Life

[Moelman]

Anybody going to ComicCon this year?

I really wish I was. I went for a day last year, and I was in San Diego in May and June, sucks that I had to come back home earlier than last year. Aside from just wanting to go in general, there's all the stuff going on for Scott Pilgrim this year which I'd love.

[syntheticgerbil]

Okay that's it, I'm going to put in my two weeks on the 9th with no job lined up but lots of new portfolio work to put up and a little bit of saved money. Too time consuming to work and try to get these personal projects and put a display together of myself. I hope I don't fall into a pit.

[Armchair General]

Okay that's it, I'm going to put in my two weeks on the 9th with no job lined up but lots of new portfolio work to put up and a little bit of saved money. Too time consuming to work and try to get these personal projects and put a display together of myself. I hope I don't fall into a pit.

You're quitting your job and going it alone? Good luck:tup:

Alternatively, I have misinterpreted and the two weeks thing is not you handing in your notice.

[Thompson]

Okay that's it, I'm going to put in my two weeks on the 9th with no job lined up but lots of new portfolio work to put up and a little bit of saved money. Too time consuming to work and try to get these personal projects and put a display together of myself. I hope I don't fall into a pit.

Ydb7S2DA4SI

Don't know if that will depress you or inspire you but I immediately thought of it.

[syntheticgerbil]

Alternatively, I have misinterpreted and the two weeks thing is not you handing in your notice.

Nah, I'm going to leave, I'm sort of going bonkers where I work and I want to move on to something in a "higher tier." It's super risky. If I fail, maybe I need to switch careers and turn drawing and animating into a hobby. I guess I'll see.

Ydb7S2DA4SI

Don't know if that will depress you or inspire you but I immediately thought of it.

I'll go with inspiring. Thanks!

[Murdoc]

Fuck My Fucking Life

That'll be the title of my non-existent book if it isn't already taken. Turns out I did get into school, I've been thinking about off and on for 3 years now and got serious last summer. It's been a really long wait and a lot of hard work to get excepted into a class of 30 accepted students once a year.

I thought that was the hard part and getting money to go to school would be easy. I paid back all my previous loans, I have outstanding credit, and had a surplus of cash last year that unfortantly had to be spent because I had one shitty year, but whatever, what's a little more money in loans compared to the big picture? So good bye job, good bye Montreal, and off to Vancouver!

Well, apparently someone with outstanding credit, who paid back all his students loans isnt worth shit to banks, they look at my co-borrower... ok so I need a co-borrower, well that sucks. Oh wait, everyone in my family is a fucking deadbeat on their last dime so Im totally shit out of luck.

I am supposed to start school in a month (granted this is a bit of my fault for being so niave of the banking system) and just finding out now (slow fuck banks) that I cant get any money to actually live (like eating and sleeping in shelter) to fucking go.

Just fucking super. If I dont hang myself by September I guess itll be back to work for me with whatever company will take me.

fuck my fucking life.

[Armchair General]

Holy shit Murdoc that sounds horrendous. We have a student loan system over here, I don't suppose that operates in Canada? Could you fit a part time job into your studies at all?

Shit man, I don't know what to suggest really, other than to say, it's normal to feel the way are feeling about it, most people would feel helpless in that situation.

Hopefully something will turn up for you

[Murdoc]

Yeah sorry for the angry, half drunk post, but I'm currently "living" with my grandparents and haven't been able to completely lose it in real life though I was/am pretty close to it.

WE have provincial/Federally funded loans, which I have and is what is paying my tuition, what I need is bank loans for living expenses. My program, as flimsy as it sounds, is actually pretty tough, we're not supposed to have jobs and we should be working 12-14 hour days 7 days a week.

