Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Churlish Snake Infestation

A very good article by a Chuck Klosterman on what he refers to as prefab populism. He takes the example of the Snakes On A Plane (the first film to earn so-bad-it's-good ironic cult status before it was even released) film which, amongst other compromises, shot new scenes to cater for what the studio viewed as audience demands and explains why this could have a damaging effect on the quality of films in the future.

For the first time in ages, we got reviewed. Not sure exactly how it works but Bloglaughs seems to have a slate of reviewers who all offer their opinion - which seems like a fairly balanced way of doing it. Plus we did ok, so it would probably be churlish to not leave it at that. But I'm nothing if not churlish. First off there's the criticism that we seem to have a 'minor ad infestation'. On any given page, the most you'll find are two ad blocks. How is that an infestation? Or is just that we're not pure of heart enough? I don't know. Another criticism was that 'more space is given over to the sidebar than to the main content of the site'. Sorry but we can only make the cartoons so big before it becomes problematic and seeing as a big chunk of that sidebar is for the archives, I don't see where that's leading. Are we making it too convenient for people to look through our cartoons? Are we pandering?

Other than that, I could argue with some of the other issues but, all in all, they have a certain amount of validity. We do have a lot of stuff on the site, I think cluttered is overstating but I might just be used to it. It would be nice to update more often but this isn't our full time jobs and it's a little trickier for Frank to find time to illustrate one of the cartoons, than it is to write out a normal blog post. Still that's not their concern and it's a fair argument. Maybe I should blog here more often but, seeing as I don't really like doing it and have no real ambitions in this direction, nah. We could put more cartoons on the main page but we tried it before and it didn't really work - the cartoons were either too small or the pages needed way too much scrolling. As for broken links in the archives, I can only imagine they viewed the site during the changeover but we'll definetly have a look into it.

Still overall, no problems with the review and i'm glad they all took the time to look in.