Lammily - Average is Beautiful | Hacker News Reader

Lammily - Average is Beautiful

lammily.com

40 pointsrodrigocoelho21 comments

I never thought much about it until now, but accurately proportioned dolls are uncanny and creepy. I wonder if that's why Barbie wasn't accurately proportioned to begin with.

I agree. To me Barbie looks obviously unrealistic which reinforces to me that it's a toy. However, I don't feel I have a good perspective on this because I never played with Barbies as a child. OTOH the toys I did play with were also not "realistic" in any sense.

Perhaps if kids grow up playing with realistic toys they won't think they are uncanny.

The more realistically proportioned dolls might only seem creepy because we're so accustomed to seeing dolls with exaggerated figures or proportions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I don't think they're doing themselves a favour by having the first image be a re-proportioned Barbie. She definitely looks creepy given that there's a familiar comparison.

It sure doesn't look like a fun toy. As a male I never played with Barbie, but I sure didn't want to play with a toy that looked like my parent. I wanted to play with the action figure that was bright, fun and imaginative. IE GI Joes, Turtles, Super heroes, etc.

I think the problem with girls toys is how they are promoted to be played with. The point of Barbie is to make sure she looks pretty, regardless of the dolls initial proportions. So little girls are taught to focus on appearance and making sure things are visually appealing as possible (including themselves).

> As a male I never played with Barbie,

I don't mean you call you out, but you should note that comments like this are essentially exactly why this project exists.

Um, sorry, I don't follow. Can you expand on that?

You're enforcing gender roles.

I do not see how creating a doll with a more regular dimensioned body will make boys want to play with them more.

Isn't the entire point of Barbie dolls to represent a ridiculously unrealistic ideal? In the same way that boys' action figures are impossibly muscular, and superheroes have super-strength/superpowers.

When making a toy, the question to ask should probably be "is it exciting?" rather than "is it beautiful" or "is it realistic". Is average exciting?

The difference is that the ideal that Barbie portrays is definitely negative; in general, it's that a woman is only "ideal" if she is beautiful and a "good wife", so to speak. What she does outside of being subservient to Ken is secondary, when it's defined at all.

With boys' action figures, the "ideal" that they push is rather more positive; the characters are "judged" on what they do, who they save, that they beat the bad guy. Their looks are very much secondary.

This is a good idea on paper, but it feels a little "Harrison Bergeron". I agree that there are major problems in our culture with body image, but Barbie seems like a minor culprit compared to advertising, fashion magazines, Photoshop [1], and celebrity culture. And I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with a certain level of idealization and fantasy in abstract representations like Barbie and He-Man.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(South_Park)

Or, maybe Barbies are way more damaging because they're aimed at children. While celebrity culture and photoshop are hard to escape for adults looking at most media, children are learning what ideal bodies look like not only from those sources but also from toys like Barbies and Bratz dolls.

For more background on this campaign, check out this TIME piece from the morning: http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/03/05/the-new-barbie-meet-the-...

I'd feel more comfortable pressing the "Back This Project" if the button said "Powered by Crowdtilt" underneath it.

The whole "looks like a kickstarter but isn't on kickstarter.com" thing scared me off.

More people are starting to handle their own crowdfunding. Lockitron got rejected by Kickstarter so they created an open-source app for it: http://selfstarter.us

Definitely. Many of the largest crowdfunding campaigns of the past year have been self-powered (see Soylent, Tile, Lockitron, Coin, Star Citizen).

Might be helpful to check out Lockitron co-founder Paul Gerhardt's views on self-hosted campaigns: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6261442

This campaign for Lammily is powered by our open source tool CrowdtiltOpen (formerly Crowdhoster). We've taken Selfstarter's awesome groundwork and turned it into an end-to-end solution.

That's a great piece of feedback. With CrowdtiltOpen (http://open.crowdtilt.com) we're trying to provide powerful, fully white-label crowdfunding - but it could be in creators' best interest to move up our logo by default to inspire more confidence.

Thanks so much, passing this along to the rest of the team.

Average in the US would be 20-30% overweight

Reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumm-Ra

His action figure came in standard and special editions.

With Lammily they could bring out a special edition "Lammily after a night on the tiles":

Stilleto heels, one of them broken, a black eye from picking a fight with a cabbie, ciggie hanging out of her mouth, bottle jack-d in her hand, vomit dripping from her chin and an inappropriate tattoo on her arse ... she has a button on the back which when pressed repeats the phrase "hey fuck you, asshole".

Far more realistic.

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