Changes, or, Making the Most of Things
Oct. 10th, 2010 12:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarkprojectOnce upon a time, I considered myself pretty good at a few things. One was music. Although my short-lived attempt at learning music through the education system ended when I chose to give up the Music A-level and move to a subject I was more likely to actually pass, I'd been doing a lot of self-directed study into scales, modes, rhythms, and harmonies in my own time. That meant when I left university the first time around and found myself with many hours to fill I was able to knuckle down to writing some good music with some vague idea of knowing what I was doing. In the early years of this millennium I was quite prolific and managed to write a couple of decent songs each month, even though recording it all was difficult back then. I'd have the Squier Stratocaster going into an ancient 10 watt amp and then via a cheap karaoke microphone into the computer, recording guitar samples that I could play with in ModPlug Tracker. Necessity is the mother of invention, and invent I did.
Music was something I only really started to appreciate in my mid-teens - an early appreciation for the Pet Shop Boys aside - and the first real interest I had was in reading and especially writing. I was writing a meandering open-ended superhero story before I started school which I kept working on for years afterwards. It was never of publishable quality but it kept me writing and honing my craft, and eventually I had one English teacher after another insisting I should aim to write professionally, maybe as a journalist. My English Language teacher Mr Thomas at college was especially impressed with my writing skills and at the fact that I did so well with the A-level despite starting it quite late, having switched to English from Music once the latter choice revealed itself as one of my poorer ones.
So, with the exhortations of my English teacher ringing in my ears, I left home to go to university and do Computer Studies instead. The seeds for this were sown in 1988 when circumstance led me to befriend someone who had a Commodore 64, classic 8-bit gaming machine of the early home computing era. Strangely enough his computer was kept in the garage next to his house and that garage became something of a legendary hangout for the local kids, fully furnished with people's discarded settees and rugs, a kettle, and most importantly a wide selection of games for the aforementioned computer, including a couple of C90 cassettes packed full with pirated software sent over from Holland by a tech-savvy pen-friend. Back then with no internet to speak of (not that it would have helped much, given that the modems only transmitted 2400 bits per second) getting hold of games was almost always a case of buying them, so for children our age to have literally hundreds at our disposal on those highly prized cassettes was a rare wonder. Whether it was seminal titles such as Impossible Mission or Boulder Dash, now-forgotten oddities like High Noon or Blagger, or even dodgy animated ASCII-art porn, everything you could want was on those tapes.
Or was it? At one point one of the older kids showed us how he could type in some BASIC commands and make very simple games himself. This captivated me instantly, the result being that I programmed some simple games on that C64, and when our family got an Amstrad CPC 464 I was programming with it almost every day. I learned more about programming by reading books about it, and then did a Computing A-level where I learned about structured programming, and both during and after university I made my own games on the PC, this time with half-decent 2D graphics, artificial intelligence, sound, and so on.
Three interests, then : music, writing, and programming. But these three noble and creative pursuits are barely, well, pursued by me any more. Sure, the situation with my band is better than it ever was, and it's truly humbling to see that people have listened to my music in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Libya, Cameroon, Pakistan, and so on. But the EP is of 3 songs that I wrote in 2005 and early 2006, mostly written towards the end of my time on my Masters degree. I've not actually finished a new song for the band since November 2008. I am still coming out with material but I've had trouble piecing it together into coherent and complete works. If the band is to get anywhere that needs to change. As for programming, that's gone onto the back burner since I started doing that as a day job. It's understandable that you might not want to come home from a day at work and throw yourself back into an almost identical pastime on your evenings. But the problem isn't just that I'm not programming in my spare time any more, it's that I don't get the inspiration for things to program like I used to. On the various online game development forums it's taken as a truism that ideas for computer games are worthless since everybody has loads of ideas, but these days I find myself reading that and wishing that I had those ideas. It never used to be a problem, back when I'd regularly dream up something I'd like to see and then attempt to code it on the Amstrad straight away, but today the muses remain very tight-lipped. And as for writing, despite having a decent idea for a fantasy novel half planned out, about the only real writing I do today comes in the form of long-winded LiveJournal posts. Like this one.
