Random acts of Ranting

What I Did on My Weekend

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption, Gaming , , ,

So, by my standards, it was an awesome but crazy-busy weekend.

Often, when my weekends are quiet and sedate, I feel like I’m letting the side down and I find myself thinking, “man, I wish I had a crazy-busy weekend, you know?” Then the crazy-busy-weekend comes along and I go along with the flow and then Monday comes and I wake blinking like a stoned raccoon wondering why I’m so tired.

I need coffee. I need to catch up on the writing that didn’t get done. And I really do need to schedule some more crazy-busy weekends in the near future.

The weekend itself is kind of squished together, a little, in my head. Things bleed into each other.

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Okay,  I guess the first thing is that I’ve been shortlisted for some Ditmar Awards this year, in both the Short Story category for One Saturday Night, With Angle, and the novella category for Bleed.  I found this out while having Breakfast with some friends on Sunday morning, largely ’cause I’d been light on the internets over the weekend, and on the whole it was a rather pleasant surprise.

So thanks to all the people who nominated me, and congratulations to the various other people who have been shortlisted. The full Ditmar short list can be found on the Natcon Fifty website and it’s a frickin’ awesome list this year.

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On Saturday night I sat down to watch the Evening With Kevin Smith DVD for the first time, which was basically as entertaining as I’d expected it to be after catching bits and pieces on youtube. Except for this one stretch which was profoundly uncomfortable, which is largely when a young queer member of the audience brings up Chasing Amy and how it contributed to a culture that made her life difficult as a younger woman.

The response is uncomfortable to watch. This is not to say that Smith doesn’t have some good points (Does no-one ever notice that the character who says “All lesbians really need is a good, deep dicking” is the idiot who is wrong about everything throughout the movie) and some that are straight off the back of the white male privileged bingo card (my brother is gay) and at least one that explains why he at least attempted the film that’s interesting (I once had a conversation with my brother about the fact he isn’t represented in narrative, and I try to change that).

But mostly  it’s just uncomfortable because there’s no real attempt to engage with the question before bulldozing through the answer. It’s one of those real I-had-good-intentions style responses that argues that good intentions excuse the faults.

And really, when you’re a geek, there are times when that does actually count as a victory, ’cause there are portions of geekdom that are scarily entrenched in their white-male-privilege and don’t want to let it go.

Which is why, a few hours later, I was really, really happy when a friend sent me the link to Bioware telling a white-straight-male to Get Over It when he complained about the possibility of female and queer relationships being given equal weight in Dragon Age 2.

There are exactly three computer games I’ve bothered to play for longer than 2 hours in the last six years: Total Extreme Wrestling, Blood Bowl Online, and the first Dragon Age. The mindset exhibited by Bioware above is one of the reasons why I got sucked into DA Origins for as long as I did. I’d talked myself out of Dragon Age 2, not because I don’t expect it to be awesome, but because it’s likely to be narrative crack that ’causes me to stop writing and lose my job.

That one response, linked to above, is probably going to change my mind.

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Okay, what else.

Saturday afternoon I did errands. I bought new jeans for the first time in about five or six years (which is one of those facts that’s readily apparent if you’ve seen the current state of my jeans, most of which have holes in them somewhere). In fact, since they were on sale, I bought a whole lot of jeans, which will cost even more to have hemmed (since I am not-so-handy with a needle and thread and thus happily pay professionals) than I did for the jeans themselves.

I bought some books at proper bookstores – Burn Bright, by Marianne de Pierres; Heist Society, by Ally Carter – then I went to my local Borders and watched the gleeful gutting of the stock by people who were all omg-the-bargins. It made me kinda sad, because I really liked my local Borders despite it’s flaws, and it made me feel sorry for the various people who worked there.

I still remember when they first opened the Borders at my preferred shopping center, and how awesome it was to be able to shop for books I actually read before picking up my weekly groceries.

I’ve already burned through Heist Society, which is just as awesome as Tansy Rayner Roberts promised it would be when she reviewed it on her blog. I would have burned through Burn Bright already, but this copy is a gift.

Sunday I went to Avid Reader and bought more books – the Collected Stories of  Gabriel Garcia Marquez (so I can read it at the same time as my dad), Motherless Brooklyn, and Yellowcake by Margo Lanagan.

There is something blissful about acquiring new fiction. Which probably explains my out of control To Be Read pile that’s taking up two bookcases at present.

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On Sunday afternoon I gamed with my Sunday Night Cthulhu group.

We’ve missed a bunch of games recently – due to illness, travel for work, celebrating the birth of one member’s son, etc – so there was something very comforting about slipping back into the Sunday Night Cthulhu routine, even though we’re not actually playing Call of Cthulhu at present.

One of the realities of being a RPG gamer in your thirties (and older) is that weekly gamers are supposed to be impossible, but at this point we’ve been gaming every Sunday for so long that it barely even registers as something as something remarkable. I can’t even remember when we started, although I’m sure it was prior to the first Gen Con Oz and a quick perusal of the blog sees things like “we kicking off the weekly Cthulu sessions after the xmas break” appearing in February of 2008.

