Author: PeterMBall
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Mmm, BBQ

S0 yesterday was pretty good day. There was a delayed birthday dinner with the family, whereupon we set out for The Smoke in New Farm and ate our own bodyweight in American-style BBQ, then we set out to see Wil Anderson at the Brisbane Comedy Festival, and then because I was full of food and happy I stayed up to listen to the latest Galactic Suburbia podcast instead of going to sleep. Somewhere in there the home internet was fixed, so I rejoined the online world, and I wrote some things. About 1 o’clock I went to bed and actually slept for five hours, which is something I rarely do since starting the dayjob and discovered that being employed is actually far more stressful and soul-destroying than being unemployed (who knew?). So yesterday was a pretty good day, against all expectations, and tonight I make chili in the hopes that it’ll redeem today in much the same way. # The

PeterMBall 23/03/2011
Journal

Grr. Arg.

Tomorrow night I am making chili. If I’d thought to defrost some of the necessary components, I’d probably make chili for lunch when I got home from the dayjob, but since this morning was one of those mornings where I was lucky to leave the house with pants on the defrosting will have to wait. Ergo, tomorrow there will be chili, which is a better dinner meal than a lunch meal anyway. I’m behind on things again. It’s like a magic trick, the way it happens. One moment I’m chugging along, happily getting things done, then the world gestures with the left hand to distract me from the right hand, and then I’m looking at the to-do list and going “really? All of this? When did all of this arrive?” So it will be a light week of blogging this week, because I’m behind, and one of the things on my to-do list is ringing the internet company and informing

PeterMBall 22/03/2011
Journal

And Now We Are 34

Right, first things first, I give you the traditional dodgy cell-phone camera self-portrait, because no birthday is truly complete until my parents ring me and say “really, Peter, did you have to put that up on the internet?”: Of course, this probably qualifies as an improvement on last years birthday photograph, but I’ve made up for that by wearing the-hated-hawaiian-shirt-I-tricked-my-mother-into-buying and eating-unhealthy-things-that-are-not-breakfast-foods-for-breakfast and being-mildly-hangover-dammit, which should make up for that in my parent’s eyes. On the other hand, this is the first time in three years I’m suffering no physical pain on my birthday (2009 – buggered up my shoudler; 2010 – root canal) which helps things considerably, and I’m not at the primary dayjob today, which removes the major source of emotional angst from my mental landscape. To celebrate my birthday I will clean the flat, re- read Haruki Murakami’s Birthday Stories anthology, because it’s a damn good collection of fiction, then I will toddle off to teach a class on

PeterMBall 18/03/2011
Big Thoughts

Situation Comedy, Redux

To give you fair warning, this is a cranky post. It’s possible I’ll swear. Often. Loudly. You have been warned. # One of the more interesting threads running through the comments on yesterday’s post, both here and over on Facebook, was this attitude that sitcoms are inherently limited and/or required to suck by virtue of the genre conventions they operate under. To which I respond, no, fuck that, genres are as limited as we want them to be, pleas take your they-cater-to-the-masses-and-therefore-must-suck class-oriented modernist bullshit to someone else’s discussion. ‘Cause, you know, that kind of attitude is the reason we get bad science fiction, bad romance, bad action-adventure films, and pretty much everything else. You reap what you sow, in that respect, and unless you’re willing to ask for more it’s unlikely you’ll ever get it. I no more accept the inevitable suckiness of sit-coms than I do the argument that Avatar needed to be a three-hour exercise in narrative tedium; it

PeterMBall 17/03/2011
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Why I Have Problems With the Big Bang Theory

I frequently find myself watching The Big Bang theory, finding it funny, then  hating myself for it. I mentioned this on the twitters and facebook yesterday, which immediately had a group of people saying, in essence, why, dude, it’s actually funny? And, yes, it is. There are times when it’s absolutely smart and entertaining, and I watch it for these moments because they’re a kind of humor that makes me happy and speaks to me as a man who self-identifies as a geek and enjoys being part of an active geek subculture. It’s a show that’s very, very good at doing that, creating little in-jokes among the broader strokes. It’s also a who willing to play to deeply entrenched cultural myths about geeks and women, which makes me less happy, and in some points outright angry. The default narrative of the show is generally one that posits all geeks are children looking for a mother figure and the bulk of

PeterMBall 16/03/2011
Journal

This probably wont be my new author photo

Somehow people neglected to mention that I was having a truly dire bad hair day yesterday. I managed to ignore it myself, right up until I got home from tutorials, caught sight of my reflection, and thought “hmmm, that’s not a look I want to continue with, is it?” For a while now I’ve been aware that I’m hitting the decision point where I either shave my head again, or settle in for the process of growing my hair out. These are, by and large, the only real options with my hair – genetics have essentially eliminated all other possibilities due to a weird series of cowlicks and a tendency towards ringlets. I used to think it came from my mother’s side of the family, largely because my dad has maintained the same hairstyle since I was, like, four, but after his brief experimentation with forgoing the regular haircut earlier this year I learned that it may well have been the

