Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Why I’m a Fan of 2 Broke Girls

So I had a Monday free from work this week and, in the absence of anything pressing on the writing front, I elected to spend the day flaked out in front of the Teev in a blatant attempt to recover from the worst of the GenreCon hangover. My televised tipple of choice – the first season of 2 Broke Girls, newly acquired on DVD by virtue of the fact that my local DVD store didn’t have season 2 of Castle on the shelves. I wasn’t really expecting much from 2 Broke Girls – it’s been routinely panned by pretty much everyone I’ve seen discussing it – but after mainlining all twenty-two episodes of Seasons One I think I’ve come to adore the show, just a little. Lets be clear – my adoration has nothing to do with the quality of the humour. There are sit-coms that I actually find consistently funny and worth-while (Community, Rosanne seasons two through four), sit-coms

PeterMBall 14/11/2012
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

GenreCon: The Aftermath

By the time you read this it will have been a little over a week since the inaugural AWM GenreCon ended. I’m going to specify this upfront, ’cause a portion of the content has been written before, during, and after the con, fitting into the little slices of time where I have sufficient brainpower to write. Some of these fragments made sense. Some of them did not. Such is the nature of running conventions. Point the First: GENRECON ROCKED I can scarcely believe I’m able to say this, since I spent so long fretting about the various ways that the conference could have gone wrong, but GenreCon proved to be a smashing success. Attendees were happy, guests were happy, my boss was really happy. We got a massive response rate to the pitching program (and a really high proportion of pitchers got asked to submit partials), the program was packed out, and for once I was at a con where

PeterMBall 12/11/2012
Gaming

5 Tips When Returning From a Campaign Hiatus

It’s been five days since we wrapped up GenreCon and, well, I’m yet to bounce back to my normal self. Cons are mentally and physically exhausting, doubly so when you’re running them, and you always have to pay your body back for the sleep debt and three days you spend operating on adrenaline and caffeine. Net result: another short hiatus for my Mutants and Masterminds campaign while I regroup, catch up on sleep, and rediscover the mental capacity for after-work activities that aren’t marathon games of Masters of Orion II on Shifty Silas the laptop. All of which put me in mind of the following topic for this Friday Superhero Gaming Post: 5 TIPS WHEN RETURNING FROM A CAMPAIGN HIATUS 1) START WITH A BANG It’s easy to lose track of things during a hiatus: hot subplots grow a little dusty, character traits get forgotten through lack of use, and long-term plots are harder to follow when you’re not engaging with them regularly.

PeterMBall 09/11/2012
Gaming

Guest Post: Get the MESSAGE with Steve D.

It’s relatively rare that I turn this blog over to someone else to make a guest post, but for the last few months my friend Steve has been putting together a thing called The MESSAGE. Given that he’s tackling one of my personal bugbears – the tendency towards misogyny among gamers – I wanted to amplify his message and asked him if he’d be interested putting together a blog post explaining things. With that, I’m going to hand things over: My name’s Steve. I’m the creator and co-director of the MESSAGE. That’s an acronym that stands for Men Ending Slurs and Sexist Attitudes in the Gaming Environment. We’re a world-wide online-based campaign group dedicated to encouraging, supporting and educating men in order to make all types of gaming more welcoming to women, and other minorities. You can find us at www.gamermessage.com and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Please do – the movement can only work with lots of support.

PeterMBall 07/11/2012
News & Upcoming Events

There is No Peter Here This Week

Sorry folks, I’m off to Sydney this week to run this piece of business: which promises to be wild and crazy and just a little exhausting, but also kinda time consuming. If you’re in Sydney over the weekend and interested in genre writing, come along and say hi. If you haven’t heard from me by this time next week, odds are I’ve either been torn apart by wild genre writers or my flight home from Sydney has been delayed.

PeterMBall 29/10/2012
Gaming

Superhero GM Advice Borrowed from Kelly Link: Fine Tune Your Subconscious

For the most part I’ve been writing about superhero gaming while my regular game was on hiatus due to a player being in the UK, but as of last night the hiatus is over. We got together despite some jetlag and played the thirty-first session of Shock and Awesome, which involved some call-backs to the very first sessions of the campaign in addition to the events of session 30. The character’s school trip to the Museum of Natural History was interrupted when Doctor Jurassic and his three Demon Dinosaurs (velociraptors with superpowers) attacked and made off with the prize of the museum’s new exhibit – fragments of the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs several billion years ago. It was probably the most fun I’ve had running bad guys in a long while, which is a sign that the villain audit I talked about last week is doing it’s job. I don’t think I’ve got my problems with combat licked

PeterMBall 26/10/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

This is the song I keep humming while I work…

I’m kinda pinned down by the crushing weight of my to-do list this week. Apparently running a convention will do that to you. In my absence, I leave you with some vintage Beastie Boys to keep you company: See you all Friday.

