sexist stories is tough. I’m not being flippant: I’m a woman who was raised in a reasonably feminist household and who currently lives in an environment with more-feminist-than-average peers, and my first drafts nearly always make me cringe. It would be easy to explain that the stories in my…
I read Sarah Rees Brennan’s novel The Demon’s Lexicon last weekend. It was quite enjoyable (although I still don’t understand the title, but nevermind, I’m always missing details by the end of a book), and I recommend it. However, I’m bringing it up mainly because it reminded of something I’ve…
So, about strong women in fiction. And I don’t mean strong only in this sense. This past month, I had the opportunity to work with U of T’s Drama Centre on a production as a historical consultant and a co-lighting-designer. While doing one of the many tasks that fall to…
Dear Mom, Dad, and the rest of my relations: Please bookmark this page for future reference. My field overall is known as History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. I am an historian of technology. In particular, I study technologies of illusion on the Victorian London stage.
I don’t eat pork. (You probably guessed that from the title.) Not only do I not eat pork, I don’t eat other products derived from pigs, including bacon, lard, and gelatin, or any sort of food containing those items. Up until now, if you’d asked me why not, I’d shrug…
Maybe you, too, read the short story “The Lady or the Tiger”, by Frank Stockton, in middle or high school. If you didn’t, read it now, because I’m going to spoil it in the next paragraph.
While discussing Lewis Wolpert’s Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (2006) with my suitemate last week, she made an interesting point. As I complained about the oversimplification of various philosophical and logical points, she said, reasonably, “Well, these books aren’t written for us.” What she meant was that popular science books…
I liked the movie Reservoir Dogs. This doesn’t seem important, but it will be. So for those of you who, like me, have too much to do all day and not enough willpower to do it, websites like FML can be an excellent tool of procrastination.