Pixiepalace

I really enjoyed this quiz. I’m not sure that I entirely agree with the results (my husband thinks I’m a little more like Batman than the quiz thinks I am), but I was happy with my result and happy to see that I scored so close to Robin and Supergirl too. Too bad only three female superheroes were included here. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty fun quiz!

Your results:
You are Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman 90% Spider-Man 80% Supergirl 80% Robin 75% Superman 70% Iron Man 55% Green Lantern 50% Hulk 50% Catwoman 45% The Flash 45% Batman 40%

You are a beautiful princess with great strength of character.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

I found the quiz through Kelly from Big A little a. Thanks Kelly!

I know that it’s been a really long time since I’ve posted any pixel dolls, but I have some new ones today. Some have been sitting on my computer waiting to be posted for a really long time while a few are pretty recent creations. Madam Mim is probably the oldest, but she was certainly fun to do. I always loved Madam Mim as she’s portrayed in the Disney version of “The Sword in the Stone” and I just couldn’t resist doing a doll of her! After that I did a few more American Girl dolls (Kaya, Elizabeth and Addy). They’re fun to do because of the historical costumes and cute details. I’m sure I’ll do more of them at some point! Superwoman there is Lois Lane from one of the many times that she got superpowers (I can’t believe how often that happened). I was mostly amused by the heart-shaped Super symbol on the costume! Lois is always fun to do, as well. The lovely lady in blue and green is Beauty from “Beauty and the Beast”. The dress came from a picture book version of the story that I have and I just kind of liked it, so I decided to try turning it into a doll. The colors presented more of a challenge than I anticipated and she’s rather brighter than I planned, but in general I like how she turned out.

The last two dolls here are by far my favorites. They represent my character from a past roleplaying game - check out the Shackled City wiki for details on this game and the characters from it - and one of the NPCs we interacted with regularly. In the blue is Verana, my rogue character. She was a great character and dear to my heart. I spent a lot of time on her and am extremely proud of how she turned out. The cleric in white is Jenya, who saved the party more times than I would care to remember! I’m not good at shading white, so she was challenging, but the mace was fun and I generally like how she turned out.

As always, if you click on the dolls they will send you to the sites of their basemakers and they will all be represented on the appropriate doll pages of my website from here on out.

I’m thrilled that the winners have been announced, but I can’t say I’m entirely thrilled with all the choices. I adored The Professor’s Daughter, which won the Teen Graphic Novel award, but I actually really disliked Artemis Fowl. I’m not saying it was a bad book, it wasn’t. It just wasn’t anything remarkable. I thought that it fell really far short of special while some of the others not only achieved that but went beyond. How it won is something of a mystery to me. Lucky for me, some of the judges are posting about their thoughts on the whole thing as well!

J. L. Bell over at Oz and Ends has a couple of posts starting the day the award was announced.

David Elzey has a great piece over at Fomagrams (and not just because he apparently agrees with me).

If I notice more judge comments from the graphic novel committee I’ll be sure and update this post! If you see more, let me know!

The winners of the 2007 Cybils have been announced over at the Cybils Blog! The panels picked some pretty amazing books, so definitely go check out the winners. I’m especially pleased to see the Graphic Novel winners, since I worked so hard to help narrow down that category at the end of last year with the rest of the wonderful Graphic Novel nominating panel. I can’t wait to get reading on some of the other winners now! The Science Fiction and Fantasy winners are both books I’ve had on my “to read” list for a while and now I’m all the more eager to check them out! Thanks to all the judges for working so hard to decide between so many great books!

All of the Cybils shortlists for 2007 have been announced at this point, including the graphic novel list that I helped put together! All the lists are great and I can’t imagine how the judges are going to choose final winners, but I’m certain that they will do a great job. Go check out all the lists at the Cybils blog!

Graphic Novels
Young Adult
Nonfiction Picture Books
MG/YA Nonfiction
Science Fiction and Fantasy
Fiction Picture Books
Poetry
Middle Grade

The awards will be announced on February 14!

