Jobs and Money

Erin has a new job. She was offered the one she interviewed for on Thursday. She's going to be a PA to a bigwig at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Edinburgh. It's a 40 second walk from the station, which is cool, although she'll want to move back as soon as she can afford it.

I was overjoyed at this. Erin was happy, but less so. She wants to work in film. Film is where she wants to be. She's taking this job not because she wants to be a PA, but for the money. Which is fine. I'm sure that not that many people wake up one morning and think "My perfect job would be to assist someone." But she needs to take the money because we need to dig ourselves back out of debt.

The problem being that each day that she spends in a non-film job is another day she spends not getting closer to what she wants to do. She's been getting herself closer to getting film work for the last few months, and if she had a driving license she'd have had paid film work by now. Unfortunately, to get a driving license, we need money to pay for it. To get money to pay for it, she needs to be doing not-film work.

So we're left with Erin working for a few months while we save up enough money to get her a driving license, then working in a horribly low-paid film job for experience, then stopping when we run out of money, and getting a well paying job again, etc, etc. The main problem there being that part-time jobs pay remarkably badly, so it takes quite a long time to save up.

I hate having to worry about money, but I'm forced into it by the current lack. I sincerely hope that Erin gets herself a decent wage in a job she likes, because that would sort us out permanently. I'm just worried that things are going to drift on like this, leaving both of us stressed and unhappy.

Nobilis

I like gaming. I like it an awful lot. It's definitely one of my three favourite activities. I don't get to do it nearly as much as I'd like, and it sometimes doesn't live up to expectations, but when it all comes together, it's far more fun books or films are.

There's an awful lot of games out there that don't inspire me, for various reasons. That just don't inspire me with their possibilities. That don't have a metaphyiscs or a background or an ethos that make me want to live in them.

I've been looking forward to Nobilis since John showed it to me in a pub over a year ago. The whole depth and feel of the world are just inspiring, and things as simple as the margin quotes are making me want to play in a game that provokes this kind of creativity.

The game is due for release 'soon' and they've got the first chapter online. If you want to read the kind of thing that inspires me, you'll find it there.

Brain....Melting...

I was going into town to get the Sunday newspapers before the shops shut.

However, I'm now going into town to get some fresh air, because it's Saturday, and the Sunday papers aren't out for another 24 hours.

Feelings

You know, when Diana died, I felt a bit upset, mostly for the sake of her two young kids. But the Queen Mum dying made me feel precisely nothing.

I've noticed recently that 'sad' events frequently don't make feel sad at all. What makes me feel sad is the reaction of people to the events. So watching films in which someone is killed (unless I felt some sympathy for that specific person) didn't actually upset me, but people being upset by it actually made me feel terrible.

As my sympathy for other people has increased, I've felt more and more upset by the thought of other people being unhappy, and less and less upset by actual events themselves. I have no idea if this is healthy or not, and no idea how I'd find out.

Stupid, stupid companies

I like to think that the universe is nice and simple. That you can break things down into fairly simple rules that can then be worked with to deal with the world. Obviously, there are exceptions to these rules, but the sign of a decent rule is that it doesn't have many exceptions, and that those exceptions are fairly easily dealt with.

One of those rules deals with successfull business. You need to know your base costs are (building rental, management, etc.) and your costs per product (material costs, manufacturing costs, support costs, etc.) ,and how many people are likely to actually buy your product (at a variety of different costs). You plug these different numbers into a fairly simple graph, and it will tell you if you can actually make any money.

If there is no point on the graph at which your profits are actually above 0, then you don't bother forming a company at all. Obviously this is made more complex by the fact that other are going to be trying to grab parts of your customer base, but you can worry about that separately. First of all you need to know if there's even a possible profit there at all.

Now, I know all of this, despite just having lived with a Business student about 7 years ago. Which makes me wonder what the flying fuck is going on with the management at such companies as ITV Digital, Telewest and others. They appear to have business plans along the line of "Go massively into debt aquiring customers, on the grounds that once we have them we'll be able to sell them products at outrageous prices." This, of course, ignores the fact that customers can just go to a competitor instead.

Ever since the dot-com boom started, companies have been obsessed with lowering their prices to the point where they can make land-grabs, convinced that once they've got the customers, they'll make huge profits eventually. Nobody seems to have any idea how to actually make money out of those customers, and in fact to get out of debt, companies like Telewest are going to have to make thousands of pounds per customer. Considering that many of those customers don't have thousands of pounds spare, and that we're not in the middle of a massive boom right now, it looks like we're going to lose an awful lot of telecoms companies.

Not that I'm massively averse to this. Their infrastructure's will be taken over by companies that do know how to run themselves at a profit, and in the end, we'll all end up with decent connections. But I just can't help wondering what all those execs were thinking, if anything at all

Zen

There is a Zen Koan:

"First there is a mountain; Then there is no mountain; Then there is."

Back in the olden days of 1992 (and before, all the way back to 1970), I believed in concepts such as Good, Evil, Right, Wrong, Beauty, etc. I have nothing to say in my defence except that I was young and hadn't really thought about anything very much.

And then, thanks to my exposure to such books as The Principia Discordia and the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, I came to realise that all of the above concepts were entirely relative and had no absolute definition whatsoever. I felt entirely too pleased with myself over this, and spend quite a long time with my head in a whirl, refusing to believe in anything and generally feeling superior to anyone that did.

And now, a few years further on, the idea of total subjectivity seems normal to me. While it's the basis of my beliefs, it's not something I feel particularly strongly about, any more than the sun rising every morning is something I feel strongly about. It's just there. I've rebuilt my morals on top of this new basis, and by strange coincidence they seem to be remarkably similar to my old morals. Whether this is because both sets of morals are/were based on emotion rather logic is something I'm still working through.

From what I can tell, children are basically idea-fascists. They have definite ideas about what the world is, and how it works. The breaking down of those preconceptions seems like an important part of growing up, and understanding of the subjectivity and fluidity of the world seems like an important part of adulthood.

And it's gratifying and reassuring to discover other people who have gone through this before, and to watch new people go through it again.