Time is a big issue. Since the summer of 2005 I've been in full-time employment, and that takes a massive chunk out of your day. You work 8 hours a day, but you're also on a lunch break for another hour, plus maybe 1 or 2 hours of commuting time. Your capacity to create things is immediately reduced by simply not having the hours for it. While unemployed I would probably spend about 40 or 50 hours a week purely on my creative endeavours, interleaved with playing computer games and scouring the Wednesday paper for jobs. As a student I was probably half as productive, but 20 hours a week was still pretty respectable and I got a lot done.
In theory, I could spare 20 hours now, too. For example, 2 hours a day on Monday to Friday, 5 hours a day on the weekends. Some people spend that long watching television, so why couldn't I use that time for programming or writing or composing?
There is a book called Getting Things Done which is considered something of a Bible of productivity, and in it is a system for handling the tasks in your life to make you more effective at dealing with them. It suggests that when choosing a task to tackle, you need to consider 4 things in order: your current context (eg. at work, at home, at a computer, out shopping), the amount of time you have, the type and amount of energy you have, and the priority of the task. The issue here is the third aspect, that of 'energy'. This is a catch-all term for physical stamina, mental motivation, and your general mood, and basically acknowledges that sometimes it is very hard to make yourself do certain things even if you have time for it. And so it is with me: those 20 hours are being used on productive and relevant tasks, but they're low energy ones - reading blog posts about game development, watching tutorial videos for getting the most out of my music software, looking online for people and webzines to contact about my band, etc. These are all essential things that needed doing and which support the real work - except the real work isn't getting done any more.
As the last few years have gone on, I've come to realise that this would continue to get worse, not better. I could learn how to make better use of the time available to me, and indeed I have of late, but the motivational side would always be the killer. The important creative tasks are 'high energy' in Getting Things Done parlance, but that energy is sapped out of me by the daily routine and the rush to fit everything else around it. Doing this stuff often requires that you get into a state of flow and that is very hard when you're trying to snatch an hour of productivity here and there. Sometimes you need to see a task through to its end or you will have severe trouble coming back to it later, but unfortunately that is rarely an option when you have work in the morning and it's already 2am.
I used to look down on people who went through life settling for whatever job paid the bills, earning promotions and better job offers just to make more money, which would then be spent on televisions, cars, houses, and package holidays. They started as somewhat creative people - aren't all children creative, after all? - but then gave up any dreams for a life of convenience and mild self-indulgence, another cog in the capitalist machine, producing nothing of lasting worth. But as I get older, I can sympathise with them as I see the trap they fell into. The need to live somewhere and eat means you have bills to pay, which turns into you getting a job, which quickly means you don't have as much time to do the things you used to do, and so you tend to find ways of making your life enjoyable which are less demanding of time and effort, and channel your aspiration into improving your career status and acquiring better material goods instead. It's very hard to stick to being artistic or creative or even to further your knowledge and education in the face of all these pressures. Most people yield to the pressure, and I blame them a lot less than I used to. But I can't be one of those people; creativity is important to me. And complaining about other people's lack of aspiration gets you nowhere; as Gandhi said, you must be the change you wish to see.
So, with nothing else specifically lined up to replace it, and in a fairly bleak economic climate, I quit my job, handing in my resignation on Friday.
Let me take a small detour for a moment. When I was about 12, shortly after we got that Amstrad CPC 464, my mother bought me a computer game for Christmas called The Bard's Tale, a simple dungeon-delving RPG with random battles, much like the ones of today except with graphics akin to looking into a box of Lego. This game was slightly unusual in that it let you save your party of brave adventurers onto cassette. I also had access to an editor program that could move people and items between parties, so on a whim I put an advert in the Amstrad Action magazine's Classifieds section, offering a service to other players of the game where I could give their characters extra gold or new items, and charge them such princely sums as £1 for the privilege. For a few weeks a steady trickle of Jiffy Bags containing a single cassette and some quantity of sellotape-secured coinage fell through our letter box, and I would set to work on loading up their warriors and paladins and conjurers and outfitting them with Fin's Flute or a Puresword or Adamantite Plate Mail before posting the edited results back. This was my first taste of offering my services for money, albeit tiny sums, and I liked it.
I never wanted a conventional job. The idea of doing someone else's bidding without any pretence of personal development always seemed rather unpalatable to me. As I approached the end of high school I therefore vowed to friends that I would never get one. My opinion on this never really changed, yet real life intervened - as it is wont to do - and my first employment came as a reluctant web developer (the most common variety, as it happens). After that I had other stints at different places doing geographical information systems, embedded software, and more web development, all just to pay the bills. But I still thought about programming computer games like I used to do, and eventually those simple PC games I had programmed after university were enough to land me a coveted job in the game development industry, which was about as good a compromise between work and play as I felt I would be likely to find.
