Letters to the Editor
Allie_
Published Letters: 1252 Editor's Choice: 109
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re: redfish/bluefish
[Read the article: To Pixar: We love it. But next time, could you add a girl?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One thing about Japan's female artists is that in Japan, there are high schools devoted to people who want to grow up and become animators, equally attended by boys and girls. There's even an episode of Sailor Moon about two girls attending such a school.
Want to see this situation change?
I don't have a daughter, but if you do - tell her that if she wants to be involved in high-tech storytelling, she's going to need to get started on her technical skills early.
For some reason, Americans realize it's necessary to push ten-year-old girls to be gymnasts or violinists or ballerinas, but they don't understand that they need to start just as early to be comic book artists and animators and video game level designers. For whatever reason, more boys than girls are naturally drawn to the technical aspects (generally boys coming into the field know the technical stuff and learn the storytelling later). There are a lot of women out there today who love games and have storytelling ideas they would like to express. Everyone has a story for a video game - it's like everyone having a screenplay - what gets you through the door and into the industry is having some technical skill that allows you to translate your story into the medium.
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re: Laurel962
[Read the article: To Pixar: We love it. But next time, could you add a girl?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm telling you, as someone who works in the field, that you're simply wrong. It's not an "old boys' club." Computer art isn't an old enough field to have become an old boys' club, for starters - my boss is in his 20's. These men want female artists, they advertise for female artists, they hire female artists with half the competency of male artists because they badly want a female perspective.
I know a fair number of female character designers, female concept artists, and female skinners. All of these are "soft" skills, which require traditional art skills rather than technical computer skills. I only know one female 3d builder and she sucks. All 3d artists are able to do the 2d stuff but not vice-versa, which gives them a huge leg up in getting jobs. If you really want clout, learn the hard skills such as programming rendering engines. I don't know a single woman who works in that aspect of the field.
If you want to see more computer animated movies for girls, encourage more girls to take these jobs. No one is saying (at least I'm not) that girls are naturally bad at these jobs. But they aren't taking them.
For the other poster who said that men can write stories about women just as well as women can: in some cases, that may be true. But no storywriters tell good stories about things they don't want to write about. Good stories don't come out of someone telling the writer what to write.
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education
[Read the article: Junk food education]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There's a bigger issue here that's not being addressed: children have been taught all throughout school to regard "education" as utterly disconnected from real life. Almost none of the skills children learn in school are used in later life (amply demonstrated by watching 'who wants to be a 5th grader'). It takes genius most kids don't have to make the leap from abstract rules about eating (or sex) to actual behavior.
A nutritional education program that might work could involve children writing down and reporting their diets, talking to their parents about what they eat, and forming groups to speak to the school lunch providers about the school meals. Way to make a nutritional education program that WON'T work? Lectures and charts on the wall.
Having said that, there is still a need for education as education - when a child wants to lose weight, and can't, because the child and the parents are both idiots, it's a problem. Case in point: a 15 year old girl in Memphis was recently the focus of several articles in the local paper because she underwent stomach reduction surgery. The girl's mother said, "Jade used to eat chips when she was hungry. Now she eats more weight-conscious snacks, like carrot sticks dipped in ranch dressing."
Excuse me while I blaspheme. This poor child is trying to lose weight, and her mother thinks RANCH DRESSING is low calorie? Depending on how much she dips, the carrot sticks are probably five times as fattening as the chips were! No wonder she had to have half her stomach removed to have a chance.
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re> AKA Smith - school lunches
[Read the article: Junk food education]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was hanging out in a gaming chatroom with a bunch of high school kids recently when the subject of school lunches came up. I wish I still had the link to the school menu one of them sent me. Monday - pizza. Tuesday - hambugers. Wednesday - subs, provided by Subway. And so on. It was really gross. Another kid, who lives in NYC, reports that his school doesn't make enough food to feed everyone, so kids who have the late lunch period don't always get to eat.
I'm almost 40 years old and I'm still young enough to remember why few kids eat the whole apples - they are bunged-up, bruised and nasty, woody-textured excuses for apples. Plus, in my school at least, there was a stigma attached to anyone who showed an inclination to eat healthy. What you pick at lunch is a big social determinant. Only weirdos drink the regular milk and not chocolate. Only weirdos bring lunch from home. At my private school, which actually had pretty decent hot lunches, only weirdos ate the hot lunch. You were supposed to buy Chef Boyardee in a can. Ravioli. The spaghetti and meatballs were "gross." Add chips, a candy bar, and a soda. So what you end up with is every student eating Chef Boyardee ravioli, chips, and candy every day, while the lunch providers throw out tons of food. Enforced by the most potent of enforcers, peer pressure.