Day: April 17, 2009
Works in Progress

Claw Update

Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 3763 Words Done in Prior 24-hour Period: 870 (Ach) Deadline: April 30th Reasons to Squee: Today, very few. Chapter two, thus far, is a big ol’ mess of revisions waiting to happen. It is, however, almost done and will likely be over some time tonight. Reasons to Wail: Apparently I’ve decided to follow a car chase with a bi ol’ lot of exposition in which the primary action is a possessed cat eating a hamburger. On the Plus Side: I’ve more-or-less finished off all the crits I owe; I got some very nice rejection letters; and I got said stories out again fast. On the Down Side: I lost my groove when it came to putting in time at the keyboard today, choosing to do things like shopping instead. Must rectify this, and soon.

PeterMBall 17/04/2009
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

This is why I’m not a reviewer

I have two moderately hard-and-fast rules when it comes picking movies: no musicals, and no spoofs. I’ve developed these rules after years of being a miserable git who complains about things, and they’re usually followed for the safety of everyone involved. I’m just not geared to enjoy either of those genres, so it’s safer to avoid them. Last Friday, while visiting the local video store, I broke said rules three times. The first to pick up Cabaret and The Producers, the second to pick up Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. To their credit, none of those films was the worst thing I watched this week (that was a film called Blue State, which made me profoundly irritated and left me wondering if a film that was theoretically about being part of the American left was perhaps funded by conservatives gleefully trying to make lefties look idiotic and redundant); yet all three reminded me that I really shouldn’t watch musicals

PeterMBall 17/04/2009
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Friday Youtubery

I’d kinda made a promise to myself that I’d stop posting Amanda Palmer/Dresden Dolls clips on Fridays, since I’m aware that I do it quite a bit. It isn’t really intentional so much as a reflection of my tendency to be very focused on one band for a few years – there’s a period in my late teens where I had the same kind of thing going with REM and the Cure, a time in my early twenties where there was ungodly amounts of Primus and Korn*, and now I seem to have caught the Dresden Doll’s bug (although it may yet turn into a long-term obsession, in much the same way that I never quite lost my obsessive fanboyishness of Nick Cave). Anyway, yes, I keep telling myself to hold back on the Amanda Palmer clips. I think, by now, you’ve all more-or-less caught onto the fact that I regard the band as awesome wrapped in greatness and delivered

PeterMBall 17/04/2009