But at the end of the day, working for someone else has always just been about the money for me- not in the sense of wanting to be rich, but simply because the rent doesn't pay itself. I can't deny that having a decent income has been a big benefit in many ways, and employment (and especially this job) beat those long and miserable months I spent on Jobseekers Allowance, living in bad parts of Nottingham because those were the only places we could afford to live in, eating the cheapest and most unhealthy food available because you could buy twice as much of it, and knowing you were missing out on things by needing to count every penny. Being unemployed was miserable.
But being properly employed wasn't exactly the polar opposite. When I look back over the years since I left home, I was most happy in my early student years and later when I was working part-time - in both cases having just enough money to be able to afford to do the things I cared about, enough of that free time to do those things, and enough freedom and flexibility to do them well. So that's what I'm aiming at now.
Exactly how I'll make money, I don't know. I have a few vague ideas and will look into them earnestly once my notice period expires. For now, I have savings, and have high hopes that I will have solved this problem before they run dry. I am already preparing for my transition from being one of the highest earners in my social group to one of the lowest: today I visited the "Everything's £1" shop and reacquainted myself with the bargains to be had there. I'm sure I'll be going back over the coming months. I'm no stranger to thrift and I'm hoping those dark days of visiting the Job Centre and living in a semi-slum will stand me in good stead for making the most of the cash I do have while I work out how to eke an income out of my various skills.
That is skills plural by the way - although I've not decided exactly what route I'm going to take, I'm hoping to work on games programming, music, and writing, in a roughly 40% / 40% / 20% split. (You could say this post is me revving up the engines for the writing part, at least. Let me know if it's shit, and I'll adjust things to 50% / 50%. ;) ) I'm hoping that it's actually more feasible to live off three small sources of income than to try and get it all from one big one, and that there will be beneficial 'synergies' across combining the three areas, if you'll forgive me the middle management speak for a moment. But we shall see.
If nothing else, it's a good point in my life to attempt these things. I'm young enough to have not let these skills and my creativity atrophy, and haven't yet become tied down by a mortgage, a family, or anything like that. Yet I'm old enough to have learned a lot of practical knowledge in these three fields, and to have made useful contacts in them. I said to my boss that I may as well get the mid-life crisis out of the way early. As the saying goes, "if not now, when?" Now seems good enough to me.
Interesting times lie ahead.
Music was something I only really started to appreciate in my mid-teens - an early appreciation for the Pet Shop Boys aside - and the first real interest I had was in reading and especially writing. I was writing a meandering open-ended superhero story before I started school which I kept working on for years afterwards. It was never of publishable quality but it kept me writing and honing my craft, and eventually I had one English teacher after another insisting I should aim to write professionally, maybe as a journalist. My English Language teacher Mr Thomas at college was especially impressed with my writing skills and at the fact that I did so well with the A-level despite starting it quite late, having switched to English from Music once the latter choice revealed itself as one of my poorer ones.
So, with the exhortations of my English teacher ringing in my ears, I left home to go to university and do Computer Studies instead. The seeds for this were sown in 1988 when circumstance led me to befriend someone who had a Commodore 64, classic 8-bit gaming machine of the early home computing era. Strangely enough his computer was kept in the garage next to his house and that garage became something of a legendary hangout for the local kids, fully furnished with people's discarded settees and rugs, a kettle, and most importantly a wide selection of games for the aforementioned computer, including a couple of C90 cassettes packed full with pirated software sent over from Holland by a tech-savvy pen-friend. Back then with no internet to speak of (not that it would have helped much, given that the modems only transmitted 2400 bits per second) getting hold of games was almost always a case of buying them, so for children our age to have literally hundreds at our disposal on those highly prized cassettes was a rare wonder. Whether it was seminal titles such as Impossible Mission or Boulder Dash, now-forgotten oddities like High Noon or Blagger, or even dodgy animated ASCII-art porn, everything you could want was on those tapes.
