No, I Wasn't Talking About The Guy From Guns -N- Roses...

For any of you wondering about the title of the last entry, “Slash” refers to a kind of fan-generated art (usually in the form of stories) that involves homosexual themes.
Specifically, fans of TV shows, movies, books, and so forth, will often write their own stories in which two (or more) of the principal characters from the source material, who are not homosexuals in the source material, engage in homosexual acts with each other.
I first became aware of “Slash” sometime in the 1980s when I read an article about “Star Trek” fans who had written stories involving Kirk and Spock getting it on.
Some “Slash” is inspired by the belief that there is an existing homosexual undercurrent in the source material but which can’t be explicitly expressed due to existing cultural mores.
An obvious example of this would be the ambiguous relationship between Xena and Gabrielle.
“Smallville” currently serves as the source for a lot of “Slash” fiction involving Lex and Clark, even though their relationship is considerably less ambiguous than that of Xena and Gabrielle. Unless you really, really want to see homosexual undercurrents in the show, they really aren’t there to be found, so what’s really at work in the “Slash” stories based on “Smallville” is simple wish-fulfillment. Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum, the actors playing Clark and Lex respectively, are, presumably, a couple of good-looking guys whom people who are into that sort of thing would like to see getting it on with each other.
As I’ve watched various TV shows I’ve been guilty of creating some “Slash” fiction in my own mind. For example, in an episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” from several years back there’s a scene in which Buffy grabs a hold of a girl named Amy, whom she’s caught skulking around in her house, and slams her up against a door. After realizing who it is and that she’s not any sort of threat, Buffy lets her go.
However, inside of my head, that scene plays out very differently…
Still, I’ve never actually felt a desire to actually write any sort of “Slash” fiction.
Nor have I ever felt any desire to read any of it.
After all, most fan fiction is bad enough, so adding explicit homoerotic sex to the various plot holes (no gross pun intended), spelling errors, and bad dialogue is unlikely to do much to improve the quality.
Anyway, if you’d like to learn more, there’s actually a Wikipedia entry here.
As for the Batman/Robin thing, it’s hardly a new idea. After all, in “Seduction of the Innocent,” one of Dr. Wertham’s major points of contention was the possible impropriety of the relationship between the Dark Knight and his “young ward.”
Personally, I think it’s crap, and has no basis in the actual source material.
Still, the only realissue I have with the gallery exhibit would be the fact that she was making use of copyrighted material, for profit, without permission from the copyright holder.
Beyond that, she’s free to think, or paint, whatever she likes.
Anyway, today found me in my CSS class.
This is the one I’ve actually been looking forward to, as I learned in the HTML class that there are a lot of cool things that can be done with CSS.
The class is actually smaller than the others I’ve taken, and there are only three chicks in it (though a fourth, a no-show, had signed up for it, apparently), only one of whom is even somewhat attractive.
When I first saw her sitting with her baggy shirt and bad posture, I thought that she was overweight, but once she stood up I saw that I was mistaken.
Still, she wasn’t exceptionally attractive, and it’s all irrelevant anyway, as for one thing, based on what I heard her and the people she was sitting with talking about, she works at one of our company’s other locations outside of this area and is only here for the training, and for another, I’m Jon.
Somewhere along the line during the class I pulled an irritating hangnail off of my pinky and started bleeding as if I were Spanish royalty (look it up), so I had to get up and find a First Aid kit.
Over the weekend I came up with some ideas for my 2005 contribution to National Novel Writing Month.
Last year, I had the problem of not having plotted my novel out in advance, and ended up making it up as I wrote it (and it showed).
This year I’m hoping to have more of a plan.
Initially, I considered writing up one of my existing ideas. In fact, I have a story that I’d begun writing back in Tucson, which, as it expanded, was rapidly threatening to become my first novel. I was trying to decide how to proceed, whether to continue on and expand it to make it an actual novel or to pare it back when I got my current job and my life was thrown into disarray by moving out here.
By the time I got my life settled and was able to go back to the story, which I had decided that was going to turn into a novel, I’d pretty much completely forgotten what was supposed to happen next.
So I was thinking about doing some brainstorming and adding the requisite 50,000 words to the existing base of about 23,000 words (no, I wasn’t going to cheat and just write 27,000 words) and turn it into this years contribution.
However, I wanted to come up with something entirely new.
So far I have a protagonist and a setting, but the plot still needs some work, which is a hell of a lot more than I had last year, and I still have a couple of months to come up with something….
Despite the lack of special features, there is one good thing about the “Sin City” DVD (beyond the movie itself, at least): using the “Scene Selection” option you can skip straight to the scene in which Carla Gugino gets up out of bed and walks around for quite some time wearing nothing but a thong.
Now that’s a “special feature” I can get behind!
(For the record, no, finding that out was not my first order of business upon putting the DVD into the player. I found out about that two days later when I was using the DVD for trying out the included DVD playback software on my new Munin.)
I’m convinced that there was a bunch of stuff that I’d thought of over the weekend to write about here, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what they are, and I apparently failed to jot down any notes in my PDA.
Ah well.
In any case, I’ll be back tomorrow with something, whether it’s what I thought of over the weekend or not.