The online journal, notebook and playground of HFM

Rowing Updates

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One of my workouts

I’ve completed Learn to Row 1 and Learn to Row 2 classes at the Indianapolis Rowing Center, although we had enough rain-outs that I’m still not very comfortable on the water. I’m going to take Learn to Row 2 again this summer so I can get more of the basics down.

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to do erg workouts a lot to get caught up with the other adult rowers, most of whom are in much better shape than I am. I’m usually spending about 40-48 minutes on a workout, doing intervals of workout / rest and trying to get my times lower. I’m competing against myself, for the most part, with a goal of improving to keep up with others.

I can feel the changes in my body pretty significantly. I have lost a bit of weight, and added quite a bit of muscle. It’s pretty awesome; I’m as strong as I was before my heart surgery, which is a really nice feeling.

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Indiana Romance Writers of America: Golden Opportunities Contest

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From the Indiana chapter of Romance Writers of AmericaIndiana Golden Opportunity Contest.

We welcome you to help us celebrate the 22nd anniversary of Indiana’s Golden Opportunity (IGO), one of the Midwest’s premier contests. The Indiana chapter of Romance Writers of America® (IRWA) has a well-deserved reputation for offering detailed, encouraging comments to our contest entrants from experienced professionals. Our four-page score sheet is designed to help entrants identify the elements of storytelling at which they excel while pinpointing the elements that require more attention. This means entrants will receive feedback that will help them create a quality polished manuscript. Many past winners have successfully sold the manuscripts they entered in the IGO, and we like to think we played a part in that. The contest is also a great way to prepare your work for Golden Heart. IGO attracts some of the most well-respected names in the industry as category and final judges.

This is an interesting opportunity for me, especially given that I’ll hopefully have a much more complete manuscript at the end of June than I do currently for my NaNoWriMo book. I could potentially enter this.

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Thoughts on Azzarello’s Wonder Woman

From Vanessa Gabriel: Thoughts on Azzarello’s Wonder Woman |.

In the last three issues of Azzarello’s Wonder Woman, I find myself less than inspired. What started off strong is now bringing diminished returns in the form of Diana’s intellect, or lack thereof. Diana is repeatedly being tricked or lied to in some monumental way, and she’s falling for it.
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I know there are various methods in fiction writing that make the protagonist interesting. One of them is creating conflict and struggle in order to build the character back up, and to give the audience something to root for. But Azzarello’s “deconstruction” of Diana’s personality is irritating the living shit out of me. Diana of Themyscira as a dumbass has got my goat far worse than the vilification of the Amazons. Apparently being one of Zeus’ bastards throws Athena’s wisdom out the door. Perhaps it’s a punishment from Hera.

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On Wonder Woman #8, Fanboy Flakkers & The Sanctity Of Myth

On Wonder Woman #8, Fanboy Flakkers & The Sanctity Of Myth (Part 1 of 2) by “Too Busy Thinking About My Comics”.

It seems that Azzarello has been granted free reign by the flakkers to reinterpret anything at all except for those aspects which serve to perpetuate misogyny. The supposed vileness of Queen Hippolyta and her brutally emasculating sex-killers ought to be forever respected, it seems, but everything else is apparently up for grabs. And so, there’s been not a murmur of discontent – let alone any spittle-flecked raging – about the innovative if hyper-real rendition of the Greek underworld and its ruler in this month’s Chasing Shadows. It’s something which really does leave the suspicion that all that rage and indignation about the sanctity of those old myths, about the necessary rightness of portraying the Amazons as despicable man-murderers, was nothing more than a desperate attempt to shout down anyone who might have pointed out how unpleasantly sexist, and indeed profoundly stupid, Wonder Woman #7 was.

Or: it was never about the sexist myths of times gone by and everything about the sexist myths of 2012.

A very interesting read. Part 2 of this analysis is here.

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Female Superheroes – No, It’s Not Equal

Kelly Thompson takes a really close look at female superheroes and body type portrayals, and the vast difference between male and female superheroes in an article called No, It’s Not Equal on Comic Book Resources.

When I look at the way characters are rendered in superhero comics for more academic purposes, I look at four primary categories: Body Type, Clothing, Beauty, and Posing….

Both men and women are given crazy nearly unattainable idealized bodies in comics, we can all agree on this. But that is where the equality ends. Men are generally portrayed with idealized ATHLETE body types. While women are generally portrayed with idealized PORN STAR and SUPERMODEL body types. Which would make sense if the women were not actually superheroes. But they are, and so making them porn stars and supermodels doesn’t make a lot of sense. If women, like men, were rendered like gymnasts, swimmers, runners, boxers, tennis pros, and body builders, you’d see far fewer objections, because that would make things quite balanced. An idealized athletic form that few of us can achieve but many of us would admire or like to have, is imminently reasonable for a superhero form, but that’s not what we get, instead we get idealized (and wholly unrealistic) supermodel and live voyeur porn star types.

It’s funny that in comics, the term “brokeback” means something quite different than the gay cowboy movie. It’s a description of the pose that many female superheroes are drawn in, where they twist in a way that is physically impossible in real life to show both their breasts and ass in the image.

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