Before I get into this I just want to say that I really wanted to like Mass Effect. I’m talking Mass Effect 1 here, and yes, I realize that I’m about four years late. This game seemed to have it all. A science-fiction FPS (first-person shooter) with an interesting story, characters, and world. Shepard (the main character, who is chosen as either male or female at the beginning), in particular was very interesting to me. She was very strong and assertive. Seeing a female badass in a game like this is sort of rare (a problem in and of itself, but let’s move on). Still, as I played my first few hours I started to get this sinking feeling that Mass Effect wasn’t as progressive about women as I’d originally thought.

Basically, the “world” of Mass Effect brings nothing new or challenging to the table when it comes to sex and gender. The Mass Effect universe is stuck with the same, tired, hurtful stereotypes about women that are being pushed onto us currently by the media and our culture. Female characters in Mass Effect are either hyper-sexualized… or they don’t exist at all. The developers chose not to include female models for most of the races in the game. The reason? The art director/designers/developers don’t know how to render a female character of an alien race without gendering her as overtly and very female (We’re talking lipstick here). How uncreative and downright stupid is that?

Read this article by Alex Raymond over at GameCritics.com for a very good write up that hits all the points much better than I could have hoped to.

Further reading:
Designing non-human females (and how Mass Effect failed)

RSS Feeds are my solution to staying focused and up to date in a variety of categories. I currently use Google Reader as my reader, but there are many different readers to choose from. One interesting thing about Google Reader is the ability to subscribe to “bundles” of feeds. There are literally hundreds of different categories to choose from, including (all of which I’m currently subscribed) Art, Feminism, Science, Technology, Web, UX, and pretty much anything you can think of (though I was surprised not to find any feed related to sexuality). You can also create your own bundles, which I did for a general ‘Design’ feed that you can subscribe to here. it has a mix of education and inspiration relevant to logo design, graphic design, illustration, and web design.

Finally getting around to finishing this.

Before now, I’ve never really done too much research into intellectual property law or the public domain, so the specifics are all pretty new to me. As an artist I had a basic understanding of copyright law, and in the case of my art I’m very restrictive about it’s use. On my deviantart page, for example, I watermark all of my work because I don’t want people to take it and put it elsewhere without my permission. deviantart is actually pretty progressive in that it allows users who submit art to attribute different types of creative commons licenses to their work if they so choose. I think that’s how I first got exposed to the creative commons and thinking about copyright and licensing.

For a copyright/cc/public domain beginner, I’d recommend reading this part of a FAQ on the Creative Commons website. The Creative Commons licensing page also has a nice video that explains the licenses themselves. This is a general overview of how it all works, but for music things are a little different. I think PD info has a pretty good FAQ that sums up how it works and gives some important dates. One thing to note (which I didn’t realize and feel silly for now), is that all of the research I’m doing applies to the USA only! I’d be interested to hear about how other countries’ copyright and public domain music laws work.

There’s also free music, “which is either in the public domain or licensed under a free license by the artist or copyright holder themselves, often as a method of promotion.” Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has released two of his albums under a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA), which was very interesting to me. Open music, a subset of free music, is the concept of “open source” applied to music, and seems to be more permissive of derivative works and collaboration.

From my research, it seems like everything I want to listen to has a composition in the public domain, but very few of them have a recording in the public domain. So what do we do? Well, there are a few resources. I think the immediate response is to try to search youtube, and while this will probably be the quickest and easiest way to find something, there’s a catch. Since youtube has a duration limit for its videos and because there are usually a number of movements in each piece, the youtube listening experience isn’t as good as having the full-length album or sound files. Still, it may be our only way to find certain pieces and it a good fallback resource.

As far as searching the internet, Wikipedia:Sound/list is a very good place to start, especially for older classical pieces. The Internet Archive is pretty good too. I got good results from searching like this: “(collection:opensource_audio OR mediatype:opensource_audio) AND -mediatype:collection AND classical”. Musopen is a non-profit that have a large database of free classical music to listen to as well. I’m pretty sure our public libraries will have a good selection, too. I’ll be going some time this week to test that theory.