Felicia Day

Episode 8: BUSTED

The 2/3 Mark of the season! Wow, time has just FLOWN by, in-show and in-life! This ep is a real story turning point. Having Codex juggle the Fawkes storyline AND Cheesybeards was a fun challenge this year. Spacing out the story beats so they were clear and concise was tough, but finally in this episode we get the moment where her little deception blows up in her face, and Tink LOVES it. It’s SO her.

There are some great emotional beats from the actors in this episode. I love Zaboo’s turn about not being happy about Fawkes and Codex’s relationship status, therefore he’s ecstatic about himself?! Huh? I just think that’s such a Zaboo beat of strange emotion. And Vork running in with those green bean cans was sheer genius acting. He’s so tired and exasperated. Jeff really nailed it with the whole Avinashi storyline, it’s a lot to bounce back and forth between appreciation and adoration, so funny from the straight-laced Vork.

The face mask matching my Jinx shirt was a total coincidence, but when I saw it I was like, yeah, let’s go with it, I like seafoam blue, haha. And the wilted flowers in Fawkes’ hand are still really funny to me because they were literally stolen from someone’s yard in the neighborhood. That’s how The Guild rolls!

Favorite line from the ep: “Stop Trolling me in real life!”

EPISODE 9: Pirate Paddy

The Cheesybeards location has been SO FUN to shoot in. It almost feels like a sitcom to me style-wise, which is so fun to inject into the show. Not sure if you’ve stumbled upon it yet unless you’re a hardcore fan, but we have a cool little ARG going on for the location at cheesybeards.info, including a Yelp review page that they kindly helped us set up! Thanks to@egspoony and@briankameoka for overseeing all the elements.

Episode 9 is, I believe, director@seanbecker’s favorite episode, not the least reason is the Bladezz commercial. Oh boy. I remember in the script, all I had as a description was:

“Worst Commercial EVER. Bladezz as a pirate. Terrible lighting and camerawork, just awful in every way. Ends with “Taste My Pirate Paddy.”

I think that Sean handily succeeded in crafting something along those lines. Like, a LOT! My particular favorite part of the commercial is the callback to “Tennis Bladezz” from Season 1. If you check out episode 9 and freeze where Codex busts out the Finn Smulders pics, then you’ll see a totally tacky headshot of Bladezz in the tennis outfit. Did a lot of people notice that? Also, I was REALLY sick that day, so I didn’t really see what was going on as far as footage, so when it was cut together, the whole thing was completely new to me, so that was a rare moment when I was out of the loop and got to watch something from a VIEWER POV. So fun

My favorite ACTING moment in the episode is between Ollie and Bladezz when he says, “Can’t carve out anything if it’s his dominant hand. Eh?” OMG. When we rehearsed that, the way Vince delivered that line with his elbow jab…it was sheer glee and magic, and I cracked up EVERY TIME! The great thing is the way Frank responds as Ollie: He LOVES it despite being SO INSENSITIVE AND AWFUL! And thus, that whole relationship is defined in one tiny moment.

As a treat, below is an extended cut of the commercial, with a DENA cameo! Hope you enjoy!

<br/><a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/season-4-bonus-clip-taste-my-pirate-patty/y0djzw3w?fg=sharenoembed');" href="http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/season-4-bonus-clip-taste-my-pirate-patty/y0djzw3w?fg=sharenoembed" target="_new"title="Season 4 - Bonus Clip - Taste My Pirate Patty">Video: Season 4 &#8211; Bonus Clip &#8211; Taste My Pirate Patty</a>

Rarely do I feel compelled to blog immediately from something I read online, but I just read a fascinating article by Jolie O’Dell entitled: Why We Don’t Need More Women In Tech… Yet. In addition to that article,@simonjadis linked me another interesting article entitled Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Telling People How They Should Feel About It. Really thought-provoking pieces about the challenges the industry faces in diversifying.  The most interesting part of these articles for me lies in the ideas about childhood and how our dearth of women in tech might stem in part from how girls and boys are treated early on, even starting out with the types of toys available to them.

You will immediately notice the drastic segregation — the gendered version of the Jim Crow-era South. There are entire aisles of pink, and other aisles devoted to dark blues and greens. Imagine that you are only “allowed” in the pink and purple areas of the store, and examine the toys you find there.

The vast majority of playthings for little girls encourage them to think about nurturing others and caring for themselves — including, to a large extent, their appearances. These aren’t inherently negative lessons to learn, except for the fact that these lessons exclude others that deal with problem-solving, strategy, physics… you know, the kinds of things you learn from playing with Lego, K’nex, Stratego and other male gender-coded games and toys.

This struck a BIG chord with me.  I’m pretty militant when it comes to how we encourage little girls (AND WOMEN) to be princesses and wear ruffles and buy name designer bags (Reality TV stars anyone?).  I loathe it with all my being, because that is soooo the opposite of me and my upbringing and how I think girls should be treated in order to reach their full potential.  It made me think back to myself as a kid.  I had very techno-savvy parents and grandparents, which I think contributed HUGELY to who I am today. Achievement in the sciences was EXPECTED.  Of course as a 5 year old I wanted the tricked out plastic kitchen from Toy’s R Us, I’m not gonna lie, but I also competed with my brother in building lego sculptures, played text adventures when I was 6 on the computer, and learned as much math as I could just to impress my physicist Grandpa every time we’d visit.  When I was 14 I even subscribed to 2600, the hacker magazine, because, for some reason, I got the idea that there would be nothing cooler in the world than to be a REAL hacker myself (didn’t have the follow-through to get good at it though, haha).

I think a LOT of this is because I was home-schooled and didn’t hang out with other girls, because honestly, I think I would have shifted my interests greatly if I had attended regular school.  I never had the peer pressure to concentrate on being gorgeous, or have the latest jeans, or attract the cutest boy in class.  I also never felt like an outcast for liking the stuff that was “nerdy” or “weird”, it was just…what I did.  Yes, I lived in a bit of a bubble, and consequently created my own parameters of what was cool and where areas to achieve in, but I also was raised blind to calling my interests out as “special” just because of my gender.  It’s almost as if calling ATTENTION to a girl who is drawn to science can be as destructive as ignoring her, you know?  Ideally we’re striving for a blind system of people attracted to their inner muses, but that can’t seem to happen as easily when you look at our education system and the way our culture grooms girls to conform to this IDEA of a GIRL that, to me, is terribly limiting.

I don’t have any answers here, and I’m not saying that little girls are all indoctrinated from birth to love Barbies and that ruins their lives (I mean, I loved them too IN ADDITION to my science fiction books. I also alphabetized my stuffed animal collection.  Er…moving on.)  Boys and girls are genetically different, clearly, but we have stereotyped them into a shortcut for what the SHOULD be before giving them a change to find out who they are themselves.   I guess the REAL work needs to be working with children early on, having the right mentors in their life so they are raised less with perceptions of HOW they should be as a girl, and instead WHAT they love as a human being.