Post by chalkey on May 21, 2013 18:04:28 GMT -5
Enclosed are the revised drafts of the ACP top three. The honorable mentions have yet to turn anything in, but I'm less worried about them anyway.
All three will be in this thread so you don't have to click back and forth.
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Reading the Soundtrack: The Star Wars Soundtrack as a Primer
What does it mean to “read” a soundtrack? What information about a movie or television show is revealed via music? A melody, especially when interwoven with other melodies, can reveal key connections, emotions, and relationships between characters and sometimes places. Additionally, music can be used to foreshadow future events or reference the past.
“Reading the soundtrack” is what I call it when I listen to the score of a movie, often before I have ever seen the film, and am able to piece together much of the plot, action, and character relationships just by reading the track titles and listening for themes within the overall score. I first started doing this when I was about fourteen and began purchasing movie soundtracks with my allowance. Memorizing music and musical themes was something that I had been doing for most of my childhood — I grew up listening to Broadway musicals and classical music, as well as a lot of 80s rock.
When my dad gave me the Star Wars Trilogy Original Soundtrack Anthology when I was a kid, it opened up an entirely new way for me to enjoy movies. The four-CD box set came with a booklet in which each track was described in detail in terms of instrumentation, themes, and what was going on in the movies during that track. I spent that Christmas break with my Walkman, some earphones, and a blown mind as I discovered that when people and places have their own theme in a movie, those themes can be mixed together, played on different instruments and at different tempos to convey the action on the screen. I was already pretty obsessed with Star Wars and I was a music lover — I played violin and did choir and orchestra in school. I had the necessary tools to use that booklet like a textbook and study the variations and possibilities in connection to the story, and this became a tool I used with other soundtracks and continue to use. The track titles that are concert arrangements of themes are useful in that they are an excellent launching point for further exploration. For example, once you know what Han and Leia’s love theme sounds like, you can then recognize it within other tracks, like the part of the movie where Han Solo is being frozen in carbonite and they have their famous, “’I love you.’ ‘I know,’” exchange. The track title is “Carbon Freeze/Darth Vader’s Trap/Departure of Boba Fett,” and it is nearly twelve minutes long. The track contains pieces of the Imperial March (often referred to as Darth Vader’s theme) as well the Jedi Fanfare often associated with Luke during action scenes. Also present in this track is a battle-ready version of Yoda’s theme, which we first heard played softly and sometimes playfully during the scenes where Luke is training under Yoda on Dagobah. Yoda’s theme is used to represent the Force and to make the viewer call to mind that Yoda was not too keen on Luke flying off to Bespin to save the day, thereby warning the savvy viewer that things are not going to go well for our hero. The swelling strings of Han and Leia’s theme provide the emotional payoff of this track. If you’ve seen the movie, the use of that theme, played in that way, during that scene does more than just tell the viewer that this is supposed to be sad — it brings the past and present together for the characters and for the audience as well.
Another example from the Star Wars soundtracks is the Imperial March. It is introduced in The Empire Strikes Back, and although its official title would seem to imply that the theme represents the Empire as a whole, the theme has become synonymous with the character of Darth Vader. I believe that this was intentional, and was therefore meant to suggest that the Empire needs Vader more than he needs the Empire, making his change of heart near the end of The Return of the Jedi even more convincing. Composer John Williams went back to plant the seeds when he composed Anakin’s theme for The Phantom Menace. What starts out as an innocent theme song for a sweet little boy has an ominous musical “tag” at the end. A small piece of the Imperial March is present, suggesting to the viewer/savvy listener that this kid already has some dark tendencies hidden within. In The Return of the Jedi when Darth Vader is dying, the once-powerful Imperial March is played softly on a harp. The theme is shown to be as volatile and changeable as its owner, providing a character sketch in musical form.
Armed with the insights I picked up from my study of the Star Wars soundtracks, I began to apply my knowledge to other movies as well. The Pirates of the Caribbean movie scores provided a new playground for me to practice my movie and musical analysis skills. Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer collaborated on the scores for the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, often working with each other’s themes and arranging them into the score. Captain Jack Sparrow’s theme, first introduced when he has stolen the small boat and sails to Port Royal, can be interpreted to be almost an internal soundtrack-ing — it sounds like what Jack Sparrow would want his soundtrack to sound like and adds further evidence of his character as dramatic, often a bit full of himself, but ultimately heroic. In fact, Jack Sparrow has at least two different theme songs; Jack Sparrow, and He’s a Pirate. One is the character’s idea of himself and the other represents how others see him. Jack’s theme(s) are used throughout the trilogy+1 and are interwoven with other themes as Jack himself crosses paths with the characters those motifs represent.
