Random acts of Ranting

Pledging My Allegiance to the Fake Geek Army

PETERMBALL Big Thoughts , , ,

There are days when I feel insufficiently geek.

Don’t get me wrong – I do plenty of things that are geeky as hell – I play, on average, 1.5 face-to-face RPG sessions a week, have a semi-regular influx of graphic novels appearing in my mailbox, and the staff at my local Fantasy, SF, and Crime bookstore know me on sight. I can just about make it through an entire week of wearing shirts with pictures of C’Thulhu on them without having to do laundry. When I run out of Lovecraft inspired T’s, I’ll move on to my collection of web-comic shirts without missing a beat. That should keep me going for a month or so before it’s time to hit the washing machine.

Two of my favourite TV shows are Justice League: Unlimited and Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. I just dropped a whole buttload of cash on the reprints of Larry Hama’s classic GI JOE series from Marvel in the 80s and 90s, and should you feel the need to question *why* I did that, I will fucking school you on why that shit is awesome beyond belief (hint: it’s so not the series you’d expect after seeing the words GI Joe).

The fact that I cannot find volume 7 of said GI JOE reprint series still bugs the hell out of me.

Plus, you know, there’s that thing where I write science fiction and fantasy short stories. And over 200,000 words of imaginary pro-wrestling fan storytelling that’s related to my only real computer game addiction.

By the standards of the rest of the world, I’m pretty damn geeky. I just…don’t feel it.

Now, sure, the list of geek things I *utterly fail to understand* is probably just as long as the things I’m a fan of. I don’t, for example, understand the appeal of CosPlay or Star Trek or, let’s be honest, the vast majority of hard SF. Stargate fans make my teeth hurt. Battlestar Galactica fans too (seriously, people, I’m glad you enjoyed it, but you’ll never convince me that it’s worth giving it another try. Please stop trying).  Geeks who don’t play D&D bewilder me. Hardcore anime fans? Look, I enjoyed a handful of movies in the early nineties, but don’t expect me to be conversant with anything newer than Astro Boy and the original version of Macross that got released into the US.

I can almost wrap my head around collecting figurines – almost – but the sole figurines I’ve got display in my house were either gifts or remnants of my childhood that I’ve kept around for sentimental reasons. Or, you know, gaming miniatures that came pre-painted. The original sculpt of the Huge D&D Miniature’s Behir was frickin’ sweet. I named mine Gomez and he spent years living on top of my CD cabinet.

Now, back to my point. All those things I don’t get? The people who do get it are slightly weird to me. As in, I know that they enjoy what they’re doing and I accept that they’re also a part of the geek subculture, but I don’t feel a bond with them, you know? They’re just people, doing their thing, same as I am.

And that’s cool.

Geek Culture is not a homogeneous thing. People who try to tell me otherwise are usually regarded with a strange mix of pity and bewilderment.

People who try to tell me it’s homogeneous while simultaneously perpetuating the stereotype of geeks as sexually-frustrated losers who are threatened by others get treated with outright fucking contempt.

If people are going to perpetuate the dialogue regarding “fake geek girls” and believe there is truly is such a thing, I hereby asks that I be included in the ranks of the “fake geeks.” I may not be a girl, but I’m totally down with being a member of the Fake Geek army. I mean, I’m okay with sharing a subculture with a bunch of people who don’t share all my enthusiasm. I’m okay with sharing a subculture with people whose enthusiasms leave me cold. I don’t demand that everyone I know understand the history of D&D and know how to translate words like THAC0 into intelligible English.

And I just can’t wrap my head around sharing a subculture whose primary modus operandi seems to be being an unbearable, sexist fuckwit. I mean, seriously, could we just not? I’m a white, university educated, middle class, middle-aged man – the veritable poster-child for privilege and rocking through life on the “easy” setting – and even I’m seriously fucking weary of the inherent sexism some branches of geek culture trot out on a semi-regular basis of late.

