DC Women Kicking Ass has an extended interview with a comics reader who goes by the handle Kyrax2, and who spent her time at Comic Con with her daughter, both of them dressed up as characters, going to panels and asking the top figures in the DC Comics universe about representation of women in character lineups, on covers, and among the creative staff of the label. It sounds like it was not a fun experience for her:

I started to mention the panels I’d previously attended. There was immediate hostility from the audience, with someone shouting, “We know!” as I began. Then I asked the question that had been bothering me since the night before, ever since I’d started thinking about the all-male composition of almost every panel I’d attended: “Are you committed to hiring more women?”

Didio responded, “I’m committed to hiring the absolute best writers and artists.”

I looked at the all-male panel and said, “Are you saying you can’t find any great women writers or artists?”

There was a furious reaction from the audience. People yelled at me to ‘sit down!’ and shouted out Gail Simone’s name over and over again. I said, “Yes, I met Gail Simone yesterday. I like her very much. But I’ve attended all these other panels, and with the exception of her and one female editor, they’ve all been male.”

I was again surprised by the audience’s reaction. If people liked Gail so much, didn’t they want to see more female writers and artists like her? It also felt very much like Gail was being used as a token female that everyone could point to and say, “Look! We have Gail! What’s wrong with you?” I didn’t hear any other name being called out.

I’m trying to decide if I think this sounds like it was a productive enterprise. I tend to prefer cajoling, jollying, and gentle shaming to confrontation, but then, the nice people at CAP have seen fit to give me this awesome platform from which to beat my favorite horses, dead or living. And I think media representation is one area where it can be productive to forcefully make people aware of their biases and blind spots even if it makes them uncomfortable. Watching or reading things with only white people, or only men, as stars may not be an active act of racism or sexism, but that doesn’t mean that passivity doesn’t have real impacts on the diversity of our stories and of our entertainment industry workforce, and it’s an act, intentional or no, of self-denial, locking yourself out of things that could illuminate your world.

So was this an effective way of waking people up? It certainly sounds like the most verbal people in the crowds were the ones who wanted to shut up Kyrax2, the panel attendance equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and singing nonsense, though I imagine that also served as a fairly indelible image for some of the more thoughtful people in the crowds who saw her. And given the venue, I’m not really shocked. I’m planning my first trip to Comic Con next year, so I don’t have first-hand experience of this, but it sounds like the event’s gotten so big that from a thematic and mission sense, it’s hard for it to maintain a coherent identity. I’m sure there are people for whom the presence of Twilight at Comic Con is a desecration, and people for whom anything that interrupts their opportunity to have contact with creators and actors in a really positive way is deeply upsetting. I respect that — though I don’t really think folks on panels should ever have a tough pass from difficult but fair questions. That said, next year it would be great to see this as a movement, a lot of women, and men who are their allies, and folks of color, and white folks, getting together to brainstorm questions in advance to elicit a lot of detailed information and reactions from artists, and to demonstrate widespread support for the idea that comics and geek culture get more interesting as they get more diverse. (And if someone is out there doing that, loop me in. I promise I’ll go as Jennifer Walters!) Lone heroes can accomplish a lot deploying the same power — or asking the same questions — over and over. But sometimes, it take the X-Men or the Avengers to win one of the bigger fights.

I had some skepticism about The Ides of March and how it would handle the campaign staff, rather than the politicians, which is, of course, the key to making a movie that’s actually about Washington as opposed to a movie that thinks it’s about Washington. It looks like it’s got at least that focus right:

And that scene with the tie’s got a little snap to it, reminiscent as it is of the famous coffee scene in Brassed Off.

I suppose my concern is that it’s going to be a naive movie dressed up in handsome and skeptical clothes. Ryan Gosling’s character, it seems, starts out as a fixer, develops what Primary Colors would call a “galloping case of TB” (or true believerism), loses faith in his specific candidate, but continues to believe in a pure ideal. Primary Colors, on the other hand, has a character who starts out as a fixer, develops a similar case of TB, but essentially gets inoculated and accepts that a flawed vehicle for progress is better than none — while another character literally can’t survive the disappointment of her idealism. I don’t think politics is an inherently corrupt business, because there are clearly candidates who manage to make it into office without breaking campaign finance laws or accepting bribes. But I think that in our current state of affairs, it’s almost impossible to be politically effective by behaving in an entirely attractive fashion.

Does that mean that to create change you have to work for someone who solicits prostitutes, or is accused of sexual assault, or even if they don’t do anything illegal, is manifestly icky in his personal life? Of course not. But I do think our politics could probably benefit from an acknowledgement that there’s an unviable gap between how we want politicians to behave on the campaign trail and in office. The noble candidate who will bind up our wounds, love his wife and children, behave with perfect dignity on all occasions except those where he’s forced by circumstance to display a rapier wit, and usher in a new age of peace and prosperity, is an insufferable fiction.