Which means we’ve been going for about four years, I think. We’ve lost a player in that time, and recently gained a new one, but for the most part a  core group of four people has been there the entire time.

We played Cthulhu pretty much eclusivly for the first two or three years, hence the fact that Sunday is permanently branded as Cthulhu night despite the fact that we’ve slowly added more systems to the mix (Space 1889 for a while, currently Classic Deadlands which is proving to be 9 kinds of awesome).

Last night’s game, though. Man, it kinda reminds me why I enjoy gaming, you know? Undead revenants kicking the crap out of solitary gunslingers who got caught unawares; the entire team getting caught in a firefight against desperado’s who have the advantage of cover upon the ridge; a mad scientist coming to realize his blueprints are haunted because things keep changing while he’s asleep; the same mad scientist unleashing his flame-thrower for the first time, going a little crazy as he does so.

There is nothing quite so awesome as knowing I get to game with these folks every week, especially since we’re largely in agreement as to the kind of game we want to play.

Situation Comedy, Redux

PETERMBALL Big Thoughts , , , , ,

To give you fair warning, this is a cranky post. It’s possible I’ll swear. Often. Loudly. You have been warned.

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One of the more interesting threads running through the comments on yesterday’s post, both here and over on Facebook, was this attitude that sitcoms are inherently limited and/or required to suck by virtue of the genre conventions they operate under.

To which I respond, no, fuck that, genres are as limited as we want them to be, pleas take your they-cater-to-the-masses-and-therefore-must-suck class-oriented modernist bullshit to someone else’s discussion. ‘Cause, you know, that kind of attitude is the reason we get bad science fiction, bad romance, bad action-adventure films, and pretty much everything else. You reap what you sow, in that respect, and unless you’re willing to ask for more it’s unlikely you’ll ever get it.

I no more accept the inevitable suckiness of sit-coms than I do the argument that Avatar needed to be a three-hour exercise in narrative tedium; it sucked because stupid choices were made, not because of some inherent fault of the  genre.

Take, for example, How I Met Your Mother. It’s not a show that’s without faults – I’d direct you to Cat Valente’s excellent take-down of the shows central premise – but for a considerable period of time it managed to be funny and geeky and not treat it’s audience like idiots. I can point you to precisely the moment it became a show I looked forward to, rather than this thing I happened to watch, which is right about the point in the second season where they closed an episode with Marshal slapping Barney well after the  Slap Bet episode where the joke was set-up. It was simple and beautifully done. Slap. “That’s two.” Done. No references to the Slap Bet to set things up, no flash-backs to the previous episode, just the show writers  trusting you to remember something that happened earlier in the seasons and get the joke.

Nothing appeals to me more than writers assuming I’m not an idiot. It’s the thing that, say, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie got wrong, because ever time they made that kind of reference the writer’s were sitting next to you, nudging you in the ribs, going “hey, we mentioned Phineas Fog, from Around the World in Eighty Days, get it? Get it? We’re being metatextual here.”

Metatext doesn’t work when you say you’re being metatextual. It just annoys the fuck out of people. In this respect, I can point to them moment when I realised How I Met Your Mother stopped being a show I really looked forward to, and became just another show I watch when it’s on. It’s called the second Slapsgiving episode (If they do a third Slapsgiving, the show will join the ranks of shows officially be dead to me, and I will be happy with the two enjoyable season, one okay season, and one sub-par season I’ve seen thus far).

There’s a sliding scale on all these things. I find Big Bang Theory‘s underlying narratives abhorrent, for example, but I’ll still watch it because it’s doing something mildly more interesting with the same core theme than, say, Everybody Loves Raymond or Two and a Half Men.

There are also different kinds of audiences – not everyone enjoys metatext as much as I do, nor do they sit there chanting interrogate your fucking theme, you fuckers when shows get particularly annoying. I have no problems with shows pitching to a particular audience, but I reserve the right to get annoyed when they start pandering to them.

There are no good sitcoms. Sitcoms are inherently limited by their format. These aren’t arguments, they’re an admission of defeat. They’re willing acknowledging that we expect so little from our entertainment that the only real response is to shrug and kill off a few more braincells in the hopes that one day we’ll see movies the same way whatever those mythical test-audiences who kill anything smart do.

I’d ask you to stop being part of the fucking problem and start engaging. Acknowledge the problems with individual narratives, individual shows, individual characters, instead of writing off entire genres. Find smart people who love the genre and ask their recommendations (this, coincidentally, is how I found romance writer Georgette Heyer, who is mindblowingly fucking awesome).

Quality is not mediated by genre, nor is the ability to create smart and interesting narrative. The *willingness* to pitch smart narrative, sure, but that’s the writer’s choice when faced with the audience, just as it’s mine to watch and say hey, man, this shit isn’t on, in the hopes that if enough people say it loudly enough, one day things will change.