So I’m choosing to defect to the ranks of Fake Geeks.

At this point, it looks like Fake Geekery more my speed. I get to enjoy stuff I like without having to devote my entire life to it, plus I no longer have to swing around my geek cred like a club in order to prove my masculinity. This seems like a pretty good deal. Plus – bonus – it seems like I’d get to hang out with a better class of human being.

Now if only someone would offer a Fake Geek and Proud  t-shirt of some kind…

Why I’m a Fan of 2 Broke Girls

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , ,

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 that are occasionally brilliant but often problematic (glares daggers at Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother), and there a sit-coms that I regard as a guilty pleasure for reasons I don’t particularly care to examine (early seasons of The Nanny).

2 Broke girls fits into neither category. Instead, the quality of the jokes in 2 Broke Girls is pitched at the level I’d associate with, say, Everybody Loves Raymond or Two and a Half Men, where everything is largely based on the clash between stereotypes that range from the clichéd to the outright insulting. Not  really my thing, or the thing of most TV critics, but you cannot deny the smashing numbers those shows do in terms of drawing an audience.

If this is all the show did, I would have turned it off after the second episode. Instead, I kept watching for two reasons.

One: Kat Dennings

For a long time I kept stumbling over films that Dennings had been in and, almost universally, they were both better and more interesting than I’d expected. Not always brilliant, mind, but they pulled off the mix of entertaining and surprising that usually endears me to a creative work.

Thus, somewhere along the way, she became one of those performers whose presence in a film or TV show was usually enough to spark my interest.  The fact that she’d become a regular in a sit-com meant I was at least a *little* interested, especially once I learned that the series also featured Jennifer Coolidge (who has been increasingly typecast in recent years, but is still awesome).

I have a friend who, when we discuss my (many) problems with The Big Bang Theory, will point out that the main reason for watching the show is the cast performances. Good performers can make even average things watchable, even if you spend the entire time wishing they were given something with a little more substance (or, in the case of BBT, less ass-hattery) to work with.

Two: The Meta-Plot

The first episode of 2 Broke Girls features a disgraced rich girl and a snarky waitress meeting and becoming friends, deciding that they’re going to start a business selling cup-cakes. It’s your classic odd-couple pairing, and I quickly expected the business to quickly disappear into the background – a conceit to keep the character’s together while they went off and had whacky sit-com-esque adventures that would inevitably, feature a string of disposable boys and dating and romantic entanglement.

And sure, that happens, but…less than you’d think. Maybe one third of the series is about that, kinda, and even then it’s only really a concentrated theme in a handful of episodes.

Throughout it all, the dream to start a business remains front-and-centre and is actually charted by the recurring motif at the end of every show, where the last thing you see before the show goes off the air is a running total on how their attempts to gather seed money has fluctuated as a result of the episode’s events.

And that…that charms me. I mean, yes, there are many things that are horrible about the show and plenty of reasons to find it classist, racist, sexist, etc. Even the methods with which the girls attempt to make money are kinda farce-like and forced, especially since one of the character’s knowledge of business seems…well, haphazard and utterly at the service of the plot.

On the other hand, 2 Broke Girls is a sit-com aimed at a wide-spread audience that features two young women who are actively trying to build a business. Where the genre teaches you to expect the characters to be defined by their relationship to the men in their lives, they’re increasingly defined by their relationship with each other and the friends/mentors/co-workers that surround them.

It’s a show with two female leads who passes the Beschedel test and shows characters whose lives don’t revolve around romance.

And seriously, that’s kinda awesome, even if there are other parts of the show that are problematic. Much as I’d like the world to make a wholesale change and embrace a future where misogyny is gone, I’m also a fan of small battles getting fought on contested ground. After years in which sit-coms have kinda relegated female characters to some fairly reprehensible character roles, there’s a part of me that’s pleased to see this small battle being fought.

