Category: Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Forgive me, regular readers, but I’m going to wax evangelical today. Two days ago I installed RescueTime on my writing computer and phone, planning on using it as a resource when I start some heavy-duty process tracking next year. I honestly didn’t expect to be back here blogging about it two days later, but…holy fucking shit, I love this program. The impulse for installing it was pretty simple – I was having a low word-count week and I was interested in tracking exactly how long I spent at the keyboard in order to get those words. My sense of self is pretty-well bonded to writing productivity these days, and days where I don’t write a lot hit me pretty hard. I know this is a bad idea for all sorts of reasons, my subconscious cleaves to this philosophy despite my best efforts to change it. You are not working hard enough, it whispers. You should be doing more. So, fuck it.

One of the things I really miss about living in the same city as my friend Allan? He’s exceptionally interested in things. All sorts of things. And he accumulates people and ideas and interests as naturally as most people breath, which means he’s often the infection vector for all sorts of interesting things. Case in point: It happened. I became a pod person. SPECIFICALLY: THE ALLUSIONIST PODCAST Al put this on over the weekend and initially I was…well, ambivalent. I have flirted with podcasts in the past, but I haven’t actually listened to one regularly since I was unemployed and stuck at home 24-7 way back in 2010. People would occasionally tell me about great stuff that was out there and I’d nod, and think perhaps I should check it out, and never really get around to it. But the weekend started with Allan pointing out all sorts of stuff he was listening too, and it all sounded great. Then he suggested an

GenreCon kicks off at twelve o’clock today. Before that happens, I think we can all agree that this is sexy as fuck:

A few months back, Kathleen Jennings leant me her copy of Swordspoint on the assumption I’d probably like it. The fact that I actually took it is a pretty good indication I thought she was probably right, since I generally don’t borrow books from people I like. No matter how many times I point out, no, seriously, it will take me forever to get around to reading this, it never seems adequate to the task of explaining how long it will take me. Case in point: I’m pretty sure what I’m writing off as a few months, up there, is actually about a year. Possibly two years. It’s entirely possible that I’d forgotten I’d borrowed it until I came across it while re-arranging a bookshelf a few weeks back, ’cause that’s the way my brain works when it comes to unread books. Do not lend me books, is what I’m saying. But, maybe, go track down Kathleen and borrow her copy of

I meant to post this over the weekend, but…conference brain. Instead, you’re getting it here. *AHEM*…GO SEE THE ODD COUPLE I got interested in Neil Simon’s 1965 theatrical version of The Odd Couple after reading James Scott Bell’s Plot and Structure, where he goes back to the play several times when he’s looking for examples to illustrate a particular point. It stood out because The Odd Couple is one of those cultural touchstones, the characters of Oscar and Felix made iconic by the movie version featuring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, or the sitcom with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. And, like most touchstones, it’s been worth smooth and toothless by that long familiarity. This is not the play that James Scott Bell describes in his book. I went and Googled some details of the play and got…intrigued. It sounded smart. It sounded good. Then I discovered it was getting a run at the Queensland Theatre Company, and naturally, I

I was walking to work this morning and it occurred to me that Heyer-Punk is a genre that should totally exist. And not Steampunk flavoured books with a Georgette Heyer influence – those, I expect, already exist in some form or another. No, I’m thinking a genre that harkens back to the punk-suffix’s origins and blends Heyer and Gibsonesque cyberpunk to maximum effect. I’m thinking stories about the young heir of The Rivenhall Corporation, Chuck, forced to care for his wayward siblings ahead of his time. He’s engaged engaged to a cold cyborg countess, Genie Wraxton, and his younger brother is trying to organise some bizarre corporate buyout and his younger sister is throwing away her life with some drug-addled rock star. Then a young social-engineer named Sophie shows up and changes everyone through the careful application of her coding skills, extracting his younger sister from an unwise romance by manipulating the media, and wins Chuck’s heart through the deployment of freshly genetically

If you’re a writer and you’ve never read Caitlin Kiernan’s work, you should probably rectify that at some point. She’s an extraordinary writer who basically looks at all the things we think of as rules, throws them out, and creates deliciously dark and beautiful fiction. Easily one of my three favourite writers active in the world today, and an author whose books I think up without question every time there’s a new release. And if you haven’t read Kiernan before, I strongly recommend head over to Clarkesworld this month, as they’ve just reprinted one of the best of Kiernan’s stories, Riding the White Bull, in which she moves away from her usual brand of Lovecraft-tinged darkness and toward…well, go see for yourself.    

One of my favourite webcomics, Girls with Slingshots, finished up its run a few weeks ago. Some of the others that make up my regular weekly reading have announced their conclusion is coming up in the near future. This means I’ve got some gaps in my weekly reading schedule that I kinda want to fill in, since I’m a fan of the webcomic format and interested in seeing what people do with it. And since I am old and set in my ways, I don’t really go searching for new comics all that often. So I’m turning to you, dear peeps – recommend me some of your favourite webcomics in the comments and I’ll go check ’em out. To save some time, I’ve already got a regular reading list that I hit pretty consistently: PVP, Something Positive, Questionable Content and XKCD are habitually daily reads; Dumbing of Age, Girl Genius, Least I Could Do, Weregeek and a handful of others get