Place themes are often used to call to mind not only a physical place itself, but also to evoke the memories of what that place might represent to different characters. The Cloud City theme from The Empire Strikes Back sounds regal and safe, and calls to mind the image of Lando Calrissian in his billowing cape. However, as it is revealed that Cloud City is not what it seems, the track is interwoven with the Imperial March, illustrating Cloud City’s entanglement with the Empire.
In The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, composed by Howard Shore, the theme of the Shire, called “Concerning Hobbits,” is often used to evoke the safety and peacefulness of Shire life. By the end of the trilogy, the motif that symbolizes the innocence of the Hobbits and of the Shire has also come to represent Frodo’s knowledge that he does not belong in such a place any longer. The theme, like the Shire, is mostly unchanged; however, Frodo has changed, and this is why he must go.
If, after reading this article, any of you might be interested in trying out some soundtrack reading of your own, I recommend the Lord of the Rings soundtracks. After familiarizing yourself with the character and place themes, listen to the score from The Hobbit and see if you can find evidence of Peter Jackson’s decision to integrate the story of The Hobbit into the first trilogy via familiar characters, scenes, and sounds. The soundtrack acts as a prequel, just like the narrative, and evidence of this can be gleaned through paying attention to the musical motifs, and where they occur in the movie.
Learning to read the soundtrack will help the viewer to predict possible outcomes of a movie or television show and gain deeper insight into the connections and motivations of the characters, enhancing the overall viewing experience.
----------
Very Pinteresting: Does Pinterest Perpetuate Female Stereotypes?
Coming from a background in theatre and communications, I interpret "entertainment" in more social terms. While some of you reading might unwind after a long day by playing a video game or watching a movie, I come home and log onto Social Media. I find great pleasure in sharing content I find relevant, humorous, and important with my friends and followers. That said, I’ve been with the social bookmarking site Pinterest since its initial beta-testing and have watched it grow into a must-have social networking tool among my friends and colleagues.
Pinterest has become so popular that many websites on the internet have tried to copy its successful concept, including a website called “Manteresting,” which pokes fun at Pinterest’s overwhelming female user base, boasting that it’s a “no girls allowed” club. You might be wondering what my hang up about this is — after all, men just want their own space, right? It is clear in the data that Pinterest must appeal directly to women. According to a recent Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project survey, 19 percent of female Internet users are on Pinterest versus 5 percent of male web users. In the United States alone, 87% of the user base is female.
It is not that I don’t understand the need to have a space dedicated to men when the current platform is vehemently opposed to their gender (you know, like most Internet websites are towards women, i.e. 4chan, Reddit, Google+, etc.). The problem is that Pinterest isn’t hostile towards the male gender, but for whatever reason men are still refusing to be associated with “the women of the Internet.” The tech world claiming that Pinterest is a place for women on the Internet insinuates that being where the women are makes you less of a man, and yet the existence of these knock-off websites like Manteresting proves that there is a marketable demand for men to organize their ideas.
With such a stereotype actively applied to the website, one would think the website’s color scheme would be pink and shiny, with female-focused language. Quite the contrary — Pinterest has a tidy, gender-neutral interface from the moment someone signs up. A careful analysis of the site reveals Pinterest to be extremely useful when looking to purchase or sell a product or service: you can find dozens of photos of a product or item pinned by other users. The site is especially well known for its usefulness in wedding or event planning, where one can collect cakes, centerpieces, and dresses that they like and organize them in one easy-to-access space. Because of this, Pinterest is stereotyped as a place solely for women. However, while categories range from weddings to fitness, the most popular categories are food and drink, DIY and crafts, and home decor, things many people, regardless of gender, subscribe to in magazines and RSS feeds. Additionally, the sign up page samples some of the cool pins a user can find on the site, which appeals to a wide range of tastes. We are shown a rock-climbing site, garden inspiration, modern kitchen décor, film photography, muscle cars, and even a vintage robot collection. For a site that is considered to be aimed exclusively at women, the first page is fairly gender neutral, or at least appeals to many tastes and interests.
