#nerdy chicana

[rose-wine-selfships]

YOOOOOO JUMPING ON THE BANDWAGON HERE! I LOVED DOING MY REBOOT OF MY S/I CHRISSY CUTIE PIE! Thank you so much for making these designs @bloodrediscream !

Design for Chrissy Cutie-Pie is done by me @rose-wine-selfships !

Ps. She has the biggest crush on Reboot Wally Darling but she would rather die than admit it shhhhhhh~

✨The Reboot Au Design is complete!!!✨

This is all their design in color, they take place in the Late 90s to early 2000s-

I believe they’ll switch clothes time to time on occasion so expect some drawings with them in different styles 🤩 it’s gonna be fun- feel free to do fanart and add oc/persona it’s totally ok if you every decide to do that!

[tubefullofdemons]

I'm coming back from a semi-hiatus since Tumblr is more active again. Looking for new mutuals. I'm autistic, demisexual and chicana. And I'm pretty old by young standards, 33. I blog about the following.

18+

Horror movies (I'm a film nerd but not a jerk about it)

Lotr

Better call saul / breaking bad

Redlettermedia

Cats

Democratic socialism

General nerdy stuff

Mental health

Body positivity

[airyairyaucontraire]

Have started watching Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous, in part because a Jurassic Park/World kids' cartoon is such a weird idea. Like... they're just going to run with the people getting eaten, are they? In the opening scene a character appears to get taken down by Velociraptors but it's revealed to be only a scene in a VR game (which our plucky young protagonist wins by, essentially, remembering the climax of Jurassic Park III and finding a Velociraptor resonating chamber in a pile of their bones, blowing it to summon raptors who beset the T-rex that was about to devour him until he can get to the rescue helicopter - despite the fact that the resonating chamber wasn't a bone that you would find in a raptor's remains, it was a 3D-printed cast that showed the shape of the chamber independent of the skull that it was actually inside, and Jurassic Park III was something that actually happened in this character's world, not a movie he could have seen, so how would he know about the resonating chamber? I'm going to guess that Billy sold his exclusive survivor's story for big bucks both because he lost the raptor eggs that he was going to sell and because he would have a lot of medical bills for the ongoing treatment of his pteranodon-inflicted wounds).

(Also, do you think the Kirbys faced charges, given that they broke the law to go to the island to look for their lost son and the US military had to rescue them?)

And presumably the tween/early-teen kids in the main cast aren't going to be picked off and eaten one by one, although there is kind of a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory vibe to this group of youngsters turning up for a prized tour of a very special and secretive place.

We have:

Darius, the Charlie I guess. He appears to be the only member of the group who is there because he loves dinosaurs, which is weird. He won his golden ticket by being the first in the world to complete the game I mentioned above (and gets a special congratulatory message from Mr DNA). It's heavily mentioned that it was his and his implied-to-be-dead father's dream to go to Jurassic World together, as if sheer maniacal love of dinosaurs were not motivation enough for any plucky lad. He has a teasing but nice big brother called Brand, and I wonder if that's a Goonies reference (this Brand does not, however, wear shorts over sweatpants). Anyway, nice to have a main character who's black and nerdy.

Ben, I think his name was Ben? A timid and pale boy who gets motion sickness, clearly does not want to be here, and quietly pumps his fist when he hears camp bedtime is quite early. It is currently a total mystery why he is present.

Yasmina, who is sporty and camera-shy and maybe quite shy generally. It is also a mystery why she is present - she hasn't expressed any special enthusiasm for dinosaurs.

Another girl, a Chicana whose name I'm sorry I haven't learned, one of the camp counsellors called her "Texas" as a nickname (she's from Texas) and it's overwritten her actual first name in my brain, though I can remember the second is Gutierrez (I think she's also the only one who has a surname so far). She cheerfully explains that her family supplies all the beef used at the park and that's why she got to come. She seems nice but she is wearing a long-sleeved black puffer jacket zipped up under her chin. Now, even though Camp Cretaceous takes place during the same time period as the first Jurassic World movie, which is set in December/Christmas holiday time, I have personally been to Costa Rica in January and can tell you she would be expiring from the heat and humidity in that. Even if she is from Texas (which even before all the news about the terrible cold snap this past winter I knew got cold in December because they wore winter jackets on King of the Hill). This is just poor character design/evidence of character weirdness.

Kenji, who is rich, we know this because he constantly tells people that he's rich (his father owns condos on the island), the way rich kids in children's cartoons always brag about being rich, as opposed to more believably being obnoxiously oblivious to how different their lives are from most people's and how much of their circumstances are down to luck, not their parents working harder or smarter. Also seems to be designed counter to ethnic stereotypes because he's the tallest in the group and has a very confident, outgoing manner - but on the other hand, he's excessively arrogant and desperate to impress, which presumably is going to be broken down to reveal his insecurity.

