Great article. Everyone should follow its advice, and not just because of the salt.

Let’s take another exciting trip to the TS3 Exchange!

It turns out there is a way to find relevant results – the Advanced Search actually pulls up results based on what you entered, rather than… honestly, I don’t know how the non-advanced search works. All I know is that it really doesn’t work.

So using this Advanced search, I decided to take a look-see and find out how many uploads of particular races and such were comprised of various stereotypes. I searched for various ethnic sims.

Sims depicting Native Americans were among the most stereotyped. As often as not, you would see them with at least two out Loves The Outdoors, Angler, and Green Thumb. One sim’s description even went so far as to say that the Sim was brave and had a green thumb because of her Native American blood. Another one had an entire wardrobe of leather because she was Native America, including her swimsuit.

Latinas (there were remarkably few Latinos) tended to be Athletic, Great Kissers, and/or Hopeless Romantics.

Japanese Sims tended to be workaholic if male, and an inordinate number of Japanese females had personality traits that seemed to be taken from anime characters. A goodly number of them also had the Computer Whiz trait.

The majority of Irish sims had red and occasionally garish orange hair. (In reality, only 10% of the population has red or reddish hair – and there are more redheads in Scotland, with 13% of the population having red or reddish hair.) Lucky, Green Thumb, and Great Kisser were favored traits.

Exchange member Walpurgis creates Sims out of missing people or victims of unsolved murders. Many of Walpurgis’s Native American sims have Loves The Outdoors as a trait, and a large number of her black sims are endowed with Party Animal. An Asian sim (the only one I saw) was given the Computer Whiz trait. When I looked up the person to see if Walpurgis had based her traits on a description somewhere, I could find nothing.

Another member, Xylander, is working on a “Women of the World” series. As you can see for yourself, each woman is horribly stereotyped:

Canada
France
Ireland
Brazil
Japan

Another thing I noticed was that many female sims had descriptions that went something along the lines of:

“This sim isn’t just gorgeous, she also has the brains to match!”
“Who says you can’t have beauty AND brains?”
“Can this sim prove that she can use both her beauty and brains to succeed?”

Wording like this implies that an attractive woman with intelligence is something we should be surprised about. But when it comes to men, a mention of brains is seldom treated as something we should find shocking. When it comes to female sims, statements about their brains often are ended in exclamation marks. Statements about the brains of male sims are ended in blase periods.

Also, sim descriptions that assure us that the sim does indeed have brains are plentiful among female sims, but uncommon among males. The word “brains” brought up 123 results (duplicates omitted) for females. Two of them were pointing out a lack of brains, four were brain eaters, and one refused to eat brains, leaving us a total of 114 female sims advertised for their brains. On the other hand, there were only 26 results for males, seven of them being zombies and one of them being the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz – leaving us fewer than 20 males using brains as an advertising point.

There are, at the time of writing, approximately 47870 male Sims on the Exchange, and 136206 female sims, which means that approximately .039% male sims are being advertised for their brains compared to .083% female sims. While you might think that this would be good because women should be appreciated for their brains, I believe it indicates that people feel they must point out that a woman (especially an attractive woman) has brains because she she is so often expected not to.

I could go on for ages with this post, but I think I’ll end it here. In closing, I hope it’ll make you think a little harder about the sims you’re creating.

In addition to weight, researchers looked at levels of cholesterol, blood pressure, bone mineral density and percent of body fat. For both groups, each of these areas changed almost identically, except that in the low-carb group, levels of HDL cholesterol – the body’s “good” cholesterol – were higher than in the low-fat group.

“For years, the conventional wisdom was that low-carb diets had a host of ill effects on health, but these results suggest that those concerns are unfounded,” said Foster.

For the curious, this study was funded by the NIH, a government – not corporate! – institution.

The original article can be found here.

Here you are: your very own Bingo card containing a selection of poorly-informed and/or downright pathetic objections to low-carb diets. Have fun!

All I can say is… go watch it on Jimmy’s channel!

Also, Story of Stuff (now The Story of Stuff Project) deals with a couple of other issues: bottled water and cosmetics.

There is a hole on the edge of my parents’ property, which for some reason some of our relatives feel entitled to throw their trash into instead of hauling it to the proper disposal areas, IE, a recycling center or thrift store.

The other day I passed by this hole when I noticed the last thing they’d tried to throw into it – and I do mean “tried,” because it wasn’t in there very well. They had cut down a pine tree and a juniper and had attempted to use the hole to dispose of it. Not a big deal; that stuff’s compostable. I passed by to get a closer look and see if the wood would be useful for any projects later on (and hey, pinecones!), and discovered something… well, horrifying.

Someone had thrown away a large load of perfectly good stuff – more than I could fit into my car in one haul. And by “perfectly good,” I mean…

-Several unopened rolls of contact paper
-One Calvin & Hobbes collection book
-Several Garfield collection books
-Five fantasy novels, decent condition
-Several childrens’ books, ranging from poor to extremely good condition
-A box full of cheesy Western romances
-An adorable porcelain doll in her box
-Several holiday gift boxes in nice condition
-A plastic grocery bag containing a teenager’s costume jewelry
-Decorative flattened marbles
-One small Caboodles jewelry box
-Several flowerpots
-And other odds and ends.

This stuff was perfectly good. Perfectly usable. And yet, someone couldn’t be bothered to donate it to a thrift store. Never mind this economy. Never mind that plastics leech toxins and carcinogens into the soil as they degrade. Never mind that a thrift store would have been a closer drive than the hole.

It’s sad, really. There are scores of wild plants (either native or imported) that grow just fine without much in the way of water. One of my favorite native plants is the globemallow, which puts on stunning orange blossoms. As far as shrubs go, the silvery-green sagebrush are beautiful, and the spiny hopsage is one of the most gorgeous things you’ll ever see.

The same goes for vegetables; we grow spinach even though it isn’t even suited for our climate, whereas goosefoot will grow of their own volition. (Did you know goosefoot is cultivated as a vegetable in India?) There are several species of wild mustard, some of them just as tasty as anything you find in the store – clasping pepperweed is especially tasty. But instead of treating them as valuable vegetables and cultivating them, we label them weeds, pull them out, and instead try to grow things that require far more resources.

Why do we waste our time and resources on lawns, flowers, and vegetables that are poorly-suited to the area instead of cultivating the ones that thrive out here?

Earth Song