This may be looking up today as I found a bank that seems to be giving me a good deal, however I think over the last half decade of working in a pretty profitable industry my interpretation of monthly payments has been totally skewed. So just trying to get in touch with my family to see if they can even qualify for this... I hope so, i'd be hilarious/awful to be stopped at this point over not having someone able to qualify for $124 a month. (long story short in order to get the loan I need to at least make it through the first year I need to know someone who has an extra $124 a month... they don't need to pay that money or spend any money of their own, they just need to have that money to qualify as "good credit". Again, to me, I think I've spent more money on pop and chips a month when I was working... for my family that might be out of their league.)

[Thompson]

So I heard today that my nanna died, she'd been in a home for a few years after she had a stroke. I didn't see her too much but i'll miss her, she was a pretty amazing woman, today happened to be her 91st birthday and until she had her stroke she still lived by herself and was really active. The funeral is Thursday and i'm not sure if I can go, i've always hated funerals.

Also, my favorite podcast died. So fuck Chris.

[Thyroid]

You know, I don't envy most of you. Best of luck to you all. But I thought I'd say something...

I'm fixing my life. I blew it up, fixed it, blew it up again and I've been taking four steps forward, three steps back. Things can and will improve if you set your mind to it. I know that sounds cheap, but it's true. It really is true. If I can do it - and I am a backwards swamp creature, alright? You couldn't spread what was good about me over burnt toast - then anyone can.

Again, best of luck to you all.

[Nachimir]

I am a backwards swamp creature, alright? You couldn't spread what was good about me over burnt toast - then anyone can.

Based solely on what you post, I don't believe that at all Kroms. You seem like a nice guy.

[Sombre]

For what it's worth Murdoc, I'm sure we're all wishing you well.

[MrHoatzin]

Murdoc, dude, you should apply for all kinds of financial aids even those you think you may not qualify for. When I was starting college, I didn't think someone with my visa status could qualify as a permanent resident for the purposes of student aid and in-state tuition, however my father made me apply anyway for all the standard governmental grants and loans and it turned out I did, in fact, qualify. Shit could still turn out just fine with the family cosigners. And even then, I doubt all avenues are really depleted.

[Nachimir]

Kingz speaks wisely, it's worth applying for everything you can to make it happen, and talking to as many people as possible, nicely, who could help.

[Raff]

I seem to have successfully changed my degree field at the end of my second year of University. I hope this has actually happened. I don't believe it yet.

[Murdoc]

Thanks everyone and, again, sorry for just the crappy rants most of the time. I never seem to have good news, but I'll just post a quick thumbs up and thumbs down when I find out about the funding. I think I can have the first term and possibly second covered, so I'll figure out what to do for next year and the year after next summer.

Thompson; sorry to hear about your gran, I'm not big on funerals either, no matter how much I cared for the person, it was always a bit too much for me.

Raff: what are you switching to?

[Raff]

I was doing French and Publishing combined. Did well in both in the first year. In second year publishing goes on hold and I did an internship in Paris which I can't really complain about. The work (or rather the distinct lack of it day after day in an isolated office) was boring as hell but well paid enough that I lived entirely off it for the whole year which is unusual.

I won't bore you with the many many additional reasons why I changed, but the straw that broke the camel's back was that the couple of projects I was set to do during the year were the most pointless pathetic drivel, which depressed me a lot and made me realise how uninspired the previous year had been as well. To give some idea, my tutor said to me in person a month before one of the projects was due that they wouldn't be using the same book again the next year because it was irrelevent. But of course I still had to use it.

Publishing (book & news/magazine publishing industries) on the other hand, which I'd pretty much chosen on a whim as an accompniment to French, had been a revelation with really interesting well resourced lectures, guest lecturers from the industry almost every week etc. It's just a world away from the experience of studying French which is just the same shit as GCSE and A-level. I'm not taking on £15k+ debt and two more years of my life for that while all my friends graduate and move on. I didn't meet any interesting people studying French, I met tons in Publishing.

