Things We Saw Today: A DIY Steampunk Darth Vader Mask

We want it. We want it a lot. (via Fashionably Geek)

• The Frisky has a gallery the proves that rhytmic gymnastics isn’t as lame as a lot of people seem to think. (Although Lizzie McGuire taught us that years ago).
• This is a tumblr dedicated to hot NASA scientists. (via tipster @Joi_The_Artist)
• New York Times Magazine is featuring a story about gender fluidity in children.

When Alex was 4, he pronounced himself “a boy and a girl,” but in the two years since, he has been fairly clear that he is simply a boy who sometimes likes to dress and play in conventionally feminine ways. Some days at home he wears dresses, paints his fingernails and plays with dolls; other days, he roughhouses, rams his toys together or pretends to be Spider-Man. Even his movements ricochet between parodies of gender: on days he puts on a dress, he is graceful, almost dancerlike, and his sentences rise in pitch at the end. On days he opts for only “boy” wear, he heads off with a little swagger. Of course, had Alex been a girl who sometimes dressed or played in boyish ways, no e-mail to parents would have been necessary; no one would raise an eyebrow at a girl who likes throwing a football or wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt.

• This eye of Sauron cosplay is kind of completely terrifying (via io9):

• One of the writers of MTV’s Teen Wolf responded to criticism that the show wasn’t developing its supporting characters of color enough. The response is actually a really nuanced, practical look at what TV writers have to juggle to bring these stories to their audience. Read all of it. (via JeffDavis75)

I love the passion all of the fans bring to the show and I’m glad it creates far more of a discourse than I ever expected. I’m pretty sure most of my response here comes out of my own insecure thinking: “Are they calling me racist? I’m not racist! Wait… am I?” But maybe some of this information will provide a different insight into the why’s and how’s of the world of television and if you don’t necessarily forgive our flaws, you might at least understand them a little better.

• Further in “awesome things people are saying on Tumblr,” someone asked this professor what they thought of fan fiction. The response is pretty long, but here’s an excerpt (via Flames of a Timelord):

I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows ****-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn.