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Scott Pilgrim Vs. Youth

2010-09-07T20:10:58Z

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World was a film that chronicled my 20s perfectly. It was such tough luck that it had to go up against BOTH the Expendables and Eat Pray Love on opening weekend. Now I have to buy up everything Scott Pilgrim from the video game, to the soundtrack, to five minutes on the Scott Pilgrim Suicide Prevention hotline to properly show my appreciation. Thanks a lot, movie-going public.

The story of Scott having to defeat seven evil exes to date his crush should feel familiar for anyone who has had to deal with relationship baggage. As I watched, all these memories came flooding back to me. Playing the Rifts RPG with my friends in rathole apartments, losing at Dance Dance Revolution in Lotteria Cafe, and my hilarious attempts at finding relationships at parties and nightclubs. You have all this energy that in another time would have been used for something real, like fighting a war and raising a family. Instead, you’re stuck burning it all off on sports, video games, or some other cheap distraction. The surreal video game tropes of Scott Pilgrim mirror that fact. Most nostalgic of all was the high pitched whine of self-deception. Trust me, with no job and a useless degree, you’ll tell yourself anything to get through the day.

So here I am at 30, looking back at the last of my adolescence, and I think, what’s different? What have I learned? I met my beautiful wife (thank god) so I don’t have to bother with nightclubs anymore. I can’t stay up until 4 am like I used to anyway. That’ll come around to haunt me once kids are in the picture. I learned that you could love your job, but there was no way it was going to love you back. People might toss you aside to maintain their self-image, but don’t take it personally. If you meet someone that doesn’t do that, hang on to them dearly. Action is a greater virtue than patience.

I’ve probably got dozens of these fortune-cookie aphorisms buried away in gut feelings and subtle hunches. That’s the funny thing about experience. We say we’re free and individual beings, but we still funnel ourselves down the same old paths of life bordered in by our fears and unanswered questions. If we can face down those situations with no easy answers, keep trying to face down the limits of our experience, we just might eventually get to the truth.

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The First Board Room

2010-09-06T06:59:14Z

My first week in the Fraser Valley Self Employment program consisted of workshops in Business Planning, Marketing, and Competition analysis. My class was quite small. Four people, including myself. There was a Music Teacher/Producer, an International Tax Accountant, and a Senior Care specialist. The sessions were very information-dense. It’s scary to think how many entrepreneurs try to go into business without knowing how to do a balance sheet or register with all levels of government. However, I think our most important take-away from those workshops was not the knowledge, but a chance to get our first taste of the culture of business.

There we were, circling a conference room table with wildly divergent forms of companies. It was almost addicting to hear all of the concerns and strategies involved in all of our companies. Did you know you could clean a house with lemon juice and steeped tea? How about the SOCANN tariff, and how that will affect the music industry? Were you aware of all the bugs that exist in commercially available accounting software? Each one of us had something to contribute. The presenters had almost as much to learn from us as we did from them. With no titles besides the ones we had given ourselves, our knowledge was one of the only things we had that proved that we belonged in this program. Our eagerness to help was the other trait that proved our worth. Not only could we offer our skills, but our network contacts as well. As time went on, I felt as though we were all on the boards of each other’s companies, brainstorming new ideas that would take us all to the top.

For all the talk about rational self-interest in business, my workshop group felt like a very egalitarian place to be. We all wanted to help each other. Everyone was willing to share information, and they wanted to know what you thought in return. I’ll be interested to see my classmates in months to come after these workshops. Hopefully, I’ll even be able to send them a few leads.

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August 30, 2010 -- It’s Official (2)
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It’s Official

2010-08-30T05:29:13Z

I got the call Thursday that my SeedsBC funding was approved. As of today, I have stopped looking for work. I have a new job. For the next 40 weeks, I’ll be receiving funding and training to start a new web design business. For the next couple of weeks or so, I’ll be attending workshops on marketing, accounting, and business planning. After that, I’ll start calling up the sales leads I picked up during my application process and go on from there.

I feel like say something inspiring or Seth Godin-like about this, but it just doesn’t feel like the right time. This is not a product launch. It wasn’t even a tough decision to make. Freelance contracting made me money. Sending out resumes did not. I’m not exactly throwing off my chains and seizing the means of production. This is just the first, faltering step on a long journey.

Entrepreneurship, for the most part, is still something I’ve only read about in books. I have no doubt a lot of its details are obscured by the triumphalism and tragedy that makes for good business publishing. But I can’t give in to the fear of the unknown. As of now, there is no boss I can beg for my job back. I signed a contract with my government that I would give this venture my full attention. I have a mortgage and car insurance that can’t be paid with anything less than profit. It sounds like pressure, but to me it’s comforting. We spend our whole lives looking for direction, wondering where to put our energies. The only direction I have now is forward.

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No Bookstores in Abbotsford

2010-08-26T17:03:47Z

A common complaint about living in Abbotsford is that there are no good bookstores. We have four, but your choice is Coles in Seven Oaks, Hemingway’s used bookstore, the House of James Christian bookstore, and Food for Thought if crystals and tarot cards are your thing.

Sure, it’s an eclectic selection, but we’re a city of over 125,000 people. We deserve some kind of ostentatious literary presence in our town. I watch every big box development with baited breath. Maybe the shell of Linens & Things will be resurrected as a Chapters. Perhaps that giant red thing will be- aw, it’s just a Shopper’s Drugmart. It’s like we’re the town that doesn’t like to read.

To make matters worse, I think we’ve just passed the point where big box bookstores are profitable. Most of the books I buy are marketed and purchased entirely online. I see an interview or a video from the author and I just sashay down to the Chapters website where everything is (almost) always in stock and cheaper than the brick and mortar store.

Is the idle pleasure of browsing a bookstore doomed to antiquity?

Having an actual physical store is different enough from online retail that we should have them well into the future. The question is how to monetize real life stores. I think we’ll see something akin to the hyper-competitive retail market I saw in Tokyo. Every store had to compete with hundreds just like it in the area. There was nothing they wouldn’t do to try and get customers to spend time shopping. There were streetside barkers, brightly coloured (and colourfully written) deal signs, animated displays, and don’t get me started with the cross-promotion! Who would have thought of using a maid cafe to market transformable cell-phone robot toys? Whatever form brick and mortar retail takes, the common factor is going to be the passion of the salespeople. As much as I hate using that word, if you are going to sling books like a machine, you might as well get replaced by one.

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September 6, 2010 -- The First Board Room (1)
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April 28, 2010 -- Vancouver Cheap City (0)

Victimism

2010-08-25T15:20:25Z

I was tooling around on wikipedia the other day and found the page for the definition of elitism. On the right hand side was elitism in all its forms, classism, racism, even terms like heightism and mentalism. With all these ways for us to be more sensitive about people, I wonder if we’ll get to the point where no one has to feel bad about themselves, ever. I don’t think this is a good thing.

I can understand being comfortable with traits you can do nothing about, like the colour of your skin, gender, and whatnot, but what if we have to feel good about traits we can change? We need to have our flaws pointed out every once in a while. It’s what keeps us grounded. Being put down too much isn’t healthy either, of course, but if no one says anything bad to you, ever, what’s going to happen the first time someone tells you no?

I got teased as a kid. A lot. I still deal with those experiences to this day, but at the same time I’m also able to look inside myself and take responsibility for who I have become. These days, I don’t mind being teased by people I trust, because that’s how I find out my limitations so I can exceed them. To paraphrase Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, your real friends won’t accept you as you are. They instead will treat you as what you are capable of becoming, and you will become that.

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Sense of Entitlement

2010-08-24T16:25:54Z

Now, I trust all of you, so I’m hoping you can help me weigh in on this.

About once a week I see a thread on Fark.com like this one about a news story concerning youth unemployment, debt, or other factors in a failure to launch. Each and every one of these threads devolves into a raging flame war between people who believe young people aren’t working hard enough and twenty-something college grads who can’t get jobs.

I wonder why some people get so angry when college grads expect to get better jobs using degrees they paid thousands of dollars for. Why shouldn’t they? The government expects them to. Billions in student loans go out to colleges and universities every year with the expectation that they produce graduates that make enough money to pay those loans back. The US is facing another debt crisis because they can’t collect on these education investments.

Moreover, it’s not like getting a degree just involves smoking weed and arguing about Sartre. Students spend hundreds of hours doing research and writing papers in order to graduate. In essence, they paid for the opportunity to work hard at something. Does that not mean anything in today’s economy? Even if someone is over-qualified for a position, isn’t a degree a written guarantee that a person can get up in the morning and follow through with their degrees?

Probably not, given that there are millions of people out there with these degrees. It’s almost as if an important human element is now missing from the hiring process. We’ve put so much stock in degrees and certificates, but all we’ve done is create a soulless buyer’s market. Where is the future of industry going to come from if we don’t create a path for new workers?

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HST Rage

2010-08-23T04:22:18Z

At first I was ambivalent about the HST. I didn’t know exactly what it was other than a combination of the GST and PST. I bought my house before the summer to avoid it. I thought the HST petition would be “fun”, that it would be nice to get a break from the Liberal party’s hegemony. There is something about taxes that inspires populist revolt. We feel the Boston tea party and the fall of the Bastille in our hearts whenever a politician dares to intimate that the government be somehow paid for the services it provides.It’s beginning to look like the HST petition was more of a referendum against our one-party legislature and Bill Vander Zalm’s return to politics than it was about helping the economy and making sure we had jobs.

This is not to say that the government is blameless. They completely botched the media coverage. They thought they could tack on an extra 7% to many goods and services without anyone noticing, when they should have been up front about the benefits from the start. Now, I’m not a tax lawyer, but from the research I’ve been able to gather, we need the HST for at least three reasons:

1) To reduce the cost of doing business in BC.

Under the PST system, BC businesses had to pay taxes on every input to their business. This includes heat, electricity, machinery, and computers. The HST eliminates these taxes and only needs to be paid on the end consumer product. This means more money for businesses so they can grow and invest in such grand things as HUMAN capital, which means better jobs for you and I. Even if you don’t have a job at this point, you could start your own business and have less costs to worry about.

2) To simplify the tax code for businesses.

Bringing in the HST and eliminating the PST takes out an entire level of bureaucracy for businesses. This frees up time and money they can use on other aspects of their services.

3) To keep tax revenue flowing from a rapidly aging population.

Like it or not, baby boomers are retiring, leaving a massive income tax revenue gap. An increased sales tax is a good way to make up the shortfall without increasing the burden on young people.

We should have known that, but they never bothered to tell us. Why should they, given how we reacted when we found out we’d be paying an extra quarter on our egg mcmuffins? The problem is that all political parties see themselves as immutable, flawless institutions, not a bunch of human beings in suits trying to make decisions.

If the HST does what it’s supposed to do and we all have more income because of it, who cares if we pay a little more sales tax? I think to complain about it gives the government a little too much credit. It’s up to us to make real changes in government. The HST is but one idea to make the province a better place and keep our government from spending money it doesn’t have. If we don’t have a better idea to take its place, all this petition is doing is tying up our supreme court and generating a little schadenfreude for bitter Liberal opponents who couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery, much less form a government.

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The Age of DinoTown

2010-08-20T05:29:27Z

I read the story of dino town closing down in the Vancouver Sun yesterday. Really poignant stuff. The park had survived Time Warner pulling the Flintstones license out from under them in 1994. The original owners are now retired. Their son took over the park, but developed a benign brain tumor. Though he recovered, he sold out to a land developer so they could put an RV park in there.

I know this is how business works. The RV deal was the best the owner could ever have hoped for. My generation just seemed…so small when I read that column. The park was built for Baby Boomers and their kids. Now that the next generation has families of their own to entertain and share memories with- poof, no more theme park. The retirees need somewhere to empty their septic tanks now.

There’s a lesson here for us though. There are times when it seems like we’ll never top the Baby Boomers, let alone the Silent or Greatest Generation before it that fought WWII. We are taught that the frontier is over, that best we can ever do is to maintain the institutions that our parents built for us.

There may come a day when someone else builds a place like DinoTown, using intellectual property that’s owned by its creators and cannot be usurped by faceless Multi-nationals. (Time Warner itself is losing money hand over fist, proving that things like Multi-national corporations are a bad idea anyway.) Somehow, this is a clean break. It’s a reminder that our world is mortal, maintained by the constant care of people who love it and want to make it a better place. If we want places for our kids to play, good restaurants to eat at, and beautiful towns to walk in, we must look to ourselves to make all of that possible.

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Axe Cop vs. Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood

2010-08-19T18:44:36Z

I wonder if Axe Cop is what Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood had in mind when they talk about creative play for children. If you haven’t read Axe Cop yet, go there now to right this injustice. I’ll wait. See, he’s a cop and he’s got an Axe, and he partners up with all these superheroes to fight the likes of Dr. Stinkyhead, King Evilfatsozon, and Vampire Man Baby Kid. The kicker is that it all comes from the head of a 5-year-old Malachai Nicolle and drawn by his 29-year old-brother Ethan.

This comic is just pure fun. Axe Cop runs into wish-granting unicorn-babies, robot zombie worlds, and rides a rocket-powered dinosaur dragon named Wexter (who has guns for arms). Best of all, he defeats bad guys with his axe. Although this is all springing from the mind of a small child, parents groups would be outraged if something like this ever made it to television. The main character is literally an axe-wielding maniac. He uses violence to solve his problems, not words. His all-birthday cake diet sets a terrible example of healthy eating habits. Worst of all, he only has one girl on his team. Talk about gender stereotyping!

As long as I could remember, adults were always trying to impose their insecurities on kids’ playtime. I can distinctly remember as an eight year old finding out what the words “violence” and “influence” meant from a TV Guide column. GI Joe, Transformers and Robotech were supposed to influence me to commit violent acts. Even as a kid I could tell this was pure garbage. It’s a children’s cartoon, not mind control! In fact, I remember many episodes warning against the dangers of mind control.

The problem is we don’t recognize childhood for what it is. We’ve got this idea that childhood is an idyllic paradise free of problems where everyone plays nice and no one calls anyone names. Malachai is a nice, normal 5-year-old boy who did what any 5-year-old boy would do when presented with the opportunity of infinite possibility. He took the most extreme elements he could find in his world and mashed them up into a story that’s entertaining for him and everyone else on the internet. If we really want children grow up to be more creative and think for themselves, we need less social engineering and more Axe Cop!

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You Can’t Judge a Book by its Cover

2010-08-18T06:49:02Z

That phrase was a mantra to me growing up. It was trumpeted by every third children’s book, my school’s curriculum, and even a few He-man and GI Joe PSAs. I understand now that it was an subtle attempt by all these institutions to instill ideas of racial and sexual equality into my fragile little mind. For the most part, it worked. We don’t judge people or things by their appearance today. Unfortunately, we’ve gone so far as to think that appearance doesn’t matter at all.

You might say this is our society evolving. I say it’s willful ignorance. Why? Appearances are a part of our decision making process. You wouldn’t trust a personal trainer with a beer gut, and you wouldn’t step into a house that was swaying in the wind. How can we critically think if we don’t account for information we take in through our own eyes?

This goes beyond using appearances to keep our personal safety. The forces of aesthetics influence our culture to this very day. If we pretend they don’t exist, we can’t understand how our society works and we’ll ultimately lose control of our culture entirely.

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