Continuing on, we see a gray and white dialogue box with a list of categories to choose from, encouraging the new user to subscribe to boards that they are most interested in. This is how Pinterest determines what kinds of pins to send to a user’s home screen. The more a user pins and follows specific boards, the less likely they will encounter content that they are not interested in. With customization so easily achieved, it is a wonder that the rumors of Pinterest perpetuating female stereotypes even exists: you could just as easily create a personalized Pinterest home screen focused on beards and plaid as you could create one focused on jewelry and sparkly wedding gowns.
Despite Pinterest’s neutrality in design and programming, men (or, at least, marketers focused towards men) seem to feel the need to escape to a completely separate website with identical functionality. Manteresting was created to reinforce stereotypical masculinity by telling users to “nail” something they like into their “workbench,” suggesting that “pins” and “pin boards” have an underlying feminine connotation (though the items themselves, digital or otherwise, are gender neutral). This also serves to further devalue the female image (women can’t or don’t use tools). According to its FAQs, Manteresting is "not the first social bookmarking website to hit the Internet, we are the first to specifically cater to the male population. Last time we checked there were 3.4 billion men on earth. It's about time.” A quick glance at the site reveals pictures of guns, hot rods, scantily-clad women, home improvement projects and bacon. When we start creating websites that cater exclusively to one type of gender (i.e. the manly man, the girly girl), society will find itself in a tricky situation of overcompensation, evident in these man-oriented Pinterest knock-offs.
I have to hand it to the boys' club of the internet, though, for pointing out the strangely obvious fact about Pinterest’s female userbase. While it should be accepted and appreciated that women are participating in a new social website, there is no doubt that it is strange. After all, the majority of users on the Internet are male. …Oh, wait. According to the 2012 Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, the majority of internet users (67%) are actually adult women between the ages of 18-29. Although I cannot agree with someone’s belief that Pinterest was built for women, I can make the statement that the developers of Pinterest are sexist, or at least participated in sexist activity, as is evident in their initial United States launch campaign. During beta-testing, the creators targeted influential online female presences to start feeding content into their website’s network, causing an influx in female-generated content. They zoned in on users of Etsy, who were primarily female based, to begin growing the interaction taking place on the new social sharing site. However, when Pinterest launched in Britain, the beta-testing campaign did not single-out specific genders, and the user base actually weighs towards male users. Visua.ly, an Internet user-data collection website, shows that 56% of British Pinterest users are men. So what are those young men (ages 24-35) pinning? Marketing techniques and design inspiration. Coincidentally, these are the same things that I am pinning as a woman in America.
In conclusion (and I can’t believe this needs stating): women are interested in a vast array of subjects that extend well past the social surface of glitter and baby animals! Women like bacon and mustaches and politics and building furniture, too. Gender stereotyped marketing in today’s world has backfired (see BIC’s pen design for women for a relevant example), so it may be time to drop the assumptions about “girliness” and “manliness” altogether. Pinterest is a powerful tool for planning and gathering information, no matter what your passions are. How you use that tool is up to you. Don’t shy away from using it because you are afraid of stumbling across interests that are new and foreign to your gender or sexuality.
Chalkey note: multiple parts are now hyperlinks in the doc - yay!
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Hey Adulthood!
How Nickelodeon’s Hey Arnold! trusted us with the real world
There’s something delightful about cartoons that sweep us away from the real world. I spent most of high school, college — and last week — watching SpongeBob and Looney Tunes. Yet Nickelodeon’s Hey Arnold! was always my favorite, although it was the most realistic children’s cartoon on the air.
“It was super emotional on purpose,” said creator Craig Bartlett in a 2012 interview. “We were trying to make it be about childhood, and we thought the way to make it different … was to make it emotionally realistic.”
The psychoanalysis of Helga Pataki alone could fill volumes. The writers came to love and write at least 40 segments around her, decoding her sad life and love for Arnold. Incredibly clever in her own right, Helga was forgotten by her flakey, under-the-influence mom, while pressured by a workaholic blowhard dad to be more like her literally perfect sister, Olga.
