Category: Journal

I spent part of yesterday researching cocktails, for the fantasy element of Fairy Dust, with Whisky Chaser, hinges upon a particular character who makes a particular drink. In my head that drink has been an Old Fashioned, for I have a fondness for them and it’s a nice allusion for the problem that drives one of the characters, but the Old Fashioned is not an exciting cocktail. It involves no shakers or bartending shenanigans, just the combining of ingredients that ultimately become something delicious. So I spent an hour googling cocktail recipes, looking for something with more pizzaz. Came up with nothing, and stuck with the old fashioned for the moment. So I started figuring out where my affection for the Old Fashioned actually came from, and I think it can be traced to my friend Allan over at Type 40 (purveyors of fine pop culture artefacts and props) who drank them when I visited Melbourne at some point, and then

There’s an interesting post over on Lifehacker about the cost of electricity in Australia and why it’s unlikely to fall any time soon. I’m linking to it because how electricity is priced tends to one of those mysterious things that people blame political parties for, without truly understanding how it works, and it’s useful to occasionally get people thinking about such things. Then again, my dream political party is the one who runs on a campaign of we’ll tax you so hard it fucking hurts, but we’ll spend it on public services and state-of-the-art infrastructure for the public good. I am destined to be disappointed every election, even if someone actually runs on such a platform. Also, I am reminded that I really should be checking in on The Conversation (where the original post was sourced) much more often than I am. For example, this article about the characteristics shared by “happy city” Instagram pics regardless of which city is being

It’s a bright, sunny Monday where I woke up early and got to work on writing projects first thing, getting a bunch of stuff done before I sit down to write this blog post. It’s cool enough that I notice when I walk around without socks on, but not so cold that I regret this decision within an hour of waking up. Over the weekend I realised that the last three weeks have been rough on my mental health. This shouldn’t be surprising – end-of-semester marking is one of those gigs is custom-built to trigger all my anxieties: high stakes, tight deadlines, and you only get one shot to put together feedback that will help, and you want it to be clear because there’s no chance to explain or expand on things the way you do when critiquing stories for friends. All of this comes together to create a very muddied vision of what “doing a good job” looks like,

I woke up this morning and mainlined Rihanna’s Work in the hopes of easing my way into marking. Mostly, it resulted in sitting there thinking that the genres we once thought of as “popular” grew increasingly more interesting once the mass market collapsed and there was no need to produce hits that were palatable to everyone. People try and seperate technology and the market from the aesthetics of art, but they’re far more intertwined than people think. 5 assignments left at time of writing. If I can get my focus back, i should be finished tomorrow. # Robin Laws has a new book out, Beating the Story: How to Map, Understand, and Elevate Any Narrative. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I’ll recommend it to you right now for a very simple reason: Robin Laws is fucking smart, and he thinks very deeply about the mechanisms of narrative. Lots of folks who read fiction don’t know this yet, because he’s

The marking continues, moving into the final third, but things have now reached the Heart of Darkness stage. The cycle of the last week has been pretty consistent: I grade papers until my brain fries, then flake out in front of the TV watching bad movies until I fall asleep. There’s been no time for writing or research over the last week, and very few opportunities to leave the house. The system the university uses for submissions means I need to have an active internet connection in order to mark papers, and that means a lot of my usual change-of-scene haunts aren’t feasible. Net result: I’ve been getting a little stir crazy, and I’ve started ranting to my partner on a semi-regular basis (never a good sign). Fortunately, I was far enough ahead that I could afford to take today off and get out of the house. I headed for breakfast at the Low Road Cafe, went late-night shopping with my partner,

I woke late this morning, allowing myself a sleep in after binge watching teen movies with my partner overnight. It didn’t start that way. We’d kicked off with Gods of Egypt, Alex Proyas’ take on the sword-and-sandal epic fantasy, which felt an awful lot like someone’s Dungeons and Dragons game rendered on screen. The D&D player in me can usually take enjoyment from that even if the film isn’t good–God knows I have an affection for Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films for much the same reason–but things dragged as the film went on and effects budget took over from the narrative. I also think Proyas did himself a disservice with the casting. Not just in the whitewashing, but in actors like Brian Brown and Geoffrey Rush who felt out of place. Rush can do genre—I’m a fan of his turn in Pirates of the Caribbean—but he just feels off-kilter as Ra, and disappears beneath the effects. Brian Brown is so recognisably

I wanted to start this entry with I have just come back from a weekend in the mountains, but we returned from the mountain on Sunday and the fact that it’s now Tuesday renders the opening inaccurate. Instead, today’s the day when my brain returned from the mountains, kicking back into gear after three days away to celebrate my beloved’s birthday. It was pretty, up in the mountains. We woke to a sea of mist every morning, broken by occasional islands where peaks rose through the white. There were cows, and whip-poor-will, and access to a store selling a vast array of flavoured liquors and whiskeys. I drank far more than is usual for me, slept far less, and didn’t think about writing for several days in a row. A post shared by Peter M Ball (@petermball) on Jun 8, 2018 at 2:44pm PDT Now my beloved is in the next room, watching Kobo and the Two Strings on my recommendation. She

I broke out my RSS reader last night while sitting on the couch with my partner. I’ve been using Newsblur for tracking blogs ever since Google Reader shut down, and part of me still holds a grudge against Google for deciding that RSS was an archaic bit of technology they no longer wanted to support. I value my RSS reader to the tune of a yearly subscription, even during the lean years where it felt like an extravagance. My partner had never encountered an RSS reader before. The difference in our age is a handful of years, but within those years was the advent of social blogging platforms such as Livejournal and the eventual rise of social media. Things powered by RSS without anywhere near the level of control if you value the ability to curate and sort the flows of information into meaningful categories. Occasionally I read about the death of the blog. It’s all about social media these

It’s 3:30 AM and the insomnia has set in, creeping in behind a mild anxiety moment that hit about six hours ago. It’s 3:30 AM and the night sky is a dark, luscious shade of indigo that sits above the darker silhouettes of trees and houses and hills. It’s 3:30 AM and I wish the camera on my phone wasn’t broken, so I could distract myself with the attempt to photograph the darkness. It’s 3:30 AM and everyone on social media is recommending Safia Samatar’s essay about Why You Left Social Media, but it’s not 3:30 AM when you read this and if you were asleep then it’s possible you missed it, and so I’m going to link it here because it is quite extraordinary and maybe you missed it while you slumbered. It’s 3:30 AM and the guinea pigs are rummaging through their hay, unbothered by my presence on the couch with a clicking laptop. It’s 3:30 AM and the