Or was it? At one point one of the older kids showed us how he could type in some BASIC commands and make very simple games himself. This captivated me instantly, the result being that I programmed some simple games on that C64, and when our family got an Amstrad CPC 464 I was programming with it almost every day. I learned more about programming by reading books about it, and then did a Computing A-level where I learned about structured programming, and both during and after university I made my own games on the PC, this time with half-decent 2D graphics, artificial intelligence, sound, and so on.
Three interests, then : music, writing, and programming. But these three noble and creative pursuits are barely, well, pursued by me any more. Sure, the situation with my band is better than it ever was, and it's truly humbling to see that people have listened to my music in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Libya, Cameroon, Pakistan, and so on. But the EP is of 3 songs that I wrote in 2005 and early 2006, mostly written towards the end of my time on my Masters degree. I've not actually finished a new song for the band since November 2008. I am still coming out with material but I've had trouble piecing it together into coherent and complete works. If the band is to get anywhere that needs to change. As for programming, that's gone onto the back burner since I started doing that as a day job. It's understandable that you might not want to come home from a day at work and throw yourself back into an almost identical pastime on your evenings. But the problem isn't just that I'm not programming in my spare time any more, it's that I don't get the inspiration for things to program like I used to. On the various online game development forums it's taken as a truism that ideas for computer games are worthless since everybody has loads of ideas, but these days I find myself reading that and wishing that I had those ideas. It never used to be a problem, back when I'd regularly dream up something I'd like to see and then attempt to code it on the Amstrad straight away, but today the muses remain very tight-lipped. And as for writing, despite having a decent idea for a fantasy novel half planned out, about the only real writing I do today comes in the form of long-winded LiveJournal posts. Like this one.
Time is a big issue. Since the summer of 2005 I've been in full-time employment, and that takes a massive chunk out of your day. You work 8 hours a day, but you're also on a lunch break for another hour, plus maybe 1 or 2 hours of commuting time. Your capacity to create things is immediately reduced by simply not having the hours for it. While unemployed I would probably spend about 40 or 50 hours a week purely on my creative endeavours, interleaved with playing computer games and scouring the Wednesday paper for jobs. As a student I was probably half as productive, but 20 hours a week was still pretty respectable and I got a lot done.
In theory, I could spare 20 hours now, too. For example, 2 hours a day on Monday to Friday, 5 hours a day on the weekends. Some people spend that long watching television, so why couldn't I use that time for programming or writing or composing?
There is a book called Getting Things Done which is considered something of a Bible of productivity, and in it is a system for handling the tasks in your life to make you more effective at dealing with them. It suggests that when choosing a task to tackle, you need to consider 4 things in order: your current context (eg. at work, at home, at a computer, out shopping), the amount of time you have, the type and amount of energy you have, and the priority of the task. The issue here is the third aspect, that of 'energy'. This is a catch-all term for physical stamina, mental motivation, and your general mood, and basically acknowledges that sometimes it is very hard to make yourself do certain things even if you have time for it. And so it is with me: those 20 hours are being used on productive and relevant tasks, but they're low energy ones - reading blog posts about game development, watching tutorial videos for getting the most out of my music software, looking online for people and webzines to contact about my band, etc. These are all essential things that needed doing and which support the real work - except the real work isn't getting done any more.
As the last few years have gone on, I've come to realise that this would continue to get worse, not better. I could learn how to make better use of the time available to me, and indeed I have of late, but the motivational side would always be the killer. The important creative tasks are 'high energy' in Getting Things Done parlance, but that energy is sapped out of me by the daily routine and the rush to fit everything else around it. Doing this stuff often requires that you get into a state of flow and that is very hard when you're trying to snatch an hour of productivity here and there. Sometimes you need to see a task through to its end or you will have severe trouble coming back to it later, but unfortunately that is rarely an option when you have work in the morning and it's already 2am.
I used to look down on people who went through life settling for whatever job paid the bills, earning promotions and better job offers just to make more money, which would then be spent on televisions, cars, houses, and package holidays. They started as somewhat creative people - aren't all children creative, after all? - but then gave up any dreams for a life of convenience and mild self-indulgence, another cog in the capitalist machine, producing nothing of lasting worth. But as I get older, I can sympathise with them as I see the trap they fell into. The need to live somewhere and eat means you have bills to pay, which turns into you getting a job, which quickly means you don't have as much time to do the things you used to do, and so you tend to find ways of making your life enjoyable which are less demanding of time and effort, and channel your aspiration into improving your career status and acquiring better material goods instead. It's very hard to stick to being artistic or creative or even to further your knowledge and education in the face of all these pressures. Most people yield to the pressure, and I blame them a lot less than I used to. But I can't be one of those people; creativity is important to me. And complaining about other people's lack of aspiration gets you nowhere; as Gandhi said, you must be the change you wish to see.
