Anger is an Energy – Page 2

Journal

In which I am stupid

If you’ve never read the Persistence Pays Parasites entry of Cory Doctrow’s Locus column then I heartily recommend dropping over and taking a look. The short-version, for those without the time or attention span, runs something like this: Doctrow is a smart and internet savvy guy, but he got himself phished despite his high awareness of such scams ’cause they hit him when there was a short-lived crack in his defenses. Actually, let me quote the key message of the column, ’cause it’s worth repeating: Phishing isn’t (just) about finding a person who is technically naive. It’s about attacking the seemingly impregnable defenses of the technically sophisticated until you find a single, incredibly unlikely, short-lived crack in the wall. ‘Course, I still recommend going over and checking out the whole thing. It’s interesting stuff and it’ll make you rethink the way spam e-mail works (at least, if will if you’re like me and you assumed Spam merchanters were going after net-surfing

PeterMBall 20/08/2010

Journal

People Must Die For This

Over the weekend I spotted a billboard that delivered some very bad news: Hey, Hey It’s Saturday is coming back. Online research reveals they’ve been given a run of twenty episode based on the strength of last year’s revival shows, and that they’ll be aired on Wednesday nights in an act of true cognitive dissonance. Darryl Summers is still going to be at the helm, although there’s no news as to which female co-host he’s planning on denigrating this time around. I’ve only got three words in response to this: What. The. Fuck? I’m not entirely sure there’s a good way to explain the lurking evil of Hey, Hey It’s Saturday to non-Australians, but suffice to say that it’s got a fine history of being hosted by a malignant, misogynist gnome who simply refuses to die no matter how many fucking gaffs he makes over the course of his career. It’s a show that routinely built its humor out of the

PeterMBall 29/03/2010

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

A short review of Avatar in 10 parts

1) I’m going to find every mother-fucker who tried to convince me I’d like this film and I’m going to punch them in the arm. If they trotted out the “you just have to turn your brain off” logic, I’m going to punch them twice. I turned my brain off, as advised. It was still too stupid for me to actually like it. 2) To be fair, there were some good bits. Many of them recycled from Aliens, the last film James Cameron made that I actually liked. I liked Giovanni Ribbisi’s evil corporate guy far more than I liked Paul Reiser’s evil corporate guy. And Michelle Rodriguez in an ornithopter makes up for a variety of ills. 3) At the end of the first hour, I hoped that this might not be an utter disappointment. The opening is solid, the characters get onstage pretty quickly, the set-up is full of bad naming conventions but otherwise okay. Conflict is established:

PeterMBall 30/12/2009

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Books I Don’t Think Are Worth Reading, But Understand Why People Do: Twilight

So as a result of my request for female authors one of my off-line friends decided it would be a lark to say “you know, you really *should* read Stephanie Meyers.” And after the requisite laughter that follows such a suggestion, I said “yeah, right-o” and promptly organised to borrow a copy of Twilight from my sister (who had, in turn, borrowed it from a friend, and wishes it to be quite clear that this is not her book I am borrowing; she was lured into reading it by its popularity among non-reader friends, and her response to the novel are probably even more negative than most). To be honest, the book wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. I mean, it didn’t touch me anywhere inappropriate or threaten to eat my children or anything like that. It just kinda ambled along telling an familiar-if-unpretentious story for the first half in which Bella and Edward stay away from each other,

PeterMBall 12/08/2009

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Female Appreciation Month

So the erstwhile editor of Twelfth Planet Press, Girliejones, has dubbed this month Female Appreciation Month in response to the all-around sausagefest that was the Triple J Hottest One Hundred of all Time*. Being a fan of female musicians in various genres, my immediate thought was “sure, I’ll be in that” and I went and pulled about thirty-odd albums out of my collection to serve as my listening for the coming month. All involve either female singers or female songwriters. Being the utter High Fidelity loving nerd that I am, I’m trying to resist the urge to blog at you about the absolute awesome of every single album on this list with top-five lists and random gushing. I may well break at some point. Until then, you’ll probably see a theme running through the Friday Youtubery posts. And I should be rocking out with a month full of XX chromosomal goodness. *This list, incidentally, has completely cured me of this lingering desire

PeterMBall 14/07/2009

Works in Progress

More Horn-spotting

This time as part of a three book review on Mondyboy’s blog covering a trio of Twelfth Planet releases – Horn, Dirk Flithart’s Angel Rising, and the New Ceres Nights anthology (featuring work by a whole bunch of worthy peeps including Dirk and Angela Slatter). I’m officially locking myself away and doing minimalist blog posts until I’m done with the current Black Candy draft and the various trips to the hopital (and at the risk of being inappropriate I really hope the later resolves itself first – given the absence of euthanasia legislation in Australia we’re basically watching a family member dehydrate and starve to death, and frankly that’s bullshit).

PeterMBall 30/06/2009

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Dancing Monkey One: Watch The Middleman, you bastards.

A steady trickle of blog topics rolling in response to my offer to be a Dancing Monkey this week (though most come, as most of my comments do, through the livejournal feed). Pushes my thoughts in interesting directions, it does, with enough random writerly nonsense included to keep me going for a while. Logically they should happen in order, but I’m going to start with something relatively easy (because it’ll feed into a couple of other topics folks have suggested). To whit, Adam demanded “a public rave about the awesomeness of The Middleman.” This I can do, with bells on and a cherry on top. I can’t, apparently, do it without swearing and unleashing hate upon the world. Consider yourselves warned. My rave starts thusly: Go and watch The Middleman in whatever form that’s available, you fuckers, because the fact that they’ve only made one season of this show makes me cry. You should know before I go any further that I’m not a fan

PeterMBall 24/04/2009

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Because PIL had it right

I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I am, essentially, a person that wavers between the frivolous and the downright irate (and even the source of my irritation is essentially frivolous, when you get right down to it). I realise this because a week ago I made the decision to stop being lazy, and part of this was making a list of all those things that I keep meaning to blog about without ever getting around too it. It’s a big list, too – over the last couple of years I’ve had a lot of ideas pass through that have captured my imagination and had me thinking “hell, yeah, I really should say something about that.” The net result of this is a half-dozen files on my computer which contain the beginning, and even the middle of posts, but never really catch the feeling of being something I’d put up on the interwebs. So today I’m giving in

PeterMBall 21/04/2009

Tag: Anger is an Energy

In which I am stupid

People Must Die For This

A short review of Avatar in 10 parts

Books I Don’t Think Are Worth Reading, But Understand Why People Do: Twilight

Female Appreciation Month

More Horn-spotting

Dancing Monkey One: Watch The Middleman, you bastards.

Because PIL had it right

Book Information?

Need Help?

About Laautor

Support

Newsletter