Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Where I talk about books, movies, television, art, pro-wrestling and other forms of culture and pop-culture

Avril Lavigne Channeling Tank Girl? I Am Down With This Combination.

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

As predicted at the tail end of my Die Hard post last week, blogging service is somewhat irregular this week and we’ll be picking up on my narrative deconstruction of Bruce Willis’s greatest movie role next Tuesday.

However, ’cause I love you all, and because I’m fairly sure I’m about to put together a sequence of words that will make my friend Kevin spontaneously combust, I’m going to do a spot of youtubery. I was alerted to Avril Lavigne’s latest video clip via this article on SF site Tor.com and, for the love of god, it really is all the shiznit they promise it to be.

If you’re not interested in following the link, let me give you the short version (Kev, brace yourself): Avril  Lavigne and Danica Fucking McKellar  team up to channel Tank Girl while fighting knife-wielding Lobsters. Also, bad guys in gas masks. Plus, you know, self-referential meta-text as part of the set-up.

Presumably this clip could have ticked more boxes on my short list of automatic awesomeness, but that would require a) catchier music (Avril is still Avril, this is going to be all about the clip), and b) the producers delivering a crate of high-end bourbon to my house.

With that, I leave you to a few minutes of free-floating pop-cultural signifiers and visual awesome-sauce.

See you next week, when we kick off part three of the Die Hard posts.

For those of you needing to chill out a little this morning….

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My head is full of complex thoughts today, largely on account of the increasingly mind-boggling craziness of Australian and American politics, so I find myself falling back on the search for distractions.

Thus, you get a link to Kurt Kuenne’s 2007 feel-good fable, Validation, which stars T.J. Thyne (aka that guy from Bones who generally brings the awesome). If you need sixteen minutes to chill out and get your mind off the complexities of the world, it’s not a bad way to pass the time:

Completely Gratuitous Post of Newly Acquired Shiny Thing

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So I’ve got a whole bunch of work on my plate this year where the income that’s generated is basically earmarked as “paying for Peter’s travel and con expenses.” It’s the stuff that allows me to go to the UK for World Fantasy at the end of the year, to Perth for the RWA conference in the middle of the year, and generally acquire a couple of shiny things (passports, luggage) that will make the increased amount of travel I’m doing a little easier.

Today I got to pick up one of those shiny things that I’ve been patiently waiting to buy for a long while. Case in point:

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Picked this up on sale, along with a whole bunch of widgets, ’cause I’ve been looking for a portable computing option that isn’t Shifty Silas the Laptop. Something I can take along on those trips where all I really need is the ability to answer email, check out my RSS feed, run the kindle app, and occasionally update my website/mess around on projects stored in the cloud while I’m travelling.

That it’s the perfect size for reading digital comics is completely coincidental, I swear.

Right now I’m in the process of updating all my apps, and I’m in need of recommendations for Android-based word-processing apps that will allow for off-line writing (aka the one thing Google Office isn’t willing to let me do). If anyone’s got recommendations, I’d love to hear them.