May The Fourth Be With You

Seems like a good day to talk geekery. Especially as it's also Free Comic Book Day tomorrow.

I'm a bit of a geek. Just a bit. I'm married to a proper, full time, in the bone geek so I know I only class as a bit of one. Star Wars (4-6), Star Trek (Classic), Red Dwarf, Firefly, Buffy, Zombies, Joss Whedon, comic books, Terry Pratchett, pretty much anything Simon Pegg has ever done... I love it all.

I don't have the talent for information retention that Big does so I might struggle to recall who did the pencilling on the Preacher series or who the Key Grip for Empire Strikes Back was but I'm not bad for a girl. Other girls into geek stuff are not especially rare but they're not so abundant to be found by the indiscriminate heaving of a half-brick. It makes it hard to break the ice with other women when I have no frame of reference for their interests (be it reality tv, reality tv celebs, soaps or whatever.... I don't mean that to sound the way it probably does) and they have no frame of reference to mine. Also you often get a moment where when you say you don't take an interest in those things you're either dismissed as weird or worse, that you're looking down on them. I'm not. It's true that I would far prefer to remove my toenails with a pair of rusty pliers than watch a soap opera these days but I've watched them in the past. I don't mind if anyone else wants to watch them, so long as they don't think they're an accurate representation of normal life or a model for interpersonal relationships. Reality shows? X-Factor? So long as you understand they're about as real as a £3 note and you enjoy them, completely fine, just don't ask me to watch them. Sadly though, common ground is important for chit chat so I don't have a lot of female friends and those I might make with non-geek affiliated women don't tend, historically to last long on the whole.

Tonight we're watching Cowboys And Aliens. We've been watching a lot of superhero movies lately so it'll make a nice change. I like Marvel superheros, but I don't read them. I don't like DC much at all but there are a few exceptions, mostly well outside the superhero remit. I don't read superheroes, rightly or wrongly, because I don't have enough lifetime to read the whole back catalogue going back 60, 70 years plus and because I am a geek, I would want to. But I like the films. I like what Marvel Studios does. We went to see The Avengers last week and loved it so much, even if I didn't know Black Widow and Hawkeye as well as Big does. It was fab, really. Hulk Smash.

And just as I was writing this, Big informed me of this article - http://news.moviefone.com/2012/05/01/girls-guide-to-the-avengers_n_1467480.html
That is the kind of thing I'm talking about above. They've come back and tried to say it's a satire but I'm not sure who it's supposed to be a satire against. Is it a satire against the Bridget Jones girls? Saying they're so dumb they need extra help to understand a movie that's already written to convey it's plot to the uninitiated? Or is it a satire against us geeky girls, presenting us as believing the Bridget Jones fans are that dumb? That we're that bitchy and superior? Or worse, that we're some kind of statistical anomaly, because proper girls would need this article? What is a proper girl Moviefone? How should we behave? Any which way it misses the important factor of a satire - humour. It's just plain insulting to anyone who happens across it, regardless of how it was supposedly intended.

Bah, I'm missing my movie with all this ranting, and Daniel Craig is beating up a lot of people.