WWWednesday: July 1, 2015

Thanks to Kate for a great year of World Wide Wednesday. I hope I can meet the high standards she set for this column! As a going-away present for her, here are some location shots from the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies. These two links are overtly commercial, but they show the gorgeous Hawaiian locations, including those accordion-fold bluffs that provide the background for so many scenes.

Unicorn Defends Himself: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Awards:

The Locus Awards were announced on Saturday, in Seattle, Washington. Connie Willis acted as MC for the awards event. Congratulations to Ann Leckie for winning best science fiction novel with Ancillary Sword, and to Katherine Addison for best fantasy novel with The Goblin Emperor. Joe Ambercrombie (who won two awards), Nancy Kress and Mary Rickert were among the other winners. It touched my heart to see that Jay Lake’s collection, The Last Plane to Heaven, won for best collection. You can see the entire list here.

Books and Movies:

The sequel to Independence Day is slated for a summer, 2016, release date. Independence Day; Resurgence, will be set 20 years after the original (released in 1996), which is convenient, since that’s now. Jeff Goldblum will be back, but Will Smith will not, and according to IO9, it’s all M. Night Shyamalan’s fault.

The US Supreme Court made history this week with its ruling on Obergefell vs The Ohio Department of Health, ruling that same-sex couples are entitled to the same protections and benefits of marriage as mixed-sex couples. Whenever there are momentous social changes, I look to speculative fiction to see how the genre that imagines the future addressed the issue. I’m not the only one. The British Film Institute site has compiled a list of gay characters, and couples in speculative fiction. Some of these examples are ahead of their time, and some, like Frank Herbert’s portrayal of Baron Harkonnen as a sadistic gay child molester, tap into our worst, and most widespread, fear-based stereotypes. Some, like the Barbarella reference, are just… really? And some of these I’ve never heard of.

Here is some information that’s old, but kinda cool; coloring books for adults! CNN covered the best-selling status Joanna Basford’s The Secret Garden, a coloring book for grownups. You can find it and many more at Amazon, Dover and even Etsy. (Note; Googling “Adult Coloring Books” may provide a NSFW result!)

Tor is offering two readers a copy of Cuban science fiction novels, translated to English! Commenters could win a copy of A Planet for Rent by Yoss, or A Legend of the Future by Augustin de Rojas. The link even has an excerpt from A Legend of the Future.

The Falcon in his Bath: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Internet:

Human languages are fascinating and mysterious, the way they spring up, move and grow. Here is a beautiful linguistic family tree courtesy of Mental Floss.

Over  on Reddit, Michael Dorn is suggesting a new Star Trek show based on Worf. I… hmm. (It’s not a completely bad idea; there are mini-muffins involved.) What do you think?

This has no relation to anything on our site, except perhaps creativity, but Don Featherstone, creator of the iconic pink flamingo lawn ornament, passed away.

Scientific American discusses the evolution of women in superhero comics and movies. Women have moved from being feisty but ultimately helpless girlfriends or nurturing assistants to being costumed heroes themselves. While this is progress, the study finds that the unrealistic physical portrayal of women costumed heroes is still problematic. And wait, are they saying most female heroes have stripper-names?

As the tools we have get better and better, our study of the brain deepens and improves. As we study how we think, it becomes clear that “objectivity” and “rationality” are goals we strive for, rather than traits we innately possess. IO9 introduces a fun quiz to find out what “type” of thinker you are. I’m an Executive Thinker, which I guess means I delegate my thinking to other people. The quiz is enjoyable. They ask for an e-mail address at the end, so they can send you offers of “tools to improve your thinking.” The comments in the IO9 article are interesting too, especially the detour where several commenters debate whether the figures used to depict the types of thinking are all male, some male or gender-neutral.

Today’s images from medieval tapestries come from the Cloisters collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. They have many other beautiful and strange tapestries in the collection.