(no subject)

[prog]

The workers outside my window are talking (actually screaming at each other) in Spanish but swearing in English. They must be Firefly fans!

One thing that bothers me about Firefly: for all the Chinese being spoken, where are all the Chinese people? You can give the Niven-ish argument that it's far enough into the future that what we call races now have long since mooshed together and become largely indistinct, but that's clearly not the case here, to look at these guys. There seems to be black folk and white folk and that's about it. I dun geddit? Note I've only watched two episodes and the movie, but still.

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I have been annoyed that, in order to use my business From: address, I had to send and receive mail from Apple Mail instead of gmail. This not only split my mail across two applications, but also prevented me from organizing my business mail with gmail's tools and techniques, which I've grown to like very much since I started using it in June.

But a duh-obvious idea appeared on BoingBoing yesterday: set up a rule in Mail to redirect all messages to gmail. This results in identical copies in both applications' databases, so I can use gmail to search, tag, and browse my business and non-business mail together, and then switch to Mail to compose new messages under my business identity. Good stuff.

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Please let me know if you want a gmail invite. I've had 100 queued up here for I don't know how long. (Wasn't it only 50, last time I mentioned it? Yow.)

Comments

[jadelennox]

Joss sez:

It kind of happened that way. We auditioned Asian actors. We auditioned pretty much every race for every role. Including for Simon after we cast River. She looks kind of Asian, and they could be half brother and sister. It was just how it worked out. And then some people have been offended by that, but ultimately the cast is fairly multi-racial and absolutely the people who are supposed to be playing those parts, so what are you going to do?

Q: Is there like a nerdly explanation, like the Chinese superpower is in another part of the solar system?

No, I don’t have a fan wank for you there.

But I don't buy it. There enough extras on the show I disbelieve he couldn't find competent Asian extras.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I was thinking that too, like the Chinese took their burgeoning space program and went somewhere else, but that still leaves everyone else from that half of the world unaccounted for. Maybe the whole "Earth-that-was" business was actually a pan-Asian prank to get all the Occidentals to leave. Gotta have elbow room...

I'm normally not picky about this sort of thing, but I become slightly more sensitive to it in SF, and absolutely more if you're trying to present an entire future world (as Joss does). Orson Scott Card once wrote that to overlook the racial question in SF worldbuilding is to state "I have seen the future, and you're not there."

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I've noticed the lack of Asian characters in the world of Firefly too. I expect there's some backstory, like China lost the big war but a lot of their culture seeped into the culture of the West (either before, during, or after). I also don't think it's a coincidence that the only three male African-American characters (Book, the bounty hunter, the operative) have been highly trained bad-asses, highly literate and philosophical, and worked for the Alliance.

Also, both Zoe and Anarra seem to have vaguely Asian features. Or maybe that's my imagination.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Hm, I should have hit reload on the comments page before posting.

[ts52.livejournal.com]

For the gmail problem, under settings, in the account tab, you can now set up email addresses that get used in the From: field. I believe you can have more than one. Then you could forward your work mail to gmail, and just be sure to choose the work email when replying. (Not sure if gmail tries to guess the same way Mail does, as I only have one address that I use outside of work these days.)

[prog.livejournal.com]

I see. Thanks.

It looks like they still give you only one signature to use, though, and I need two. I guess I could set up some macro program that dumps in one sig or the other at a keystroke...

[toonhead-npl.livejournal.com]

Or you could just log onto your .Mac account in a browser and change your settings to forward all your email to your gmail address.

[prog.livejournal.com]

But then replying from gmail would (given the world as I understood it half an hour ago) result in me using my silly gmail address and signature and not my oh-so-profressional business address & sig.

(I don't use .Mac, but an IMAP mail service running on the volity machine. But, same idea.)

[pseudomanitou.livejournal.com]

One thing that bugged me was that in Firefly: all the really bad-ass people are black. Even the preacher had many hints dropped that, while a tame teacher of wisdom then, he was a major ass-kicker in the past. This trend continues into the movie as the head bad-guy is also black. Combined with the whole 'civil war' tie-in, and I actually find myself asking is Joss is a racist or something.
But I'm sure it's just a casting coincidence that he didn't notice...

[prog.livejournal.com]

I bet that the intersection of villainy and race is actually a very tricky topic that film producers are keenly aware of.

I think it takes an odd sort of chutzpah to make cast a black person in the role of a lone villain. It's very un-PC and I can respect it at that level. The Operative was an example of a very well done evil-genius character that made me forget my "yow that's so un-PC" thoughts shortly after his introduction. I'm not sure this was handled as well in, say, "Equilibrium", but that may be because that wasn't all that great a film to start with.

However, I think you'll very rarely ever see a black low-life thug in any movie, unless he's accompanied by some equally scummy white dudes. I assume that studios fear that to do otherwise would exactly depict the very real black-men-are-thugs stereotype, which they want to avoid, and this too I understand. But it leaves you with this artificial constraint that only white guys can be thugs, and it ends up making me squirm for the wrong reasons no matter who they cast. Blah. I think too much, is what it comes down too.