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?