when you engage with the trolls

[MitchiestInge]

. . . is it a personal thing (actually engaging emotionally) or are you communicating with a wider, more silent audience or are there other motivations?

I can't work out why more people don't ignore them, but every now and then the exchanges are unintentionally funny or interesting - although mostly it gets very dull very quickly. Wondering what's in it for them too.

Vagina denata would be a great thread. Perhaps when things have calmed down.

I hated my BlackBerry with a surprising amount of passion. But I love my iPhone. I'm angling strongly for an iPad too.

I would like an entire set of film and television threads, that's where I would frolic like a feminsty lamb.

I'd like an Ipad too. I don't actually need one but I just want one.

We will never be having a Star Wars themed thread as DS2 is bloody obsessed with it and is his main topic of conversation.

Really SGM? Because that's pretty much how I feel about Avatar too. With the added note that the first time I went to see it (to review it) I was so bored I fell asleep twenty minutes in and had to go again.

Avatar wasn't all bad - sigourney Weaver was in it and she is ace.

I'd love an iPad. Have settled on asking for a portablle Hard Drive for Christmas. I've already filled my laptop with music... There aren't enough megabytes in the world.

Must get round to introducing DS to Star Wars soon. He's already approved of Harry Potter. I've got him well trained...

That's reminded me. Must get round to my Lights, Camera, Feminism blog soon...

Haven't seen Avatar yet... Saw the synopsis and decided it sounded too shit for my effort.

I totally heart Sigourney. Her Ellen Ripley was a huge role model for me growing up (and Linda Hamilton from Terminator to a lesser extent).

Story goes that Ripley was originally written for a man, but when Weaver was cast, they decided not to change a single reference. Which is why she works so brilliantly - the character was written as a human, not "as a woman", aka "through a male prism reflecting what a man thinks a woman might be." It also helps explain why they got worse as they went along of course - gradually the "OMG Ripley's A Woman" effect kicked in.

David Cameron? You mean James Cameron... Although, I like the idea of blaming DC for Avatar, too

SGM, you speke my branes. I am going to spontaneously combust if I read too many of the comments on your thread, I wish I'd been here at the time.

It never fails to stagger me how many people say about film/tv "dude, lighten up, it's only a xxx" when they have been in fact the predominant mythological reference points of our era.

Say for example, particularly relevant here as it's sci-fi, you take genre theory: the 'ritual' approach to genre (Cawelti et al) would have it that we use genre fiction as a way of enacting/embodying/replaying dominant questions, contradictions or troubling societal fantasies; the ideological approach would have it that genre fiction is a means of reproducing dominant ideological positions (e.g. the primacy of the heteronormative relationship, the 'inevitability' of capitalism, the 'natural state' of male superiority) etc. So you can take what ever position you like but you CANNOT say the fiction we create is not socially significant.

I shall kindly spare you all my thoughts on Russian formalism.

Can we have a collective moan about The Princess And The Frog later?