I can speak, read and understand French to a level I'm very happy with and there aren't really that many language jobs for mother-tongue english speakers unless you go to a much more advanced level than I think I ever can. All the linguists I meet speak 3 or more languages, I only speak English and French and don't have the stamina to study more languages and do translation Masters etc. I got screwed out of being able to also learn Spanish at school due to timetabling bullshit.

I looked into the practicality of changing and it looks like I'll only have to trail one missing module so it'll almost be like starting the second year of a normal 3 year publishing degree.

Good luck Murdoc! No idea how the systems work over there but like the others I'd definitely suggest asking about bursaries/scholarships. It's what they're for and I'm always hearing about people getting them somehow.

In the UK, generally anyone who gets into higher enducation can at least take out interest-free (not inflation-free ) loans to pay for the institution and a maintenance loan each year that covers about 4-5 months of rent. People from 'Lower income households' have varying amounts of that loan as a grant instead. You only have to pay back the loans once you have a job and earning something like £15-20k a year. Until a few years ago the government paid the institution fees.

[monkeyarmada]

So I heard today that my nanna died, she'd been in a home for a few years after she had a stroke. I didn't see her too much but i'll miss her, she was a pretty amazing woman, today happened to be her 91st birthday and until she had her stroke she still lived by herself and was really active. The funeral is Thursday and i'm not sure if I can go, i've always hated funerals.

Also, my favorite podcast died. So fuck Chris.

Dude, that's some shitty news, I lost my grandfather last year, a similar situation to your nanna. The funeral was such a hard thing to attend but I'm so glad I did, I got a much better picture of my Grandfather, as a husband and a father, all the things you don't really appreciate when they are still around.

best wishes dude.

[Murdoc]

Yeah, from an outsider standpoint publishing sounds more interesting then just French... though knowing the language to a well enough degree to speak and write it is on my life list, hehehe.

Aside from the basic jobs I would know(editor?) in publishing, what sorts of things are there in that world? And what's your day to day like in those jobs?

Kind of curious about the whole books/magazine side of things.

[Raff]

I'm not sure I'll be working in book/mag/news publishing ultimately, I see it more as something I find interesting with useful skills to learn along the way, wide relevance and decent potential job connections if I do decide to go after them (UK publishing industry is still a big deal, unlike a lot of other industries...). It's a good time to be studying it because the print industry is right in the middle of adjusting to the internet, print on demand (anyone can write a book and put it out for sale like a cafepress t-shirt), ebooks, standards, readers, drm etc.

A browse on here will give a better idea of some jobs than I can describe:

http://www.thebookseller.com/jobs.html

The industry is largely made up of huge publishers who do most stuff inhouse and who have been consolidating a lot over the last few years, plus lots of small niche outfits that rely mostly on freelancers.

[syntheticgerbil]

So, uh, are all the UK people from Idlethumbs gone forever at this point (Besides Dan and Marek)?

[DanJW]

I think they're doing some light lurking. I'll ask them when we get together next. They're all pretty busy these days.

[Nachimir]

Publishing

How is that doing as a subject right now? Given the field is going through some major changes, and feeding new content into courses can sometimes take 4 or 5 years, I could see it possibly being frustrating. ?

To give some idea, my tutor said to me in person a month before one of the projects was due that they wouldn't be using the same book again the next year because it was irrelevent. But of course I still had to use it.

My brother found the same thing with Psychology; he hated that each successive year through the A-Level and undergrad degree, they told them that all the stuff they learned in the previous year was obsolete.

[elmuerte]

ffs...

So, I decided to buy a gigabit switch, because now both my desktop and new router/htpc have a gigabit nic. After hooking it all up of course my desktop machine wouldn't got to 1gbps. Luckily my desktop nic has some diagnostics, apparently there's an issue at 19m. And guess what, the cable is about 19m long. Tried with a different (10m) cable, and that worked. Of course 10m isn't long enough to properly connect to my desktop... so now I have to get a new cable too.

[toblix]

Sounds like a dodgy RJ-45. If you have the tools, just replace the connector(s).