Girls with Big Books

I sometimes write for a site called thisisby.us, which is a writing site which I consider very nice. When I first started reading the posts there, I found many female writers like the ones that I write about here; intelligent and interesting women, writing things that I love to read.

Some of them are still there, but the site have been seeing less activity lately, so therefore I thought that I would post this here to try to enlist some more smart and fun girls.

If you like to write, you can write at thisisby.us. The site allows original writings of any kind, and you get paid for writing. You don’t get paid much (we often talk about the sweet, sweet TIBU-pennies) and possibly not at all, but I love to come there for the atmosphere, even though the site will never make you rich.

There are a lot of nice regulars there who write interesting posts and leave lots of fun comments. I think that if you are someone who likes to write, you should check it out. You can register here.

If you want to read what I’ve written for the site, you can see my stuff here. There is some humor, politics, obscene haiku-poetry, posts about religion and civil rights, and a couple of short stories.

I hope to see you on TIBU! The site really is a very nice place and I would love to see some of you there. Every writing site can use some more girls with big books, and more people who like them.

Tags: writing

I have personally considered myself very much a feminist since around second grade. I recognize the need for a continued struggle for women’s rights. Despite that, this site is not at all meant to be a feminist site. This is merely a tribute to the kind of girls that I find the most attractive, without any political agenda to it.

However, it has come to my attention that some people would still view this as a feminist site. And that got me thinking. Continue Reading »

Tags: feminism

I feel the need to write a short little post about one of my favorite historical nerds, the intriguing Lady Lovelace, in case this site has any visitors who do not know about her.

Ada Lovelace

Tags: ada lovelace, Computers, history, programming

Yesterday I wrote a post about webcomics and comics in general. I briefly mentioned xkcd, a webcomic that is extremely popular among nerdy people.

I want to pay special tribute to xkcd, because I think that Randall Munroe, who creates this minimalist stick-figure strip, has a great ability to think up the best in nerdy girls. The women in his comic are usually so intelligent and nerdy that they look rather sexy despite being nothing but a few simple black lines.

One of the nerdiest, sweetest, silliest, most romantic things I’ve ever seen

The one above depicts a girl who must be the most romantic geek ever, and one of my favorite fictional females. Original found here. 

There is plenty more where that came from. Here are some other examples of my favorite girls: Continue Reading »

Tags: xkcd

I have always loved reading typical newspaper comic strips. Unfortunately though, a lot of it them are pretty bad and unentertaining and, more relevant to this website, usually seriously lacking in any interesting female characters or creators.

Cathy, with her trademark explosive perspiration

One of the few cartoons created by a woman I saw in newspapers published around where I grew up was Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy. And that is a really bad strip. I have rarely found much humor in it, and most of the time it is concentrated on nothing but perpetuating stereotypes about how women care only about shopping, their own weight, food and weddings. Men, on the other hand, care about nothing other than technical gadgets. Women are of course not interested in those.
Continue Reading »

Tags: Webcomics

Over the last few days we’ve been posting articles with thoughts about the girls we like and don’t like on TV and in video games. That is a series of posts that will continue and examine other media as well, but today we wanted to bring you a YouTube-video instead.

It is an insanely popular video, so at first we saw no reason to put it up here too. But when I found out that some of my close friends hadn’t even heard of it yet, I felt that I had to do my part in bringing it out to the unfortunate people who have yet not heard it. Thus I present to you Kate “Alpinekat” McAlpine’s “Large Hadron Rap”:

I don’t like rap at all, but if more of it had lyrics like these I might listen to it more. And Kate McAlpine is really the kind of girl that Girls with Big Books is all about. Continue Reading »

Tags: LHC, music, physics

Video games have always been plagued by the fact that people write what they know.

Writing what you know is usually a good thing, but the custom did somewhat hinder the development of interesting female figures in video games. Not to overly stereotype, but for most of the history of video game development, the developers have been men with a high probability of being single. So the developers haven’t had all that much knowledge about women, so there just haven’t been very many female characters, and the ones that have been have tended to be very boring stereotypes.

History of Video Games – From Bad to Better

For much of video game history women mainly appeared in the role of the helpless damsel in distress, like for instance Princess Peach from the Super Mario-games. The girl was nothing more than a plot device; a MacGuffin to search for, to keep the game moving forward, with little or no personality of their own.

Princess Peach - Professional Damsel in Distress

After that came many appearances of an opposite stereotype; the violent, buxom vixens. While the damsel in distress type of character is cute, innocent and helpless, the violent vixens are always overtly sexy, scantily clad and very effective killing machines. They are usually just as two-dimensional and boring as their helpless counterparts.

Vinyl Goddess from Mars - No, really

Continue Reading »

Tags: Video Games

The web is filled with articles written by people who praise women in the entertainment industry based solely on their beauty. They profess their love for various women for no other reason than that they look good.

Now, we here at Girls with Big Books appreciate beauty too, but we want more. Beauty isn’t really important, and besides, the entertainment industry is filled with nothing but beautiful people, so it’s such a boring thing to concentrate on.

We want openly intelligent and preferably nerdy girls, because that is what we find attractive. That’s why we are beginning this series of posts about our favorite nerdy girls, to help promote that and to balance all those articles about people’s girls who are hot in a more traditional sense.

Today we begin with a couple of examples of what or opinion is about some women we see on TV. Continue Reading »

Tags: firefly, mythbusters, TV

This blog is slowly starting to take shape.

An about-page has been added with some information about what this blog actually is.

A “mission statement”-page has also been added with some information on why this blog exists.

There is also a page with contact information, if you want to get in touch with us through other means than comments.

Hopefully we will start updating the actual blog with entertaining posts during the week, and hopefully updates will happen fairly regularly after that. Please check in again if this site seems interesting to you.

Tags: site update