Helga escaped her own harsh reality by escaping into a more pleasant one: love. Obsessive, manic love for our football-headed protagonist, Arnold.
“Arnold, my love, my sultry preteen… You make my girlhood tremble, my senses all go wacky…” Real cartoony, huh? Someone’s been reading romance novels again. Helga crooned passionate love sighs to a photo of Arnold, but outwardly, she was hard-as-nails toward everyone and a bully to him… Just like any little girl on the playground who doesn’t want to share her emotions for fear of rejection. “Childhood’s all about unrequited love,” Bartlett said. “She’d rather be abusive than tell him the truth.”
But Hey Arnold! was swarming with messed-up people, not just Helga. Stoop Kid’s phobia made him physically unable to leave his home. In the boarding house, Oskar was unreliable and thieving. Grandma’s dementia was charming because she was still mobile, not yet paranoid. Pigeon Man was a flat-out hermit whose rooftop was trashed by vandals because he was an outsider, not just bullied by the other kids, but truly ostracized from society.
“Who did this?” Arnold asked.
“People … it’s people I don’t understand,” Pigeon Man said. “Some people are meant to be with people. And others, like me, are just different.” You don’t get the same level of brutal honesty in SpongeBob or The Fairly OddParents.
As a children’s show, Hey Arnold! usually ended on a positive note, and characters learned the lesson, but first they had to deal honestly with their consequences. The classroom girls mocked newcomer Lila, until they realized she was nearly destitute. Arnold was mugged, then accidentally attacked and humiliated a stranger. Mr. Hyunh even gave up his infant daughter to save her life during the Vietnam War.
“It’s very complicated story, Arnold,” he said. “Many years ago, I lived in another country very far away … I was the luckiest man in the world, but there was trouble in my country. There was a war in the north. They said there was only room for one.” We watched Mr. Hyunh hand his baby to soldiers in the last helicopter and then return to the fireplace where he sat alone every Christmas.
Hey Arnold! was humorous, but not cartoonish. Doug and Rocket Power were the only other realistic 90s Nicktoons. Both dealt with young people problems (Doug navigated teenage issues, like dating, cheating, and bullies, while the Rockets rebelled against authority), but without the same degree of character damage. All three had people you’ll meet in real life, but Hey Arnold! really got inside their minds.
Plus, the creators trusted kids enough to use them as voice actors. Old Nicksclusive clips show a roomful of boys and girls recording and improvising together. This differs hugely from another show with plenty of ensemble scenes, Archer, where actors record alone, or Doug, in which teenage characters Doug and Judy Funnie and Patti Mayonnaise were played by actors born in the 1950s (according to IMDB.com).
Jim Lang’s soundtracks also treated viewers like adults. Arnold’s city wouldn’t be the same without adventurous swinging jazz riffs, and Arnold wouldn’t be the same pensive boy without mellow bluesy tones. If need be, the music tenderly cut into our hearts during the sadder moments.
Bartlett compared watching old episodes to “weird diary pages that everyone got to see.” He said TV executives warned, “This is too sophisticated. Kids won’t get this. Or kids won’t like this,” but the ultimate approval came when executive Geraldine Laybourne told him, “I was Helga.”
We wrangled 100 episodes (five seasons and a movie) before Hey Arnold! wrapped. Spencer Klein (the third voice of Arnold) and Francesca Marie Smith (Helga) had no more acting credits after the series and movie ended, which leaves a teardrop on the show and second movie that was supposed to follow (in which Arnold returned his feelings for Helga on a class trip to find his parents).
But that’s how growing up goes, isn’t it? You don’t always hear the boy next door return your love. Sometimes you throw away the used bubblegum shrine, keeping only a locket or book of poetry as a reminder of feelings that couldn’t be said.
Hey Arnold! was the therapist everyone needs at some point in life. Craig Bartlett and the writers trusted kids enough to realistically teach us the complexities of true love and life, using actors our age. Writers didn’t shy away from romance, muggings or outcasts, nor did they water down the delivery or turn it into a soap opera. Hey Arnold! was the grown-up show that meant just for kids.
Chalkey notes: -- holy shit this one got garbled by the forums. Edit paragraph formatting as you desire! I'll fix it when I get a chance if you don't beat me to it.
