I Need To Try This - Blog Posts

My 5-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl. The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.) But my daughter was determined. She liked the story pretty well so far, but Bilbo was definitely a girl. So would I please start reading the book the right way? I hesitated. I imagined Tolkien spinning in his grave. I imagined mean letters from his testy estate. I imagined the story getting as lost in gender distinctions as dwarves in the Mirkwood. Then I thought: What the hell, it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be. And you know what? The switch was easy. Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender—and neither does anyone else.

Bilbo Baggins is a girl: Until children’s books catch up to our daughters, rewrite them. (via sashimigrade)

There is a post in r/dwarffortress I always think about from time to time, it shows a maze the poster made for a minotaur they caught. It's a neat project for your fortress, you can use it as a dungeon to throw any prisoners into it and watch them struggle to navigate until their inevitable demise, pretty fun stuff. The post also shows the Minotaur's attributes and skills, and she is described as a Grand Master Observer (which in Dwarf Fortress all Minotaurs are) and also "good with language" traits which often Scholars have. A comment suggested as a joke making some office space for her and supplying her with writing materials. Minotaurs can't write (not that I've checked myself), but the concept alone is hilarious can you imagine? being a fearsome minotaur, and going by your day smashing people's skulls and stuff and then writing in your little diary about it? or writing about your existence serving the sole purpose of killing people the little bearded men throw down there simply for entertainment, you know just a cow-girl doing cow-girl things. I swear Dwarf Fortress produces top-quality writing material sometimes