PeterMBall 11/03/2011
Journal

‘Tis a busy type of day today, so I’m going to just ramble on about things for the breif period I’ll be home between the first dayjob and the second. Plus there are several workmen helpfully digging up the road out the front of my house, ostensibly to lay down something or other involving pipes large enough to crawl through, which inevitably means my power or my internet or my phone line will go out at some point in the very near future. # On the list of conversations I never expected to have with my father, the one that starts with do you have any Warhammer 40k novels I could borrow? is pretty damn high on the list. I also never expected the answer to be yes, but you can’t borrow them right now, but you can have the short story anthologies if you like. Yet, somehow, we had that conversation yesterday, and my copies of Tales of the Heresy and

PeterMBall 10/03/2011
Works in Progress

A grumpy, crabby kind of blog post

Yesterday… Well, yesterday I did not run away and join the circus, but it was probably one of those days where I would have if I had viable circus-type skills and access to a travelling circus to run away with. I did not turn into the Incredible Hulk and smash things in a frenzy of anger. I did not resign from my dayjob to take up a position that would be more useful to the world at large, such as hunting werewolves or wrangling wild unicorns or, you know, going into politics. But, oh,  I was sorely tempted. Especially by the werewolf thing, which, really, goes to show how much I disliked certain aspects of yesterday, because I’m actually quite fond of werewolves. # We actually had a full cohort at write-club last night, which is the first time all four write-clubbers have been in the same place since other people started joining the inimitable Angela Slatter and I on a regular

PeterMBall 09/03/2011
Smart Advice from Smart People

International Women’s Day, Redux

Right, so, by this point everyone’s more-or-less seen this, but for the small percentage of you who haven’t:

PeterMBall 08/03/2011
Works in Progress

International Women’s Day and A Writer’s Woe

Today is International Women’s Day, which is one of those days that ought to be celebrated. I’m tempted to post more, but everything I come up with always sounds a little “yay for women” and/or overly patronizing, which isn’t really what I’m aiming for on a day that’s all about women’s causes and their achievements. So, instead, I’m going to go find a worthy and appropriate cause to donate money to in celebration of the day. And later, possibly, I will attempt to write something doesn’t make me feel like a misogynist arse every time I touch the keyboard. # I sent off the third story in the Flotsam series yesterday, after which I collapsed into bed and tried to sleep and eventually gave up and read all of The Hunger Games in one fell swoop because it was there and I was too lazy to climb out of bed and get something else to read and it was obvious that sleep

PeterMBall 08/03/2011
Journal

Grr. Arg. Zzzz.

Last night, because I am classy, I ate a dinner of hot-dog franks and baked beans and melted lite cheese slices with BBQ sauce. Then I wrote and wrote and wrote and accidentally fell asleep at the keyboard, which is one of those things that hasn’t happened to me in about fifteen years, and is even less productive than it sounds ’cause you wake up and discover all the odd things you’ve edited into the story by rolling onto the laptop in your sleep. In a less sane and reasonable world, I would have woken up this morning and gone back to writing, fixing the editing mistakes. Unfortunately I live in a world where the landlord is insistent about things like rent, so I got up and went to work at the dayjob instead. I may have done all of this, up until the going to work part, in my underwear. It’s also entirely possible I did not. I’ll leave

PeterMBall 07/03/2011
Journal

It’s a pleasant kind of Sunday afternoon, except for the parts that aren’t. In this case the parts that aren’t are largely covered by a party happening elsehwere, where my friend Chris is welcoming his son into the world alongside a bunch of other friends we have in common, while I’m here trying to figure out how to end the story that absoloutely needs to be ended and sent off later tonight. I’m at the point where I work on a scene then pace for a bit, then work on another scene and pace for a bit, then go back and change everything in the first scene to match the changes I’ve just made. Basically, my favourite kind of day, were it not for the awkward glances I keep shooting the clock and the under-my-breath muttering about my inability to get these issues sorted earlier. The only upside is that at least I’ve already met the younger Slee, who is

PeterMBall 06/03/2011

Book Information?

Please send us an email at support@laautor.tld

Need Help?

Please call us at +6221.1000.1212

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

About Laautor
Support
Newsletter

Signup our newsletter to get update information, promotions and insight.

Copyright © 2021 Laautor, All rights reserved. Powered by MoxCreative.
Facebook Twitter Youtube