Ok, I realize I’m very late in posting this and everyone else already has it up, but here it finally is. The Cybils are children’s book awards given out by the kidlit community. Anyone who wants to (this means you) is free to nominate one book in each category that they think is worthy of being considered for the award. The only rules are that the book must have been published in 2007 and must not already have been nominated. For more information about the history of the Cybils and what the award is all about, go check out the official website. To nominate books in any and all categories, go to the official blog. You can learn more about the categories and panels on this page and see a list of what books won last year on this page!

This year I’m going to serve on the one of the graphic novel panels for the Cybils! Here’s a list of the awesome people I’m going to be working with:

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Category Organizer: Sarah Stevenson (Reading YA: Readers’ Rants)

Nominating Panel:

Mary Lee Hahn (A Year of Reading)
Alyssa Feller (The Shady Glade)
Katie Zenke (Pixie Palace)
Elizabeth Jones
Gina Ruiz (AmoXcalli)

Judging Panel:

David Elzey (The Excelsior File)
J.L. Bell (Oz and Ends)
Anna (TangognaT)
Snow Wildsmith (My Reading Project)
Angie Thompson (Angieville)

The winners that I’ve read from last year are awesome and all the people involved in this project are great, so I’m thrilled to be involved this year! I encourage everyone to nominate their favorite books from 2007! There were so many great books this year and it would be a shame if we missed your favorite!

I enjoy videogames, but I regularly have problems with the avatars that are presented to me in them for various reasons. Anyone who’s looked at my “I Want to Play Her” page might have noticed that there is exactly one videogame represented there (and I’ve never actually played it, I just liked the cover art). Believe me, it’s not for lack of looking for interesting female avatars in videogames. It’s just that if the avatar reminds me of a porn star, a Disney princess or an anime school girl, I don’t really want to play her - and that pretty much rules out most female characters in videogames these days.

Andrea Rubenstein has written a paper about the body types of avatars in World of Warcraft, the most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game on the market right now. It’s not exactly anything new (I could point you to a couple of papers that say essentially the same thing about comic books), but it is quite well done and well worth reading. What I particularly appreciated about it was Rubenstein’s thoroughness in looking at how the avatars changed from Alpha to release and why those changes were made as well as the differences in the gender imagery and some of the meaning behind those differences (e.g. women are more overtly sexualized, with exaggerated hourglass figures and focus on sexual areas, while men are more focused on sexually based strength with their actual sexual features minimized). It’s a good, and surprisingly quick, read. I definitely recommend it.

What it did not do is give me any more hope for finding decent avatars in games that don’t annoy me. Take the image above, for example. It’s again from World of Warcraft. Those two are the male and female avatars from the blood elf race. Notice anything about the imagery there? Maybe that he’s about three times bigger than her? Or that he’s fully clothed while she isn’t? I first noticed that she’s hiding behind him for protection while he’s being strong and taking action. I hadn’t noticed until I was cropping the image for this post that she appears to be barefoot. Why would you ever go barefoot in a game where goblins roam around the starting zones? That seems really dumb! You start the game with free shoes! You are never, ever compelled to go without shoes! So what’s with the lack of footwear? I suppose it does set off her helpless little girl dress, but still! This is supposed to be an avatar, not an elf version of Heidi! Speaking of helpless little girl dress, I’m not wild about that either - she does have an oversexed little girl look about her, and there is something distinctly creepy about that.

My character in World of Warcraft was a dwarf. A dwarf with a very large axe. The elves bug me. So do the humans and most of the overly attractive evil races. I’m sorry, if I’m going to play a goblin, she’s not going to be “pretty”. Until I can make a goblin who isn’t fundamentally attractive (saggy breasts, hunched back, missing/rotting teeth, sharp curled claws, etc.) I’m not playing one, it’s just not right. Goblins are not supposed to be “pretty”. Neither are orcs or undead. That’s creepy. Maybe all this is part of why the game failed to hold my attention for longer and I’ve since moved on to other things.