I'm gonna dump these here and come back after my evening calms down a bit, but from a brief skim all of these look much stronger than before.
All three will be in this thread so you don't have to click back and forth.
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Reading the Soundtrack: The Star Wars Soundtrack as a Primer
What does it mean to “read” a soundtrack? What information about a movie or television show is revealed via music? A melody, especially when interwoven with other melodies, can reveal key connections, emotions, and relationships between characters and sometimes places. Additionally, music can be used to foreshadow future events or reference the past.
“Reading the soundtrack” is what I call it when I listen to the score of a movie, often before I have ever seen the film, and am able to piece together much of the plot, action, and character relationships just by reading the track titles and listening for themes within the overall score. I first started doing this when I was about fourteen and began purchasing movie soundtracks with my allowance. Memorizing music and musical themes was something that I had been doing for most of my childhood — I grew up listening to Broadway musicals and classical music, as well as a lot of 80s rock.
When my dad gave me the Star Wars Trilogy Original Soundtrack Anthology when I was a kid, it opened up an entirely new way for me to enjoy movies. The four-CD box set came with a booklet in which each track was described in detail in terms of instrumentation, themes, and what was going on in the movies during that track. I spent that Christmas break with my Walkman, some earphones, and a blown mind as I discovered that when people and places have their own theme in a movie, those themes can be mixed together, played on different instruments and at different tempos to convey the action on the screen. I was already pretty obsessed with Star Wars and I was a music lover — I played violin and did choir and orchestra in school. I had the necessary tools to use that booklet like a textbook and study the variations and possibilities in connection to the story, and this became a tool I used with other soundtracks and continue to use. The track titles that are concert arrangements of themes are useful in that they are an excellent launching point for further exploration. For example, once you know what Han and Leia’s love theme sounds like, you can then recognize it within other tracks, like the part of the movie where Han Solo is being frozen in carbonite and they have their famous, “’I love you.’ ‘I know,’” exchange. The track title is “Carbon Freeze/Darth Vader’s Trap/Departure of Boba Fett,” and it is nearly twelve minutes long. The track contains pieces of the Imperial March (often referred to as Darth Vader’s theme) as well the Jedi Fanfare often associated with Luke during action scenes. Also present in this track is a battle-ready version of Yoda’s theme, which we first heard played softly and sometimes playfully during the scenes where Luke is training under Yoda on Dagobah. Yoda’s theme is used to represent the Force and to make the viewer call to mind that Yoda was not too keen on Luke flying off to Bespin to save the day, thereby warning the savvy viewer that things are not going to go well for our hero. The swelling strings of Han and Leia’s theme provide the emotional payoff of this track. If you’ve seen the movie, the use of that theme, played in that way, during that scene does more than just tell the viewer that this is supposed to be sad — it brings the past and present together for the characters and for the audience as well.
Another example from the Star Wars soundtracks is the Imperial March. It is introduced in The Empire Strikes Back, and although its official title would seem to imply that the theme represents the Empire as a whole, the theme has become synonymous with the character of Darth Vader. I believe that this was intentional, and was therefore meant to suggest that the Empire needs Vader more than he needs the Empire, making his change of heart near the end of The Return of the Jedi even more convincing. Composer John Williams went back to plant the seeds when he composed Anakin’s theme for The Phantom Menace. What starts out as an innocent theme song for a sweet little boy has an ominous musical “tag” at the end. A small piece of the Imperial March is present, suggesting to the viewer/savvy listener that this kid already has some dark tendencies hidden within. In The Return of the Jedi when Darth Vader is dying, the once-powerful Imperial March is played softly on a harp. The theme is shown to be as volatile and changeable as its owner, providing a character sketch in musical form.
Armed with the insights I picked up from my study of the Star Wars soundtracks, I began to apply my knowledge to other movies as well. The Pirates of the Caribbean movie scores provided a new playground for me to practice my movie and musical analysis skills. Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer collaborated on the scores for the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, often working with each other’s themes and arranging them into the score. Captain Jack Sparrow’s theme, first introduced when he has stolen the small boat and sails to Port Royal, can be interpreted to be almost an internal soundtrack-ing — it sounds like what Jack Sparrow would want his soundtrack to sound like and adds further evidence of his character as dramatic, often a bit full of himself, but ultimately heroic. In fact, Jack Sparrow has at least two different theme songs; Jack Sparrow, and He’s a Pirate. One is the character’s idea of himself and the other represents how others see him. Jack’s theme(s) are used throughout the trilogy+1 and are interwoven with other themes as Jack himself crosses paths with the characters those motifs represent.