Brooklynn, a girl with very cute pink hair who seems to be a popular YouTuber (her followers are called Brooklanders and Texas is a very enthusiastic one). She has clearly been invited in order to promote the park with her videos. Rather than being written as vapid or catty, so far she seems to be pretty friendly and nice, just off-putting because she constantly films on her phone and expects other people to be as comfortable as she is talking to the camera. Gets an odd line about "So that's what toxic masculinity looks like" about an interaction between Darius and Kenji where they're both talking pointedly about becoming friends while Kenji is trying to pressure Darius into telling him a secret and Darius is increasingly fed up but restrained by habitual politeness from just giving Kenji a shove and walking off - which honestly? is more like toxic femininity in my experience.

The other odd thing about this is that Brooklynn has found the two of them alone after lights-out, Kenji has his arm around Darius' shoulders and is leaning close to his face as he talks to him, and she makes a comment about toxic masculinity instead of being like "GAYYYYYYY"

anyway the three of them are sneaking out after lights-out because Darius is absolutely desperate to see the Compsognathus (I think it's kind of sweet that he's so excited to see a chicken-sized dinosaur) and cannot wait until tomorrow to see if, you know, they'll be taken to see dinosaurs during their stay at the world's only living dinosaur-themed resort. And he is still bugging this hard to visit the compies although they earlier got a zipline ride which gave them a perfect view of dozens of dinosaurs being herded to their night-time enclosures and he personally made eye contact with a Brachiosaurus, the official dinosaur of "Jurassic Park/World is an awe-inspiring place." It's kind of a contrivance is what I'm saying. They are transparently going to blunder into danger. Particularly after Kenji, trying too hard to ingratiate himself by "helping" her take good photos, drops Brooklynn's phone into an enclosure and climbs down to retrieve it. Hey, is Kenji going to get eaten?

Well, Kenji is being approached by a Velociraptor, but luckily for him he's standing behind a wall of bars that runs around the inside of the enclosure, leaving space for keepers to walk safely between that and the outer wall, wow, an actually sensible safety feature on an InGen/Masrani property, remarkable. Brooklynn pushes a button meaning to open the outer gate for him. Instead it raises the inner bars. Oh dear. Darius has hopped down to try to help him and that's the end-of-episode 1 cliffhanger

they're probably not going to be eaten

[thelivebookproject]

Talking Books With @speculative-imaginaries!

[What is this and how can I participate?]

Last interview of the year!!!!!!

Today we discuss books for class, reading outside your comfort zone, and Hercule Poirot. Come and join!

Important note: I haven’t changed or edited any of the answers. I’ve only formatted the book titles so they were clearer, but nothing else. Because I’m incapable of shutting up, my comments are between brackets and in italics, so you can distinguish them clearly.

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[Image description: a square titled “Know the blogger”. Name & pronouns: Rebecca, she/her; three adjectives to describe her: Southeast Asian, nerdy & distraced /end] 

1. What is a book you discovered thanks to having to read it for school/uni?

I studied literature, so the answer is: too many! But lately, I’ve been thinking about the novel Their Dogs Came with Them, by Helena María Viramontes, which is set in a sort of slantwise East Los Angeles against the historical backdrop of the Chicano Movement.

If you’ll let me cheat, other books from the syllabus that have stuck with me include Nella Larsen’s Passing; Rob Roy by Walter Scott; and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

[*takes notes* The only one I’ve heard of from this is Milton’s, so I’ll look up the others for sure! Their Dogs Came with Them, specially, sounds really interesting.

Am I profitting off my own interviews to get books recs? Perhaps. Was this my goal all along? Who knows.]

2. Last book you read that was out of your "comfort zone"? 

The Sweetest Fruits, which is the most recent novel by Monique Truong. I did not finish it!

The premise of the novel is that different narrators remember the enigmatic 19th-century writer Patricio Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-born Irishman who migrated first to the United States and then Japan.

The narrators are his mother Rosa; his first wife Alethea, who was enslaved as a child; and his second wife, Setsu. There’s a fourth section, but, again, I did not finish the book—I found the voices in the first-person narration to be extremely stilted and contrived.

It’s a shame, because Truong employs the same kind of narrative voice in her debut novel, The Book of Salt, to excellent effect; I read it next, as a sort of apology to the author, and enjoyed it. It’s about a Vietnamese cook, Binh, who lives in exile in 1930s Paris in the employ of Gertrude Stein. (Truong’s second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, is in my opinion the most readable of the trio, and conveniently also has the most straightforward and conventional plot.)

I didn’t expect The Sweetest Fruits to be “out of my comfort zone,” because I’d read her writing before, so I was quite disappointed.

