Women in pop culture, typography, and other random thoughts

I'm having one of those months where a hundred projects squawk for my attention like a nest of hungry chicks; I can't focus on any one thing for more than....

Hey, a blue car! No, wait, that's a puddle.

Anyway, this post can only be a brief round-up of what's flitted through my mind lately. I'm already getting antsy.

1) The misrepresentation of women in pop culture.
This is becoming more and more of an issue for me. When I started to pay attention to mainstream movies, TV shows, books, comics and video games, I was shocked that women are almost never the main character or even experiencing a story arc of their own. Instead, they are more often plot devices that progress a male character's story; for example, as a victim to be avenged or a reward to be won. Don't believe me? Try out this simple test, called the Bechdel Test, next time you watch a movie. It's depressing.
Video games, a huge part of my childhood, are some of the worst offenders at under-representing female characters, especially the mainstream franchises like Mario or The Legend of Zelda.

Poor Peach. Always the object, never the subject.  

If you're curious about this topic, I highly recommend the work of Anita Sarkeesian, her blog Feminist Frequency, and in particular her new video series called Tropes vs. Women. Anita's work was my springboard to authors like Gloria Steinem, Nora Ephron and Ariel Levy—all of whom have opened my eyes to the importance of pop culture in shaping how we as a society treat men and women.

2) Typography.
Fonts have personalities of their own—some are formal, some are modern and energetic, some are universally hated (lookin' at you, Comic Sans). The font you use, the size, placement and alignment of type, all of this matters—a lot—because it influences the message received by your audience. Hilarious example of conveying the wrong message with poor typography? Here.
I am fascinated by the wonderful, beautiful ways typography is used. If you think type is cool too, you might like these resources:

• Typography articles on the design site creative bloq
• Two collections of artistic typography: Ina Saltz on pinterest page, Type Worship on tumblr .
• Myfonts: a huge repository of fonts and type resources.
• Identifont: for all your font identification needs. 

3) Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr or Facebook for photos?
So, where the heck is the best place to share photos? I'm swamped lately with all these photo-sharing apps on my phone that make it so easy to edit and upload pics to the web...but I don't want to have five different pages to maintain. And I'm not crazy about connecting a bunch of sites together; I just want a one-stop site to share pictures on. How do you share your photos?

Choked up about Crocus

Crocuses are beautiful, crocuses are fine.

I like crocuses; to me they are divine. 

I see the bursts of colour and I smile ear to ear: 

When the crocuses arrive, I know that spring will soon be here. 

*Sung to the tune of this Fred Penner classic. 
**Pictures from out backyard (except one with fallen leaves, that was Pacific Spirit Park)

Do you know how to read a book?

Until recently, I excluded popular non-fiction books from my personal reading. I'm not sure why. Somewhere along the line I lumped it all in with the worst of the"self-help" books—the "win friends in 10 easy steps", "learn Russian in your sleep", "blink and be thin" variety—giving non-fiction as a whole a whiff of desperation and self-delusion. Plus, if I'm surrounded by scientific papers at work all day, why bring other poorly-written, dry-as-toast non-fiction home to read? Or so I thought.

Then I met Stephan and his annoying habit of learning in his spare time. His bookshelf was mostly non-fiction and contained intriguing titles like Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds, A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink and Design for How People Learn by Julie Dirksen. I began to leaf through a few. Soon I was reading them in earnest. How did I miss all these great books for so long?

The most influential so far has been How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. When I picked this one up, I thought "this'll be a breeze, I'm already an ace at reading". Wrong; at least in part. For example, does this sound familiar to you:

"most people, even most good readers....start a book on page one and plow steadily through it, without even reading the table of contents."

Yup, that was me. A table of contents was a roadmap I used after I'd gotten lost in the book or wanted to skip to a specific chapter or topic. And page one? Of course I started on page one, it's the first page. I'm not an anarchist. So what's wrong with plowing through a book?

"...They [readers] are thus faced with the task of achieving a superficial knowledge of the book at the same time they are trying to understand it. That compounds the difficulty."

Crap, I thought, I do that too. I remembered recently reading a book about teaching that had a long story about playing chess, full of cognitive psychology jargon. I didn't see what the story had to do with teaching and I actually quit the book because it annoyed me so much.

Clearly I could learn a thing or two from HTRAB. So I read on. What I found was a clear, logical breakdown of what the authors consider to be the four levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical and syntopical. The levels build upon each other: elementary is putting the words and sentences together, inspectional is skimming with a purpose, analytical is question-based reading for understanding an author's arguments and syntopical* is, well, hard. The level used depends on what you goal is—reading for entertainment, for factual information, or for conceptual understanding.

Inspectional and analytical reading were the most interesting to me. I won't go into too much detail today except to touch upon inspectional reading, or skimming systematically.

Before HTRAB, I thought skimming was something done in an aimless, haphazard way, like flipping to a random page or scanning for the pretty pictures. Turns out skimming, if done purposefully. can be a powerful way to get a sense of a book before diving into the details. Whatever amount of time you have—15 minutes, an hour—can be tailored to an effective inspectional read. No surprise, a great place to start is the table of contents. Also the index: which terms have lots of page references (therefore are most commonly used)? What kinds of examples are given? Do you recognize any specific people listed?

I used to think skimming was lazy, something you wouldn't do if you were serious about a book. Now, I skim every non-fiction book before I read it, even if only for a few minutes. I find it so helpful for understanding the general message and style of an author.

I think I'll write more about HTWAB in future posts. For now, I'll end with the greatest insight it gave me: I wasn't giving any thought to how I read a book. Sure, I used bits and pieces of inspectional and analytical reading here and there—sometimes I haphazardly skimmed, sometimes I took notes and tried to pay attention to every word—but I never reflected on why I used the technique I did, or when. In other words, there was nothing deliberate to how I read a book; I just read.

Now I am conscious of how I read. I might be giving a new book a 15-minute inspectional read to see if it's worth investing more time, I might be delving more deeply into a book that I want to learn from, taking notes and trying to understand the author's main points, or I might be reading for entertainment and just dive in at page one. Regardless, I think I'm finally getting better at reading all the non-fiction books Stephan brings home. Turns out they're not all about dieting.

Two of my favourite non-fiction books.

*One final note: The fourth level of reading, syntopical, is the Everest of reading. Not only is it a hard word to say—syntopical—it's hard to do. Read a bunch of things analytically while simultaneously comparing it to similar works, creating a synthesis of the field. In grad school this is what you're supposed to do, only no one shows you how. And now I find out there are instructions?! God dammit.