I discovered Processing a few days ago, a project developed at MIT and UCLA. It’s a programming language focused on visual elements and interaction. And it’s built off of Java, so it is easy to create applets and applications from Processing ’sketches’. Plus there are a ton of cool examples on their website which make learning a breeze (for someone with previous experience, at least). I found it sometime after discovering the book Designing Interactions and listening to the interviews on their website.

It was great to find Processing so soon after Scratch, a children’s programming environment built from Squeak and similar to the brick-base visual programming found in Lego Mindstorms (Scratch is also, of course, from MIT). It’s fun to play around with, but a bit clunky and limited.

In a day or two of playing with Processing, on the other hand, I created Koipod. The fish in this simple games runs away from your mouse, making the control scheme a bit ‘wonky’ — aka, innovative. You guide the fish around, gobbling up green dots and avoiding the red ones. I often get frustrated when I program, focusing too much on code when I just want to put something on the screen, but Koipod was a joy to make. Go play it and tell me what you think.

Speaking of pond creatures, these tiny baby tortoises are adorable to the point of making a grown man squee (untested). I went through a few minutes of wanting a pet turtle which I would name Skipperdee, but the moment passed as soon as I learned how picky they can be about their habitat… Instead, I now dream of a tiny robot turtle that can sit on my shoulder.

On a more serious note, Joss Whedon is an awesome feminist. Cataloguing magazine ads for Charlene Makley is starting to get me to realize how much sexism still exists — I hadn’t seen it before. It’s just subtle, in the way women are portrayed as sex objects over and over again, in the way advertisements systematically tell women that they’re not supposed to be happy with who they are. I hope Makley makes her archive public some day, because the patterns are scary. In the meantime, just pick up any women’s magazine and you’ll see what I mean.

Avoiding such things has helped me turn a blind eye to the whole mess, but there is some hilarious and disturbing stuff in other places, too: a superhero drawing guide is parodied to show how ridiculously women are portrayed in comic books. Attractiveness and exaggeration aren’t necessarily bad, but when the female characters are consistently reduced to their sexual characteristics, it’s no wonder people are upset. Feminism is not outdated, and it’s not just for women — it’s for everyone trying to get some equal footing on a social ground that altogether too uneven.