There are times when I find myself hoping this is much like the first season of Roseanne, another series with a rocky start that blossomed when they ejected the original show-runner and gave it over to Roseanne Barr. It’d be really fucking nice to see something awesome stomp the hell out of the various shows run by Chuck Lorre the devil on our airwaves.

Four Words All Creative Practitioners Should Live By

PETERMBALL Works in Progress, Writing Advice - Craft & Process

RESPECT YOUR GODDAMN AUDIENCE.

Okay, here’s your warning. I’m going to rant my fucking pants off in this one, ’cause I’m mightly passionate and this post has been sparked by something that really pissed me off. If you’d prefer to skip the rage, feel free. Go read something else. I won’t be offended. Just remember those four words, ’cause everything else is just a cautionary tale explaining why they’re important.

Respect your goddamn audience.

There’s plenty of reasons to follow this advice, but here’s the big one: if you don’t, there’s pretty good odds I’m going to hunt you down and carve out your fucking spleen with an ice-cream scoop. Especially if I’m part of that audience, and you’ve contrived things so I don’t have the option of leaving when it becomes obvious that your fucking lack of respect is wasting my goddamn time.

This one irritates me enough that it probably should have been a conversation with the spokesbear entry, if only so I can present the illusion of having an even keel, but the truth is that this is one of those things really pisses me off. I’m firmly of the belief that anyone who takes their audience for granted should be herded into an open field and hunted for sport, preferably by the audience members who were utterly ripped off by the creator’s complacency. There is no leeway there. There is no reasonable part of me when it comes to this. An audience is a privileged, not a right. Treat them as such.

This is not to say that you need to be brilliant all the time. I recently went to an open mic night that was marked with a steady streak of performers whose approach to the audience seemed to be a hearty fuck you, you’re stuck here and you have to listen to me. People were permitted to tell long, rambling stories without time-limit or, in many cases, a point. At least once I considered throwing a beer bottle at the performer on stage, on the theory that I’d either hit them and they’d shut up, or I’d miss and get ejected from the venue. Either way the night would be over and I’d be fucking free.

Instead I just sat there chanting Skip to the Fucking End when it became obvious that the rambling wasn’t actually leading to a point, it was just rambling. The whole demeanor of their performance said they didn’t give a shit about the people they were performing for, and it wasn’t just a case of nerves. If they’d rehearsed, they hadn’t rehearsed enough to be comfortable with their material. If they’d given their material any thought, they hadn’t really given it enough. Listening to them was excruciating, because the venue was cramped enough that there was no way of getting up and walking out until intermission was called.

It wasn’t all bad. There was one guy who’d rehearsed his piece and actually had some idea of how to work a crowd. His performance was great. Polished, entertaining, short. I’d go seem him read or perform again in a heartbeat. It was the performance of someone comfortable in front of a crowd.

But my favourite was actually the least showy performance of the night. It was the most nervous, verging on hesitant, and it consisted of a woman who stepped up to the microphone and told a story she’d obviously written and memorized. Occasionally she stumbled, occasionally she’d pause and struggle to remember what came next. It wasn’t polished in any way, but it was rehearsed and it was shaped and it was personal and it drove towards a poignant point. In short, they’d taken their brief for the evening and thought about the audience and respected them enough to prepare.

It’s about being good. No-one is good all the time. Everyone starts somewhere.

It’s about respecting your audience enough to show them that you’ve put in effort, even if you’re nervous as hell. It’s about showing up prepared and willing to do your best, not a half-arsed facsimile of your best.

You don’t have to be good at what you do, but you have to show your audience that you’ve respected them enough to deliver something you’ve put effort into. You have to appreciate the fact that they’re giving you their time and their eyeballs and their money. You owe your audience, your audience doesn’t owe you.

And if you forget that, then you’re in trouble, ’cause I’ve only got a vague idea where the spleen is located and I’m perfectly willing to keep digging around with that ice-cream scoop until I find it.