PeterMBall 24/10/2012
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Busy Today

GenreCon looms like a big, awesome loomy thing, which means I’m alternating between YO, I’M CRAZY BUSY DUDES and flaking out on the couch in front of wrestling DVDS. In deference to my current state, I’m going to skip today’s post and point towards an awesome thing on the internet: THE LIZZIE BENNETT DIARIES About four months ago my flatmate wandered past and said words to the effect of “Hank, The Vlog Brother who isn’t not John Green, is doing a youtube recreation of Pride and Prejudice. You should really check it out.” Given that the last time he said this it led me to John Green’s Swindowntown Swiddleypoopers youtube videos, I flagged it as one of those things I should follow up on and immediately forgot about. Which is, like, utter damn stupid of me. ‘Cause, a) I really like Pride and Prejudice, b) I really like smart adaptations, and c) I’m fascinated by people doing smart things that

PeterMBall 22/10/2012
Gaming

Running a Villain Audit

A lot of people have been offering advice since I admitted that the fights in my Mutants and Masterminds campaign, Shock & Awesome, haven’t exactly been up to snuff. I’m still in the process of compiling it all, since the conversation seems to have spread to multiple message-boards in addition to the blog, but it’s useful stuff (also, you guys rock). Hopefully, by the time I get around to posting the lessons I’ve learned after sixty sessions, things will have improved a whole bunch. ‘Course, given that we were on a three-week break from the game while one of the players is overseas, I’d already started tackling ways to fine-tune the campaign during the downtime. It’s one of the nice things about taking a break when you’re gaming weekly – it gives you the space to look back and reflect. In this instance I had a sneaking suspicion that my own habits were a  part of the dull-fight-scene problem, so over

PeterMBall 19/10/2012
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

On Writing In the Morning

Putting this one here as a kind of addendum to my last post: it’s time to start bringing the laptop to work and spending my morning writing-shift down in the State Library cafe. With everything being all NOW NOW NOW inside my head in the lead-up to GenreCon, it’s becoming increasingly easy to come into work early and start putting out fires (metaphorically speaking) related to the event. This isn’t why I come into work early every morning. Much as I like my job, I don’t like it enough that I’m willing to spend an extra hour a day working on it without getting paid (well, I am, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve stayed late to get some urgent stuff done a couple of times in the last month, but I’m not willing to give my job this particular writing hour).  The morning writing shift has become increasingly sacred to me over the last couple of months, which is weird, ’cause I’m

PeterMBall 17/10/2012
Journal

What it’s like to be me at the moment

8:02 in the morning and I’ve snuck into work early to get some writing done. This has become a particularly well-worn part of my routine of late – so much so that I’ve come into work early on days when I wasn’t planning on writing, simply ’cause my morning habit is largely this: wake up, noodle around on the smart phone for a couple of minutes, shower, breakfast, drive to work, buy a cup of coffee, write 500 words. Most days, that 500 words is fiction. Today, its blogging stuff, ’cause I’m prepping for November when I run a genre writer’s convention in Parramatta. I seem very calm on the surface, but underneath I’m thrashing around like a shark that smells blood. Or I’m kidding myself about how calm I seem, ’cause the crazy is very close to the surface these days, and it doesn’t take much to let it out. I know this feeling. I’ve felt it a couple

PeterMBall 15/10/2012
Gaming

Campaign Resource Round-Up

So this is a heads up for the non-gamer folks – I’m dedicating my Friday blog post to the topics of Superhero RPGs for the next forseeable while, largely ’cause I’m a big ol’ gamer nerd who enjoys writing about games (and, lets be honest, I don’t have the time to spend on gaming messageboards that I once did). What this means, if you’re not a gamer, is pretty much this: I’m about to spend Fridays talking about things that’ll seem a little…well, esoteric. The rest of the week, on the other hand, will be my usual mix of ranting and writer-geekery. CAMPAIGN RESOURCE ROUND-UP I’m fairly system agnostic when it comes to superhero RPGs. I’ve run a lot of them, accumulated the rules for a whole bunch more, and while I’ve finally settled on a system that works for me in Mutants and Masterminds 3E, I’m always interested in seeing how new superhero systems work. This means that my campaigns

PeterMBall 12/10/2012