To argue otherwise is to mire you in the kind of close-mindedness you’re trying to rail again when you condemn the genre as a whole.

Why I Have Problems With the Big Bang Theory

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , ,

I frequently find myself watching The Big Bang theory, finding it funny, then  hating myself for it. I mentioned this on the twitters and facebook yesterday, which immediately had a group of people saying, in essence, why, dude, it’s actually funny? And, yes, it is. There are times when it’s absolutely smart and entertaining, and I watch it for these moments because they’re a kind of humor that makes me happy and speaks to me as a man who self-identifies as a geek and enjoys being part of an active geek subculture. It’s a show that’s very, very good at doing that, creating little in-jokes among the broader strokes.

It’s also a who willing to play to deeply entrenched cultural myths about geeks and women, which makes me less happy, and in some points outright angry.

The default narrative of the show is generally one that posits all geeks are children looking for a mother figure and the bulk of the female characters with any depth are either caring mother-replacements (Penny, Leonard’s girlfriend from season two, Shelton’s actual mother) or emasculating shrews (Leonard’s mother, Raj’s mother, Howard’s mother – are you seeing a theme here? – Leslie Winkle, and ironically, Shelton’s mother due to her ability to countermand Shelton’s self-built idea of masculinity based around intellect).

The remaining female characters that appear in the series are generally there to be gratuitously objectified and competed for by the male cast, thus serving as a means of proving their masculinity and “growing up” (see Shelton’s sister and Penny’s friend from Nebraska) or non-idealized sexual partners who are characterized by their non-threatening naivety (Howard’s girlfriend Bernadette in season three).

The core cast of Male characters don’t actually fare much better: they’re infantilized by their interests, by their inability to get women (problematic, in and of itself), by their heights, by their familial relationships, but their inability to do their jobs correctly (Leonard’s research is derivative, Raj’s hypothesis is disproved, Howard fucks up every engineering prospect he comes up with), by their lack of knowledge about non-geek popular culture (I mean, really, geeks tend to know radiohead is a band). They’ve been neatly cut off from any traditional notions of the masculine, which would be fine if 90% of the show’s narrative wasn’t focused on three of the four trying to prove their masculinity through having sex while the fourth is determined to prove it through constantly being right.

Essentially the show strives to create a contemporary tribe of Lost Boys adopting a Wendy as a mother figure, except that only works in the case of Sheldon who actually is a childish innocent because the others all have deeply fucked up relationships with women (Which is not to say Sheldon doesn’t, but at least his relationship with women isn’t defined by sex).

We won’t even speak of the Howard-and-Raj-Are-a-dysfunctional-gay-couple thing they’ve started playing with. It was unpleasant-but-tolerable when it was a joke being played out in the episodes featuring Leonard’s mother, it was less tolerable when it became a recurring part of the narrative.

Yes, there are individual episodes where they seem to get it right. I breathed an audible sigh of relief the first time they introduced Stuart the comic shop guy, who spent his first few appearance being self-assured enough to flirt with Penny even if he exhibited signs of nervousness about the actual date. “He runs a successful small business,” Leonard opines, “he’s a talented artist. Not all geeks are like Captain Sweatpants over there.”

And I was like, “man, finally, it’s about fucking time.”

Of course, Stuart serves his narrative purpose, getting Penny together with Leonard, and the next time he appears he’s a lonely and isolated man who obsesses over Penny and  shares his Friday night meals with a stray cat.

And really, fuck that shit. All of it.

The show is largely redeemed by solid casting, the episodes where the writing is genuinely smart and interested in laughing with the geeks rather than at them, and very occasionally by the presence of guest stars from the cast of Roseanne (lets face it, any television show that puts Laurie Metcalf back on television gets something of a pass).

But beneath it all is a series of narrative assumptions I find deeply, deeply uncomfortable, and it seems to be getting worse rather than better. Sooner or later they will hit the point where the stupid outweighs the smart, and then I’ll be forced to stop watching lest I throw things at the television.

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Friday night I went to check my PO Box and discovered a cheque I forgot was coming, which was kinda nice, then got home to the news of the Japanese earthquake and Pacific Ocean tsunami’s, which was less nice and kinda put a downer on the evening overall. There’s news on the latter everywhere at the moment, so I won’t repeat what’s readily available. There is, as always, Red Cross donations that can be made to help those affected.

Later, after absorbing the news via twitter, I paid far to much for the least appealing take-away Butter Chicken of my life, but ate it anyway ’cause, well, it was butter chicken. Then the news of the explosions in the nuclear reactor started filtering in.

I don’t watch television anymore, nor to I read newspapers, so world news and I have a very strange relationship. Information tends to flow in through the communication in online mediums – twitter, facebook, blogs, etc – which means simultaneously seem better and worse than they appear to be depicted in traditional media. There are portions of my friends list that are all lo, the nuclear Apocalypse is upon us, and there are those linking to things like this post over at Genki English.

I expect that if I were watching traditional media, I’d be a nervous wreck right now. At this point, I’m just watching the internet and waiting further developments.