3. Do you have any favourite film adaptations?

Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The book is the best of J.K. Rowling’s maudlin ramblings, and Cuarón distilled it into something even better, something truly innovative and boundary-pushing and atmospheric and his own. It doesn’t always work (the shrunken heads on the Knight Bus) but when it does, it’s fantastic (“HE WAS THEIR FRIEND!”).

Being a long-time Remus/Sirius shipper (the pining! the heartbreak!) only adds to the appreciation.

Let’s also not forget the iconic Hermione-punches-Malfoy scene! Purely a coincidence, I just realised that I own a very similar hoodie and used to wear the same shade of pink lipstick. Wow, now I love this even more.

[It IS a really good film!!!! JKR aside, this was always my fave Harry Potter book, and I do agree that the film was an excellent adaptation for the most part]

4. Have you ever been to a convention/book fair/etc?

When I was younger, I hoped to visit the San Diego Comic Con one day. I never achieved that, but I think I’ve fallen out of love with the concept of cons. On the other hand, academic conferences are :D, I hope to attend many more, and I had a wonderful, eye-opening, thrilling time at the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) annual conference when I was in college.

5. Favourite male character?

This is the most difficult question. I could tell you all my favourite female characters in fiction (not least of which are Terry Pratchett’s Angua von Überwald, especially in the painfully romantic The Fifth Elephant, or Imra Ardeen, a.k.a. Saturn Girl, especially in Legion of Super-Heroes: The Beginning of Tomorrow), but I… can’t say I’ve ever paid as much attention to the dudes 😮

So I had to put a lot of thought into this. I’m still not thoroughly satisfied with my response, but I’m leaning towards one of two great detectives—either Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie) or Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle), both of whom are tremendous eccentrics with a curious sense of social graces and a delight in overturning people’s expectations.

On the whole, I think I prefer Poirot, who is the more quixotic—and more fallible, therefore more interesting—of the two.

To be fair, his characterisation can be wildly inconsistent, because Christie was a wildly inconsistent writer, done in by commercial instincts and possibly, in her later years, dementia (we do not speak of The Big Four).

Now, Murder on the Orient Express is remembered for Poirot’s famous line, “I do not approve of murder,” that sets up the moral problem of Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. But, in my opinion, it’s the overlooked 1940 murder mystery One, Two, Buckle My Shoe where Poirot is given a situation at once both ethically clear (turn in the culprit!) and extremely relatable to our modern sensibilities.

Mild spoiler: Poirot is told that it might be in the national interest to let the killer of an innocent dentist go free. He refuses, insisting that even the national interest cannot be worth the life of another human being. (Moral rectitude! Cue audience applause.)

Relatedly, I find some of Christie’s 1940s and 1950s novels fascinating simply as documentation of social change at that time in British history.

[I, too, prefer Poirot. He’s more human while still being mildly annoying, while Holmes, to me, is just too annoying overall. But I still have quite a few Christie books to read, and I’m looking forward to seeing the Poirot character changes you mention here.]

Free space!

I love recommending things to read to people! In fact, I’m quite notorious among my IRL friends for this trait. Apparently, I basically throw a lot of titles/links at them and run away, and turn everything into a book club/discussion group.

So, please, hit me up in my ask box if you ever need a rec or ten! Just give me a theme or a topic and I’ll check the great index catalogue in my head. 🤓

You can follow her at @speculative-imaginaries. 

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Thank you, Rebecca! This was a really good interview.

Next interview: Wednesday, 6th of January!

[sometimes-reading]

The House on Mango Street

by Sandra Cisneros

Review | September 11, 2020

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

i’ve been putting off doing this review because i like to procrastinate and because i haven’t had sufficient time to process my feelings about this book, but i thought i might as well go for it.

i read this book maybe a week ago? i can’t keep track. it’s a short but powerful literary fiction novel told in vignettes that follows the story of a 12 y/o chicana girl growing up in chicago.

well. i really, really, really liked it, as you can tell by the rating. this is another book that was probably more of a 4.5 situation, but i definitely wanted to round up here. i tried to read this book a couple of weeks before i actually did read it, and i thought that it wasn’t for me. i wasn’t sure that i liked the vignette style, and i felt like i was having to piece it together myself. but when i finally sat down to read it during the day and not at 11:00 pm when my brain wasn’t working right, i thought it was so incredibly well written. cisneros shows such an incredible command of language in this book. it is written in prose, but it almost feels like poetry. i was so enamored by her writing that i ordered a collection of her poetry that i will hopefully be able to read in the near future.

i want to possibly reread this book as i really only read it for enjoyment, but i noticed a lot of thematic elements that my nerdy ass wants to take a closer look at. i also read the book outloud to myself, which really enhanced the experience for me and emphasized how poetic the language is.

tl;dr: this review wasn’t particularly coherent or structured, but i gave this book 5 stars and you should read it. i really loved this book and the writing, especially in its more poetic parts. i also thought it was thematically very strong and well developed, and i was thoroughly impressed by it.