So, with nothing else specifically lined up to replace it, and in a fairly bleak economic climate, I quit my job, handing in my resignation on Friday.
Let me take a small detour for a moment. When I was about 12, shortly after we got that Amstrad CPC 464, my mother bought me a computer game for Christmas called The Bard's Tale, a simple dungeon-delving RPG with random battles, much like the ones of today except with graphics akin to looking into a box of Lego. This game was slightly unusual in that it let you save your party of brave adventurers onto cassette. I also had access to an editor program that could move people and items between parties, so on a whim I put an advert in the Amstrad Action magazine's Classifieds section, offering a service to other players of the game where I could give their characters extra gold or new items, and charge them such princely sums as £1 for the privilege. For a few weeks a steady trickle of Jiffy Bags containing a single cassette and some quantity of sellotape-secured coinage fell through our letter box, and I would set to work on loading up their warriors and paladins and conjurers and outfitting them with Fin's Flute or a Puresword or Adamantite Plate Mail before posting the edited results back. This was my first taste of offering my services for money, albeit tiny sums, and I liked it.
I never wanted a conventional job. The idea of doing someone else's bidding without any pretence of personal development always seemed rather unpalatable to me. As I approached the end of high school I therefore vowed to friends that I would never get one. My opinion on this never really changed, yet real life intervened - as it is wont to do - and my first employment came as a reluctant web developer (the most common variety, as it happens). After that I had other stints at different places doing geographical information systems, embedded software, and more web development, all just to pay the bills. But I still thought about programming computer games like I used to do, and eventually those simple PC games I had programmed after university were enough to land me a coveted job in the game development industry, which was about as good a compromise between work and play as I felt I would be likely to find.
But at the end of the day, working for someone else has always just been about the money for me- not in the sense of wanting to be rich, but simply because the rent doesn't pay itself. I can't deny that having a decent income has been a big benefit in many ways, and employment (and especially this job) beat those long and miserable months I spent on Jobseekers Allowance, living in bad parts of Nottingham because those were the only places we could afford to live in, eating the cheapest and most unhealthy food available because you could buy twice as much of it, and knowing you were missing out on things by needing to count every penny. Being unemployed was miserable.
But being properly employed wasn't exactly the polar opposite. When I look back over the years since I left home, I was most happy in my early student years and later when I was working part-time - in both cases having just enough money to be able to afford to do the things I cared about, enough of that free time to do those things, and enough freedom and flexibility to do them well. So that's what I'm aiming at now.
Exactly how I'll make money, I don't know. I have a few vague ideas and will look into them earnestly once my notice period expires. For now, I have savings, and have high hopes that I will have solved this problem before they run dry. I am already preparing for my transition from being one of the highest earners in my social group to one of the lowest: today I visited the "Everything's £1" shop and reacquainted myself with the bargains to be had there. I'm sure I'll be going back over the coming months. I'm no stranger to thrift and I'm hoping those dark days of visiting the Job Centre and living in a semi-slum will stand me in good stead for making the most of the cash I do have while I work out how to eke an income out of my various skills.
That is skills plural by the way - although I've not decided exactly what route I'm going to take, I'm hoping to work on games programming, music, and writing, in a roughly 40% / 40% / 20% split. (You could say this post is me revving up the engines for the writing part, at least. Let me know if it's shit, and I'll adjust things to 50% / 50%. ;) ) I'm hoping that it's actually more feasible to live off three small sources of income than to try and get it all from one big one, and that there will be beneficial 'synergies' across combining the three areas, if you'll forgive me the middle management speak for a moment. But we shall see.
If nothing else, it's a good point in my life to attempt these things. I'm young enough to have not let these skills and my creativity atrophy, and haven't yet become tied down by a mortgage, a family, or anything like that. Yet I'm old enough to have learned a lot of practical knowledge in these three fields, and to have made useful contacts in them. I said to my boss that I may as well get the mid-life crisis out of the way early. As the saying goes, "if not now, when?" Now seems good enough to me.
Interesting times lie ahead.
