think to euro fashion shows with asian models who always seem to have that extremely severe face and needle thin eyes (more like 1st pic) and compare that to to cutesy doe eyed baby faced women from any asian CD cover or movie (see: anne suzuki, liu yifei), or even the girl on the poster for your upcoming local asian nightclub dance party (more like 2nd pic).

i’m not saying either are more accurate representations of what asian women actually look like, but it’s a valid point that there are distinct looks that both cultures find attractive… or maybe i’m totally wrong! kelly hu is pretty hot, zhang ziyi crossed over successfully, grace park especially in those fhm pics, riyo mori was chosen by japan to represent japan and won the very american miss universe competition and none of them would go in the severe looking needle eyed asian category (sorry lucy liu and sandra oh, you’re firmly in that first category). perhaps we do have good taste in asian women in the west! it’s just that maybe we just don’t know how to draw em pretty yet.

which is fine, i think an asian artist person would be more likely to accurately depict an asian person than some swedish team. seriously, i’ve never met any asian girl that looks like the chick from heavenly sword.

having said all this, i think the artist should have left the whole breast augmentation business alone. it just sets the new image up as an easy target for claims of being superficial and contradictory (“oh, the asian man gives the asian girl bigger boobs which are so only a western thang!”) the whole breast issue is ethnically insignificant anyway, its not a race thing, it’s an individual preference thing. if changes had been left to the face only, people would be having much more interesting discussion on cultural perceptions of beauty.

anyway, even though the boob job wasn’t necessary, i definitely prefer the second one. she looks prettier.

* That said, male characters can convince both women into a threesome, which brings back your point of appealing to the “whoa, two chicks at once” crowd.

I blame that whole “it’s impossible to satirize fundamentalists because someone, somewhere, has said the exact same thing while actually believing it” thing. Except replace “fundamentalists” with “pompous feminist academic stereotype.”

Poe’s Law! =)

Oh, and yeah… this is why I don’t read gaming websites. The only time they mention anything about feminism is to mock it, or to bitch about how we’re trying to take away their booth babes and boob physics.

Mirror’s Edge looks shiny though; I might go play through the demo just to see if I can hack the controls.

Holly – I have read that article before. The only way I can see this being “intentionally hilarious” is if the author is intentionally pulling crap out of his butt. If he is, I love it and think it’s great; if he actually believes some of the tenuous arguments he lays out, then I’m terrified. Alas, my irony-sense is not keen enough to determine whether he’s serious or not. I blame that whole “it’s impossible to satirize fundamentalists because someone, somewhere, has said the exact same thing while actually believing it” thing. Except replace “fundamentalists” with “pompous feminist academic stereotype.”

And now I have sucked all the fun out of that article. Dammit! Sorry. -_-

Also, re: Mass Effect – though I concur that it was refreshing to choose the gender of the protagonist (among myriad other aspects of the character), I was sorely disappointed by the relationship choices presented. If you were female, you could either have a heterosexual relationship or a homosexual relationship. If you were male, however, you could either have a heterosexual relationship… or a heterosexual (kind of) relationship with an alien. Hm. It leads me to conclude that the game developers were more worried about the “straight men think lesbians are hot” stereotype than striving for true sexual equality.

Ha! That’s how I feel about it! I like playing games w/ my husband, but I get so frustrated. He will clear a whole room of zombies and I am still trying to figure out how not to run into the wall. I spend all of my time trying to not run into things and not get shot! My inability to master standard controls made me give up on Mass Efffect before I had gotten very far at all. It frustrated me too, in Assassin’s Creed, which I really want to play. One time I got my controller stuck staring at the sun in some game and had to quit.

*sigh* I will have to stick to computer games. A mouse and arrow keys in WoW is about all I can handle. I love gaming, but I get a little frustrated w/ the controls when the pressure is on!

Left 4 Dead is still fun, though.

I actually hadn’t played any FPS-style games since those until about a year ago. Then I thought it might be worth checking out the latest generation. Halo hasn’t changed the basic formula all too much, although co-operative first-person shooters feel very different in terms of tactics, and AI is good enough now that you can be grateful for computer teammates. The real interesting games that use that same old FPS engine for new purposes are ones like Portal, Bioshock, and Mirror’s Edge.

As for my laptop, it was an Asus z71v with a Pentium M chip, but the real reason it melted was due to power supply problems between the AC adapter and the power connection for the laptop.