[nohovictor]

Make sure you stop by @columcon! 1104 S. Wabash. I'll be here until 5pm! . . .#vixtopher #columcon #columcon2017 #illustration #comics #geeky #nerdy #conseason #pokemon #stevenuniverse #su #dnd #dungeonsanddragons #criticalrole #voxmachina #stickers #stationery #chicana #chicago ##chicagoartists #aoi #artistsofinstagram #artistsofig #artistsonig #artistsoninstagram

[qttalkpdx-blog]

Queer Influence: Brows and Books by Angelica Paz Ortiz

Even when I had long hair and wore short skirts, I was never fully femme. I was never read as the pretty girl. We might also consider that my self perception has always been and continues to be (although I am vehemently working to change this) tainted by societal standards of beauty and gender conformity that are centered in whiteness. All of which I do not meet. I never got as much attention from boys and men as my friends, cousins, tias did; which as I grew older I became very grateful for. Even in my femme days, I liked to shop in the Men’s section.In a family of predominantly women who grew up in San Francisco during the twists and turns of chola fashion, my shopping in the men’s section made a lot of sense. Yeah Mija, I like those little squares, my grandma would say as I brought home my first few starched flannels from the men’s sections of American Eagle and Kohls. In terms of gender performance, it is obvious to me that my grandma influenced me tremendously. Every day she wears the same look- red lipstick, light mascara, and long dark brown brows freshly penciled. She wears shades and puffed black vests over plaid long sleeve shirts. She is straight but her gender presentation, I have found, is not only queer in its embrace of masculinity (despite her role of housewife) but queer in its full bodied acceptance of her big Brown self. She’s a tough lady and she doesn’t have time for Eurocentric beauty standards and expectations of gender conformity.

Dressing in a way that I am read as queer or preferably, hella gay, has definitely helped me to really embrace and truly love and be grateful for my queerness. Since a lot of famous woman loving women are white I never really connected to a ton of openly gay, woman icons. However, upon my first year of college I found feminist theory, which is pretty often, queer as hell. Of my feminist library the book that rocked my gay world is without a doubt, Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Your Mothers Warned You About edited by Carla Trujillo. I had never even heard the words Chicana and lesbian together before this book. My ideas around Brown queerness before this book were mostly questions that I felt like I had no one to ask. Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Your Mothers Warned You About is full of stunning and warm poems and short stories written by queer Brown women. This book truly introduced me to loving my coarse and abundant dark hair, Brown skin, and big ass. I felt immense agency while reading poems about the histories, bodies, minds, and spirits of queer women I could actually relate to. Today, I am so grateful to be a big ol’ Brown queer. As always, with the help of incredible womxn of color and moving literature, I have begun to truly begin the journey of dismantling white supremacy by learning to love myself and my community.

This piece was written by Angelica Paz Ortiz. Angelica is a nerdy Brown queer  who loves food and feminism. They are Nicaragüense, Costa Rican and Chicanx. They love to teach, write, and eat eclectic varieties of cheese! They’re really into feminist research, feminist activism, & iced tea. 

[geekygirlguide]

Nerdy Podcasting and the Best Fandoms on Earth

Brand spankin new ep! Join us! Emily Timmins is sitting in for Leslie today. We talk about the benefits of nerdy parenting, the pitfalls of watching old Disney movies with your kids, and the latest on Star Wars and Star Trek.

Rebekah also interviews Janelle McCammack! (@schoolsoutlaw) Janelle Ureta McCammack is a chicana loud mouth who believes wholeheartedly that stories saved her life as they gave her an escape. She podcasts at Sipping Sisters Podcast with her two sisters about the sh*t they see on their screens. She writes for Tell-Tale TV and Fangirlish. Representation matters to her and she is still on the lookout for seeing herself represented on screen. 

Rebekah asks her what it's like podcasting with your sisters plus her favorite fandoms, like 

Timeless Crazy Ex Girlfriend Younger Brooklyn 99

aaand our live and let live philosophy on shipping! Join us!!

  Click here to be taken on a weird geeky journey

[mujerrabia]

[kawaiininjacat]

Forgot to post this earlier, but yo homegirl graduated from university earlier this month! ¡Si se puede! 👩🏻‍🎓✨💕🇲🇽

[kawaiininjacat]

✌🏽✨💕✌🏽

[kawaiininjacat]

A little late, but I decided to give light hair a try🌻🌻

[kawaiininjacat]

Snapchat filters always do such a good job hiding my depression! 🤓

[kawaiininjacat]

I thought I looked cute in this 👾💕😈