Place themes are often used to call to mind not only a physical place itself, but also to evoke the memories of what that place might represent to different characters. The Cloud City theme from The Empire Strikes Back sounds regal and safe, and calls to mind the image of Lando Calrissian in his billowing cape. However, as it is revealed that Cloud City is not what it seems, the track is interwoven with the Imperial March, illustrating Cloud City’s entanglement with the Empire.
In The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, composed by Howard Shore, the theme of the Shire, called “Concerning Hobbits,” is often used to evoke the safety and peacefulness of Shire life. By the end of the trilogy, the motif that symbolizes the innocence of the Hobbits and of the Shire has also come to represent Frodo’s knowledge that he does not belong in such a place any longer. The theme, like the Shire, is mostly unchanged; however, Frodo has changed, and this is why he must go.
If, after reading this article, any of you might be interested in trying out some soundtrack reading of your own, I recommend the Lord of the Rings soundtracks. After familiarizing yourself with the character and place themes, listen to the score from The Hobbit and see if you can find evidence of Peter Jackson’s decision to integrate the story of The Hobbit into the first trilogy via familiar characters, scenes, and sounds. The soundtrack acts as a prequel, just like the narrative, and evidence of this can be gleaned through paying attention to the musical motifs, and where they occur in the movie.
Learning to read the soundtrack will help the viewer to predict possible outcomes of a movie or television show and gain deeper insight into the connections and motivations of the characters, enhancing the overall viewing experience.
----------
Very Pinteresting: Does Pinterest Perpetuate Female Stereotypes?
Coming from a background in theatre and communications, I interpret "entertainment" in more social terms. While some of you reading might unwind after a long day by playing a video game or watching a movie, I come home and log onto Social Media. I find great pleasure in sharing content I find relevant, humorous, and important with my friends and followers. That said, I’ve been with the social bookmarking site Pinterest since its initial beta-testing and have watched it grow into a must-have social networking tool among my friends and colleagues.
Pinterest has become so popular that many websites on the internet have tried to copy its successful concept, including a website called “Manteresting,” which pokes fun at Pinterest’s overwhelming female user base, boasting that it’s a “no girls allowed” club. You might be wondering what my hang up about this is — after all, men just want their own space, right? It is clear in the data that Pinterest must appeal directly to women. According to a recent Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project survey, 19 percent of female Internet users are on Pinterest versus 5 percent of male web users. In the United States alone, 87% of the user base is female.
It is not that I don’t understand the need to have a space dedicated to men when the current platform is vehemently opposed to their gender (you know, like most Internet websites are towards women, i.e. 4chan, Reddit, Google+, etc.). The problem is that Pinterest isn’t hostile towards the male gender, but for whatever reason men are still refusing to be associated with “the women of the Internet.” The tech world claiming that Pinterest is a place for women on the Internet insinuates that being where the women are makes you less of a man, and yet the existence of these knock-off websites like Manteresting proves that there is a marketable demand for men to organize their ideas.
With such a stereotype actively applied to the website, one would think the website’s color scheme would be pink and shiny, with female-focused language. Quite the contrary — Pinterest has a tidy, gender-neutral interface from the moment someone signs up. A careful analysis of the site reveals Pinterest to be extremely useful when looking to purchase or sell a product or service: you can find dozens of photos of a product or item pinned by other users. The site is especially well known for its usefulness in wedding or event planning, where one can collect cakes, centerpieces, and dresses that they like and organize them in one easy-to-access space. Because of this, Pinterest is stereotyped as a place solely for women. However, while categories range from weddings to fitness, the most popular categories are food and drink, DIY and crafts, and home decor, things many people, regardless of gender, subscribe to in magazines and RSS feeds. Additionally, the sign up page samples some of the cool pins a user can find on the site, which appeals to a wide range of tastes. We are shown a rock-climbing site, garden inspiration, modern kitchen décor, film photography, muscle cars, and even a vintage robot collection. For a site that is considered to be aimed exclusively at women, the first page is fairly gender neutral, or at least appeals to many tastes and interests.