A reader who has worked in video game design for more than a decade but who has asked to remain anonymous writes in with some more context on profit pools and how they fit into video game salaries overall:

I am well compensated, but I think Mr. Pachter is way off in describing future earnings from profit pools. For starters, in all the places I’ve worked, there’s rarely anything in writing about them, and, if there is, it can be amended as often as the wind blows. If the company has profits to share from a game and it’s feeling benevolent, it shares them with those that produced it. We have no contracts to guarantee such profit sharing. Additionally, while the market is crowded by huge hits, I don’t believe the majority of titles are exceptionally profitable, though I don’t have data to back this up. I don’t think “You may get a carrot if you work hard” is an excuse for extended crunch time.

There’s a major lawsuit under way against the company Activision, which the plaintiffs allege withheld $54 million in promised bonuses from the designers who did Modern Warfare 2 to keep them working on Modern Warfare 3. That suit is moving forward, and it’ll be interesting to see, if the plaintiffs win, how that affects profit pools in the future — whether they’ll get formalized, or disappear altogether to be replaced by somewhat — though probably not equivalently — higher salaries.

The same reader who sent along those observations about profit pools was also kind enough to point me in the direction of the seminal post by EA Spouse, now unmasked as Erin Hoffman, about the impact of extended crunch time. Since that post came out in 2004, lots of folks have argued that crunch time is unproductive (I’d be interested to see industry-specific, quality studies on the impact of crunch time on productivity and error rates). Edge is running a week-long conversation on whether crunch is necessary — the consensus, unsurprisingly, is that some is inevitable, but much could be avoided. So as I’m thinking about this, I’d be curious to learn if there are companies that have successfully managed to cut down on crunch by implementing protocols or planning strategies that are portable from project to project, and if they’ve seen employee retention and productivity improve and error rates fall? I’d like to believe doing the right thing pays off for companies, but I want to know if it’s actually true.

Mr. Pachter and I are going to talk all about this further — he emailed that he thinks game developers have every right to try to form unions, but that it’s likely, given the structure of the industry and the availability of labor, that they’ll be unsuccessful. So if you’ve got questions for him, toss ‘em in comments and I’ll use them to inform my own thinking.

Bill Nye is good at a lot of things, among them teaching children about science, killing it on Fox News

In our conversation about non-white manic pixie dream girls, a couple of commenters recommended that I give Issa Rae’s web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, a try. It’s a suggestion for which I’m deeply grateful (and as a thank-you, if you’ve got questions for Rae, toss ‘em in comments: I’ll be interviewing her later this week) — I would love to see this expanded as a network show. Part of what’s great about the series is that the main character, J, is allowed to be less than completely pleasant all the time (she vents her considerable spleen by writing really, really angry rhymes), and though there are guys in her life, she has concerns other than landing her cute coworker.

But I think the central genius of Awkward Black Girl is in the title. As Rae writes on a Kickstarter proposal to keep the show going, “at its core, it’s about being ‘awkward,’ which is a unifying and universal thing that we all have experienced in some capacity.” That’s absolutely true, and Rae’s great at getting at the little things, like whether you talk to a coworker you don’t know well when you get stuck walking down the same endless hallway multiple times a day, or how to feel when you learn that a party invitation doesn’t mean what you think it means. But I appreciate that the show isn’t neutral about the awkwardnesses of conversations and interactions across race. How do you handle an expansively racist coworker of whose ethnicity you’re uncertain? What happens when an otherwise close friend starts talking like a Hollywoodized slave at a party, claiming “black guys love it when I talk this way”? In one of my favorite scenes in the series, J, the main character, meets a cute white guy with the same name at a party in the fifth episode. Riffing on the JJ coincidence, he attempts a Good Times joke — but rather than dismissing him as an ignorant racist white dude, the series lets him walk it back, acknowledges that the moment is awkward for both participants, but from very different places.

We’ve had conversations in this space about the kind of female comedian who could, if given the opportunity, replicate Louie, handling everything from script to edits. The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl is a gentler show, but I think Issa Rae might be the woman who could do it. FX, or somebody, should get her some of that Louis C.K. money.

-My friend Alejandra O’Leary has a couple of songs from her new album available for listening. What are you waiting for?

-The saddest movie scene of all time, as determined by psychological testing.

-Online distribution concerns might hold up the NBCUniversal-Comcast merger.

-Chewie and Han Solo have some unresolved issues.

-We would solve a lot of problems if we could prevent giant alien robots from hiding lots of equipment in the ocean in the first place:

If that video isn’t working, this one should be.