So I’ll keep looking for some videogame women to add to my “I Want to Play Her” page, but my hopes of finding many aren’t really high. Until I can find more women with waists bigger than their heads and armor that actually seems to serve some function other than covering enough to please censors, I’m not going to be attracted to playing many videogame women just on how they look. The industry can do better, I know it. I just want to see it, now. There is so much creativity in videogames, some of it eventually has to spill over into variety in avatars, right? Besides, there are enough reasonable people making games these days that it’s going to have to occur to one of them that if they allow players to design a woman avatar who actually does look like she could kick butt not only would it be cool but it might improve sales. Maybe. Or, you know, I could be dreaming. That’s been known to happen.

Betsy at Fuse posted about this great blanket on her blog and after checking out the pictures on the website, I totally want one!  They don’t appear to be actually for sale (nothing this cool ever actually is), but I could make one if I could figure out a way to get the words on to the fabric.  I love that the story appears to be “Sleeping Beauty”!  How appropriate!

It’s practical too.  The pages turn, so you can decide how much blanket you want covering you (how many pages).  If you’re cold, pull the whole book over you, but if you’re hot, just one page!  What a great idea!  This could be great for Michael and I, since I’m always cold and he’s always hot.

I may make one with pictures or something.  I could make one that tells a story through pictures and then I wouldn’t have to worry about transferring words onto the fabric somehow.  This could be an interesting project.

Roger Sutton has an interesting post up right now about the terms that we use to review children’s books, and which ones are likely overused or perhaps used when they really shouldn’t be.  I found the words he chose to highlight particularly interesting, although the topic itself certainly deserves much discussion and thought.

He mentions the word “humorous” and how it irritated him simply because of its strangeness in speech.  People rarely say “this book was humorous, you should read it”, they say “it was funny, you might like it”.  The idea that our reviews should read like we are speaking to someone isn’t new and is actually rather appealing in many ways.  If you’re reading a review that sounds like your friend talking and recommending (or not recommending, as the case may be) a book to you, are you more likely to listen than if the review sounds like it was written by a college professor giving a lecture?  There are advantages either way, I guess.  It could depend on the book being reviewed and potentially it could make a difference in the audience that will hear or read it.  How much difference does tone make in a review?

I also found his inclusion of the word “feisty” in his post quite interesting.  I always hated the word feisty.  It always seemed like a backwards compliment, and it seems like Deborah Stevenson might feel much the same way.  In children’s book reviews, and likely adult book reviews as well (although I would guess to a lesser degree, but I may be completely wrong), there seem to be all manner of ways to describe heroes (usually female heroes) that seem more like backhanded compliments than actual positive statements.  What other code words do we use in reviews, though?  I know there are others.

Feisty always bugged me because it indicated to me that no matter how interesting and strong the girl might be, she was always A Girl and in the end, she remembered and embraced that role.  I’m sorry, but if your character’s biggest development is to embrace their gender/get married/have a baby I’m just not that interested.  I need more than that, no matter how independent and interesting she may have seemed at the beginning.  If the word “feisty” turns up in more than one review of a book, I’m not likely to want to read it.

I’m certainly going to start paying more attention to the words I use when reviewing and writing about books casually, since I’m interested now to see what patterns I have.  What patterns do you have?

Thanks to Kelly at Big A little a I found this fun time wasting quiz that gives you a score for how much of a nerd, geek and dork you are.  It was entertaining.  I was, not shockingly, overwhelmingly a nerd, but also very, very geeky with a bit of dork thrown in for good measure.  I’m apparently a “cool nerd”.  Sounds good to me!  My actual stats were:

95% nerd, 69% geek, 34% dork

It’s a quick quiz (60 short questions) and I was relatively entertained by it.  If nothing else, it kept me from thinking about my most recent injury, which is definitely a good thing!  If you try it, I’d love to hear your results!