Continuing on, we see a gray and white dialogue box with a list of categories to choose from, encouraging the new user to subscribe to boards that they are most interested in. This is how Pinterest determines what kinds of pins to send to a user’s home screen. The more a user pins and follows specific boards, the less likely they will encounter content that they are not interested in. With customization so easily achieved, it is a wonder that the rumors of Pinterest perpetuating female stereotypes even exists: you could just as easily create a personalized Pinterest home screen focused on beards and plaid as you could create one focused on jewelry and sparkly wedding gowns.
Despite Pinterest’s neutrality in design and programming, men (or, at least, marketers focused towards men) seem to feel the need to escape to a completely separate website with identical functionality. Manteresting was created to reinforce stereotypical masculinity by telling users to “nail” something they like into their “workbench,” suggesting that “pins” and “pin boards” have an underlying feminine connotation (though the items themselves, digital or otherwise, are gender neutral). This also serves to further devalue the female image (women can’t or don’t use tools). According to its FAQs, Manteresting is "not the first social bookmarking website to hit the Internet, we are the first to specifically cater to the male population. Last time we checked there were 3.4 billion men on earth. It's about time.” A quick glance at the site reveals pictures of guns, hot rods, scantily-clad women, home improvement projects and bacon. When we start creating websites that cater exclusively to one type of gender (i.e. the manly man, the girly girl), society will find itself in a tricky situation of overcompensation, evident in these man-oriented Pinterest knock-offs.
I have to hand it to the boys' club of the internet, though, for pointing out the strangely obvious fact about Pinterest’s female userbase. While it should be accepted and appreciated that women are participating in a new social website, there is no doubt that it is strange. After all, the majority of users on the Internet are male. …Oh, wait. According to the 2012 Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, the majority of internet users (67%) are actually adult women between the ages of 18-29. Although I cannot agree with someone’s belief that Pinterest was built for women, I can make the statement that the developers of Pinterest are sexist, or at least participated in sexist activity, as is evident in their initial United States launch campaign. During beta-testing, the creators targeted influential online female presences to start feeding content into their website’s network, causing an influx in female-generated content. They zoned in on users of Etsy, who were primarily female based, to begin growing the interaction taking place on the new social sharing site. However, when Pinterest launched in Britain, the beta-testing campaign did not single-out specific genders, and the user base actually weighs towards male users. Visua.ly, an Internet user-data collection website, shows that 56% of British Pinterest users are men. So what are those young men (ages 24-35) pinning? Marketing techniques and design inspiration. Coincidentally, these are the same things that I am pinning as a woman in America.
In conclusion (and I can’t believe this needs stating): women are interested in a vast array of subjects that extend well past the social surface of glitter and baby animals! Women like bacon and mustaches and politics and building furniture, too. Gender stereotyped marketing in today’s world has backfired (see BIC’s pen design for women for a relevant example), so it may be time to drop the assumptions about “girliness” and “manliness” altogether. Pinterest is a powerful tool for planning and gathering information, no matter what your passions are. How you use that tool is up to you. Don’t shy away from using it because you are afraid of stumbling across interests that are new and foreign to your gender or sexuality.
Chalkey note: multiple parts are now hyperlinks in the doc - yay!
-------
Hey Adulthood!
How Nickelodeon’s Hey Arnold! trusted us with the real world
There’s something delightful about cartoons that sweep us away from the real world. I spent most of high school, college — and last week — watching SpongeBob and Looney Tunes. Yet Nickelodeon’s Hey Arnold! was always my favorite, although it was the most realistic children’s cartoon on the air.
“It was super emotional on purpose,” said creator Craig Bartlett in a 2012 interview. “We were trying to make it be about childhood, and we thought the way to make it different … was to make it emotionally realistic.”
The psychoanalysis of Helga Pataki alone could fill volumes. The writers came to love and write at least 40 segments around her, decoding her sad life and love for Arnold. Incredibly clever in her own right, Helga was forgotten by her flakey, under-the-influence mom, while pressured by a workaholic blowhard dad to be more like her literally perfect sister, Olga.
Helga escaped her own harsh reality by escaping into a more pleasant one: love. Obsessive, manic love for our football-headed protagonist, Arnold.