Writing about Captain Planet made me want to revisit one of the few television shows I watched on a regular basis as a kid after we got a television. Ghostwriter isn’t widely available: until recently, you couldn’t buy DVDs of the show commercially, though you could find a few of the story arcs on used VHS. So I spent a bunch of yesterday piecing together the mysteries of who was stealing backpacks from the kids at Zora Neale Hurston Middle School, who’s dumping toxic waste in the Fort Greene community garden, and, of course, who burned down Mr. Brinker’s store:

The show’s premise, that a ghost (in accounts from the show’s creators and writers, alternatively meant to be a great writer like Shakespeare or an ancestor of the main character, Jamal, who escaped slavery and educated himself ) who can only communicate in writing and who expresses a lot of confusion about elements of modern life ranging from cornflakes to copyright infringement helps a diverse group of Fort Greene kids solve mysteries, may have been a little goofy. But in spite of that, Ghostwriter works remarkably well.

The show makes effective use of the fact that it’s set in a dense urban neighborhood to create a believably diverse cast. Jamal’s the grandson of a postwoman (and the son of Samuel L. Jackson, who only appears in the show occasionally); Alex and Gaby are Salvadorian immigrants whose parents run a convenience store; Lenni and her musician father live in a loft above that same store; Tina, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants who run a tailoring business, is Gaby’s best friend; Rob comes to Hurston when his father gets a military posting to New York. The kids’ parents have believable professions and incomes — where Lenni’s father might be a rock star in our Gossip Girl-ified world, but in Ghostwriter, he’s just a working musician with a regular series of gigs. Jamal’s sister is on scholarship at college. When Lenni’s father and Gaby and Alex’s father get into a car accident, it’s a big deal, enough so that the tension between them trickles down to their children.

Though the plots got more baroque as the series progressed, most of the problems the Ghostwriter team addressed were about on that scale: serious, but plausible. The kids aren’t immune from the consequences of things that happen in their community: Gaby gets sick when a cleaning company dumps toxic waste in the Fort Greene community garden, Victor’s brother is paralyzed by gang violence and Victor is suspected of vandalism, Jamal’s accused of setting a fire at a corner video store, Alex is offered marijuana. But they also take responsibility for trying to solve problems around them, and the adult characters in their lives tend to take them seriously. Whether it’s Rob staying stubbornly on the phone as he’s transferred through every environmental agency in the city until he finds a civil servant who will help him out in “Over a Barrel,” or Lenni insisting that Hurston move ahead with a community concert even as there’s a flare of gang violence in the neighborhood, Ghostwriter treats the team’s efforts to be good citizens with respect.

To a certain extent, it’s the inverse of a lot of today’s young adult fiction, which posit apocalyptic circumstances that can only be combatted by one or two unusually gifted young people. That may be an attractive fantasy, but it’s also a discouraging one. Katniss Everdeen might be admirable, but her feats are out of reach — she’s not really a role model. Ghostwriter might have extraordinary events as a catalyst, but the hard work — and it is hard: there are queues for toxic waste removal, FBI suspicion is not easily dispelled — is done by fairly average kids with fairly average resources.

Tim Gunn’s description of Hillary Clinton as someone who dresses like “she’s confused about her gender!” is disappointing not just because Tim Gunn is someone who has been able to achieve great fame and wealth because society’s become more accepting of men who are more interested in things that are traditionally feminine than masculine, but because Tim Gunn has achieved that great fame and wealth by purporting to know something about fashion. And I’ve always thought one of the most important things about fashion is that it’s situational. Gunn doesn’t appear to have considered that playing up her femininity and sex appeal might not always be strategic for Hillary as one of the first women to serve as Secretary of State. It’s not like Clinton doesn’t know how to dress in accordance with normative conceptions of American femininity, as she did when her daughter Chelsea got married last year. I particularly liked this number she wore to the rehearsal dinner, which was a terrific color and cut for her:

But if you’re meeting with, say, the Saudi foreign minister, it wouldn’t necessarily be respectful to wear something so low-cut. And if you’re sitting down at the table with Hu Jintao, it might actually be strategic to dress as if you’re dowdy or less formidable so people will underestimate you. Fashion choices that are diplomatically appropriate and strategic may have nothing to do with current conventions of style. Gunn said, after insulting Clinton’s clothing choices, that “I have great respect for her intellect, and her tenacity, and for what she does for our country, and for our governmental role, I just wish she could send a stronger message about American fashion.” It’s disappointing that a man who thinks so much time thinking about what will make women’s bodies look good apparently hasn’t considered very carefully how style can accentuate or detract from the other parts of themselves that women might care about presenting, too.