Another Weekend Flashes By
“Do we lose Bechdel points if we wrestle right now?”
November is kicking my arse.So glad I didn’t try to sign up for NaNoWriMo or any other writing commitment (though I have a bunch of commitments still hovering meaningfully around my head) because the combination of work outside the house and my trip away means that I am behind on everything, simply everything, and every day seems to put me further behind.
The house is a mess, my stress levels are through the roof, and ever since Genrecon my brain has been screaming at me to get a real job, which is frankly unproductive.
On the bright side, we watched Flash Gordon on Blu-Ray with a horde of children on Friday night, and even though their ages range from 3-9, it was the perfect timing for ALL of them. We cynical adults were quite taken aback with the sheer joy and devotion to which our children glommed on to this movie. I mean, what are the odds that the thing we love ironically because of Brian Blessed wearing leather shorts and wings, or Timothy Dalton dressed as Robin Hood, would also appeal to little fairy-and-princess obsessed Jem AND the Captain-America-obsessed Felix?
FLASH! Ah-ahhh. I do love that music, even if Queen slacked off and only wrote about six bars for the whole movie.
There was a bit of adulty not-appropriate-for-kids stuff in it, but surprisingly little. The sexism was ingrained to the point of hilarity, right up to the point where Princess Aura was whipped, and all the adults in the room went – ohhh, crap just stopped being funny. The children didn’t seem to notice. There was also a gross bit where one of the bad guys was impaled on spikes and his eye bulged out, and while we were all busily trying to cover the eyes of the little ones, the elder ones thought this was the BEST THING EVER and promptly started re-enacting it. So that’s gonna be a fun school playground this lunchtime.
I was amused to noted that despite its general glorious awfulness, the movie does pass the Bechdel Test. And while the movie is wall to wall slave women, and Princess Aura’s costumes defy gravity and all laws of taste, it’s kind of hard to argue that Flash Gordon’s treatment of women is worse than say, Star Wars. What with there at least being two female main characters, a female beta-villain (we mentally recast her as Michelle Pfieffer in the inevitable Tim Burton remake) and a world that would actually be able to repopulate itself in a reasonable manner.
Also, Dale Arden is a freaking superhero. For at least ten minutes of the movie. In high heels.
As part of my post-Genrecon wave of Do The Internet/Career/Business Better, I have decided to bite the bullet and experiment with affiliate links on my blog. I’ve always been resistant to ads in the past, but given that so much of what I write ends up inspiring people to make massive book/DVD purchases anyway, I might as well make it official. Still tinkering, as I don’t want to make my pages ugly or the links/ads to be invasive. So mostly I’m putting them underneath the big, substantial pop culture essays. I’ve signed up for a few different programs, all online book sellers that I actually use myself, but so far I am skewing towards those which are the easiest & prettiest.
It’s all so hard! I want to use a variety of sellers because everyone wants to use whatever their favourite is, but I can’t see how using more than a couple is going to be remotely possible because it will get messy. Also some affiliates make producing pretty banners/visual ads super easy and others are very hard to navigate. Still, the experiments continue.
You can see an example of the kind of affiliate links I’m setting up here on the Batgirl essay or my Susan Death essay if you’re interested. Happy to take feedback or suggestions from anyone who has Opinions on how the links look, or anything else to do with this because new! and hard! I hope it doesn’t have a negative effect on any regular readers of my blog, or annoy people.
The good news is that if I do make even a small amount of income from these links, I will officially lose all guilt about the amount of time I devote to writing long and complicated blog entries instead of actual novels. So, there’s that! And of course anything that makes it easier for people to get hold of my own books has to be a positive thing for me as a writer.
Speaking of blogging, keep an eye out tomorrow for the new blog essay series I am launching, Who-50, in which I will be writing SOMETHING about every year of Doctor Who between now and the big anniversary in November 2013. Yes, that means that tomorrow is 1963!