“Arnold, my love, my sultry preteen… You make my girlhood tremble, my senses all go wacky…” Real cartoony, huh? Someone’s been reading romance novels again. Helga crooned passionate love sighs to a photo of Arnold, but outwardly, she was hard-as-nails toward everyone and a bully to him… Just like any little girl on the playground who doesn’t want to share her emotions for fear of rejection. “Childhood’s all about unrequited love,” Bartlett said. “She’d rather be abusive than tell him the truth.”
But Hey Arnold! was swarming with messed-up people, not just Helga. Stoop Kid’s phobia made him physically unable to leave his home. In the boarding house, Oskar was unreliable and thieving. Grandma’s dementia was charming because she was still mobile, not yet paranoid. Pigeon Man was a flat-out hermit whose rooftop was trashed by vandals because he was an outsider, not just bullied by the other kids, but truly ostracized from society.
“Who did this?” Arnold asked.
“People … it’s people I don’t understand,” Pigeon Man said. “Some people are meant to be with people. And others, like me, are just different.” You don’t get the same level of brutal honesty in SpongeBob or The Fairly OddParents.
As a children’s show, Hey Arnold! usually ended on a positive note, and characters learned the lesson, but first they had to deal honestly with their consequences. The classroom girls mocked newcomer Lila, until they realized she was nearly destitute. Arnold was mugged, then accidentally attacked and humiliated a stranger. Mr. Hyunh even gave up his infant daughter to save her life during the Vietnam War.
“It’s very complicated story, Arnold,” he said. “Many years ago, I lived in another country very far away … I was the luckiest man in the world, but there was trouble in my country. There was a war in the north. They said there was only room for one.” We watched Mr. Hyunh hand his baby to soldiers in the last helicopter and then return to the fireplace where he sat alone every Christmas.
Hey Arnold! was humorous, but not cartoonish. Doug and Rocket Power were the only other realistic 90s Nicktoons. Both dealt with young people problems (Doug navigated teenage issues, like dating, cheating, and bullies, while the Rockets rebelled against authority), but without the same degree of character damage. All three had people you’ll meet in real life, but Hey Arnold! really got inside their minds.
Plus, the creators trusted kids enough to use them as voice actors. Old Nicksclusive clips show a roomful of boys and girls recording and improvising together. This differs hugely from another show with plenty of ensemble scenes, Archer, where actors record alone, or Doug, in which teenage characters Doug and Judy Funnie and Patti Mayonnaise were played by actors born in the 1950s (according to IMDB.com).
Jim Lang’s soundtracks also treated viewers like adults. Arnold’s city wouldn’t be the same without adventurous swinging jazz riffs, and Arnold wouldn’t be the same pensive boy without mellow bluesy tones. If need be, the music tenderly cut into our hearts during the sadder moments.
Bartlett compared watching old episodes to “weird diary pages that everyone got to see.” He said TV executives warned, “This is too sophisticated. Kids won’t get this. Or kids won’t like this,” but the ultimate approval came when executive Geraldine Laybourne told him, “I was Helga.”
We wrangled 100 episodes (five seasons and a movie) before Hey Arnold! wrapped. Spencer Klein (the third voice of Arnold) and Francesca Marie Smith (Helga) had no more acting credits after the series and movie ended, which leaves a teardrop on the show and second movie that was supposed to follow (in which Arnold returned his feelings for Helga on a class trip to find his parents).
But that’s how growing up goes, isn’t it? You don’t always hear the boy next door return your love. Sometimes you throw away the used bubblegum shrine, keeping only a locket or book of poetry as a reminder of feelings that couldn’t be said.
Hey Arnold! was the therapist everyone needs at some point in life. Craig Bartlett and the writers trusted kids enough to realistically teach us the complexities of true love and life, using actors our age. Writers didn’t shy away from romance, muggings or outcasts, nor did they water down the delivery or turn it into a soap opera. Hey Arnold! was the grown-up show that meant just for kids.
Chalkey notes: -- holy shit this one got garbled by the forums. Edit paragraph formatting as you desire! I'll fix it when I get a chance if you don't beat me to it.
I'm gonna dump these here and come back after my evening calms down a bit, but from a brief skim all of these look much stronger than before.